Biography of Brecht Berthold. Bertolt Brecht short biography What is “epic theater”

German Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht

German playwright, poet, prose writer, theater figure, art theorist, founder of the Berliner Ensemble theater

Bertolt Brecht

short biography

Bertolt Brecht- German writer, playwright, prominent figure in European theater, founder of a new movement called “political theater.” Born in Augsburg on February 10, 1898; his father was the director of a paper mill. While studying at the city real gymnasium (1908-1917), he began to write poetry and stories, which were published in the Augsburg News newspaper (1914-1915). Already in his school essays There was a sharply negative attitude towards the war.

Young Brecht was attracted not only to literary creativity, but also to theater. However, the family insisted that Berthold become a doctor. Therefore, after graduating from high school, in 1917 he became a student at the University of Munich, where, however, he did not study for long, as he was drafted into the army. Due to health reasons, he served not at the front, but in the hospital, where real life was revealed to him, which contradicted the propaganda speeches about a great Germany.

Perhaps Brecht’s biography could have been completely different if not for his acquaintance with Feuchtwanger in 1919, famous writer, who, seeing the young man’s talent, advised him to continue his studies in literature. In the same year, the first plays of the novice playwright appeared: “Baal” and “Drumbeat in the Night”, which were staged on the stage of the Kammerspiele theater in 1922.

The world of theater became even closer to Brecht after graduating from university in 1924 and moving to Berlin, where he made acquaintance with many artists and entered the service of the Deutsches Theater. Together with the famous director Erwin Piscator, in 1925 he created the “Proletarian Theater”, for the productions of which it was decided to write plays independently due to the lack of financial opportunity to order them from established playwrights. Brecht took famous literary works and dramatized them. The first signs were “The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik” by Hasek (1927) and “The Threepenny Opera” (1928), created on the basis of “The Beggar’s Opera” by J. Gay. He also staged Gorky’s “Mother” (1932), since Brecht was close to the ideas of socialism.

Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and the closure of all workers' theaters in Germany forced Brecht and his wife Elena Weigel to leave the country, move to Austria, and then, after its occupation, to Sweden and Finland. The Nazis officially stripped Bertolt Brecht of his citizenship in 1935. When Finland entered the war, the writer’s family moved to the USA for 6 and a half years. It was in exile that he wrote his most famous plays - “Mother Courage and Her Children” (1938), “Fear and Despair in the Third Empire” (1939), “The Life of Galileo” (1943), “The Good Man from Szechwan” (1943), “Caucasian Chalk Circle” (1944), in which the red thread was the idea of ​​the need for man to fight against the outdated world order.

After the end of the war, he had to leave the United States due to the threat of persecution. In 1947, Brecht went to live in Switzerland, the only country that issued him a visa. The Western zone of his native country refused to allow him to return, so a year later Brecht settled in East Berlin. The last stage of his biography is associated with this city. In the capital, he created a theater called the Berliner Ensemble, on the stage of which the playwright’s best plays were performed. Brecht's brainchild went on tour in a large number of countries, including the Soviet Union.

In addition to plays, Brecht’s creative heritage includes the novels “The Threepenny Novel” (1934), “The Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar” (1949), and a fairly large number of stories and poems. Brecht was not only a writer, but also an active public and political figure, and took part in the work of left-wing international congresses (1935, 1937, 1956). In 1950, he was appointed vice-president of the Academy of Arts of the GDR, in 1951 he was elected a member of the World Peace Council, in 1953 he headed the all-German PEN Club, and in 1954 he received the international Lenin Peace Prize. A heart attack interrupted the life of the playwright, who became a classic, on August 14, 1956.

Biography from Wikipedia

Brecht's work as a poet and playwright has always been controversial, as have his theory of "epic theater" and his political views. However, already in the 50s, Brecht's plays became firmly established in the European theatrical repertoire; his ideas in one form or another were adopted by many contemporary playwrights, including Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Arthur Adamov, Max Frisch, Heiner Müller.

The theory of “epic theater,” put into practice by director Brecht in the post-war years, opened up fundamentally new possibilities for performing arts and had a significant influence on the development of theater in the 20th century.

Augsburg years

Eugen Berthold Brecht, who later changed his name to Bertolt, was born in Augsburg, Bavaria. Father, Berthold Friedrich Brecht (1869-1939), originally from Achern, moved to Augsburg in 1893 and, having entered as a sales agent at the Heindl paper mill, made a career: in 1901 he became a prokurist (confidant), in 1917- m - commercial director of the company. In 1897 he married Sophia Bretzing (1871-1920), the daughter of the station master at Bad Waldsee, and Eugen (as Brecht was called in the family) became their first-born.

In 1904-1908 Brecht studied at public school Franciscan monastic order, then entered the Bavarian Royal Real Gymnasium, an educational institution with a humanitarian profile. “During my nine-year stay ... at the Augsburg real gymnasium,” Brecht wrote in his short autobiography in 1922, “I was unable to contribute in any significant way to the mental development of my teachers. They tirelessly strengthened in me the will for freedom and independence.” Brecht’s relationship with his conservative family, from which he moved away shortly after graduating from high school, was no less difficult.

"Brecht's House" in Augsburg; currently a museum

In August 1914, when Germany entered the war, chauvinist propaganda also captured Brecht; he contributed to this propaganda - published it in the Augsburg latest news"Notes on Our Time", in which he argued the inevitability of war. But the numbers of losses very soon sobered him up: at the end of the same year, Brecht wrote an anti-war poem “ Modern legend» ( Moderne Legende) - about soldiers whose death is mourned only by mothers. In 1916, in an essay on a given topic: “It is sweet and honorable to die for the fatherland” (a saying of Horace) - Brecht already qualified this statement as a form of purposeful propaganda, easy for the “empty-headed”, confident that their last hour is still far away.

Brecht's first literary experiments date back to 1913; from the end of 1914, his poems, and then stories, essays and theater reviews, regularly appeared in the local press. The idol of his youth was Frank Wedekind, the predecessor of German expressionism: it was through Wedekind, says E. Schumacher, that Brecht mastered the songs of street singers, farce couplets, chansons and even traditional forms - the ballad and folk song. However, even in his gymnasium years, Brecht, according to his own testimony, “all sorts of sports excesses” brought himself to the point of heart spasms, which influenced his initial choice of profession: after graduating from the gymnasium in 1917, he entered the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he studied medicine and natural science. However, as Brecht himself wrote, at the university he “listened to lectures on medicine and learned to play the guitar.”

War and revolution

Brecht's studies did not last long: in January 1918 he was drafted into the army, his father sought deferments, and in the end, in order not to end up at the front, on October 1, Brecht entered service as an orderly in one of the Augsburg military hospitals. His impressions in the same year were embodied in the first “classical” poem - “The Legend of the Dead Soldier” ( Legende vom toten Soldaten), the nameless hero of which, tired of fighting, died a hero’s death, but upset the Kaiser’s calculations with his death, was removed from the grave by a medical commission, declared fit for military service and returned to duty. Brecht himself set his ballad to music - in the style of an organ grinder's song - and performed it in public with a guitar; It was precisely this poem, which became widely known and was often performed in literary cabarets performed by Ernst Busch in the 1920s, that the National Socialists pointed to as the reason for depriving the author of German citizenship in June 1935.

In November 1918, Brecht took part in revolutionary events in Germany; from the hospital in which he served, he was elected to the Augsburg Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, but very soon retired. At the same time, he participated in the funeral meeting in memory of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and in the funeral of Kurt Eisner; hid the persecuted Spartak player Georg Prem; he collaborated in the organ of the Independent Social Democratic Party (K. Kautsky and R. Hilferding), the newspaper Volksville, and even joined the NSDPD, but not for long: at that time Brecht, by his own admission, “suffered from a lack of political convictions.” The Volksville newspaper in December 1920 became the organ of the United Communist Party of Germany (section of the Third International), but for Brecht, who was far from the Communist Party at that time, this did not matter: he continued to publish his reviews until the newspaper itself was banned.

Having been demobilized, Brecht returned to the university, but his interests changed: in Munich, which at the turn of the century, during the time of the Prince Regent, turned into the cultural capital of Germany, he became interested in theater - now, while studying at the Faculty of Philosophy, he attended classes at a theater seminar Arthur Kucher and became a regular at literary and artistic cafes. To all the theaters in Munich, Brecht preferred the fair booth, with its barkers, street singers, with a barrel organ, explaining a series of paintings with the help of a pointer (such a singer in the “Threepenny Opera” will talk about the adventures of Mackheath), panopticons and distorting mirrors - the city drama theater seemed to him mannered and sterile. During this period, Brecht himself performed on the stage of the small “Wilde Bühne”. Having completed two full courses at the university, he did not register in any of the faculties in the summer semester of 1921 and was excluded from the list of students in November.

In the early 20s, in Munich beer halls, Brecht observed Hitler’s first steps in the political field, but at that time the supporters of the unknown “Fuhrer” were for him nothing more than “a bunch of wretched half-babies.” In 1923, during the “Beer Hall Putsch,” his name was included in the “black list” of persons subject to extermination, although by that time he had long since retired from politics and was completely immersed in his own creative problems. Twenty years later, comparing himself with Erwin Piscator, the creator of political theater, Brecht wrote: “The turbulent events of 1918, in which both took part, disappointed the Author, and Piscator was made a politician. Only much later, the Author, under the influence of his scientific studies also came to politics.”

Munich period. First plays

Brecht’s literary affairs at that time were not going well: “I’m running around like a stupefied dog,” he wrote in his diary, “and nothing works out for me.” Back in 1919, he brought his first plays, “Baal” and “Drums in the Night,” to the literary section of the Munich Kammerspiele, but they were not accepted for production. Five one-act plays, including “A Bourgeois Wedding,” also did not find their director. “What a melancholy,” Brecht wrote in 1920, “Germany brings upon me! The peasantry has become completely impoverished, but its rudeness does not give rise to fairy-tale monsters, but to silent brutality, the bourgeoisie has become fat, and the intelligentsia is weak-willed! What remains is America!” But without a name, he had nothing to do in America. In 1920, Brecht visited Berlin for the first time; his second visit to the capital lasted from November 1921 to April 1922, but he failed to conquer Berlin: “a young man of twenty four years, dry, skinny, with a pale, ironic face, prickly eyes, with short-cropped dark hair sticking out in different directions,” as Arnolt Bronnen described him, in the capital literary circles was received coolly.

Brecht became friends with Bronnen, just as he came to conquer the capital, back in 1920; The aspiring playwrights were brought together, according to Bronnen, by the “complete denial” of everything that had hitherto been composed, written and published by others. Having failed to interest Berlin theaters in his own works, Brecht tried to stage Bronnen's expressionist drama "Parricide" at the Jung Bühne; however, he failed here too: at one of the rehearsals, he quarreled with the leading actor Heinrich George and was replaced by another director. Even Bronnen’s feasible financial support could not save Brecht from physical exhaustion, with which he ended up in the Berlin Charité hospital in the spring of 1922.

In the early 20s in Munich, Brecht tried to master filmmaking, wrote several scripts, according to one of them, together with the young director Erich Engel and comedian Karl Valentin, he made a short film in 1923 - “The Mysteries of a Barber Shop”; but he didn’t win any laurels in this field either: audiences saw the film only a few decades later.

In 1954, in preparation for the publication of a collection of plays, Brecht himself did not rate his early experiences highly; Nevertheless, success came in September 1922, when the Munich Kammerspiele staged Drums in the Night. The authoritative Berlin critic Herbert Ihering responded more than favorably to the performance; the honor of “discovering” Brecht the playwright belongs to him. Thanks to Iering, “Drums in the Night” was awarded the Prize. G. Kleist, however, the play did not become a repertoire and did not bring wide fame to the author; in December 1922, it was staged at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and was severely criticized by another influential specialist, Alfred Kerr. But from that time on, Brecht’s plays, including “Baal” (the third, most “smoothed out” edition) and “In the Thicket of Cities” written in 1921, were staged in different cities in Germany; although performances were often accompanied by scandals and obstructions, even Nazi attacks and the throwing of rotten eggs. After the premiere of the play “In the Deep of Cities” at the Munich Residenztheater in May 1923, the head of the literary department was simply fired.

And yet, in the capital of Bavaria, unlike Berlin, Brecht managed to complete his directorial experiment: in March 1924, he staged “The Life of Edward II of England” - his own adaptation of K. Marlowe’s play “Edward II” in the Kammerspiel. . This was the first experience of creating an “epic theater”, but only Iering understood and appreciated it - having thus exhausted the possibilities of Munich, Brecht in the same year, following his friend Engel, finally moved to Berlin.

In Berlin. 1924-1933

Me-ti said: my affairs are bad. Rumors are spreading everywhere that I have said the most ridiculous things. The trouble is that, absolutely between you and me, I actually said most of them.

