Singing in Dark Times: Report from Berlin

It is a widely acknowledged fact that director Wolfgang Langhoff's acceptance of the plan to found a studio theatre — first called "Helene Weigel," later renamed "Berliner Ensemble" — at his Deutsches Theater was a chief reason for Bertolt Brecht to settle down in Berlin after his years of exile. The Berliner Ensemble provided him with the opportunity to test his theoretical concepts about drama and to experiment with his and other playwrights’ plays in the course of theatrical practice. In Berlin. Brecht struck a harsh note in his criticism of the political and historical situation in the post-war Gennany to which he had returned. His main points were "that Germany ha[d] not yet realized the dimensions of the crisis it finds itself in" and that dialectic was being employed merely as a "magic Jack-in-the-box, a conjuring trick," which "arrests the flow of things, turning them into inflexible matter." In short: "bloody awful times."

A Whole Carnal Stereophony: The Wooster Group Stages Brecht

All Right. Good Night. (Excerpt)

The Humboldt Forum was opened in Berlin in the fall of 2021. The collections of the Ethnological Museum, containing mainly exhibits from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, as well as the collections of the Museum of Asian Art, were moved from Dahlem to the newly reconstructed building of the former royal palace. Many objects on display were obtained in more or less transparent ways during the period of colonialism, in which the then German Empire also actively participated. According to the management of the museum, the curators of permanent and short-term exhibitions tried to balance the legacy of the colonial era and reflect contemporary discourse about the problematic past of the European museums. However, the authors of the text question whether the effort to come to terms with the past and to open an intercultural dialogue can be considered successful in this case, or whether the Humboldt Forum is following in the footsteps of the ethnological museums of the 19th and a large part of the 20th century, where Europeans used to go to look at “exotic” objects and where, among other things, the construction of the European colonial imagination took place.

Since the demise of East Germany in 1990 stripped state theatres of their privilege as subsidized institutions of critique in a repressive society, they have had to find new roles in the crowded scene in Berlin, capital of unified Germany. While the Volksbühne has earned attention through director Frank Castorf's outrageous deconstructions of classic texts (reviewed in Theatre Journal as part of the Theatertreffen), the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht's former home, on the other hand, has lost momentum under Claus Peymann, formerly innovative director in Bochum and Vienna. The Deutsches Theater, once led by pioneering directors Otto Brahm and Max Reinhardt, distinguished itself in the 1980s with the critical and often campy productions of Alexander Lang (such as Trilogie der Leidenschaft in 1986) but lapsed after unification into a polished, unadventurous routine. As the first two seasons under the artistic management of Bernd Wilms suggest, the theatre has largely, if not completely, recovered its role as producer of pointed but historically grounded stagings of German and other classics, while also developing the work of recent authors.

Common Ground

In October 1946 Brecht wrote from American exile to his oldest friend and collaborator, the designer Caspar Neher: 'It would be nice if the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, for instance, were available to us again.' The war and Hitler's reign over, Brecht had set his mind on getting a theatre of his own and finally achieving what must have been an ultimate goal that never before had seemed attainable. In a letter to Neher of December the same year, he stated: 'I'm convinced that we'll build up a theatre again.'

In October 1946 Brecht wrote from American exile to his oldest friend and collaborator, the designer Caspar Neher: 'It would be nice if the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, for instance, were available to us again.' The war and Hitler's reign over, Brecht had set his mind on getting a theatre of his own and finally achieving what must have been an ultimate goal that never before had seemed attainable. In a letter to Neher of December the same year, he stated: 'I'm convinced that we'll build up a theatre again.' It took Brecht little more than two years to realise his ambition. In April 1949 the East Berlin authorities, that is, the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party, agreed to provide the financial support for his project: a company under Brecht's artistic guidance that was to be managed by his wife Helene Weigel as 'Intendant'. She would also be the company's leading actress. His plan to take over the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, however, had to wait until the company in residence would move into the Volksbuhne theatre, still to be rebuilt from its ruins at Luxemburg Square. The Intendant of the Deutsches Theater, Wolfgang Langhoff, offered Brecht his two houses, the Deutsches and the Kammerspiele, as a provisional home where the company could perform two to three times a week.

