Through the Minefield of Ideologies: Brecht and the Staging of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder

Abstract

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."