B. Brecht

During these years, Berlin was turning into the theater capital of Europe, rivaled only by Moscow; here was their “Stanislavsky” - Max Reinhardt and their “Meyerhold” - Erwin Piscator, who taught the capital’s public not to be surprised by anything. In Berlin, Brecht already had a like-minded director - Erich Engel, who worked at the Deutsches Reinhardt Theater; another like-minded person followed him to the capital - school friend Kaspar Neher, at that time already a talented theater artist. Here Brecht was provided in advance with both the support of the authoritative critic Herbert Ihering and sharp condemnation from his counterpart - the no less authoritative Alfred Kerr, a supporter of Reinhardt's theater. For the play “In the Thicket of Cities,” staged by Engel in 1924 in Berlin, Kerr called Brecht “the epigone of epigones, exploiting in a modern way the trademark of Grabbe and Buchner”; his criticism became harsher as Brecht’s position strengthened, and for the “epic drama” Kerr did not find better definition than "an idiot's play." However, Brecht did not remain in debt: from the pages of the Berliner Börsen-Kurir, in which Iering headed the feuilleton department, until 1933 he was able to preach his theatrical ideas and share his thoughts about Kerr.

Brecht found work in the literary section of the Deutsche Theater, where, however, he rarely appeared; at the University of Berlin he continued his study of philosophy; the poet Klabund introduced him to the capital's publishing circles; an agreement with one of the publishing houses provided the yet unrecognized playwright with a living wage for several years. He was also accepted into the circle of writers, most of whom had only recently settled in Berlin and formed the “1925 Group”; among them were Kurt Tucholsky, Alfred Döblin, Egon Erwin Kisch, Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam. In these first Berlin years, Brecht did not consider it shameful to write advertising texts for capital companies and received a car as a gift for the poem “The Singing Machines of the Steyr Company.”

From the Reinhardt Theater, Brecht moved to the Piscator Theater in 1926, for which he revised plays and staged The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik by J. Hasek. Piscator's experience opened up to him previously unexplored possibilities of the theater; Brecht subsequently called the director’s main merit “the turn of the theater towards politics,” without which his “epic theater” could not have taken place. The innovative stage decisions of Piscator, who found his own means of epicizing drama, made it possible, in Brecht’s words, to “embrace new themes” that were inaccessible to naturalistic theater. Here, in the process of turning the biography of the American entrepreneur Daniel Drew into a drama, Brecht discovered that his knowledge of economics was insufficient - he began studying stock speculation, and then “Capital” by K. Marx. Here he became close to the composers Edmund Meisel and Hans Eisler, and in the actor and singer Ernst Busch he found the ideal performer for his songs and poems in Berlin literary cabarets.

Brecht's plays attracted the attention of director Alfred Braun, who, starting in 1927, staged them on Berlin Radio with varying degrees of success. Also in 1927, a collection of poems, “Home Sermons,” was published; some called it “a new Revelation”, others “the devil’s psalter” - one way or another, Brecht became famous. His fame went beyond Germany when Erich Engel staged The Threepenny Opera with music by Kurt Weill at the Schiffbauerdamm Theater in August 1928. This was the first unconditional success about which a critic could write: “Brecht has finally won.”

By this time, his theatrical theory had developed in general terms; for Brecht it was obvious that a new, “epic” drama needed a new theater - a new theory of acting and directing. The testing ground was the Theater on Schiffbauerdamm, where Engel, with the active participation of the author, staged Brecht's plays and where they together, at first not very successfully, tried to develop a new, “epic” style of performance - with young actors and amateurs from proletarian amateur troupes. In 1931, Brecht made his debut on the capital's stage as a director - he staged his play “Man is Man” at the State Theater, which Engel had staged at the Volksbühne three years earlier. The playwright's directorial experience was not highly rated by experts - Engel's performance turned out to be more successful, and the “epic” style of performance, tested for the first time in this production, did not find understanding among either critics or the public. Brecht’s failure did not discourage him - back in 1927, he set his sights on reforming the musical theater, composing together with Weil a small zong opera “Mahogany”, which two years later was reworked into a full-fledged opera - “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”; in 1931, Brecht himself staged it at the Kurfürstendamm Theater in Berlin, and this time with greater success.

On the left flank

Since 1926, Brecht intensively studied the classics of Marxism; he later wrote that Marx would have been the best audience for his plays: “... A man with such interests should have been interested in these particular plays, not because of my mind, but because of his own; they were illustrative material for him.” At the end of the 20s, Brecht became close to the communists, to which he, like many in Germany, was pushed by the strengthening of the National Socialists. In the field of philosophy, one of the mentors was Karl Korsch, with his rather original interpretation of Marxism, which was later reflected in Brecht’s philosophical work “Me-ti. Book of Changes." Korsch himself was expelled from the KPD in 1926 as an “ultra-leftist,” where in the second half of the 20s one purge followed another, and Brecht never joined the party; but during this period he wrote, together with Eisler, “Song of Solidarity” and a number of other songs that were successfully performed by Ernst Busch - in the early 30s they were distributed on gramophone records throughout Europe.

During the same period, he dramatized, very freely, A. M. Gorky’s novel “Mother,” bringing the events to 1917 in his play, and although it retained Russian names and names of cities, many problems were relevant specifically for Germany at that time. He wrote didactic plays in which he sought to teach the German proletarians " correct behavior"in the class struggle. The script for Zlatan Dudov’s film “Kule Vampe, or Who Owns the World?”, written by Brecht in 1931 together with Ernst Otwalt, was devoted to the same topic.

In the early 30s, in the poem “When Fascism Gained Strength,” Brecht called on the Social Democrats to create a “red united front” with the communists, but the differences between the parties turned out to be stronger than his calls.

Emigration. 1933-1948

Years of wandering

...Remember,
speaking about our weaknesses,
and about those dark times
which you have avoided.
After all, we walked, changing countries
more often than shoes...
and despair choked us,
when we only saw
injustice
and did not see the indignation.
But at the same time we knew:
hatred of meanness
also distorts features.

- B. Brecht, "To posterity"

Back in August 1932, the NSDAP organ “Völkischer Beobachter” published a book index in which Brecht found his name among “Germans with a tarnished reputation,” and on January 30, 1933, when Hindenburg appointed Hitler Reich Chancellor, and columns of supporters of the new head of government organized a triumphal procession through the Brandenburg Gate, Brecht realized that it was time to leave the country. He left Germany on February 28, the day after the Reichstag fire, still in full confidence that this would not last long.

With his wife, actress Elena Weigel, and children, Brecht arrived in Vienna, where Weigel’s relatives lived and where the poet Karl Kraus greeted him with the phrase: “Rats are running to a sinking ship.” From Vienna he very soon moved to Zurich, where a colony of German emigrants had already formed, but he felt uncomfortable there too; Later, Brecht put into the mouth of one of the characters in “Refugee Conversations” the words: “Switzerland is a country famous for the fact that you can be free in it, but for this you need to be a tourist.” In Germany, meanwhile, fascisation was carried out at an accelerated pace; On May 10, 1933, an “educational campaign of German students against the anti-German spirit” took place, ending with the first public burning of books. Along with the works of K. Marx and K. Kautsky, G. Mann and E. M. Remarque, everything that Brecht managed to publish in his homeland was thrown into the fire.

Already in the summer of 1933, at the invitation of the writer Karin Macaelis, Brecht and his family moved to Denmark; His new home was a fishing hut in the village of Skovsbostrand, near Svendborg; an abandoned barn next to it had to be converted into an office. In this barn, where Chinese theatrical masks hung on the walls, and on the ceiling were inscribed the words of Lenin: “Truth is concrete,” Brecht, in addition to many articles and open letters, dedicated to current events in Germany, wrote “The Threepenny Novel” and a number of plays that in one way or another responded to events in the world, including “Fear and Despair in the Third Empire” and “The Rifles of Teresa Carrar” - about civil war in Spain. Here the Life of Galileo was written and Mother Courage began; here, divorced from theatrical practice, Brecht seriously began developing the theory of “epic theater,” which in the second half of the 20s acquired the features of political theater and now seemed relevant to him more than ever before.

In the mid-30s, local National Socialists grew stronger in Denmark, constant pressure was put on the Danish embassy in Berlin, and if the production of the play “Roundheads and Pointedheads” in Copenhagen, with a completely outright parody of Hitler, was not banned, then the ballet “ The Seven Deadly Sins,” written by Weill to a libretto by Brecht, was removed from the repertoire in 1936 after King Christian X expressed his indignation. The country became less and less hospitable, it became increasingly difficult to renew a residence permit, and in April 1939 Brecht left Denmark with his family.

Since the end of 1938, Brecht had been seeking an American visa and, while waiting for it, settled in Stockholm, formally at the invitation of the Swedish Union of Amateur Theaters. His social circle consisted mainly of German emigrants, including Willy Brandt, who represented the Socialist workers' party; in Sweden, as before in Denmark, Brecht witnessed the surrender of anti-fascists to the German authorities; he himself was under constant surveillance by the secret security service. The anti-war Mother Courage, conceived in Denmark as a warning, was completed in Stockholm only in the fall of 1939, when the Second World War was already underway: “Writers,” Brecht said, “cannot write with the speed with which governments start wars: because in order to compose, you have to think.”

The German attack on Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940 and the refusal to renew his residence permit in Sweden forced Brecht to look for a new refuge, and on April 17, without receiving an American visa, at the invitation of the famous Finnish writer Hella Vuolijoki, he left for Finland .

"The Life of Galileo" and "The Book of Changes"

In the second half of the 1930s, Brecht was worried not only about events in Germany. The Executive Committee of the Comintern, and after it the KKE, proclaimed the Soviet Union the decisive historical force in the opposition to fascism - in the spring of 1935, Brecht spent more than a month in the USSR and, although Weigel did not find any use for himself or Elena and did not share theses about “socialist realism” , adopted by the First Congress Soviet writers, in general, he was satisfied with what was shown to him.

However, already in 1936, German emigrants whom Brecht knew well began to disappear in the USSR, including Bernhard Reich, the former chief director of the Munich Kammerspiele, actress Carola Neher, who played Polly Peachum in The Threepenny Opera on stage and on screen, and Ernst Othwalt, with whom he wrote the script for “Kule Vampe”; Erwin Piscator, who had lived in Moscow since 1931 and headed the International Association of Revolutionary Theaters, even earlier considered it best to leave the Land of the Soviets. The notorious Moscow open trials split the hard-fought “united front”: the Social Democrats called for the isolation of the communist parties.

The criminal keeps ready evidence of his innocence.
The innocent often have no evidence.
But is it really best to remain silent in such a situation?
What if he's innocent?

B. Brecht

During these years, Brecht decisively opposed the isolation of the communists: “...What is important,” he wrote, “is only a tireless, comprehensive struggle against fascism, carried out by all means and on the broadest possible basis.” He captured his doubts in the philosophical work “Me-ti. The Book of Changes,” which he wrote both before and after World War II, but never finished. In this essay, written as if on behalf of the ancient Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu, Brecht shared his thoughts on Marxism and the theory of revolution and tried to understand what was happening in the USSR; in Meta, along with impartial assessments of Stalin’s activities, there were arguments in his defense borrowed from the Soviet and other Comintern press.

In 1937, Sergei Tretyakov, a friend of Brecht and one of the first translators of his works into Russian, was shot in Moscow. Brecht learned about this in 1938 - the fate of one person well known to him made him think about many others who were executed; He called the poem dedicated to the memory of Tretyakov “Are the people infallible?”: knowing nothing about the “troikas” of the NKVD, Brecht believed that sentences in the USSR were handed down by “the courts of the people.” Each stanza of the poem ended with the question: “What if he is innocent?”

It was in this context that The Life of Galileo, one of Brecht's best plays, was born. In a note accompanying the first German edition, in 1955, Brecht indicated that the play was written at a time when newspapers "published reports of the fission of the uranium atom produced by German physicists" - thus, as Ilya Fradkin noted, hinting at the connection the idea of ​​a play with problems atomic physics. However, there is no evidence that Brecht foresaw the creation of the atomic bomb in the late 1930s; Having learned from Danish physicists about the splitting of the uranium atom, carried out in Berlin, Brecht in the first (“Danish”) edition of “The Life of Galileo” gave this discovery a positive interpretation. The conflict of the play had nothing to do with the problem of the creators of the atomic bomb, but clearly echoed the Moscow open trials, about which Brecht wrote in Me-ti at that time: “...If they demand of me that I (without proof) believe into something provable, then this is the same as demanding from me that I believe in something unprovable. I won’t do this... He caused damage to the people with an unproven process.”

Brecht’s theses “Prerequisites for the successful leadership of the movement for the social transformation of society” date back to the same time, the first point of which called for “the abolition and overcoming of leaderism within the party,” and the sixth point called for “the elimination of all demagoguery, all scholasticism, all esotericism, intrigue, arrogance that does not correspond to the real state of affairs of swagger”; It also contained a very naive call to abandon “the requirement of blind ‘faith’ in the name of convincing evidence.” The theses were not in demand, but Brecht’s faith in the mission of the USSR forced him to somehow justify Stalin’s entire foreign policy.

In the United States

Finland was not the most reliable refuge: Risto Ryti, then prime minister, was conducting secret negotiations with Germany; and yet, at Vuolijoki's request, he granted Brecht a residence permit - only because he had once enjoyed The Threepenny Opera. Here Brecht managed to write a pamphlet play, “The Career of Arturo Ui,” about the rise of Hitler and his party to the heights of power. In May 1941, amid the open deployment of German troops and obvious preparations for war, he finally received an American visa; but it turned out to be impossible to sail to the USA from the northern port of Finland: the Germans already controlled the port. I had to go to the Far East - through Moscow, where Brecht, with the help of surviving German emigrants, unsuccessfully tried to find out the fate of his disappeared friends.

