Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble: Politics and Ethics

The Berliner Ensemble was constituted by Intendantin Helene Weigel with Bertolt Brecht as artistic leader in 1949; the ensemble was in residence at the Deutsches Theater until 1954, when it moved to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Laura Bradley writes that until the death of Brecht in 1956, the “entire approach” of the BE “was underpinned by a holistic understanding of political theater—one that went far beyond the argument or subject matter of any individual play.”Footnote ⁷ David Barnett calls the BE's holistic approach “politicized theatre”Footnote ⁸ or “making theatre politically,”Footnote ⁹ writing in A History of the Berliner Ensemble that this phrase, “deliberately differentiated from ‘making political theatre’, shifts the emphasis from content to form.”Footnote ¹⁰ Individual plays at the Berliner Ensemble had of course political subjects (unionizing a factory, say): Brecht did not attempt to choose neutral content, he chose specifically political content. But he did not stop there. The Berliner Ensemble made theatre politically, from the structure and content of the plays, to their stagings, to the way the institution operated. In other words, Brecht made politics into a verb. Sometimes this meant, as Barnett writes in Brecht in Practice, that Brecht worked “to craft forms of drama and theatre that can point to the political in the most apparently unpolitical of situations in order to alert the spectator that even these things could change in a changed society.”Footnote ¹¹ Bradley illustrates the holistic approach to politics through the BE's 1951 production The Mother—a play of love and politics, in which love fully manifests by becoming political action. In that production's opening scene, the BE located “the heroine's struggle to feed her son in a global class context.”Footnote ¹² While the audience heard Pelagea Vlassova (the mother) lament her inability to give her son the food he needs for his hard factory work, they saw projected on the stage “images of three working-class women.”Footnote ¹³ And, Bradley points out, the BE made this production politically: “During rehearsals for The Mother, its members attended weekly lectures on the Russian Revolution.”Footnote ¹⁴ In other words, the production process, the play, and the production itself all engaged in political thinking about how the working class could emancipate itself.

Part of the holistic approach to politics at the Berliner Ensemble was the “workshop character”Footnote ¹⁵ of the production process. Barnett writes: “What marks the BE as different from any other company at that time was that it did not simply view itself as an institution that staged plays. Manfred Pauli, who undertook work experience at the BE under Brecht, calls it ‘a craftsman's workshop [“Handwerksbetrieb”] or a research laboratory.’”Footnote ¹⁶ The techniques developed through this focus on process over product were meant to be successfully utilized, and developed upon, by other artists working in other contexts. To facilitate transferability of Brecht's methods, Ruth Berlau and other collaborators made the famous documentary Modellbücher. These “modelbooks” established how to produce his plays by illustrating how decisions were made about the production, with photographs of stagings alongside set and costume designs and commentary on the playtexts and actors’ blocking. Other theatres and directors could borrow and use the modelbooks to help with their own productions, and some were even published.Footnote ¹⁷

Though the Berliner Ensemble and Brecht himself emphasized politics, Brecht also used theatre to think about ethics. In his personal life, Brecht conducted his affairs in ways that sometimes hurt his friends and lovers; likewise, in his professional life, he sometimes miscredited the contributions of others to artistic productions he signed with only his name. These actions have shaped the reception of Brecht, and scholars and artists today struggle to balance his ideas, plays, and aesthetic innovations against his treatment of others. George Hunka, for example, reviewing Stephen Parker's 2014 biography, writes that Parker both “abjures” the temptation “to interpret the life from a moral and ethical perspective” and also “paints a portrait of a most unpleasant man.”Footnote ¹⁸ Brecht himself dramatized the conflict between production and behavior in Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo, first version written in 1938), among other plays. When the Procurator of Padua University visits Galileo to report that Galileo will not be given a raise—“Mathematics, so to speak, is an unproductive art”Footnote ¹⁹—Galileo refashions a tube with two lenses his pupil Ludovico has told him about and presents it to the Doge as “a completely new instrument, namely my spyglass or telescope.”Footnote ²⁰ At the end of this essay, I examine a recent production at the Berliner Ensemble about Ruth Berlau, who collaborated with Brecht and had a relationship with him, that uses Brecht's personal and artistic behavior toward Berlau to ask complicated ethical and aesthetic questions. For now, I turn to Brecht's materialist approach to ethics: an approach based, Markus Wessendorf writes, on “the idea that one should always behave as if not the next person but ‘history’ (i.e., the history of class struggle) would be the judge.”Footnote ²¹

In his thinking about how people treat each other, Brecht stressed that “morality reflects specific historical relations of production,”Footnote ²² as Wessendorf writes in an article about his materialist ethics. Or as Sonia Arribas puts it, “Brecht tries to integrate the political, the juridical, the ethical and/or the subjective into an analysis of the economic.”Footnote ²³ Arribas is careful to point out that Brecht did not make ethics the servant of economics, as some scholars have claimed of Marxism.Footnote ²⁴ Brecht's thinking here, as elsewhere, was dialectical. “[A]t his best,” Arribas writes, “Brecht neither neglects economic issues, nor dismisses the subjective responsibility and fundamental contradictoriness that lies at the source of ethical actions.”Footnote ²⁵

Wessendorf argues that Brecht “conflates” materialism with two other approaches to ethics: “the mimetic-utilitarian idea that a social attitude or gestus of virtue can easily be copied . . . and is therefore useful for the facilitation of a more productive social climate; and the assumption that benevolence and kindness are expressions of human nature as opposed to aggressive and hostile behavior.”Footnote ²⁶ Many of his characters serve as models—negative, positive, and often, dialectically, both—such as the troubling case of the Young Comrade in Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken, 1929/30), a play that edges on utilitarianism, with seemingly immoral means excused by revolutionary ends:

Here the Young Comrade performs a gestus of sacrifice—although that pause adds ambivalence, and the action feels cruel, even within the world of the play. Still, in contrast, an emphasis on Freundlichkeit, meaning “kindness” or “friendliness,” can be found throughout Brecht's artistic work, perhaps most famously at the end of the poem “To those born after”: “Oh we / Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness / Could not ourselves be friendly. // You, however, when the time comes / When mankind is a helper unto mankind / Think on us / With forbearance.”Footnote ²⁸ Notice the echo with The Measures Taken: we are preparing the foundation for kindness.

