Patricide or Re-Generation?: Brecht's "Baal" and "Roundheads" in the GDR

Abstract

The secret is out. The evidence is in. What began a decade ago in West German theatre circles as the somewhat heretical assertion that plays were nothing more than a constant, liturgical repetition of what one already knows,' now stands as common dramaturgical parlance in the GDR as well. is dead, was the Nietzschean pronouncement of Hellmut Karasek in the Spiegel,3 to which the celebrated Brecht-Killer4 and heir apparent Heiner Miiller could only add that it was, in all due respect, a Vatermord (patricide).A And statistics would bear all this out. Whereas 1967 saw twenty separate new Brecht productions in the GDR,6 this number had dropped to eight in 1985, three of which were of The Threepenny Opera and two of The Rifles of Frau Carrar 7 not exactly the center of the classical Brechtian canon. If that is not enough, one need only cite the burial of bb as a classicist by the Brecht progeny in the Berliner Ensemble. Brecht's theatre works of the mature period, GDR critic Christoph Funke offers by way of historical explanation, make a tired-out, worn-down impression. The clearer, the more intelligent, the more logical and coherent the Brechtian text, the less it seems to offer today in the way of critical intellectual challenge.8 Speaking from the towers of academic literary criticism, Werner