In July, he arrived in Los Angeles and settled in Hollywood, where by that time, according to actor Alexander Granach, “the whole of Berlin” was already there. But, unlike Thomas Mann, E.M. Remarque, E. Ludwig or B. Frank, Brecht was little known to the American public - his name was well known only to the FBI, which, as it turned out later, collected more than 1000 pages of “inquiry” about him ”, - and they had to make a living mainly from plot projects of film scripts. Feeling in Hollywood as if he had been “ripped out of his century” or transported to Tahiti, Brecht could not write what was in demand on the American stage or in cinema, for a long time could not work fully at all, and in 1942 he wrote to his long-term employee: “What we need is a person who would lend me several thousand dollars for two years, with a return from my post-war fees...” Written in 1943 the plays “The Dreams of Simone Machar” and “Schweik in the Second World War” could not be staged in the USA; But old friend Lion Feuchtwanger, attracted by Brecht to work on Simone Machar, wrote a novel based on the play and from the fee received gave Brecht 20 thousand dollars, which was enough for several years of comfortable existence.

After the end of World War II, Brecht created a new (“American”) version of “The Life of Galileo”; staged in July 1947 in Los Angeles, in the small Coronet Theatre, with Charles Laughton in the title role, the play was very coolly received by the Los Angeles “film colony,” according to Charles Chaplin, with whom Brecht became close in Hollywood, the play , staged in the style of “epic theater,” seemed too untheatrical.

Return to Germany

Even a flood
Didn't last forever.
One day they ran out
Black abysses.
But only a few
We survived it.

At the end of the war, Brecht, like many emigrants, was in no hurry to return to Germany. According to Schumacher’s memoirs, Ernst Busch, when asked where Brecht was, answered: “He must finally understand that his home is here!” - at the same time, Bush himself told his friends how difficult it is for an anti-fascist to live among people for whom Hitler is only to blame for losing the war.

Brecht's return to Europe was accelerated in 1947 by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which became interested in him as a “communist.” When the plane brought him to the capital of France in early November, many large cities were still in ruins, Paris appeared before him “shabby, impoverished, a complete black market” - in Central Europe, Switzerland, where Brecht was heading, turned out to be the only country that the war did not devastated; son Stefan, who served in the American army in 1944-1945, chose to stay in the United States.

“A stateless man, always with only a temporary residence permit, always ready to move on, a wanderer of our time... a poet for whom incense is not burnt,” as Max Frisch described him, Brecht settled in Zurich, where even during the war the German and Austrian emigrants staged his plays. With these like-minded people and with his longtime colleague Kaspar Neher, he created his own theater - first in the city's Schauspielhaus, where he failed with the adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone, and a few months later he experienced his first success after returning to Europe with the production of Mister Puntila, performance that became a theatrical event with international resonance.

As early as the end of 1946, Herbert Ihering from Berlin urged Brecht to “use the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm for a well-known cause.” When Brecht and Weigel with a group of emigrant actors arrived in the eastern sector of Berlin in October 1948, the theater, which had been inhabited in the late 20s, was occupied - the Berliner Ensemble, which soon gained worldwide fame, had to be created on the small stage of the German theater Brecht arrived in Berlin when the editor-in-chief of the magazine "Theater der Zeit" F. Erpenbeck welcomed the production of his play "Fear and Despair in the Third Empire" at the Deutsche Theater as a stage overcoming of the "false theory of epic theater." But the very first performance staged by the new team - “Mother Courage and Her Children”, with Elena Weigel in the title role - entered the “golden fund” of world theatrical art. Although it caused a debate in East Berlin: Erpenbeck even now predicted an unenviable fate for the “epic theater” - in the end it would be lost in “decadence alien to the people.”

Later, in The Tales of Mr. Coyne, Brecht explained why he chose the eastern sector of the capital: “In city A... they loved me, but in city B they treated me friendly. In city A they were ready to help me, but in city B they needed me. In city A I was invited to the table, and in city B I was invited to the kitchen.”

There was no shortage of official honors: in 1950 Brecht became a full member, and in 1954 - vice-president of the Academy of Arts of the GDR, in 1951 he was awarded the National Prize of the first degree, since 1953 he headed the German PEN club "East and West" “- Meanwhile, relations with the leadership of the GDR were not easy.

Relations with the leadership of the GDR

Having settled in East Germany, Brecht was in no hurry to join the SED; in 1950, the Stalinization of the GDR began, complicating his relationship with the party leadership. At first, problems arose with his favorite actor Ernst Busch, who in 1951 moved to East Berlin from the American sector: during the party purge of those who had been in Western emigration, some were expelled from the SED, including some of Brecht’s friends, others were subjected to additional verification - Bush, in not the most refined terms, refused to undergo verification, considering it humiliating, and was also expelled. In the summer of the same year, Brecht, together with Paul Dessau, composed the cantata “The Hernburg Report”, timed to coincide with the opening of the III World Festival of Youth and Students; two weeks before the scheduled premiere, E. Honecker (at that time in charge of youth affairs in the SED Central Committee) by telegram strongly recommended that Brecht remove Bush’s name from the song included in the cantata - “so as not to popularize it beyond measure.” Brecht’s argument was surprising, but Honecker did not consider it necessary to explain to him the reasons for his dissatisfaction with Bush; instead, an even stranger, from Brechtian point of view, argument was put forward: young people have no idea about Bush. Brecht objected: if this is indeed the case, which he personally doubted, then Bush, with his entire biography, deserved to be known about him. Faced with the need to choose between loyalty to the SED leadership and basic decency towards an old friend: in the current situation, deleting Bush’s name could no longer cause moral damage to the actor, Brecht turned to another high-ranking functionary for help; and they helped him: without his knowledge, the entire song was removed from the performance.

In the same year, a discussion about “formalism” unfolded in the GDR, which, along with the main composers of the Berliner Ensemble theater - Hans Eisler and Paul Dessau - also affected Brecht himself. At the plenum of the SED Central Committee, specially dedicated to the fight against formalism, to the surprise of many, a production of Brecht’s play “Mother” was presented as an example of this destructive tendency; at the same time, they especially did not like its didactic character - the party leadership was afraid that East German dissidents would learn lessons from the play, but many scenes of the play were declared “historically false and politically harmful.”

Subsequently, Brecht was subjected to criticism for “pacifism,” “national nihilism,” “degradation of the classical heritage,” and “humour alien to the people.” The implantation of the “system” of K. S. Stanislavsky, which began in the GDR in the spring of 1953, primitively interpreted, in the spirit of the then Moscow Art Theater, for Brecht turned into another accusation of “formalism”, and at the same time of “cosmopolitanism”. If the first performance of the Berliner Ensemble, Mother Courage and Her Children, was immediately awarded the National Prize of the GDR, then further productions increasingly aroused caution. Repertoire problems also arose: the leadership of the SED believed that the Nazi past should be forgotten, attention was ordered to be concentrated on positive qualities German people, and first of all on the great German culture - therefore, not only anti-fascist plays turned out to be undesirable (The Career of Arturo Ui appeared in the repertoire of the Berliner Ensemble only in 1959, after Brecht’s student Peter Palitsch staged it in West Germany), but also “The Governor” by J. Lenz and G. Eisler’s opera “Johann Faust,” the text of which also seemed insufficiently patriotic. The Brecht theater's appeals to the classics - "The Broken Jug" by G. Kleist and "Prafaust" by J. V. Goethe - were regarded as "denial of the national cultural heritage."

Tonight in a dream
I saw a strong storm.
She shook the buildings
Iron beams were destroyed,
The iron roof was demolished.
But everything that was made of wood
It bent and survived.

B. Brecht

As a member of the Academy of Arts, Brecht more than once had to defend artists, including Ernst Barlach, from the attacks of the Neues Deutschland newspaper (the organ of the Central Committee of the SED), by which, in his words, “the few remaining artists were plunged into lethargy.” In 1951, he wrote in his work journal that literature was again forced to make do “without a direct national response,” since this response reaches writers “with disgusting extraneous noise.” In the summer of 1953, Brecht called on Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl to dissolve the Arts Commission and thus put an end to “its dictates, poorly reasoned regulations, administrative measures alien to art, vulgar Marxist language, which has a disgusting effect on artists”; he developed this theme in a number of articles and satirical poems, but was heard only in West Germany and by that public, whose approval could only do him a disservice.

At the same time, reproducing the ideological campaigns carried out at different times in the USSR, the leadership of the SED refrained from Soviet “organizational conclusions”; The wave of political trials that swept across Eastern Europe - against R. Slansky in Czechoslovakia, against L. Rajk in Hungary and other imitations of the Moscow trials of the 30s - bypassed the GDR, and it was obvious that East Germany did not receive the worst leadership.

June 1953 events

On June 16, 1953, strikes began in Berlin at individual enterprises, directly related to increased production standards and rising prices for consumer goods; During spontaneous demonstrations in different areas of Berlin, political demands were also put forward, including the resignation of the government, the dissolution of the People's Police and the reunification of Germany. By the morning of June 17, the strike had grown into a citywide one, with thousands of excited columns of demonstrators rushing to the government quarter - in this situation, the non-party Brecht considered it his duty to support the leadership of the SED. He wrote letters to Walter Ulbricht and Otto Grotewohl, which, however, in addition to expressing solidarity, also contained a call to enter into dialogue with the strikers - to properly respond to the legitimate discontent of the workers. But his assistant Manfred Weckwerth was unable to break into the building of the SED Central Committee, which was already besieged by demonstrators. Outraged by the fact that the radio was broadcasting operetta melodies, Brecht sent his assistants to the radio committee with a request to provide airtime to the team of his theater, but was refused. Without waiting for anything from the leadership of the SED, he himself went out to the demonstrators, but from conversations with them he got the impression that the forces that he described as “fascist” were trying to take advantage of the discontent of the workers, attacking the SED “not because of its mistakes, but because of its merits,” Brecht spoke about this on June 17 and 24 at the general meeting of the Berliner Ensemble. He understood that the radical sentiments of the demonstrators were avenging themselves by the lack of freedom of speech, but he also said that lessons had not been learned from the history of Germany in the 20th century, since the topic itself was taboo.

The letter written by Brecht to Ulbricht on June 17 reached the addressee and was even partially published a few days later - only the part that expressed support, despite the fact that after the suppression of the uprising, support itself acquired a different meaning. In West Germany and especially in Austria it caused indignation; an appeal published on June 23, in which Brecht wrote: “... I hope that... the workers, who have demonstrated their legitimate discontent, will not be put on the same level as the provocateurs, for this would from the very beginning prevent the much-needed broad exchange of views on mutually committed mistakes,” nothing could change; theaters that had previously staged his plays declared a boycott against Brecht, and while in West Germany it did not last long (calls for a boycott were renewed in 1961, after the construction of the Berlin Wall), the “Viennese boycott” lasted for 10 years, and in the Burgtheater it ended only in 1966

Last year

In the conditions of the Cold War, the struggle to preserve peace became an important part of not only social, but also creative activity Brecht, and the curtain of the theater he created was decorated with Picasso’s dove of peace. In December 1954, he was awarded the International Stalin Prize “For Strengthening Peace Among Nations” (two years later renamed the Lenin Prize), on this occasion Brecht came to Moscow in May 1955. He was taken to theaters, but in those days Russian theater was just beginning to come to life after twenty years of stagnation, and, according to Lev Kopelev, of all that was shown to him, Brecht liked only V. Mayakovsky’s “Bathhouse” at the Satire Theater. He recalled how in the early 30s, when he first went to Moscow, Berlin friends said: “You are going to the theatrical Mecca,” - the past twenty years have thrown the Soviet theater back half a century. They were in a hurry to please him: in Moscow, after a 20-year break, a one-volume volume of his selected plays is being prepared for publication - Brecht, who back in 1936 wrote that “epic theater,” in addition to a certain technical level, presupposes “an interest in the free discussion of vital questions,” he noted, not without sarcasm, that his plays for the Soviet theater were outdated; the USSR suffered from such “radical hobbies” in the 20s.

When delusions are exhausted,
Emptiness looks into our eyes -
Our last interlocutor.

B. Brecht

In Moscow, Brecht met with Bernhard Reich, a survivor of Stalin's camps, and again unsuccessfully tried to find out the fate of his remaining friends. Back in 1951, he reworked Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” for production in his theater, in which he significantly shifted the emphasis: “The tragedy of an individual,” wrote Brecht, “interests us, of course, to a much lesser extent than the tragedy of society caused by an individual.” . If Shakespeare's Coriolanus is driven by wounded pride, then Brecht added to it the hero's belief in his indispensability; he looked in “Coriolanus” for specific means of counteracting “leadership” and found them in “self-defense of society”: while in Shakespeare the people are fickle, the aristocracy is cowardly and even the tribunes of the people do not shine with courage, in Brecht the people are rushing from one extreme to the other , in the end, under the leadership of the tribunes, creates something reminiscent of the “popular front” of the 30s, on the basis of which a kind of popular power is formed.

However, in the same year, work on Coriolanus was interrupted: the “cult of personality”, borrowed from the experience of the USSR, flourished in the early 50s in many countries of Eastern Europe, and what gave the play relevance simultaneously made its production impossible. In 1955, the time seemed to have come for Coriolanus, and Brecht returned to this work; but in February 1956 the 20th Congress of the CPSU took place - the resolution of the Central Committee “On overcoming the cult of personality and its consequences” published in June dispelled its last illusions; Coriolanus was staged only eight years after his death.