Although Brecht favored “a case-by-case consideration of conditions, context, and means”Footnote ²⁹—as opposed to metaphysics and Kantian categorical imperatives—Wessendorf does find one normative virtue. Here he quotes Brecht's prose text “Mo Zi and Ethics,” where the philosopher Mo Zi says: “I haven't found that many ‘you shall’ sentences that I would like to enunciate. I mean sentences of a general nature, sentences that could be addressed to the general public. Yet one such sentence would be: You shall produce.”Footnote ³⁰ Such a commandment can also be found in the conclusion of Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1944). “What there is should belong / To those who are good at it. / Children to true mothers, / That they may thrive. / Carts to good drivers, / That they may be driven well.” Most important: “the valley to the waterers,” not back to its original, less productive use, “So that it bears fruit.”Footnote ³¹ It is hard not to see some connection to Brecht's behavior—some excuse he might have given himself—in his admonition to produce and in his belief that we should imagine as the judge of our actions the history of the class struggle, and not, say, our friends and family.

Despite the normative virtue of production, and as much as his reputation says otherwise, Brecht rejected moralist education. In Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechwan, 1941), for example, the good Shen Teh is pushed by her protocapitalist society to become Shui Ta, who treats his fellow humans as means, not ends. Nicholas Ridout, in Theatre & Ethics, argues that in Brecht's satire of the gods in Good Person we watch “a sly attack on its own audience's desire to seek out ethical nourishment in the theatre.”Footnote ³² Instead of offering the audience what they want—answers that promote their own values—the play incites debate. The answer to the question “Should men be better?”Footnote ³³ posed in the play's epilogue, is that the economic-political system must be changed. But how? Wessendorf finds one answer in Brecht's approach to ethics: Marxist materialism, but practical and built from dialectics; a value ethics that allows for models of virtuous behavior (such as Mo Zi and the Young Comrade); and a general belief that people, like Shen Teh, are kind and will act with kindness, if only we can create a socialist state for them to live in.Footnote ³⁴ For Brecht, good ethics emerge from good politics, and good politics from good ethics.

But good art comes first. Wessendorf quotes a late fragment from Messingkauf, or Buying Brass, that “includes the following statement in the form of a stage direction: ‘(The arts free of moral obligations).’”Footnote ³⁵ Earlier in that conversation, during “The First Night,” Brecht has the Philosopher say to the Dramaturg and Actor: “I thought we might use your imitations for very practical purposes: simply to find out the best way to behave. We could turn them into something similar to physics.” The Dramaturg replies simply, “So your purposes are scientific ones! That's got nothing to do with art you know”Footnote ³⁶—though he also admits shortly thereafter that he doesn't see “why people shouldn't be able to draw practical lessons from our theatre as well.”Footnote ³⁷ Artworks do not necessarily provide good examples, but they can—or viewers can draw out good examples on their own. This freedom from moral obligations accords with how Brecht gave priority to aesthetics onstage and in his writing. Bradley points out that “instead of labeling his work political theater, Brecht used the terms epic theater and non-Aristotelian or dialectical theater—which placed the focus on aesthetics. This was consistent with his view that theater needed to stage its revolution on aesthetic grounds by developing methods for engaging with contemporary reality.”Footnote ³⁸ The Dramaturg in Messingkauf puts it more bluntly: “Yet theatre is a playful activity.”Footnote ³⁹

After Brecht's death in 1956, the Berliner Ensemble slowly retreated from being a process-oriented institution—a dialectical, politicized theatre—intended as a model for others. Barnett documents this transformation in his history:

If the BE in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s was “post-Brechtian” to various degrees, by the late 1990s, Barnett argues, there was none of that dialectic pursuit left.Footnote ⁴¹ Barnett ends his book just before the Intendanz of Claus Peymann: “It was clear even back in 1997”—before he actually took charge of the Ensemble in 1999—“that Peymann was not coming to the BE to continue the tradition, but to break with it in favour of his own ideas and conceptions about how to run such a theatre.”Footnote ⁴² Although he still produced Brecht's plays, Peymann seems to have seen himself as something of an exorcist, desiring “to drive out the ghosts of the past from the BE's staff.”Footnote ⁴³ Especially interesting for our purposes here is what Bradley writes about Peymann, in a different article than the one I have been quoting on politics, which is quoted by Barnett in his history: Peymann was “committed to the Schillerian concept of theatre as a moral institution, explaining that he wants to enlighten spectators in the tradition of Lessing, Schiller and Brecht.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The Berliner Ensemble in the 2000s and much of the 2010s was neither Brechtian nor post-Brechtian in its aesthetics, politics, and ethics; it was a regular German public theatre.Footnote ⁴⁵

