by Bertolt Brecht believed that theater should not only entertain its audience but make them think politically. To achieve this effect, according to the German dramatist and poet, a play should not be polished – but sparkling. Actors should break out of character to address their audience, plot lines should be broken up and interrupted. In one memorable phrase, he described his ideal drama as one that could be “cut into individual pieces, which remain fully viable in life”.
A new exhibition at London’s Raven Row shows just how literal the author of The Threepenny Opera was when he came up with that description. Curated by the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin, brecht: fragments is the most extensive exhibition to date of the visual material collected by the playwright during his career, from newspaper and magazine pictures to photocopies of medieval paintings and images from Chinese theatre.
These are the collage diaries that Brecht turned into, most of which have never been shown before, and have been overlooked because of the archive of Brecht’s oeuvre in socialist East Germany, where he lived from 1949 until his death in 1956 at the age of 58. Researchers who asked for material at a reading room on Robert-Koch-Platz in Berlin were only able to see low-quality photographs of these images, which were all cataloged in alone, not as works of art stuck together.
“You had no idea they were all on the same sheet of paper,” says Tom Kuhn, Emeritus Fellow of Hugh College, Oxford. “Their context was completely erased.” Kuhn, who discovered the collages about 10 years ago and co-curated the Raven Row exhibition, became convinced that these collected fragments, far from being a slapdash scrapbook, were a significant art project in their own right. “They are very clearly composed,” he says. “They’re not just materials to add to something else.”
After the chaos of the first world war, Weimar-Republic of Germany saw the birth of collage as an art form, pioneered by the likes of Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch. Two of his greatest political practitioners, George Grosz and John Heartfield, were friends of Brecht. Although the dramatist’s montages are less dynamic, the attempt to suggest meaning through juxtaposition is evident. A photograph of soldiers in gas masks accompanies a journal entry about William Wordsworth’s poem She Was a Phantom of Delight (“A Spirit still, and bright / With something of angelic light”). It looks like a postpunk record sleeve.
In one large album, called BBA 1198, there is a page with two photographs: one of Adolf Hitler raising his fist in anger, and one of a blond schoolboy, not yet a teenager, making the same gesture. The vicinity is unsettling. It makes the Führer look like a naughty, acting child, but it also shows how keen Nazi Germany was to imitate its expressive anger: the schoolboy, the panel explains, is giving a speech on current affairs . The open newspaper in front of him is a Nazi publication.
In Germany, Brecht is the most frequently performed playwright after Shakespeare and the leading playwrights stand on the fourth wall that Bertolt brought down, lest anyone should think of raising it again. Elsewhere, the term “Brechtian” has become shorthand for almost any theatrical maneuver intended to politicize an audience.
This show feels like a brand new antidote to all the Brecht-first theory, revealing a grittier, punkier version of the writer. Fittingly, there will be twice-daily performances of fragments from his experimental, unfinished plays, not the classics. The Brechtian devices they contain are still raw ideas rather than perfected techniques.
It is clear from the pictures that Brecht collected that he was interested in gestures – and how they could be used and abused. We see people begging for food, soldiers accepting loved ones before going to the front. Hitler is also shown next to the corrupt mayor of New York Jimmy Walker: both are waving their fingers in the same way, two intelligent leaders confidently assuring the audience that they are serious.
Most of the images at Rae na Fiach were found and collected during Brecht’s years in exile. Fearing persecution, the committed socialist left Germany on 28 February 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire. By the time his books were burned by the Nazis, Brecht and his family had already been detained on the Danish island in the north sea, from where he eventually reached the USA. In California, Brecht tried to become a Hollywood screenwriter. Although he wrote Hangmen Also Die, directed by fellow exile Fritz Lang, he struggled to break into the industry.
But, even as Brecht moved further from home, his photomontage suggests that the rise of fascism was never far from his thoughts – especially how it affected German politics so much. Given Brecht’s status as the evangelist of political theatre, it is worth asking how sharp his analysis is now.
The Threepenny Opera, his breakthrough play, explored the parallels between London’s grim underworld and the respectable capitalist endeavors of the city’s bankers. He expanded that analogy in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1941, about the path to power taken by a fictional Chicago mobster like Hitler (and racks of cauliflower). Fascism is presented as a criminal enterprise, but also as a capitalist enterprise.
The Raven Row show includes a remarkable typescript of the play performed with 24 pictures, including a photomontage that combines news images of mass funerals and funerals with shots of Hitler and his acolytes. The most extraordinary image from this archival find is as stark as it is simple: a typed Arturo Ui page with a pasted cutout of Hitler looking like he’s standing on a corner in Lower Manhattan’s Five Points, hands lodged rakishly in trouser pockets.
The dictators-as-gangsters thesis is also throughout the BBA 1198 album. One page draws a parallel to the media’s romance of Bonnie and Clyde (“Bonnie Good Girl Gone Wrong, Says Mother,” reads the Brecht cut-out headline). Another, from a Nazi publication, depicts Hitler and Goebbels as good outcasts. This thesis has stood up very well. If Brecht were making these short books today, you’d imagine them full of Donald Trump’s tiny hand gestures, with headlines quoting his mafia-don-don-style speech, not to mention that menacing sight of former US president after his indictment in 2023. in Atlanta. Additional volumes could be filled with the power pose of Vladimir Putin, on horseback.
But there are blind spots in the analysis of fascism as “the most open, shameless, oppressive and treacherous form of capitalism”, as Brecht said in 1935. As the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote – an appreciator of plays and Brecht’s poetry – about his politics: if you don’t understand fascism as nothing more than a continuation of class warfare, you end up with racism at its core. Racial persecution in such an interpretation will be nothing more than a diversionary tactic to channel proletarian anger, an “optical illusion”.
But, says Kuhn, “Brecht held firmly to his interpretation of fascism, and we can read it entirely as a limit to his political analysis. He wrote a lot about racism, but he didn’t appreciate how central anti-Semitism is to National Socialism.”
When Brecht returned to East Berlin after the end of the war and founded the Berliner Ensemble theater, he came into conflict with the ruling Socialist Unity Party and the apparatuses he had put in charge of cultural affairs. But his criticism of Stalinism and the Soviet Union remained largely a private affair. The line was his most quoted poem, mocking the party’s response to the workers’ uprising in 1953: “Wouldn’t it be simpler if the people dissolved the government and elected someone else?” It was not published until after his death.
Precisely because Brecht managed to say that much and not be so small in his photomontage, one range in BBA 1198 stands out. Here, he has assembled five photographs of Lenin and Stalin, but there is no juxtaposition, no clear conversation between the images. It is as if the man who turned the theater into a politically involved experience briefly allowed himself to stop thinking.
• brecht: fragments are at Raven Row, London, 15 June to 18 August