From early 1955, Brecht worked with old colleague Erich Engel on a production of The Life of Galileo at the Berliner Ensemble and wrote a play that, unlike The Life of Galileo, was actually dedicated to the creators of the atomic bomb and was called The Life of Einstein. “Two powers are fighting…” wrote Brecht regarding the central conflict of the play. - X transfers the great formula to one of these powers, so that with its help he himself can be protected. He does not notice that the facial features of both powers are similar. A power favorable to him wins and overthrows another, and something terrible happens: it itself turns into another...” The illness slowed down his work both in the theater and at his desk: Brecht returned from Moscow completely exhausted and was able to start rehearsals only at the end of December, and in April he was forced to interrupt them due to illness - Engel had to finish the performance alone. “The Life of Einstein” remained in sketches; Turandot, written in 1954, turned out to be Brecht's last play.

Illness and death

A general decline in strength was evident already in the spring of 1955: Brecht aged sharply; at 57 years old, he walked relying on a cane; in May, going to Moscow, he drew up a will in which he asked that the coffin with his body not be publicly displayed anywhere and that farewell words should not be spoken over the grave.

In the spring of 1956, while working on a production of “The Life of Galileo” in his theater, Brecht suffered a myocardial infarction; Since the heart attack was painless, Brecht did not notice it and continued to work. He attributed his increasing weakness to fatigue and at the end of April he went on vacation to Bukkov. However, my health did not improve. On August 10, Brecht arrived in Berlin for the rehearsal of the play “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” for the upcoming tour in London; on the evening of the 13th his condition began to deteriorate.

The next day, a doctor invited by relatives diagnosed a massive heart attack, but the ambulance from the government clinic arrived too late. On August 14, 1956, five minutes before midnight, Bertolt Brecht died at the age of 59.

Early in the morning of August 17, Brecht was buried, according to his will, in the small Dorotheenstadt cemetery not far from the house in which he lived. In addition to family members, only the closest friends and the staff of the Berliner Ensemble theater took part in the funeral ceremony. As the playwright wanted, no speeches were made over his grave. Only a few hours later the official wreath-laying ceremony took place.

The next day, August 18, a funeral meeting was organized in the building of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, where the Berliner Ensemble had been located since 1954; Ulbricht read out an official statement from the President of the GDR, W. Pieck, in connection with the death of Brecht, and added on his own behalf that the leadership of the GDR provided Brecht with the leadership of the theater “for the implementation of all his creative plans”; he received “every opportunity to speak with the working people” in East Germany. Literary critic Hans Mayer, who knew well the value of his words, noted only three sincere moments at this “absurd celebration”: “when Ernst Busch sang their common songs to a dead friend,” and Hans Eisler, hidden behind the scenes, accompanied him on the piano.

Personal life

In 1922, Brecht married the actress and singer Marianne Zoff, from which in 1923 he had a daughter, Hannah, who became an actress (known as Hannah Hiob) and played many of his heroines on stage; passed away on June 24, 2009. Zoff was five years older than Brecht, kind-hearted and caring, and to a certain extent, Schumacher writes, replaced his mother. Nevertheless, this marriage turned out to be fragile: in 1923, Brecht met in Berlin the young actress Elena Weigel, who gave birth to his son Stefan (1924-2009). In 1927, Brecht divorced Zoff and in April 1929 formalized his relationship with Weigel; in 1930 they had a daughter, Barbara, who also became an actress (known as Barbara Brecht-Shall).

In addition to his legitimate children, Brecht had an illegitimate son from his youthful love, Paula Banholzer; Born in 1919 and named Frank after Wedekind, Brecht's eldest son remained with his mother in Germany and died in 1943 on the Eastern Front.

Creation

Brecht the poet

According to Brecht himself, he began “traditionally”: with ballads, psalms, sonnets, epigrams and guitar songs, the lyrics of which were born simultaneously with the music. “He entered German poetry,” wrote Ilya Fradkin, “as a modern vagant, composing songs and ballads somewhere at a street intersection...” Like vagants, Brecht often resorted to parody techniques, choosing the same objects for parody - psalms and chorales (collection “Home Sermons”, 1926), textbook poems, but also bourgeois romances from the repertoire of organ grinders and street singers. Later, when all of Brecht’s talents were concentrated in the theater, the zongs in his plays were born in the same way along with the music; only in 1927, when staging the play “Man is a Man” at the Volksbühne in Berlin, he for the first time entrusted his texts to a professional composer - Edmund Meisel, who at that time collaborated with Piscator. In The Threepenny Opera, the zongs were born along with the music of Kurt Weill (and this prompted Brecht, when publishing the play, to indicate that it was written “in collaboration” with Weill), and many of them could not exist outside of this music.

At the same time, Brecht remained a poet until his last years - not only the author of lyrics and zongs; but over the years he increasingly preferred free forms: the “ragged” rhythm, as he himself explained, was “a protest against the smoothness and harmony of ordinary verse” - that harmony that he did not find either in the world around him or in his own soul. In the plays, since some of them were written primarily in verse, this “ragged” rhythm was also dictated by the desire to more accurately convey the relationships between people - “as contradictory relationships, full of struggle.” In the poems of the young Brecht, in addition to Frank Wedekind, the influence of François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud and Rudyard Kipling is noticeable; later he became interested in Chinese philosophy, and many of his poems, especially in recent years, and above all "Bukov's Elegies", in form - in laconicism and capacity, partly in contemplation - resemble the classics of ancient Chinese poetry: Li Bo, Du Fu and Bo Juyi, which he translated.

Since the late 20s, Brecht wrote songs designed to inspire struggle, such as “Song of the United Front” and “All or Nobody”, or satirical ones, such as a parody of the Nazi “Horst Wessel”, translated in Russian as “March of Rams”. At the same time, writes I. Fradkin, he remained original even in such topics that, it seemed, had long ago turned into a cemetery of truisms. As one critic noted, Brecht was already such a playwright in these years that many of his poems, written in the first person, are more like the statements of stage characters.

In post-war Germany, Brecht put all his creativity, including poetry, at the service of building a “new world”, believing, unlike the leadership of the SED, that this construction can be served not only with approval, but also with criticism. He returned to lyricism in 1953, in his last closed cycle of poems - “Bukov Elegies”: Brecht’s country house was located in Bukov on Schermützelsee. Allegories, which Brecht often resorted to in his mature drama, were increasingly encountered in his later lyrics; written on the model of Virgil's "Bucolik", "Bukov's Elegies" reflected, as E. Schumacher writes, the feelings of a person "standing on the threshold of old age and fully aware that there is very little time left for him on earth." Along with the bright memories of youth, there are not just elegiac, but stunningly gloomy, according to the critic, poems - to the extent that their poetic meaning is deeper and richer than the literal meaning.

Brecht the playwright

House of Brecht and Weigel in Bukov, now Bertolt-Brecht-Strasse, 29/30

Brecht's early plays were born out of protest; “Baal” in its original edition, 1918, was a protest against everything that is dear to the respectable bourgeois: the asocial hero of the play (according to Brecht - asocial in an “asocial society”), the poet Baal, was a declaration of love for Francois Villon, “a murderer, a robber from the high road, a writer of ballads,” and, moreover, obscene ballads - everything here was designed to be shocking. Later, “Baal” was transformed into an anti-expressionist play, a “counter-play,” polemically directed, in particular, against the idealized portrait of playwright Christian Grabbe in “The Lonely One” by G. Jost. The play “Drums in the Night,” which developed the same theme in the “concrete historical situation” of the November Revolution, was also polemical in relation to the well-known thesis of the Expressionists “a good man.”

In his next plays, Brecht also polemicized against the naturalistic repertoire of German theaters. By the mid-20s, he formulated the theory of “epic” (“non-Aristotelian”) drama. “Naturalism,” wrote Brecht, “gave the theater the opportunity to create exceptionally subtle portraits, scrupulously, in all details, to depict social “corners” and individual small events. When it became clear that naturalists overestimated the influence of the immediate, material environment on human social behavior... - then interest in the “interior” disappeared. The broader background became important, and it was necessary to be able to show its variability and the contradictory effects of its radiation.” At the same time, his first epic drama Brecht called “Baal,” but the principles of “epic theater” were developed gradually, its purpose was clarified over the years, and the nature of his plays changed accordingly.

Back in 1938, analyzing the reasons for the special popularity of the detective genre, Brecht noted that a person of the 20th century acquires his life experience mainly in conditions of disasters, while he is forced to look for the causes of crises, depressions, wars and revolutions: “Already when reading newspapers ( but also bills, news of dismissal, mobilization agendas, and so on), we feel that someone did something... What and who did? Behind the events that are reported to us, we assume other events that are not reported to us. They are the real events.” Developing this idea in the mid-50s, Friedrich Dürrenmatt came to the conclusion that theater is no longer able to reflect the modern world: the state is anonymous, bureaucratic, incomprehensible to the senses; In these conditions, only victims are accessible to art; it can no longer comprehend those in power; “The modern world is easier to recreate through a small speculator, clerk or policeman than through the Bundesrat or the Bundeschancellor.”

Brecht sought ways to present “true events” on stage, although he did not claim to have found them; he saw, in any case, only one opportunity to help to modern man: to show that the world around us is changeable, and to the best of our ability to study its laws. Since the mid-30s, starting with “Roundheads and Sharpheads,” he increasingly turned to the parabola genre, and in recent years, working on the play “Turandot, or the Congress of the Whitewashers,” he said that the allegorical form still remains the most suitable for “alienation” of social problems. I. Fradkin explained Brecht’s tendency to transfer the action of his plays to India, China, medieval Georgia, etc. by the fact that exotically costumed plots fit more easily into the shape of a parabola. “In this exotic setting,” the critic wrote, “the philosophical idea of ​​the play, freed from the shackles of familiar and familiar everyday life, more easily achieves universal significance.” Brecht himself saw the advantage of the parabola, despite its known limitations, in the fact that it is “much more ingenious than all other forms”: the parabola is concrete in the abstract, making the essence visual, and, like no other form, “can elegantly present the truth”

Brecht - theorist and director

It was difficult to judge from the outside what Brecht was like as a director, since the outstanding performances of the Berliner Ensemble were always the fruit of collective work: in addition to the fact that Brecht often worked in tandem with the much more experienced Engel, he also had thinking actors, often with directorial inclinations, which he himself knew how to both awaken and encourage; His talented students also contributed to the creation of performances as assistants: Benno Besson, Peter Palich and Manfred Weckwerth - such collective work on the performance was one of the fundamental principles of his theater.

At the same time, working with Brecht, according to Weckwerth, was not easy - because of his constant doubts: “On the one hand, we had to accurately record everything that was said and achieved (...), but the next day we had to hear: “I never did this.” I didn’t say that, you wrote it down incorrectly.” The source of these doubts, according to Vevkvert, in addition to Brecht’s spontaneous dislike for all kinds of “final solutions,” was also the contradiction inherent in his theory: Brecht professed an “honest” theater that did not create the illusion of authenticity, did not try to influence the viewer’s subconscious, bypassing it a mind that deliberately reveals its techniques and avoids identifying the actor with the character; Meanwhile, theater by its very nature is nothing more than the “art of deception,” the art of depicting something that actually does not exist. “The magic of the theater,” writes M. Weckwerth, lies in the fact that people, having come to the theater, are ready in advance to indulge in illusion and accept at face value everything that is shown to them. Brecht, both in theory and in practice, tried by all means to counteract this; often he chose performers depending on their human inclinations and biographies, as if he did not believe that his actors, experienced masters or bright young talents, could portray on stage something that was not typical for them in life. He did not want his actors to act - the “art of deception,” including acting, in Brecht’s mind was associated with the performances into which the National Socialists turned their political actions.

But the “magic of the theater,” which he drove through the door, kept breaking through the window: even the exemplary Brechtian actor Ernst Busch, after the hundredth performance of “The Life of Galileo,” according to Weckwerth, “already felt not only a great actor, but also a great physicist " The director tells how once employees of the Institute for Nuclear Research came to see “The Life of Galileo” and after the performance expressed a desire to talk with the leading actor. They wanted to know how an actor works, but Bush preferred to talk to them about physics; spoke with all passion and persuasiveness for about half an hour - the scientists listened as if spellbound and at the end of the speech burst into applause. The next day, the director of the institute called Wekvert: “Something incomprehensible has happened. ...I only realized this morning that it was complete nonsense.”

Did Bush, despite all Brecht’s insistence, really identify himself with the character, or was he simply explaining to physicists what the art of an actor is, but, as Weckwerth testifies, Brecht was well aware of the indestructibility of the “magic of the theater” and in his directorial practice he tried to make it serve their goals - to turn into a “cunning of the mind” ( List der Vernunft).

For Brecht, the “cunning of the mind” was “naivety,” borrowed from folk art, including Asian art. It was precisely the readiness of the spectator in the theater to indulge in illusions - to accept the proposed rules of the game that allowed Brecht, both in the design of the performance and in the acting, to strive for maximum simplicity: to indicate the place of action, the era, the character of the character with meager but expressive details, to achieve “reincarnation” sometimes with the help of ordinary masks - cutting off everything that can distract attention from the main thing. Thus, in Brecht’s production of “The Life of Galileo,” Pavel Markov noted: “The director unmistakably knows at what point in the action the viewer’s special attention should be directed. She does not allow a single unnecessary accessory on stage. Precise and very simple decoration<…>It conveys the atmosphere of the era only through some meager details of the setting. The mise-en-scène is also constructed expediently, sparingly, but correctly,” - this “naive” laconicism ultimately helped Brecht concentrate the audience’s attention not on the development of the plot, but primarily on the development of the author’s thought.