The BE Today

Under the Intendanz of Oliver Reese, whose current contract runs through 2027, the BE continues to operate as a well-functioning, well-polished repertory theatre, not out of the ordinary in the German theatre landscape. It is one of several municipal theatres in Berlin, each with its own aesthetic, such as the Schaubühne, the Deutsches Theater, the Volksbühne, and the Maxim Gorki. There are also several prominent Freie Szene institutions there—which are subsidized by the city at lower levels, draw significant funds from grants, and host visiting artists instead of an ongoing ensemble—including Hebbel am Ufer, Sophiensaele, and Radialsystem. (For a full overview of the 2021–2 season in Berlin, which discusses many of these theatres as well as the BE, see my “Report from Berlin” published in PAJ.)Footnote ⁴⁶ Like many of these theatres, the BE posts “Content Notes” on their website, subtitled “notes on sensitive content and physical triggers.”Footnote ⁴⁷ According to two BE employees with whom I spoke,Footnote ⁴⁸ these notes were a collaboration between visitor services and the audience engagement and pedagogy department (which I discuss in more detail below), with input from dramaturgy. The page begins with a skeptical paragraph about theatre as a place of triggering conflicts, with a nod to Brecht: “The negotiation of social conflicts is inherent in this theatre and can make it possible to experience how our reality is made, constructed—and is therefore also changeable.”Footnote ⁴⁹ And yet (you can almost read the page as a dialogue!), a more convinced voice answers, “Depending on personal sensitivity, such confrontations can be perceived as (too) painful.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In other words, the Content Notes reflect an ethical decision about how the BE wants to treat its visitors: with kindness and consideration to all audience members, both the sensitive and the skeptical.

The Berliner Ensemble's brand is immediately recognizable among the posters that plaster the city, especially its logo, the Futura all-caps “Berliner Ensemble” inside a circle. Its marketing materials feel contemporary, while calling back to the BE's history in the similarity of the logo and font to those used at its founding.Footnote ⁵¹ But more than the marketing, it is Brecht's legacy that makes the BE unique. During the 2021–2 season in Germany, Austria, and the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland, there were twenty-three different productions of plays written by Brecht.Footnote ⁵² Four of these productions (or 17 percent) were at the BE; other than the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, which produced two Brecht plays, no other theatre produced more than one. But these statistics don't quite capture the Berliner Ensemble's hold on Brecht: in fact, more than 25 percent of the total performances of Brecht plays happened at the BE, and more than 40 percent of spectators who saw a Brecht play saw a BE production. In other words, Brecht is produced throughout the German-speaking parts of Europe,Footnote ⁵³ but especially at the Berliner Ensemble. Reese leans into the BE's Brecht legacy. And as we shall see, he invites in the Ensemble's ghosts.

The 2021–2 season at the BE featured twelve premieres, in a total repertoire of about thirty-six (as of 23 June 2022);Footnote ⁵⁴ in this article I discuss seven of those premieres, plus one production from the very end of the previous season. Reese and his dramaturgy team program their repertoire with some of Reese's own work, as well as productions by prominent older directors, like Frank Castorf, Michael Thalheimer, and Barrie Kosky, and the work of much younger artists and artistic teams.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is important to mention that 2021–2 was the first mostly normal theatre season in Germany following the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. For most of the season, visitors were required to wear medical masks, show proof of vaccination, and even, at times, provide proof of a recent negative test. (These regulations were issued by Berlin; only rarely did individual theatre institutions establish stricter requirements.) Still, despite frequent COVID cases among performers, which required theatres on any given evening to replace actors quickly, or even cancel performances or switch productions, the theatres strove to mimic normal practices: actors engaged in physical contact with one another, for example, and audience seating was allowed at full capacity.

In his own directorial work, Reese skews toward more conventional aesthetics, at least for the German theatre: a Regietheater that foregrounds actors and ideas, not so much the director's own id. In January 2022, Reese premiered Mein Name sei Gantenbein (My name is Gentenbein), with Matthias Brandt, a well-known German actor, performing a monologue adaptation of Max Frisch's novel.Footnote ⁵⁶ The set—a framed, rounded box like a giant television set or an aquarium, with a slightly forced perspective—directs attention to Brandt's performance of Frisch's midcentury exploration of identity, truth, and man in his society. It's a bourgeois production of a bourgeois text, focused on a man who is lost in some general, unstated way.

Three productions by other established directors are especially noteworthy. Barrie Kosky's Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera)—which premiered August 2021 in the Berliner Ensemble's fifth production of the musical—was the season's biggest success with audiences, a showbiz spectacle that often sold out even before tickets went on sale to the full public.Footnote ⁵⁷ Appealing to international audiences—with a rapturous review on the front page of the Arts section of the New York Times Footnote ⁵⁸—it was, like several productions each month at the BE, performed with English surtitles. Draußen vor der Tür (The Man Outside, March 2022) was Michael Thalheimer at his best.Footnote ⁵⁹ Working with Olaf Altmann, his usual set designer, Thalheimer mostly ignored Wolfgang Borchert's original postwar setting, “placing [the play] in a gorgeous field of colored lights [that became] the night sky, a river to drown in, a circus. As [the expressionist soldier-everyman] Beckmann, Kathrin Wehlisch is always onstage, both lit and obscured by Altmann's hanging bulbs.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The production, like the play, viewed bourgeois values, such as caring for family and disabled war veterans, through a dark lens: abandoned by everyone who should have cared for him as soon as he became an inconvenient presence, Wehlisch's Beckmann was left alone and screaming as the lights blinked off.

Castorf premiered his adaptation of Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde (Fabian; or, Going to the dogs) in June 2021, at the end of the previous season.Footnote ⁶¹ This Fabian was played by Marc Hosemann as Bugs Bunny meets Mephisto. Wearing an ugly, ill-fitting black suit with a crimson shirt of fake silk, Hosemann's Fabian was abstracted, the character's moralism and irony mostly erased. Setting Erich Kästner's 1931 novel against letters written to Castorf describing complicated love triangles—which come across as deeply embarrassing to Castorf—the production's four or five hours ended with actresses taking over the stage, led by Margarita Breitkreiz as a diva. As Castorf's productions do when they are working at their best, I felt both disgusted and tempted by Hosemann and his compatriots, drawn by their charisma and impressed by their energy, but repelled by their actions, as when Hosemann mimed putting Breitkreiz's hand through a meat grinder. The Anständigkeit (moral decency) for which Fabian longs in Kästner echoes #MeToo, as Castorf flattened time in the production, mingling references to Nazis and Babylon Berlin with the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany political party and the movie Reservoir Dogs. Castorf is a satirist, and the production left me laughing and uneasy: it made great fun of contemporary social justice values, and it also made great fun of Castorf himself.