Review essay: Between the Material and the Ephemeral

From 1884 to 1914, the world’s fourth-largest overseas colonial empire was that of the German Kaiserreich. Yet this fact is little known in Germany and the subject remains virtually absent from most school textbooks. While debates are now common in France and Britain over the impact of empire on former colonies and colonizing societies, German imperialism has only more recently become a topic of wider public interest. In 2015, the German government belatedly and half-heartedly conceded that the extermination policies carried out over 1904–8 in the settler colony of German South West Africa (now Namibia) qualify as genocide. But the recent invigoration of debate on Germany’s colonial past has been hindered by continued amnesia, denialism, and a populist right endorsing colonial revisionism. A campaign against postcolonial studies has sought to denounce and ostracize any serious engagement with the crimes of the imperial age. Henning Melber presents an overview of German colonial rule and analyses how its legacy has affected and been debated in German society, politics and the media. He also discusses the quotidian experiences of Afro-Germans, the restitution of colonial loot, and how the history of colonialism affects important institutions such as the Humboldt Forum.

In the back of Friedrichstrasse station in Berlin, a narrow footbridge beneath the railway tracks spanning the Spree river leads from the station's upper platform to Albrechstrasse and Schiffbauerdamm. Continuing straight into Albrechtstrasse you walk three short blocks to the Deutsches Theater and its smaller house next door, the Kammerspiele; if you turn right you arrive after less than 200 yards at the home of the Berliner Ensemble. For nine years I used to cross this bridge several times a day on my way to and from work or play. The first time I walked it was even earlier, in 1949, on my way to see Brecht's seminal Mother Courage production at the Deutsches Theater. The last time before I left Berlin, in July 1961, I crossed it to attend a general company meeting of the Ensemble, when a high-ranking party functionary spoke to dispell what he called 'the unfounded rumors' about an imminent closing of the border to West Berlin. A few days later I left for the city of Libeck where I was to direct the West German premiere of the Brecht/Farquhar comedy Trumpets and Drums. We were two weeks into rehearsal when the former GDR sealed its borders on August 13, 1961. After some deliberation I decided not to return to a state that locked its people in.

Look at the map of Berlin. Follow the border between East Berlin and West Berlin. Better still, walk along the border. You will find that West Berlin forms a large semicircle around the city center of Mitte, as can be seen on any map of Berlin since the mid-nineteenth century. Up until 1945 Mitte was also the cultural center of Berlin. West Berlin has been cut off from this center since 1945; its isolation was not, however, complete until the building of the Berlin wall in 1961, and for some years after the Second World War the outstanding places of cultural interest in the city center Berlin-Mitte remained places of all Berliners. The most important ones were the Friedrich-Wilhelm-University, today Humboldt University, founded in 1810, the museums, the former Prussian State Theaters, most of which were destroyed during the Second World War, e.g., the German State Opera (Deutsche Staatsoper). From 1945 to 1955 it was in the Admiralspalast on Friedrichstraße, but it was rebuilt and reopened in 1955 at its old location Unter den Linden. The German Theater (Deutsches Theater) on Schumannstraße, founded in 1883, survived the war. From 1949 to 1954, it housed the Berliner Ensemble of Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel which, since 1954, has found its place in the theater on Schiffbauerdamm. The Comic Opera (Komische Oper) on Behrenstraße, a house for opera, musicals, and ballet, reopened in 1947, the Metropol-Theater, a stage for operettas and musicals, in 1945 at the Colosseum, Schönhauser Allee. In 1955, it moved to the Admiralspalast when the German State Opera returned to its old location Unter den Linden, and it has been there since.KeywordsCultural CenterState LibraryCultural LifeGerman TheaterLiterary CenterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.