Director's work

• 1924 - “The Life of Edward II of England” by B. Brecht and L. Feuchtwanger (arrangement of the play “Edward II” by C. Marlowe). Artist Kaspar Neher - Kammerspiele, Munich; the premiere took place on March 18
• 1931 - “Man is Man” by B. Brecht. Artist Kaspar Neher; composer Kurt Weill - State Theater, Berlin
• 1931 - “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany”, opera by K. Weil to a libretto by B. Becht. Artist Kaspar Neher - Theater am Kurfürstendamm, Berlin
• 1937 - “The Rifles of Teresa Carrar” by B. Brecht (co-director Zlatan Dudov) - Sall Adyar, Paris
• 1938 - “99%” (selected scenes from the play “Fear and Despair in the Third Empire” by B. Brecht). Artist Heinz Lohmar; composer Paul Dessau (co-producer Z. Dudov) - Salle d'Jena, Paris
• 1947 - “The Life of Galileo” by B. Brecht (“American” edition). Design by Robert Davison (co-director Joseph Losey) - Coronet Theater, Los Angeles
• 1948 - “Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti” by B. Brecht. Artist Theo Otto (co-director Kurt Hirschfeld) - Schauspielhaus, Zurich
• 1950 - “Mother Courage and Her Children” by B. Brecht. Artist Theo Otto - Kammerspiele, Munich

"Berliner Ensemble"

• 1949 - “Mother Courage and Her Children” by B. Brecht. Artists Theo Otto and Kaspar Neher, composer Paul Dessau (co-director Erich Engel)
• 1949 - “Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti” by B. Brecht. Artist Kaspar Neher; composer Paul Dessau (co-director Erich Engel)
• 1950 - “The Governor” by J. Lenz, adapted by B. Brecht. Artists Kaspar Neher and Heiner Hill (co-directors E. Monk, K. Neher and B. Besson)
• 1951 - “Mother” by B. Brecht. Artist Kaspar Neher; composer Hans Eisler
• 1952 - “Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti” by B. Brecht. Composer Paul Dessau (co-composer Egon Monk)
• 1953 - “Katzgraben” by E. Strittmatter. Artist Carl von Appen
• 1954 - “Caucasian Chalk Circle” by B. Brecht. Artist Carl von Appen; composer Paul Dessau; director M. Wekvert
• 1955 - “Winter Battle” by I. R. Becher. Artist Carl von Appen; composer Hans Eisler (co-producer M. Weckwerth)
• 1956 - “The Life of Galileo” by B. Brecht (“Berlin” edition). Designer Caspar Neher, composer Hans Eisler (co-director Erich Engel).

Heritage

Brecht is best known for his plays. In the early 60s, West German literary critic Marianne Kesting, in her book “Panorama of the Modern Theatre,” presenting 50 playwrights of the 20th century, noted that the majority of those living today are “sick of Brecht” (“brechtkrank”), finding a simple explanation for this: his “completed in the very itself" concept that united philosophy, drama and acting techniques, drama theory and theater theory, no one was able to oppose another concept, "equally significant and internally integral." Researchers find Brecht's influence in the works of such diverse artists as Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Arthur Adamov, Max Frisch and Heiner Müller.

Brecht wrote his plays “on the topic of the day” and dreamed of a time when the world around him would change so much that everything he wrote would be irrelevant. The world was changing, but not that much - interest in Brecht’s work either waned, as it did in the 80s and 90s, and then was revived again. It was revived in Russia as well: Brecht’s dreams of a “new world” lost their relevance - his view of the “old world” unexpectedly turned out to be relevant.

The Political Theater (Cuba) bears the name of B. Brecht.

Essays

Most famous plays

• 1918 - “Baal” (German: Baal)
• 1920 - “Drums in the Night” (German: Trommeln in der Nacht)
• 1926 - “Man is Man” (German: Mann ist Mann)
• 1928 - “The Threepenny Opera” (German: Die Dreigroschenoper)
• 1931 - “Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses” (German: Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe)
• 1931 - “Mother” (German: Die Mutter); based on the novel of the same name by A. M. Gorky
• 1938 - “Fear and despair in the Third Empire” (German: Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches)

Popular biographies › Bertolt Brecht

Every person at least a little interested in theater, even if he is not yet a sophisticated theatergoer, is familiar with the name Bertolt Brecht. He occupies an honorable place among the outstanding theatrical figures, and his influence on European theater can be compared with the influence K. Stanislavsky And V. Nemirovich-Danchenko into Russian. Plays Bertolt Brecht are installed everywhere, and Russia is no exception.

Bertolt Brecht. Source: http://www.lifo.gr/team/selides/55321

What is "epic theater"?

Bertolt Brecht- not just a playwright, writer, poet, but also the founder of theatrical theory - "epic theater". Myself Brecht opposed it to the system " psychological" theater, the founder of which is K. Stanislavsky. Basic principle "epic theater" was a combination of drama and epic, which contradicted the generally accepted understanding of theatrical action, based, in the opinion of the Brecht, only on the ideas of Aristotle. For Aristotle, these two concepts were incompatible on the same stage; the drama had to completely immerse the viewer in the reality of the performance, evoke strong emotions and force them to acutely experience events together with the actors, who were supposed to get used to the role and, in order to achieve psychological authenticity, isolate themselves on stage from the audience (in which, according to Stanislavsky, they were helped by the conventional “fourth wall” that separated the actors from the audience). Finally, for psychological theater a complete, detailed restoration of the surroundings was necessary.

Brecht on the contrary, he believed that such an approach shifts attention to to a greater extent only for action, distracting from the essence. Target " epic theater“- make the viewer abstract and begin to critically evaluate and analyze what is happening on stage. Lion Feuchtwanger wrote:

“According to Brecht, the whole point is that the viewer no longer pays attention to the “what”, but only to the “how”... According to Brecht, the whole point is that the person in auditorium I just contemplated the events on stage, trying to learn and hear as much as possible. The viewer must observe the course of life, draw appropriate conclusions from the observation, reject them or agree - he must become interested, but, God forbid, not get emotional. He must consider the mechanism of events in exactly the same way as the mechanism of a car."

Alienation effect

For "epic theater" was important " alienation effect" Myself Bertolt Brecht said it was necessary “simply to strip an event or character of everything that is self-evident, familiar, obvious, and to arouse surprise and curiosity about this event” which should form in the viewer the ability to critically perceive the action.

Actors

Brecht abandoned the principle that the actor should get used to the role as much as possible; moreover, the actor was required to express his own position in relation to his character. In his report (1939) Brecht argued this position as follows:

“If contact was established between the stage and the audience on the basis of getting used to it, the viewer was able to see exactly as much as the hero he got used to saw. And in relation to certain situations on stage, he could experience feelings that were resolved by the “mood” on stage.”

Scene

Accordingly, the design of the stage had to work for the idea; Brecht refused to reliably recreate the surroundings, perceiving the stage as an instrument. The artist was now required minimalist rationalism, the scenery had to be conventional and present the depicted reality to the viewer only in general terms. Screens were used on which titles and newsreels were shown, which also prevented “immersion” in the performance; sometimes the scenery was changed right in front of the audience, without lowering the curtain, deliberately destroying the stage illusion.

Music

To realize the “alienation effect” Brecht also used musical numbers in his performances - in the “epic theater” music complemented the acting and performed the same function - expressing a critical attitude towards what is happening on the stage. First of all, for these purposes they used zongs. These musical inserts deliberately seemed to fall out of the action and were used out of place, but this technique emphasized the inconsistency only with the form, and not with the content.

Influence on Russian theater today

As already noted, the plays Bertolt Brecht are still popular with directors of all stripes, and Moscow theaters today provide a large selection and allow you to observe the full range of the playwright’s talent.

So, in May 2016 the premiere of the play took place “Mother Courage” in the theatre Workshop of Peter Fomenko. The performance is based on a play “Mother Courage and her children”, which Brecht began writing on the eve of World War II, intending to make a warning. However, the playwright finished his work in the fall of 1939, when the war had already begun. Later Brecht will write:

“Writers cannot write as quickly as governments start wars: after all, in order to write, you have to think... “Mother Courage and Her Children” is late”

Sources of inspiration when writing a play Brecht served two works - the story " A detailed and amazing biography of the notorious liar and tramp Courage", written in 1670 G. von Grimmelshausen, a participant in the Thirty Years' War, and " Tales of Ensign Stol» J. L. Runeberg. The heroine of the play, a sutler, uses the war as a way to get rich and does not feel any feelings towards this event. Courage takes care of his children, who, on the contrary, represent the best human qualities, which are modified in the conditions of war and doom all three to death. " Mother Courage"not only embodied the ideas of "epic theater", but also became the first production of the theater " Berliner Ensemble"(1949), created Brecht.

Production of the play “Mother Courage” at the Fomenko Theater. Photo source: http://fomenko.theatre.ru/performance/courage/

IN Theater named after Mayakovsky The play premiered in April 2016 "Caucasian chalk circle" based on the play of the same name Brecht. The play was written in America in 1945. Ernst Schumacher, biographer Bertolt Brecht, suggested that by choosing Georgia as the setting, the playwright seemed to pay tribute to the role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War. The epigraph of the performance includes a quote:

"Bad times make humanity dangerous to man"

The play is based on the biblical parable of the king Solomon and two mothers arguing over whose child (also, according to biographers, on Brecht influenced by the play " chalk circle» Klabunda, which, in turn, was based on a Chinese legend). The action takes place against the backdrop of World War II. In this work Brecht poses the question, what is a good deed worth?

As researchers note, this play is an example of the “correct” combination of epic and drama for “epic theater.”

Staging the play “Caucasian Chalk Circle” at the Mayakovsky Theater. Photo source: http://www.wingwave.ru/theatre/theaterphoto.html

Perhaps the most famous in Russia production of “The Good Man of Szechwan”(« Good man from Sichuan") - production Yuri Lyubimov in 1964 Taganka Theater, with which the heyday began for the theater. Today, the interest of directors and spectators in the play has not disappeared, the performance Lyubimova still on stage Pushkin Theater you can see the version Yuri Butusov. This play is considered one of the most striking examples of " epic theater" Like Georgia in " Caucasian chalk circle“China here is a peculiar, very distant conventional fairy-tale country. And in this conventional world the action takes place - the gods descend from heaven in search of a good person. This is a show about kindness. Brecht believed that it is an innate quality and that it refers to a specific set of qualities that can only be expressed symbolically. This play is a parable, and the author here poses questions to the viewer: what is kindness in life, how is it embodied and can it be absolute, or is there a duality of human nature?

Production of Brecht's 1964 play "The Good Man from Sichuan" at the Taganka Theater. Photo source: http://tagankateatr.ru/repertuar/sezuan64

One of the most famous plays Brecht, « The Threepenny Opera", staged in 2009 Kirill Serebrennikov at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater. The director emphasized that he was staging a zong opera and had been preparing the performance for two years. This is the story of a bandit nicknamed Mackey- knife, action takes place in Victorian England. Beggars, police officers, bandits, and prostitutes take part in the action. According to himself Brecht, in the play he portrayed bourgeois society. It is based on a ballad opera " Beggar's Opera» John Gay. Brecht said that the composer participated in the writing of his play Kurt Weill. Researcher V. Hecht, comparing these two works, wrote:

“Gay directed disguised criticism at obvious outrages, Brecht subjected obvious criticism to disguised outrages. Gay explained the ugliness by human vices, Brecht, on the contrary, explained the vices by social conditions.”

Peculiarity " The Threepenny Opera” in her musicality. The zongs from the play became incredibly popular, and in 1929 a collection was even published in Berlin, and later they were performed by many world stars of the music industry.

Staging of the play “Tehgroshova Opera” at the Moscow Art Theater named after A.P. Chekhov. Photo source: https://m.lenta.ru/photo/2009/06/12/opera

Bertolt Brecht stood at the origins of a completely new theater, where the main goal of the author and actors is to influence not the emotions of the viewer, but his mind: to force the viewer to be not a participant empathizing with what is happening, sincerely believing in the reality of the stage action, but a calm contemplator who clearly understands the difference between reality and the illusion of reality. The spectator of the dramatic theater cries with the one who weeps and laughs with the one who laughs, while the spectator of the epic theater Brecht

German playwright and poet, one of the leaders of the “epic theater” movement.

Born February 10, 1898 in Augsburg. After graduating from a real school, in 1917–1921 he studied philosophy and medicine at the University of Munich. During his student years he wrote the plays Baal (Baal, 1917–1918) and Drums in the Night (Trommeln in der Nacht, 1919). The last one, staged by Munich chamber theater September 30, 1922, won the prize named after. Kleist. Brecht became a playwright at the Chamber Theater.

Anyone who fights for communism must be able to fight and stop it, be able to tell the truth and keep silent about it, serve faithfully and refuse to serve, keep and break promises, not deviate from a dangerous path and avoid risks, be known and stay in the shadows .