Younger directors included Antú Romero Nunes, with a Der Diener zweier Herren (The Servant of Two Masters, December 2021);Footnote ⁶² Robert Borgmann and Nazanin Norri, with Sarah Kane's Phaidras Liebe (Phaedra's Love, April 2022, in the BE's smaller Neues Haus theatre);Footnote ⁶³ Christina Tscharyiski with Die Mutter (The Mother, September 2021, also in the Neues Haus); and the collective Raum + Zeit with Berlau: Königreich der Geister (Berlau: Kingdom of Ghosts, May 2022, in the Neues Haus's black box space). Nunes's Servant was a howdy doody nightmare set in a German imaginary of the American frontier and performed in English (with German surtitles)—though neither Nunes nor any of the actresses are native English speakers. As the Servant, a German immigrant in lederhosen, Stefanie Reinsperger performed with great physical charisma, rattling off jokes. Still, Nunes didn't seem to trust the comedy: the play ended without marriages. Instead, Reinsperger skinned her pet lamb, two other characters committed suicide, and the remaining actresses (all the performers were women) sat around in long underwear mournfully playing “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” with a saw and a banjo. A single cornstalk, as high as an elephant's eye, waited solemnly for some breeze to set it asway. Reinsperger also dominated Phaedra's Love, a kind of audio-play installation set to ambient-hardcore noise in which Reinsperger played both Hippolytus and Phaedra. As Hippolytus—violent and lonely, sitting around masturbating, whining, and playing video games—Reinsperger's energy had little direction. But as Phaedra, a hot mess in a black crinoline hoop skirt, she performed the violence of Kane's language with relish. The production's grotesquery reached its climax with the sparagmos of Hippolytus. After he was disemboweled and his genitals thrown onto a barbeque—and just before he died, finally, the last of his family—text above the stage read: “If there could have been more moments like this,”Footnote ⁶⁴ a line given to Hippolytus in Kane's play. Of these four, The Mother and Berlau are the most interesting to think about in terms of ethics; the former is a highly political play by Brecht that Tscharyiski made into a moralist production, whereas the latter took particularly bad conduct on the part of Brecht and theatricalized it, creating an immersive experience about ethics. In the following sections, I discuss these two in much more detail.

It is possible to read several of these eight productions as political. In Nunes's Servant, for example, the rich stay rich and the poor get beaten just for being around. The Man Outside felt well-timed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, if accidentally so, with its depiction of universal suffering both during and after the war. These politics are inherent in the original plays and emphasized, to a greater (Nunes) or lesser (Thalheimer) extent in the productions.Footnote ⁶⁵ But whether considered individually or collectively, the repertoire prioritized ethical values and relations over political ideology and action. Given Brecht's legacy at the BE and his own theorizing of politics and ethics, it's especially interesting to trace this shift in the new Threepenny Opera, so I start there. Thereafter I turn to The Mother, and finally, at the end of this essay, to Berlau.

Typical of Kosky, his Threepenny Opera projects an attitude of fun and ease. In the original, the audience loses its innocence or naivety, its belief that people are free to self-create and you can wash your hands of the blood of capitalism. Theatrical elements clash, and the audience beholds the ugly mobster violence of capitalist activity that covertly permeates all aspects of society, from the lives of beggars to families to gangsters to cops. In Kosky's version, to choose a single moment as a synecdoche for the whole, while Mack (Nico Holonics) and Polly (Cynthia Micas) get married, and just before the song “Seeräuber-Jenny” (“Pirate Jenny”), they engaged in a call-and-response with the audience. Both of them were trashy sexy, with Mack in tux with mascara and Polly in a feathery, short white dress, and they teased music director Adam Benzwi, just below them in the pit (Fig. 1). The scene did not so much implicate the audience as involve us: we were in on the joke.

Figure 1. (from left) Cynthia Micas as Polly and Nico Holonics as Mack in the wedding scene of Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, directed by Barrie Kosky, 2021) at the Berliner Ensemble. Photo: © JR Berliner Ensemble.

Instead of staging capitalist violence politically—Mack's line about bankers as the greatest thieves, toward the finale, was cut, for example—Kosky's Threepenny flattered the morality of its audience: well-mannered cosmopolitans. Once “Pirate Jenny” began, Micas performed the song, in all its disgust and fury, with the audience and not against them. Micas, whose Polly does capture the character's need for freedom and her jealousy, is Black. But the production, as its German audiences like to imagine themselves, acted color-blind, everyone much too polite to acknowledge that “Pirate Jenny” did at least in part become about race when Micas performed it: a Black woman serving a mostly white audience. The color-blind choice here can be contrasted with Nina Simone's celebrated interpretations of “Pirate Jenny,” which illustrate how the song can become strikingly political.Footnote ⁶⁶

The audience's moral superiority to that of the play's world was expressed also through aesthetic taste. Holonics's Mackie Messer was ugly and hungry. At the end, freed from the gallows, he was zipped into his suit and seemed to step out into public more dangerous than ever. Jonathan Peachum (Tilo Nest) wore a tawdry black velvet suit, and Frau Peachum (Constanze Becker) a body-length fur coat and seemingly nothing else: new money, baby. We're better than them. We—the cultural elite audience—have great taste, just look at us sitting here in the Berliner Ensemble, looking at the beautiful scaffolding set by Rebecca Ringst and listening to Benzwi conducting. So it's not so much that we laughed with Holonics as at him. The audience was superior, aesthetically and morally. We know how to behave. Compare this to the “sly attack” Ridout identifies in Good Person.

