Bertolt Brecht's The Exception and the Rule. It Doesn't Say What It Says It Says

Abstract

Bertolt Brecht's short didactic play The Exception and the Rule (Die Ausnahme und die Regel, 1930-31) was neither published nor performed in Weimar Germany (first performances, Palestine 1938, Paris 1950, Dusseldorf (959). But it was the first didactic play Brecht published after the war, and he recommended it for performance. Now it has become "by far the best-known and most performed Lehrstuck (didactic play) of Brecht today," according to Jan Knopf. This study approaches the play not as an illustration of Epic Drama or as a document in Marxist thought of the thirties, but in the way a naive spectator or reader might, testing the final statement or lesson of the play against the actions of the three main characters as demonstrated by the previous action.