Brecht Berthold

In the fall of 1924 he moved to Berlin, receiving similar place at the German Theater at M. Reinhardt. Around 1926 he became a free artist and studied Marxism. The following year, Brecht's first book of poems was published, as well as a short version of the play Mahogany, his first work in collaboration with the composer C. Weil. Their Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) was performed with great success on August 31, 1928 in Berlin and then throughout Germany. From this moment until the Nazis came to power, Brecht wrote five musicals, known as “training plays” (“Lehrst cke”), with music by Weill, P. Hindemith and H. Eisler.

On February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, Brecht left Germany and settled in Denmark; in 1935 he was deprived of German citizenship. Brecht wrote poems and sketches for anti-Nazi movements, in 1938–1941 he created his four largest plays - The Life of Galileo (Leben des Galilei), Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder), The Good Man from Szechwan (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan) and Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti (Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti). In 1940, the Nazis invaded Denmark and Brecht was forced to leave for Sweden and then Finland; in 1941 he went through the USSR to the USA, where he wrote The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1941) and two more plays, and also worked on English version Galilee.

After leaving America in November 1947, the writer ended up in Zurich, where he created his main theoretical work, the Small Organon (Kleines Organon, 1947) and his last completed play, Days of the Commune (Die Tage der Commune, 1948–1949). In October 1948 he moved to the Soviet sector of Berlin, and on January 11, 1949, the premiere of Mother Courage in his production took place there, with his wife Elena Weigel in the title role. They then founded their own troupe, the Berliner Ensemble, for which Brecht adapted or staged approximately twelve plays. In March 1954 the group received the status of a state theater.

We should not be afraid of death, but of empty life.

Brecht Berthold

Brecht has always been a controversial figure, especially in the divided Germany of the last years of his life. In June 1953, after the riots in East Berlin, he was accused of being loyal to the regime, and many West German theaters boycotted his plays.

In 1954 Brecht received the Lenin Prize.

Brecht died on August 14, 1956 in East Berlin. Much of what he wrote remained unpublished; many of his plays were not staged on the professional German stage.

Bertolt Brecht - photo

Bertolt Brecht - quotes

We should not be afraid of death, but of empty life.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) is one of the largest German theater figures, the most talented playwrights of his time, but his plays are still popular and are staged in many theaters around the world. and poet, as well as the creator of the Berliner Ensemble theater. The work of Bertolt Brecht led him to the creation of a new direction of “political theater”. He was from the German city of Augsburg. From his youth he was interested in theater, but his family insisted that he become a doctor, after high school he entered the University. Ludwig Maximilian in Munich.

Bertolt Brecht: biography and creativity

However, serious changes occurred after a meeting with the famous German writer Leon Vaichwanger. He immediately noticed remarkable talent in the young man and recommended that he take up literature closely. By this time, Brecht had completed his play “Drums of the Night,” which was staged by one of the Munich theaters.

By 1924, after graduating from university, young Bertolt Brecht sets off to conquer Berlin. His biography indicates that here another amazing meeting awaited him with the famous director Erwin Piscator. A year later, this tandem creates the “Proletarian Theater”.

A short biography of Bertolt Brecht indicates that the playwright himself was not rich, and his own money would never have been enough to commission and buy plays from famous playwrights. That is why Brecht decides to write on his own.

But he began by remaking famous plays, and then he began staging popular literary works for non-professional artists.

Theater work

The creative path of Bertolt Brecht began with the play “The Threepenny Opera” by John Gay, based on his book “The Beggar’s Opera,” which became one of the first such debut experiences, staged in 1928.

The plot tells the story of the life of several beggar vagabonds who do not disdain anything and seek their livelihood by any means. The play almost immediately became popular, since tramp beggars had not yet been the main characters on the theatrical stage.

Then Brecht, together with his partner Piscator, staged a second joint play based on M. Gorky’s novel “Mother” at the Volksbünne Theater.

Spirit of revolution

In Germany at that time, the Germans were looking for new ways to develop and organize the state, and therefore there was some ferment in their minds. And this revolutionary pathos of Berthold very much corresponded to the spirit of that mood in society.

This was followed by a new play by Brecht based on the novel by J. Hasek, which tells about the adventures of the good soldier Švejk. It attracted the attention of the audience because it was literally stuffed with humorous everyday situations, and most importantly, with a bright anti-war theme.

The biography indicates that at that time he was married to the famous actress Elena Weigel, and with her he moved to Finland.

Work in Finland

There he begins to work on the play “Mother Courage and Her Children.” He spied the plot in a German folk book, which described the adventures of one tradeswoman during the period

He could not leave the state of fascist Germany alone, so he gave it a political overtones in the play “Fear and Despair in the Third Empire” and showed in it the true reasons for Hitler’s fascist party coming to power.

War

During World War II, Finland became an ally of Germany, and so Brecht again had to emigrate, but this time to America. He staged his new plays there: “The Life of Galileo” (1941), “The Good Man of Szechwan”, “Mr. Puntilla and His Servant Matti”.

The basis was taken from folklore stories and satire. Everything seems simple and clear, but Brecht, having processed them with philosophical generalizations, turned them into parables. So the playwright was looking for new means of expression your thoughts, ideas and beliefs.

Taganka Theater

His theatrical productions were performed in close contact with the audience. Songs were performed, sometimes the audience was invited onto the stage and made them direct participants in the play. Such things had an amazing effect on people. And Bertolt Brecht knew this very well. His biography contains another very interesting detail: it turns out that the Moscow Taganka Theater also began with a play by Brecht. Director Yu. Lyubimov made the play “The Good Man from Szechwan” the hallmark of his theater, although with several other performances.

When the war ended, Bertolt Brecht immediately returned to Europe. The biography has information that he settled in Austria. There were benefit performances and standing ovations for all his plays that he wrote in America: “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”, “The Career of Arturo Ui”. In the first play, he showed his attitude to Chaplin’s film “The Great Dictator” and tried to convey what Chaplin did not say.

Berliner Ensemble Theater

In 1949, Berthold was invited to work in the GDR at the Berliner Ensemble theater, where he became artistic director and director. He writes dramatizations of the largest works of world literature: “Vassa Zheleznova” and “Mother” by Gorky, “The Beaver Coat” and “The Red Rooster” by G. Hauptmann.

He traveled halfway around the world with his performances and, of course, visited the USSR, where in 1954 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.

Bertolt Brecht: biography, list of books

In mid-1955, Brecht, at the age of 57, began to feel very ill; he had aged greatly and walked using a cane. He drew up a will in which he indicated that the coffin with his body should not be put on public display and that farewell speeches should not be made.

Exactly one year later, in the spring, while working in the theater on a production of “The Life of Gadileus,” Brekh suffered a micro-infarction on his feet, then, by the end of the summer, his health worsened, and he himself died from a massive heart attack on August 10, 1956.

This is where we can finish the topic “Brecht Berthold: biography, life story.” It only remains to add that throughout his life this amazing man wrote many literary works. His most famous plays, besides those listed above, are “Baal” (1918), “Man is Man” (1920), “The Life of Galileo” (1939), “Caucasian Cretaceous” and many, many others.

Brecht, Bertolt (Brecht), (1898-1956), one of the most popular German playwrights, poet, art theorist, director. Born on February 10, 1898 in Augsburg in the family of a factory director. He studied at the medical faculty of the University of Munich. Even in his high school years, he began to study the history of antiquity and literature. Author of a large number of plays that were successfully performed on the stage of many theaters in Germany and the world: “Baal”, “Drumbeat in the Night” (1922), “What is this soldier, what is that” (1927), “The Threepenny Opera” (1928) , “Saying “yes” and saying “no” (1930), “Horace and Curation” (1934) and many others. Developed the theory of “epic theater”. In 1933, after Hitler came to power, Brecht emigrated; in 1933-47 lived in Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, USA. In exile he created a series of realistic scenes “Fear and Despair in the Third Reich” (1938), the drama “The Rifles of Teresa Carrard” (1937), and the parable drama “The Good Man from Szechwan” (1940). ), “The Career of Arturo Ui” (1941), “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” (1944), historical dramas “Mother Courage and Her Children” (1939), “The Life of Galileo” (1939), etc. Returning to his homeland in 1948, he organized Theater "Berliner Ensemble" in Berlin. Brecht died in Berlin on August 14, 1956.

Brecht Bertolt (1898/1956) - German writer and director. Most of Brecht's plays are filled with a humanistic, anti-fascist spirit. Many of his works have entered the treasury of world culture: “The Threepenny Opera”, “Mother Courage and Her Children”, “The Life of Galileo”, “The Good Man from Szechwan”, etc.

Guryeva T.N. New literary dictionary / T.N. Guryev. – Rostov n/d, Phoenix, 2009, p. 38.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was born in Augsburg, the son of a factory director, studied at a gymnasium, practiced medicine in Munich and was drafted into the army as an orderly. The songs and poems of the young orderly attracted attention with the spirit of hatred of the war, the Prussian military, and German imperialism. In the revolutionary days of November 1918, Brecht was elected a member of the Augsburg Soldiers' Council, which testified to the authority of a very young poet.

Already in Brecht's earliest poems we see a combination of catchy, catchy slogans and complex imagery that evokes associations with classical German literature. These associations are not imitations, but unexpected rethinking of old situations and techniques. Brecht seems to move them into modern life, makes them look at them in a new, “alienated” way. Thus, already in his earliest lyrics, Brecht groped for his famous dramatic technique of “alienation.” In the poem “The Legend of the Dead Soldier,” the satirical techniques are reminiscent of the techniques of romanticism: a soldier going into battle against the enemy has long been just a ghost, the people accompanying him are philistines, whom German literature has long depicted in the guise of animals. And at the same time, Brecht’s poem is topical - it contains intonations, pictures, and hatred from the times of the First World War. Brecht also condemns German militarism and war in his 1924 poem “The Ballad of Mother and Soldier”; the poet understands that the Weimar Republic was far from eradicating militant pan-Germanism.

During the years of the Weimar Republic, Brecht's poetic world expanded. Reality appears in the most acute class upheavals. But Brecht is not content with merely recreating images of oppression. His poems are always a revolutionary call: such are “Song of the United Front”, “The Faded Glory of New York, the Giant City”, “Song of the Class Enemy”. These poems clearly show how at the end of the 20s Brecht came to a communist worldview, how his spontaneous youthful rebellion grew into proletarian revolutionism.

Brecht's lyrics are very wide in their range, the poet can capture the real picture of German life in all its historical and psychological specificity, but he can also create a meditation poem, where the poetic effect is achieved not by description, but by the accuracy and depth of philosophical thought, combined with refined, not a far-fetched allegory. For Brecht, poetry is, first of all, the accuracy of philosophical and civil thought. Brecht considered even philosophical treatises or paragraphs of proletarian newspapers full of civic pathos to be poetry (for example, the style of the poem “Message to Comrade Dimitrov, who fought the fascist tribunal in Leipzig” is an attempt to bring together the language of poetry and newspapers). But these experiments ultimately convinced Brecht that art should speak about everyday life in far from everyday language. In this sense, Brecht the lyricist helped Brecht the playwright.

In the 20s, Brecht turned to the theater. In Munich, he became a director and then a playwright at the city theater. In 1924, Brecht moved to Berlin, where he worked in the theater. He acts both as a playwright and as a theorist - a theater reformer. Already in these years, Brecht’s aesthetics, his innovative view on the tasks of drama and theater, took shape in its decisive features. Brecht outlined his theoretical views on art in the 20s in separate articles and speeches, later combined into the collection “Against Theater Routine” and “On the Way to modern theater" Later, in the 30s, Brecht systematized his theatrical theory, clarifying and developing it, in the treatises “On Non-Aristotelian Drama”, “New Principles of Acting Art”, “Small Organon for the Theater”, “Buying Copper” and some others.

Brecht calls his aesthetics and dramaturgy “epic,” “non-Aristotelian” theater; by this name he emphasizes his disagreement with the most important, according to Aristotle, principle of ancient tragedy, which was subsequently adopted to a greater or lesser extent by the entire world theatrical tradition. The playwright opposes the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis. Catharsis is extraordinary, highest emotional intensity. Brecht recognized this side of catharsis and preserved it for his theater; We see emotional strength, pathos, and open manifestation of passions in his plays. But the purification of feelings in catharsis, according to Brecht, led to reconciliation with tragedy, life's horror became theatrical and therefore attractive, the viewer would not even mind experiencing something similar. Brecht constantly tried to dispel the legends about the beauty of suffering and patience. In “The Life of Galileo” he writes that a hungry person has no right to endure hunger, that “to starve” is simply not eating, and not showing patience, pleasing to heaven.” Brecht wanted tragedy to provoke thinking about ways to prevent tragedy. Therefore, he considered Shakespeare’s shortcoming to be that at performances of his tragedies, for example, “a discussion about the behavior of King Lear” is unthinkable and the impression is created that Lear’s grief is inevitable: “it has always been this way, it is natural.”

The idea of ​​catharsis, generated by ancient drama, was closely related to the concept of the fatal predetermination of human destiny. Playwrights, with the power of their talent, revealed all the motivations for human behavior; in moments of catharsis, like lightning, they illuminated all the reasons for human actions, and the power of these reasons turned out to be absolute. That is why Brecht called Aristotelian theater fatalistic.