I don't want to be unfair to the production, which really was great fun. Kosky's Threepenny may have flattered the audience, but he did not try to teach a simple lesson. Instead, this Threepenny foregrounded the play's ethical questions. What is justice and why is it impossible in this world? How should we judge Mackie Messer? The audience might think about how ethical values can be hijacked by economic and religious systems in order to subjugate individuals. After Mack was lowered from the gallows, having hung high in the air for a near eternity (Fig. 2), a giant neon sign reading “LOVE ME” flew in behind him. Is it possible to live a good life, to love, within our economic, religious, and political systems? Or has love, as a value and as an act, been repackaged to increase consumption, while enabling the powerful to maintain power?

Figure 2. The hanging of Mack the Knife (Holonics) in The Threepenny Opera. Photo: © JR Berliner Ensemble.

Wessendorf writes of Brecht's ethics that “the aim of his epic theater was to study intolerable social conditions and to discover means for their elimination.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In Kosky's Threepenny, as in Brecht, reversal followed reversal, suffering followed suffering. But where Brecht tasked his audience with recognizing themselves in the historicized situation of poverty, crime, and capitalist governance, Kosky did not: not as Mack was hanging—watched by the entire cast, in solemn black, standing in a line against the scaffolding and looking up at the swinging body—and not with the final reversal, when the rex ex machina arrived to free him. The production showed us intolerable social conditions, but without any specific historical relations. There was no need to compare the staged action to our intolerable social conditions nor our global class conflict. We were asked to think about justice and the good life in the abstract, as if considering thought experiments in a book of moral philosophy. In Messingkauf, the Dramaturg says of the actors in a great performance that “they acted in such a way as to keep the audience's interest focused on the ensuing development, the continuation: on the mechanics of the events, as it were. On the play of cause and effect.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Kosky was not interested in the play of cause and effect. More than anything else, he was interested in Holonics as Mack. Where Brecht wants history—the history of class struggle—to serve as judge, Kosky invites us—we in the audience, we the good, the elite class—to judge Mack and not our society.

Moralizing The Mother

While Kosky's Threepenny mostly complimented the values of an older cultural elite, another production of a Brecht play that same season did the same for younger audiences, but more so, flattering their morality. Written in 1932, Die Mutter: Leben der Revolutionärin Pelagea Wlassowa aus Twer (The Mother [The mother: life of the revolutionary Pelagea Vlassova from Tver]) is one of Brecht's most insistently political plays. Adapted from the novel by Maxim Gorky and set in Tver, northwest of Moscow, just before the Russian Revolution, between 1905 and 1917, The Mother illustrates the revolutionary education of Pelagea Vlassova, who at the beginning is a religious woman living day to day, but who gradually learns from her son Pavel and his friends about unions and labor rights, and even how to read. After Pavel is killed, Pelagea becomes, at the play's end, a leader among the striking workers.

Directed by the young Christina Tscharyiski, born 1988, the 2021 Berliner Ensemble production of The Mother, with the new subtitle Anleitung für eine Revolution [Instructions for a revolution], was credited as “nach Brecht,” or adapted from Brecht.Footnote ⁶⁹ This is an especially noteworthy production for our purposes because it set out to adapt Brecht's communist learning play for Millennials and Gen Z—not only onstage, but also in its marketing campaign, which was far more extensive than that of the typical Berliner Ensemble production. In its adaptation for these new generations, the production and its surrounding apparatus moved between political and moral themes and forms, sometimes demanding that we come together in solidarity to alter systems and sometimes calling for social justice–style interventions in individual behavior and relationships.

While the production's subtitle is new, and a couple of long monologues supplemented Brecht's original text, including some writings by Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova, most of the spoken language in Tscharyiski's The Mother came from the original play. Instead of making a full adaptation, Tscharyiski used mise-en-scène, music, and casting to write on top of Brecht's text, as when one scribbles notes over original pages and both new and old are visible at once. The scenery by Janina Audick and costumes by artist Verena Dengler referenced memes, Web 3.0, and crypto. There were pixelated GIF-style faces on the curtain stage right, and prints on pants, vests, and ties composed of thousands of small screenshots. Musician Manuel Poppe reset Hanns Eisler's original score for an onstage punk-indie band of guitar (which he played), drums, and keyboard. The cast of only six each played multiple roles, with Constanze Becker as the mother, Pelagea—a role taken over in the final couple of scenes by Josefin Platt. (Both Becker and Platt are Berliner Ensemble stars.) The cast was mostly femme and, other than Becker and Platt, strikingly young, with Sophie Stockinger as the son, Pavel, as well as a maid in later scenes (Fig. 3). Jade Pearl Baker, a drag performer well-known from the TV show Voice of Germany and a regular in a late-night bathtub at the cabaret BKA-Theater, also performed several roles. If Brecht's dramaturgy centered a woman, in a kind of pre–second-wave feminism, Tscharyiski further emphasized women both in the story and in the creative team. In a profile in the Berliner Morgenpost, Tscharyiski talked about her preference for working with women: “I am of the opinion that there are still too few women working in the theatre. I have an opportunity to create jobs for great female artists.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Figure 3. Constanze Becker as “the Mother” Pelagea Vlassova holding the corpse of her son Pavel, played by Sophie Stockinger, in Die Mutter (The Mother, directed by Christina Tscharyiski, 2021) at the Berliner Ensemble. Photo: © JR Berliner Ensemble.

As noted above, The Mother of 1951 called up class consciousness by referencing worldwide hunger; Audick's set, on the other hand, referenced a starvation more spiritual than physical, with a giant box of Demeter peas, an inexpensive organic brand, sitting stage left, its front defaced by graffiti. In her adaptation for the 2020s, Tscharyiski sought to generate revolutionary class consciousness in the psychically hungry gig workers of our digital capitalism: the precariat of Web 3.0, represented in the cast and those GIF-styles faces. A long opening monologue by Stockinger, Tscharyiski's major addition to Brecht's play, performed out of character in a kind of lecture style, set up the audience to read the rest of the play as about this precariat. “Yes in fact,” Stockinger began, standing just slightly stage right, in the middle of the stage: “There are indeed people still left behind by society.”Footnote ⁷¹ The speech, a tirade against neoliberalism, would not have been out of place at a Bernie Sander's rally circa 2020. The change of subtitle—from “Life of the revolutionary” to “Instructions for a revolution”—insisted on a political interpretation. This is no mere history of revolution: it is a manual.

The marketing on YouTube and Twitter attempted something similar to the opening speech, framing the play through contemporary themes and encouraging users to post the hashtags #BEempowered and #Ermächtigteuch (the latter meaning roughly the same thing as the former, but without the nice pun). In a series of video interviews, members of the artistic team answered the question: “Wofür kämpfst du?”Footnote ⁷² (What are you fighting for?). Pearl Baker, Tscharyiski, Stockinger, and the actor Peter Moltzen listed issues that would sound familiar to young members of the creative class in the United States: climate crisis; sexual and bodily autonomy; gender equality; social equality; empowerment. Tscharyiski's Mother was the most political, or at least it had the most desire to be political, of the productions I saw at the BE in the 2021–2 season.

Still, throughout the production and its apparatus, the politics edged into moralism. Take the hashtag #BEempowered, or, as Tscharyiski said in one of her promotional videos: “really it's about empowerment.”Footnote ⁷³ This is a personal message, drawn directly from the language of American-style social justice and often used by Tscharyiski and the other artists without translation into German. Empowerment is something you do to better your treatment of yourself: it may have “power” as a root, but this is a power of self-esteem and independence.Footnote ⁷⁴ Tscharyiski said of The Mother: “It is a history of self-empowerment.”Footnote ⁷⁵ As much as Tscharyiski's Mother tried to generate a class consciousness of the precariat, it also wanted to generate a femme, gender-based consciousness grounded in self-empowerment.

Gunnar Decker suggested a revealing juxtaposition in Neues Deutschland, a socialist newspaper, arguing that Tscharyiski's Mother reminded him of Frank Castorf's 1997 adaptation of Gerhart Hauptmann's Die Weber (The Weavers, 1892) at the Volksbühne Berlin.Footnote ⁷⁶ Castorf took that protosocialist play and used it to satirize East German malaise, West German greed, and the post-Wall dissolving of ideology and equality into desire for luxury brands. For Decker, The Mother showed the ends of what Castorf had noticed was beginning more than twenty years earlier, when people were living “in the direct shadow of the socialist system and in the middle of a history-free culture of fun, with its Love Parade and Ballerman vacations.”Footnote ⁷⁷ By 2021 there was no longer even the shadow of other economic and cultural systems—just history-free capitalism everywhere, all the time.

Tscharyiski has inherited much from Castorf, including disassociating actors from characters, as seen in a wonderful moment in The Mother in which Moltzen gave an extended Aristophanic parabasis, dressed as an Old Holland Light Red paint tube, reveling in Quatsch (nonsense). Yet the class consciousness of The Mother was much less clear than what Castorf satirized and what Brecht depicted in the original, in part because Tscharyiski is more earnest than Castorf, and in part because this Mother was so tangled in moralism. Decker lamented the movement in Tscharyiski's Mother from analyzing class based on labor and capital to class based on personal identity, a move common among those in Tscharyiski's generation: “The identitarians of the right and the left have been very successfully draining society of its social consciousness and replacing class with sex, national sentiment, or other vague concepts. This is in the end a neoliberal principle, even if it believes itself to be emancipatory.”Footnote ⁷⁸ One doesn't need to agree with Decker's conclusion to see that the difference between generations he draws is correct, and notable.

There is an attempt at moral education happening in this Mother, much more similar to US American–style social justice than is typical of German theatre. As Tscharyiski said in the Morgenpost: “We belong to education.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, while the production and its marketing made claims to revolution, it also showed a deep discomfort with actually overturning systems. Tscharyiski, in her #BEempowered video, talked about fighting for democracy against fascism,Footnote ⁸⁰ and in the Morgenpost interview said: “It can come to forms of radicalization, which represent a danger for society.”Footnote ⁸¹ While the designers built their scenography from crypto memes, I had no idea how the production stood in relation to cryptocurrency politically: Is it an antifascist liberatory force for the precariat, or a new way of oppressing them? Should we work within the political system to regulate crypto, or should we be using crypto to secede from our governments? If there's a revolution being called for in The Mother, it's personal, not political. In a promotional video, Tscharyiski said, “I ultimately believe that theatre cannot make politics, politics has to be made by politicians, but [theatre] can [. . .] prominently display a social phenomenon and it can tackle a current issue, making it more visible and leading perhaps toward a just world.”Footnote ⁸² The point is to create a more just or equitable world by revising the morality of individuals. Taken in its entirety, The Mother was moralist theatre with political content.