Brecht saw a contradiction between the principle of reincarnation in the theater, the principle of the author’s dissolution in the characters and the need for a direct, agitation-visual identification of the writer’s philosophical and political position. Even in the most successful and tendentious in the best sense In traditional dramas, the position of the author, according to Brecht, was associated with the figures of reasoners. This was the case in the dramas of Schiller, whom Brecht highly valued for his citizenship and ethical pathos. The playwright rightly believed that the characters of the characters should not be “mouthpieces of ideas”, that this reduces the artistic effectiveness of the play: “...on the stage of a realistic theater there is a place only for living people, people in flesh and blood, with all their contradictions, passions and actions. The stage is not a herbarium or a museum where stuffed animals are displayed...”

Brecht finds his own solution to this controversial issue: the theatrical performance and the stage action do not coincide with the plot of the play. The plot, the story of the characters, is interrupted by direct author's comments, lyrical digressions, and sometimes even demonstrations of physical experiments, reading newspapers and a unique, always relevant entertainer. Brecht breaks the illusion of continuous development of events in the theater, destroys the magic of scrupulous reproduction of reality. Theater is genuine creativity, far beyond mere verisimilitude. For Brecht, creativity and acting, for which only “natural behavior in the given circumstances” is completely insufficient. Developing his aesthetics, Brecht uses traditions consigned to oblivion in the everyday, psychological theater of the late 19th - early 20th centuries; he introduces choruses and zongs of contemporary political cabarets, lyrical digressions characteristic of poems, and philosophical treatises. Brecht allows a change in the commentary principle when reviving his plays: he sometimes has two versions of zongs and choruses for the same plot (for example, the zongs in the productions of “The Threepenny Opera” in 1928 and 1946 are different).

Brecht considered the art of impersonation to be obligatory, but completely insufficient for an actor. He believed that much more important was the ability to express and demonstrate one’s personality on stage - both civilly and creatively. In the game, reincarnation must necessarily alternate and be combined with a demonstration of artistic abilities (recitation, movement, singing), which are interesting precisely because of their uniqueness, and, most importantly, with a demonstration of the actor’s personal civic position, his human credo.

Brecht believed that man retains the ability free choice and responsible decisions in the most difficult circumstances. This conviction of the playwright manifested faith in man, a deep conviction that bourgeois society, with all the power of its corrupting influence, cannot reshape humanity in the spirit of its principles. Brecht writes that the task of “epic theater” is to make the audience “give up... the illusion that everyone in the place of the hero portrayed would have acted in the same way.” The playwright deeply comprehends the dialectics of social development and therefore crushes the vulgar sociology associated with positivism. Brecht always chooses complex, “non-ideal” ways to expose capitalist society. “Political primitiveness,” according to the playwright, is unacceptable on stage. Brecht wanted the life and actions of the characters in plays from the life of a proprietary society to always give the impression of unnaturalness. He sets a very difficult task for the theatrical performance: he compares the viewer to a hydraulic engineer who is “able to see the river simultaneously both in its actual course and in the imaginary one along which it could flow if the slope of the plateau and the water level were different.” .

Brecht believed that a truthful depiction of reality is not limited only to the reproduction of social circumstances of life, that there are universal human categories that social determinism cannot fully explain (the love of the heroine of the “Caucasian Chalk Circle” Grusha for a defenseless abandoned child, Shen De’s irresistible impulse to goodness) . Their depiction is possible in the form of a myth, a symbol, in the genre of parable plays or parabolic plays. But in terms of socio-psychological realism, Brecht's dramaturgy can be placed on a par with the greatest achievements of world theater. The playwright carefully observed the basic law of realism of the 19th century. - historical specificity of social and psychological motivations. Comprehension of the qualitative diversity of the world has always been a primary task for him. Summing up his path as a playwright, Brecht wrote: “We must strive for an ever more accurate description of reality, and this, from an aesthetic point of view, is an ever more subtle and ever more effective understanding of description.”

Brecht's innovation was also manifested in the fact that he was able to fuse traditional, indirect methods of revealing aesthetic content (characters, conflicts, plot) with an abstract reflective principle into an indissoluble harmonious whole. What gives amazing artistic integrity to the seemingly contradictory combination of plot and commentary? The famous Brechtian principle of “alienation” - it permeates not only the commentary itself, but also the entire plot. Brecht’s “alienation” is both a tool of logic and poetry itself, full of surprises and brilliance.

Brecht makes “alienation” the most important principle of philosophical knowledge of the world, the most important condition for realistic creativity. Brecht believed that determinism is insufficient for the truth of art, that historical concreteness and socio-psychological completeness of the environment - the “Falstaffian background” - are not enough for “epic theater”. Brecht connects the solution to the problem of realism with the concept of fetishism in Marx’s Capital. Following Marx, he believes that in bourgeois society the picture of the world often appears in a “bewitched”, “hidden” form, that for each historical stage there is its own objective, forced “appearance of things” in relation to people. This “objective appearance” hides the truth, as a rule, more impenetrably than demagoguery, lies or ignorance. The highest goal and highest success of the artist, according to Brecht, is “alienation,” i.e. not only the exposure of the vices and subjective errors of individual people, but also a breakthrough beyond objective appearance to genuine laws, only emerging, only guessed at today.

“Objective appearance,” as Brecht understood it, is capable of turning into a force that “subjugates the entire structure of everyday language and consciousness.” In this, Brecht seems to coincide with the existentialists. Heidegger and Jaspers, for example, considered the entire everyday life of bourgeois values, including everyday language, as “rumor,” “gossip.” But Brecht, understanding, like the existentialists, that positivism and pantheism are just “rumour”, “objective appearance”, exposes existentialism as a new “rumour”, as a new “objective appearance”. Getting used to the role, to the circumstances does not break through the “objective appearance” and therefore serves realism less than “alienation”. Brecht did not agree that adaptation and transformation are the path to truth. K.S. Stanislavsky, who asserted this, was, in his opinion, “impatient.” For experience does not distinguish between truth and “objective appearance.”

Brecht's plays of the initial period of creativity - experiments, searches and first artistic victories. Already "Baal" - Brecht's first play - amazes with its bold and unusual presentation of human and artistic problems. In terms of poetics and stylistic features, “Baal” is close to expressionism. Brecht considers the dramaturgy of G. Kaiser to be “decisively important,” which “changed the situation in the European theater.” But Brecht immediately alienates the expressionistic understanding of the poet and poetry as an ecstatic medium. Without rejecting the expressionistic poetics of fundamental principles, he rejects the pessimistic interpretation of these fundamental principles. In the play, he reveals the absurdity of reducing poetry to ecstasy, to catharsis, shows the perversion of man on the path of ecstatic, disinhibited emotions.

The fundamental principle, the substance of life is happiness. She, according to Brecht, is in the serpentine coils of a powerful, but not fatal, evil that is substantially alien to her, in the power of coercion. Brecht's world - and this is what the theater must recreate - seems to be constantly balancing on a razor's edge. He is either in the power of “objective appearance”, it feeds his grief, creates a language of despair, “gossip”, or finds support in the comprehension of evolution. In Brecht's theater, emotions are mobile, ambivalent, tears are resolved with laughter, and a hidden, ineradicable sadness is interspersed into the brightest paintings.

The playwright makes his Baal the focal point, the focus of the philosophical and psychological trends of the time. After all, the expressionistic perception of the world as horror and the existentialist concept of human existence as absolute loneliness appeared almost simultaneously; the plays of the expressionists Hasenclever, Kaiser, Werfel and the first philosophical works of the existentialists Heidegger and Jaspers were created almost simultaneously. At the same time, Brecht shows that the song of Baal is a dope that envelops the listeners' heads, the spiritual horizon of Europe. Brecht depicts the life of Baal in such a way that it becomes clear to the audience that the delusional phantasmagoria of his existence cannot be called life.

“What is this soldier, what is that one” is a vivid example of a play that is innovative in all its artistic components. In it, Brecht does not use traditional techniques. He creates a parable; The central scene of the play is a zong that refutes the aphorism “What is this soldier, what is that one”, Brecht “alienates” the rumor about the “interchangeability of people”, speaks of the uniqueness of each person and the relativity of environmental pressure on him. This is a deep premonition of the historical guilt of the German man in the street, who is inclined to interpret his support for fascism as inevitable, as a natural reaction to the failure of the Weimar Republic. Brecht finds new energy for the movement of drama in place of the illusion of developing characters and naturally flowing life. The playwright and the actors seem to be experimenting with the characters, the plot here is a chain of experiments, the lines are not so much communication between the characters as a demonstration of their probable behavior, and then “alienating” this behavior.

Brecht's further searches were marked by the creation of the plays The Threepenny Opera (1928), Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses (1932) and The Mother, based on the novel by Gorky (1932).

Brecht took the comedy of the 18th century English playwright as the plot basis for his “opera”. Gaia "Beggar's Opera". But the world of adventurers, bandits, prostitutes and beggars depicted by Brecht has not only English specifics. The structure of the play is multifaceted, the severity of the plot conflicts is reminiscent of the crisis atmosphere of Germany during the Weimar Republic. This play is based on Brecht's compositional techniques"epic theater" The direct aesthetic content contained in the characters and plot is combined with zongs that carry theoretical commentary and encourage the viewer to intense work of thought. In 1933, Brecht emigrated from Nazi Germany, lived in Austria, then in Switzerland, France, Denmark, Finland, and from 1941 in the USA. After World War II, he was pursued in the United States by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The poems of the early 30s were intended to dispel Hitler's demagoguery; the poet found and exposed contradictions in fascist promises that were sometimes invisible to the average person. And here Brecht was greatly helped by his principle of “alienation.”] What was generally accepted in the Hitlerite state, familiar, caressing the German ear - under Brecht’s pen began to look dubious, absurd, and then monstrous. In 1933-1934. the poet creates "Hitler's chorales". The high form of the ode and the musical intonation of the work only enhance the satirical effect contained in the aphorisms of the chorales. In many poems, Brecht emphasizes that the consistent struggle against fascism is not only the destruction of the Hitlerite state, but also the revolution of the proletariat (poems “All or Nobody”, “Song against War”, “Resolution of the Communards”, “Great October”).

In 1934, Brecht published his most significant prose work, The Threepenny Novel. At first glance, it may seem that the writer created only a prose version of The Threepenny Opera. However, “The Threepenny Novel” is a completely independent work. Brecht specifies the time of action much more precisely here. All events in the novel are related to the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. Characters familiar from the play - the bandit Makhit, the head of the "beggar empire" Peachum, policeman Brown, Polly, Peachum's daughter, and others - are transformed. We see them as businessmen of imperialist acumen and cynicism. Brecht appears in this novel as a genuine “doctor of social sciences.” It shows the mechanism of behind-the-scenes connections between financial adventurers (like Cox) and the government. The writer depicts the external open side events - the departure of ships with recruits to South Africa, patriotic demonstrations, a respectable court and a vigilant police force in England. He then sketches the true and decisive course of events in the country. Traders, for the sake of profit, send soldiers in “floating coffins” that go to the bottom; patriotism is inflated by hired beggars; in court, the bandit Makhit-knife calmly plays the insulted “honest trader”; the robber and the chief of police have a touching friendship and provide each other with a lot of services at the expense of society.

Brecht's novel presents the class stratification of society, class antagonism and the dynamics of struggle. The fascist crimes of the 30s, according to Brecht, are not news; the English bourgeoisie of the beginning of the century largely anticipated the demagogic techniques of the Nazis. And when a small merchant, selling stolen goods, just like a fascist, accuses the communists, who oppose the enslavement of the Boers, of treason, of lack of patriotism, then this is not an anachronism or anti-historicism in Brecht. On the contrary, it is a profound insight into certain recurring patterns. But at the same time, for Brecht, an accurate reproduction of historical life and atmosphere is not the main thing. For him, the meaning of the historical episode is more important. The Anglo-Boer War and fascism for the artist are a raging element of possessiveness. Many episodes of The Threepenny Affair are reminiscent of Dickens's world. Brecht subtly captures the national flavor of English life and specific intonations English literature: a complex kaleidoscope of images, intense dynamics, a detective shade in the depiction of conflicts and struggles, the English nature of social tragedies.

In emigration, in the struggle against fascism, Brecht's dramatic creativity flourished. It was extremely rich in content and varied in form. Among the most famous plays of the emigration is “Mother Courage and Her Children” (1939). The more acute and tragic the conflict, the more critical, according to Brecht, a person’s thought should be. In the conditions of the 30s, “Mother Courage” sounded, of course, as a protest against the demagogic propaganda of war by the Nazis and was addressed to that part of the German population that succumbed to this demagoguery. War is depicted in the play as an element organically hostile to human existence.

The essence of “epic theater” becomes especially clear in connection with Mother Courage. Theoretical commentary is combined in the play with a realistic manner that is merciless in its consistency. Brecht believes that realism is the most reliable way of influence. That is why in “Mother Courage” the “true” face of life is so consistent and consistent even in small details. But one should keep in mind the two-dimensionality of this play - the aesthetic content of the characters, i.e. a reproduction of life, where good and evil are mixed regardless of our desires, and the voice of Brecht himself, not satisfied with such a picture, trying to affirm good. Brecht's position is directly manifested in the zongs. In addition, as follows from Brecht’s director’s instructions for the play, the playwright provides theaters with ample opportunities to demonstrate the author’s thoughts with the help of various “alienations” (photography, film projection, direct address of actors to the audience).