Theatrical Events

Just as important for understanding the Berliner Ensemble as a less political theatre are the fünfte Sparte (fifth division) events there. “In Germany,” Christopher Balme writes, “theatres are increasingly being used to hold lectures, organize discussions, and host conferences, activities more familiar in the academy or on (public) television.”Footnote ⁸³ Drama, opera, dance, and children's theatre typically make up the four divisions of the German public theatre; these “fifth division” events, which Balme calls “postfictional,” increasingly contribute to programming. In fact, Balme writes: “This area of theatrical activity is now second only to drama in the German subsidized theatre system.”Footnote ⁸⁴ At the Berliner Ensemble, nontheatre events are listed on the Spielplan—the monthly calendar of performances—and take place in a variety spaces, from the Großes Haus (their largest stage), to rehearsal rooms, to Bertolt-Brecht-Platz in front of the theatre, to the interior courtyard garden. Generally sponsored by outside funders and grant organizations, as opposed to being funded through the main subsidy the Berliner Ensemble receives from Berlin, the events are free or low cost.

Many of the events are organized by the Abteilung Einblicke (The Insight Department, a play on words), which sees its mission as creating “encounters in the theatre and through theatre: encounters with stories, aesthetics, generations, visual habits, opinions, concepts, humor, biographies.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Though operating out of the theatre pedagogy department (with one staff member doing a Freiwilliges Soziales Jahr, roughly the equivalent of AmeriCorps in the United States), it is incorrect to think of the Abteilung Einblicke as applied theatre. There is a difficult to translate word in German to describe the kind of theatrical activity in which Abteilung Einblicke engages, activity that finds itself somewhere amid pedagogy, dramaturgy, and aesthetic production: Vermittlung, which means “mediation,” and describes the role of someone who works between a cultural institution and society (Fig. 4).Footnote ⁸⁶

Figure 4. From Berliner Ensemble's “multigenerational theatre workshop” for It's Britney, Bitch! (by Lena Brasch and Sina Martens, 2022) and Möwe ([Seagull], by Lili Epply, Sarah Viktoria Frick, and Anne Kulbatzki, 2022). Photo: © JR Berliner Ensemble.

Abteilung Einblicke does not organize events just intended for children or people with specific needs, as often happens with applied theatre in the United States, though they do design workshops for schoolchildren. Instead, most of the workshops are advertised to anyone who might be interested, serving small groups of about twenty to thirty people at a time. Events range from simple, common audience engagement efforts such as backstage tours, to workshops on acting techniques, explorations of themes around productions using theatre games, and even performances like “Brecht to Go,” which is subtitled “an enacted audio-workshop.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The events are best understood not as informational or postfictional, as Balme claims, but rather as extensions of onstage theatrical activity: into the corners of the institution, for audience members who want more than just to watch Stefanie Reinsperger in the BE's production of Elfriede Jelinek's Schwarzwasser (Blackwater, directed by Tscharyiski, 2021), and who also want to see how Jelinek's text feels and sounds when they speak and enact it.

Is there a way of thinking about Abteilung Einblicke as producing Lehrstücke, theatrical events without audiences, or for which the audience makes the event happen? Often no: the workshops primarily offer aesthetic exploration, missing the revolutionary political lesson that is the purpose of The Measures Taken or Was kostet das Eisen (How Much Is Your Iron?, 1939): “We explore both content-related questions and artistic forms, and closely analyze figures as well as individual themes.”Footnote ⁸⁸ And the workshops are not meant as reproducible experiments: the BE does not offer instructions to other theatre makers, along the lines of a script or notebook, and the workshops are tied to specific productions. So they fall more under the rubric of audience development or marketing, rather than the kind of theatre-as-community engagement of Brecht. Still, some of the workshops could be understood as small-scale, ethicized Lehrstücke. For the workshops around Phaedra's Love, for example, participants discussed with each other issues around gender and violence,Footnote ⁸⁹ seeking to make interventions in their personal lives (rather than researching systemic, political changes).

According to Mona Wahba, who has led the Abteilung Einblicke since 2022, the overall goal of these events and workshops is not primarily political, but rather to bring people in dialogue, to let them play together and experience the feeling of being onstage and being watched by an audience. For the workshops tied to The Mother, she said: “Depending on the participants and their questions and topics the focus of the workshops may vary. Nevertheless our starting point is always the respective play. Regarding The Mother, we dealt with questions around resistance, activism, and gender.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The division also works broadly on such social justice themes. Wahba told me that the Abteilung Einblicke intends to help audiences feel more represented, asking (both through statistical analysis and open conversations): For whom exactly are we making performances, and with whom?

I want to emphasize that the BE today, under Reese, may often take up political themes in its fifth division and sometimes even hosts politicians on its stage, but the institution does not politicize the events. They focus more often on the individual than on social organization, asking questions about aesthetics and justice that do not demand systemic change. They do not generate a political dialectic, in the Marxist sense of the word, which implies ongoing process.

An Ethicized Theatre

What are the consequences of this shift away from politics and toward ethics both for making theatre and for thinking about theatre? I do not believe the shift marks a failure to engage with the world or to try to change it, though that does sometimes happen. Nor does ethical theatre necessarily equate with moralizing or lecturing audiences on personal behavior, though again, that can happen. What we have seen at the Berliner Ensemble illustrates how the values of German theatre more broadly are changing. The BE is increasingly oriented toward a cosmopolitan cultural elite (as with Kosky's Threepenny Opera), toward social justice (as with Tscharyiski's The Mother), toward audience development (as with the Abteilung Einglicke events), and toward care (as with the “Content Notes”). There is also room for darkness and satire of these same values (as with Fabian and The Man Outside).

There remains one extraordinary example from the 2021–2 season of a production that showed the aesthetic and philosophical potential of an ethicized theatre, that is to say, a theatre that thinks actively and dialectically about ethics, that uses “ethics” as a verb, similarly to how Brecht used “politics” as a verb: Berlau, by Raum + Zeit.Footnote ⁹¹

For Berlau, which premiered in the Berliner Ensemble's flexible, black-box Werkraum in May 2022, individual audience members themselves embodied Ruth Berlau and confronted three more embodiments of Ruth Berlau.Footnote ⁹² Born in 1906, Berlau was a Danish actress and artist who met Brecht in 1933; later, they became lovers, and even after their intimate relationship ended, they collaborated on and off for the rest of Brecht's life. She became a skilled photographer and developed the modelbook form, first in Copenhagen in the mid-1930s, and then with Brecht in the United States and Berlin in the 1940s. At the Berliner Ensemble, Berlau “assumed special responsibility for matters visual and pictorial, gathered and archived pictorial material and sources, and edited and prepared for publication the four Modelbooks.”Footnote ⁹³ In Raum + Zeit's interactive tour of her life, relationship with Brecht, and artistry, one form of embodiment took place through an Oculus headset, with the visitor blindfolded by the headset and sitting quietly in a chair, addressed as Berlau. Wake up, a voice commanded. You're dreaming. It's 1954. You're in Berlin. Between experiences inside the headset, the visitor was moved through three small, enclosed rooms, where they confronted versions of Berlau performed by different live actresses. The visitor met the actresses, standing a couple of feet apart from them at most: first they encountered a middle-aged Berlau, after the early death of Michael, the infant son she had with Brecht in the United States; then a young Berlau, flirting with a Brecht that was the visitor; and finally an older Berlau, struggling with long-term alcoholism, shortly before her death in 1974 of a fire started by her cigarette in Berlin's Charité hospital. Within the Oculus, the visitor sat in the BE's auditorium, then walked about on its stage, encountering Brecht (played in the VR film by Martin Rentzsch). Guided by angels in black dresses with billowy upper arms almost like wings and faces covered by black masks, visitors moved from small room to virtual reality to small room, through a kind of station drama for one person at a time, until the dream ended (Fig. 5).

Figure 5. An angel guide and a participant in Berlau: Königreich der Geister ([Berlau: kingdom of ghosts], by Raum + Zeit, 2022) at the Berliner Ensemble. Photo: © Matthias Horn.

Something of a ghost story in content, something of a Lehrstück in its participatory presentation, and something of an epic drama in form, Berlau historicized the institution that produced it, showing that the BE developed in its early years from a particular set of social relations. But this historicization was not in the service of politics. Berlau's main intertext was The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which the BE produced, under Brecht's direction, and with Berlau's participation, in 1954—scenes from Berlau take place just before that 1954 premiere. Chalk Circle is a politicized play in which a theatre troupe puts on a play about motherhood—a child, named Michael, is fought over—in order to show that the true owner of land is the communist collective that can use the land most productively (as I described above). But Raum + Zeit referenced Chalk Circle to turn the visitor's attention back to questions of behavior: how parents should care for their children, lovers for their partners, and collaborators for each other, treating these relationships not primarily as economic but as personal.

Taken together, the content, presentation, and form of Berlau asked visitors to think ethically. As visitors proceeded through the stations of Berlau, they confronted the central questions and conflicts of ethics and performance, placed in the past in order to “invite audiences to confront them from unexplored angles”:Footnote ⁹⁴ What should I value? What is justice? What is the goal of a (good) life? Of (good) art? Berlau revealed ethical relations; Raum + Zeit ethicized the action onstage. Can artists today make amends to Berlau's restless ghost? To the BE's other ghosts? Was Berlau itself a form of redress? In one scene within the Oculus, the visitor confronted a Brecht who refused to care for the Berlau they embodied; as Brecht, they refused care to the actresses playing Berlau. Raum + Zeit showed how the command be productive came at great cost to Berlau and Michael. Judging Brecht's choices through the history of class struggle would be an excuse to ignore injustice: the gender relations of the 1940s and ’50s, not just the period's economic context, clearly framed Brecht's cruelty.

At its best an ethicized theatre works toward justice and truth through theatre's aesthetic attributes, including beauty. In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry argues that “beauty and truth are allied,” though not identical:

It was the experience of error, contestation, and plurality, this aspiration for truth, that I felt so strongly within Berlau.

Berlau intervened in the history of the Berliner Ensemble, refiguring its legacy to make it more personal, as well as more inclusive of Ruth Berlau's restless spirit, though she has always been there anyway. It achieved this form of justice, inspired in the visitor a desire for truth, through its aesthetic beauty. At the end of my visit, I found myself guided to a chair, the Oculus blindfold removed, the dream of Berlau over, even while the theatre continued. For these final ten minutes, as I sat in the chair, alone, unattended by the angel-death guides, observing other visitors moving through the stations (Fig. 6), I thought about Berlau as a person: the choices she made, her failures, and how she was failed, personally and professionally, by others, especially Brecht. I watched the actresses, through windows in the little wooden rooms, perform the same short scenes they had performed with me, and then watched them as they waited between visitors, and I thought about the power of their craft, and the energy it took to produce such power for each new visitor over several hours. I thought about the guides, how gentle they were with their near-helpless, blindfolded charges, as I watched them caring for others. And then I was taken out of the Werkraum, awakened again from the dream of a dream. Not for the first time after a performance, but in an especially poignant way, I thought about what makes a good life, as a father, a husband, a critic, a teacher. I walked out of the Neues Haus, across the quiet, dark courtyard, past the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, which was playing something that night, I don't recall what, the lobby bright and inviting, and then to my bike, chained to a tree in Bertolt-Brecht-Platz, which took me home through the night. I rode back to my life, my children, my wife, my work, and finally my bed: time again for sleep, and dreams.

Figure 6. (from left) Susanne Wolff (a middle-aged Ruth Berlau), an angel guide, and Amelie Willberg (a young Berlau) in Berlau: Königreich der Geister. Photo: © Matthias Horn.