The characters of the heroes in Mother Courage are depicted in all their complex contradictions. The most interesting is the image of Anna Fierling, nicknamed Mother Courage. The versatility of this character evokes various feelings in the audience. The heroine attracts with her sober understanding of life. But she is a product of the mercantile, cruel and cynical spirit of the Thirty Years' War. Courage is indifferent to the causes of this war. Depending on the vicissitudes of fate, she hoists either a Lutheran or a Catholic banner over her wagon. Courage goes to war in the hope of big profits.

Brecht's disturbing conflict between practical wisdom and ethical impulses infects the entire play with the passion of argument and the energy of preaching. In the image of Catherine, the playwright painted the antipode of Mother Courage. Neither threats, nor promises, nor death forced Catherine to abandon her decision, dictated by her desire to help people in some way. The talkative Courage is opposed by the mute Catherine, the girl’s silent feat seems to cancel out all the lengthy reasoning of her mother.

Brecht's realism is manifested in the play not only in the depiction of the main characters and in the historicism of the conflict, but also in the life-like authenticity of episodic characters, in Shakespearean multicoloredness, reminiscent of a “Falstaffian background.” Each character, drawn into the dramatic conflict of the play, lives his own life, we guess about his fate, about the past and future life and it’s as if we hear every voice in the discordant chorus of war.

In addition to revealing the conflict through the clash of characters, Brecht complements the picture of life in the play with zongs, which provide a direct understanding of the conflict. The most significant zong is “Song of Great Humility”. This complex look“alienation,” when the author speaks as if on behalf of his heroine, sharpens her erroneous positions and thereby argues with her, instilling in the reader doubts about the wisdom of “great humility.” Brecht responds to the cynical irony of Mother Courage with his own irony. And Brecht’s irony leads the viewer, who has already succumbed to the philosophy of accepting life as it is, to a completely different view of the world, to an understanding of the vulnerability and fatality of compromises. The song about humility is a kind of foreign counterpart that allows us to understand the true, opposite wisdom of Brecht. The entire play, which critically portrays the practical, compromising “wisdom” of the heroine, is a continuous debate with the “Song of Great Humility.” Mother Courage does not see the light in the play, having survived the shock, she learns “no more about its nature than a guinea pig about the law of biology.” The tragic (personal and historical) experience, while enriching the viewer, taught Mother Courage nothing and did not enrich her at all. The catharsis she experienced turned out to be completely fruitless. Thus, Brecht argues that the perception of the tragedy of reality only at the level of emotional reactions in itself is not knowledge of the world, and is not much different from complete ignorance.

The play “The Life of Galileo” has two editions: the first - 1938-1939, the final - 1945-1946. " Epic start"constitutes the inner hidden basis of the Life of Galileo. The realism of the play is deeper than traditional. The whole drama is permeated by Brecht's insistence on theoretically comprehending every phenomenon of life and not accepting anything, relying on faith and generally accepted norms. The desire to present every thing requiring explanation, the desire to get rid of familiar opinions is very clearly manifested in the play.

The Life of Galileo shows Brecht's extraordinary sensitivity to the painful antagonisms of the 20th century, when the human mind reached unprecedented heights in theoretical thinking, but could not prevent the use of scientific discoveries for evil. The idea of ​​the play goes back to the days when the first reports about the experiments of German scientists in the field of nuclear physics appeared in the press. But it is no coincidence that Brecht turned not to modernity, but to a turning point in the history of mankind, when the foundations of the old worldview were crumbling. In those days - at the turn of the XVI-XVII centuries. - scientific discoveries for the first time became, as Brecht narrates, the property of streets, squares and bazaars. But after Galileo’s abdication, science, according to Brecht’s deep conviction, became the property of only scientists. Physics and astronomy could free humanity from the burden of old dogmas that fetter thought and initiative. But Galileo himself deprived his discovery of philosophical argumentation and thereby, according to Brecht, deprived humanity not only of a scientific astronomical system, but also of far-reaching theoretical conclusions from this system, affecting fundamental issues of ideology.

Brecht, contrary to tradition, sharply condemns Galileo, because it was this scientist, unlike Copernicus and Bruno, having in his hands irrefutable and obvious to every person evidence of the correctness of the heliocentric system, who was afraid of torture and abandoned the only correct teaching. Bruno died for a hypothesis, and Galileo renounced the truth.

Brecht “alienates” the idea of ​​capitalism as an era of unprecedented development of science. He believes that scientific progress rushed along only one channel, and all other branches withered. About the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Brecht wrote in his notes on the drama: “... it was a victory, but it was also a shame - a forbidden technique.” When creating Galileo, Brecht dreamed of the harmony of science and progress. This subtext is behind all the grandiose dissonances of the play; Behind the seemingly disintegrated personality of Galileo is Brecht’s dream of an ideal personality “constructed” in the process of scientific thinking. Brecht shows that the development of science in the bourgeois world is a process of accumulation of knowledge alienated from man. The play also shows that another process - “the accumulation of a culture of research action in the individuals themselves” - was interrupted, that at the end of the Renaissance, the forces of reaction excluded the masses from this most important “process of accumulation of research culture”: “Science left the squares for the quiet of offices” .

The figure of Galileo in the play is a turning point in the history of science. In his person, the pressure of totalitarian and bourgeois-utilitarian tendencies destroys both the real scientist and the living process of improvement of all humanity.

Brecht's remarkable skill is manifested not only in an innovatively complex understanding of the problem of science, not only in the brilliant reproduction of the intellectual life of the heroes, but also in the creation of powerful and multifaceted characters, in the revelation of their emotional life. The monologues of the heroes of “The Life of Galileo” are reminiscent of the “poetic verbosity” of Shakespeare’s heroes. All the characters in the drama carry something renaissance within them.

The play-parable “The Good Man from Szechwan” (1941) is dedicated to the affirmation of the eternal and innate quality of man - kindness. The main character of the play, Shen De, seems to radiate goodness, and this radiation is not caused by any external impulses, it is immanent. Brecht the playwright inherits in this the humanistic tradition of the Enlightenment. We see Brecht's connection with the fairy tale tradition and folk legends. Shen De resembles Cinderella, and the gods who reward the girl for her kindness resemble the beggar fairy from the same fairy tale. But Brecht interprets traditional material in an innovative way.

Brecht believes that kindness is not always rewarded with fabulous triumph. The playwright introduces social circumstances into fairy tales and parables. China, depicted in the parable, is devoid of authenticity at first glance; it is simply “a certain kingdom, a certain state.” But this state is capitalist. And the circumstances of Shen De’s life are the circumstances of life at the bottom of a bourgeois city. Brecht shows that on this day the fairy tale laws that rewarded Cinderella cease to apply. The bourgeois climate is destructive to the best human qualities that arose long before capitalism; Brecht views bourgeois ethics as a deep regression. Love turns out to be just as destructive for Shen De.

Shen De embodies the ideal norm of behavior in the play. Shoy Yes, on the contrary, he is guided only by soberly understood self-interests. Shen De agrees with many of Shoi Da’s reasonings and actions, she saw that only in the guise of Shoi Da can she really exist. The need to protect her son in a world of bitter and vile people, indifferent to each other, proves to her that Shoi Da is right. Seeing the boy looking for food in a garbage can, she vows that she will ensure her son's future even in the most brutal struggle.

The two appearances of the main character are a vivid stage “alienation”, this is a clear demonstration of the dualism of the human soul. But this is also a condemnation of dualism, for the struggle between good and evil in man is, according to Brecht, only a product of “bad times.” The playwright clearly proves that evil, in principle, is a foreign body in a person, that the evil Shoi Da is just a protective mask, and not the true face of the heroine. Shen De never becomes truly evil and cannot eradicate the spiritual purity and gentleness in himself.

The content of the parable leads the reader not only to the thought of the destructive atmosphere of the bourgeois world. This idea, according to Brecht, is no longer sufficient for the new theater. The playwright makes you think about ways to overcome evil. The gods and Shen De are inclined towards compromise in the play, as if they cannot overcome the inertia of thinking of their environment. It is curious that the gods, in essence, recommend to Shen De the same recipe that Mekhit used in The Threepenny Novel, who robbed warehouses and sold goods at a cheap price to poor shop owners, thereby saving them from hunger. But the plot ending of the parable does not coincide with the playwright’s commentary. The epilogue deepens and illuminates the problems of the play in a new way and proves the profound effectiveness of “epic theater.” The reader and viewer turn out to be much more vigilant than the gods and Shen De, who never understood why great kindness was interfering with her. The playwright seems to suggest a solution in the finale: to live selflessly is good, but not enough; The main thing for people is to live wisely. And this means building a reasonable world, a world without exploitation, a world of socialism.

"The Caucasian Chalk Circle" (1945) also belongs to Brecht's most famous parable plays. Both plays are related by the pathos of ethical quests, the desire to find a person in whom spiritual greatness and kindness would be most fully revealed. If in “The Good Man of Szechwan” Brecht tragically depicted the impossibility of realizing the ethical ideal in the everyday environment of a possessive world, then in “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” he revealed a heroic situation that requires people to uncompromisingly follow their moral duty.

It would seem that everything in the play is classically traditional: the plot is not new (Brecht himself had already used it earlier in the short story “The Augsburg Chalk Circle”). Grusha Vakhnadze, both in its essence and even in its appearance, evokes deliberate associations with Sistine Madonna, and with heroines of fairy tales and songs. But this play is innovative, and its originality is closely related to the main principle of Brechtian realism - “alienation”. Malice, envy, self-interest, conformism constitute the motionless environment of life, its flesh. But for Brecht this is only an appearance. The monolith of evil is extremely fragile in the play. All life seems to be permeated with streams of human light. The element of light is in the very fact of the existence of the human mind and the ethical principle.

In the rich philosophical and emotional intonations of the lyrics of “The Circle”, in the alternation of lively, plastic dialogue and song intermezzos, in the softness and inner light of the paintings, we clearly feel Goethe’s traditions. Grusha, like Gretchen, carries within herself the charm of eternal femininity. A beautiful person and the beauty of the world seem to gravitate towards each other. The richer and more comprehensive a person’s talent, the more beautiful the world is for him, the more significant, ardent, immeasurably valuable is invested in other people’s appeal to him. Many external obstacles stand in the way of the feelings of Grusha and Simon, but they are insignificant compared to the power that rewards a person for his human talent.

Only upon returning from emigration in 1948 was Brecht able to rediscover his homeland and practically realize his dream of an innovative dramatic theater. He is actively involved in the revival of democratic German culture. The literature of the GDR immediately received a great writer in the person of Brecht. His activities were not without difficulties. His struggle with the “Aristotelian” theater, his concept of realism as “alienation” met with misunderstanding both from the public and from dogmatic criticism. But Brecht wrote during these years that he believed literary struggle“a good sign, a sign of movement and development.”

In the controversy, a play appears that completes the playwright’s path - “Days of the Commune” (1949). The team of the Berliner Ensemble theater, led by Brecht, decided to dedicate one of its first performances to the Paris Commune. However, the existing plays did not meet, according to Brecht, the requirements of “epic theater.” Brecht himself creates a play for his theater. In "Days of the Commune" the writer uses the traditions of classical historical drama in its best examples (free alternation and richness of contrasting episodes, bright household painting, the encyclopedic nature of the “Falstaffian background”). “Days of the Commune” is a drama of open political passions, it is dominated by the atmosphere of a debate, a national assembly, its heroes are speakers and tribunes, its action breaks the narrow boundaries of a theatrical performance. Brecht in this regard relied on the experience of Romain Rolland, his “theater of revolution,” especially Robespierre. And at the same time, “Days of the Commune” is a unique, “epic,” Brechtian work. The play organically combines historical background, psychological authenticity of the characters, social dynamics and an “epic” story, a deep “lecture” about the days of the heroic Paris Commune; This is both a vivid reproduction of history and its scientific analysis.

Brecht's text is, first of all, a living performance; it requires theatrical blood, stage flesh. He needs not only actors-actors, but individuals with the spark of the Maid of Orleans, Grusha Vakhnadze or Azdak. It can be argued that any classical playwright needs personalities. But in Brecht's performances such personalities are at home; it turns out that the world was created for them, created by them. It is the theater that must and can create the reality of this world. Reality! Solving it is what primarily occupied Brecht. Reality, not realism. The artist-philosopher professed a simple, but far from obvious idea. Conversations about realism are impossible without preliminary conversations about reality. Brecht, like all theater workers, knew that the stage does not tolerate lies and mercilessly illuminates it like a spotlight. It does not allow coldness to disguise itself as burning, emptiness as meaningfulness, insignificance as significance. Brecht continued this thought a little; he wanted the theater and the stage to prevent the common ideas about realism from masquerading as reality. So that realism in understanding limitations of any kind is not perceived as reality by everyone.

Notes

Brecht's early plays: "Baal" (1918), "Drums in the Night" (1922), "The Life of Edward P of England" (1924), "In the Jungle of the Cities" (1924), "What is this soldier, what is that" (1927) .

Also the plays: “Roundheads and Sharpheads” (1936), “The Career of Arthur Wee” (1941), etc.

Foreign literature of the twentieth century. Edited by L.G. Andreev. Textbook for universities

Reprinted from the address http://infolio.asf.ru/Philol/Andreev/10.html

Read further:

Historical figures of Germany (biographical reference book).

World War II 1939-1945 . (chronological table).