…After an appearance before the House Un-American Committee in 1947, Brecht went directly to Switzerland where his reputation seemed to be reviving, and when the regime in East Berlin offered him a theater of his own and a subsidy to maintain it, Brecht, after characteristically insuring his personal survival by procuring an Austrian passport, opening a Swiss bank account, and signing a contract with a West German publisher, decided to accept. It was the greatest opportunity of Brecht’s life; almost at once, through the unparalleled repertory productions of the Berliner Ensemble, he proved how ready he was to take it.
---Bertolt Brecht appeared before the HUAC on October 30, 1947. Brecht’s testimony consisted of wry jokes and evasions. He played dumb and frequently blamed sloppy translation for the committee’s ‘misunderstanding’ of his work and his politics. Nonetheless, Brecht was praised by HUAC chair Rep. John Parnell Thomas (R-NJ) for his cooperativeness. Brecht flew to Zurich the day after the hearing.--- Read More:http://thenewinquiry.com/post/3293240539/the-history-of-dialogue-3-brecht-vs-the-huac
He spent the last eight years of his life producing, not the Marxian allegories and Communist broadsides, the hoary dogma of his youth now heavy, cliched and spent, but the plays he had written in exile that never found an audience. He did not write anything specifically pro-Western or anti- Communist, or religious, even during the last years in Berlin; rather, an intrinsic humanism had gradually moved to the center of his work, infiltrating the materialism of his earlier years.
Joerg Immendorf painting. Caudwell, (1935):Bourgeois culture has discovered that what pays is bourgeois violence. This is more subtle and less overt than Tamburlane violence. Roman violence, which consisted in bringing home not only fair women and gold, but slaves also, and making them work in the household, farms, and mines, occupied a mid-position. Bourgeois culture has discovered that those social relations are most profitable to the bourgeois which do not include rapine and personal slavery, but on the contrary forbid it. Therefore the bourgeois, wherever he has conquered non-bourgeois territory, such as Australia, America, Africa, or India, has imposed bourgeois, not Tamburlane, social relations. In the name of liberty, self-determination, and democracy, or sometimes without these names, they enforce the bourgeois essence, private property, and the ownership of the means of production for profit, and its necessary prerequisite, the free labourer forced to dispose of his labour, for a wage, in the market. This priceless bourgeois discovery has produced material wealth beyond the dreams of a Tamburlane or a Croesus. Read More:http://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/1935/pacifism-violence.htm image:http://www.sauer-thompson.com/junkforcode/archives/2005/10/
He showed himself increasingly aware of the mystical, self-contradictory, and inherently tragic sources of the human personality. All his life, Brecht had admired certain ideals of the Orient; whenever he had the chance to settle for a time and take up his work, he would unroll and hang beside his desk a painted image of a Confucian elder: this image incarnated for Brecht a society of artful graciousness, of mildness, and of ritualistic courtesy. Before he died, Brecht knew that any code is a disciplined response to a common dilemna. Brecht’s Good Woman of Setzuan, Shen Te, laments finally to the perambulating gods:
“Your injunction / To be good and yet to live / Was a thunderbolt / It has torn me in two… Why are bad deeds rewarded / Good ones punished? …I became a wolf / Find me guilty then, illustrious ones / But know: / All that I have done I did / To help my neighbour / To love my lover / And to keep my little one from want.” …
Kuspit:Neo-Expressionist painting has been called decadent because of its revival of an old, indeed, pre-World War I, idea of modern painting, but it integrates all the abstract painting, both gestural and geometrical, that has developed since then, complicating and changing painting, and making it once again a serious experience -- esthetically shocking. But if there is an aura of dèjá vu -- the already painted -- hanging over Neo-Expressionist painting, there is an aura of Duchampian Dadaism and Surrealism hanging over Neo-Conceptualism, suggesting that it also is decadent, that is, reiterates, with whatever cleverness, the old idea of art in the service of the mind (the same old ironical mind). As has been said, the modern "new" has become the postmodern "neo" -- which, depending on how one conceives decadence, means decay or preciousness, perhaps decay into preciousness, implying Alexandrian codification and polishing of artistic gains rather than inspired esthetic innovation. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit8-9-06.asp image:http://www.electricgallery.co.uk/index.php/art-history/jorg-immendorff-2/
…And the intellectual Galileo Galilei, as Brecht gives him to us, was a man who “treasured the comforts of the flesh. I have no patience with those cowardly souls,” Galileo insists, “who speak of its weakness. I say: pleasure is an achievement.” Brusque, self-centered, sloppy, surpassingly gifted, at once naive and cynical- a personality cut unmistakably along the lines of Brecht’s own- Galileo appears first in Venice, as an impoverished physicist, and manages to insinuate himself into the entourage of the patron of Florence, Cosimi de Medici, and take his chosen place among the fleshpots.
Before long he begins to arrive at the conclusions about dynamics that were to destroy the sanctified Ptolemaic world view of physics. Inevitably, the inquisitor appears and invites the old sybarite to come in for a session with the “instruments” ; inevitably, Galileo, unburdened of his assumption that people will believe whatever can reasonably be demonstrated, recants. Truth, he cannot help but agree, is what accords with the system. The rest of the play records Galileo’s deterioration as a rationalist and the improvement of his appetites.
Kent Williams. Kuspit:Sometimes the atmosphere was gloomy, as though perpetually overcast, at other times it was colorful and luminous. Everyday life was ironically rendered, more often the works had a dream-like, even hallucinatory quality and sensuous directness. They seemed to spring from some altered state of consciousness. Many seemed like newborn infants still attached to the umbilical cord of the unconscious. Bursting with life, they had a raw, fresh excitement, as though driven by forces beyond their control. They tended to be manically intense, as though in a process of perpetual self-transformation. The labile new painterliness and the dramatic new images often bordered on the bizarre.... Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus
tures/kuspit/kuspit8-9-06.asp image:http://www.dailyartfixx.com/2011/01/25/kent-williams-painting/
Similar themes pervade Brecht’s later work. In the parable world of The Caucasian Chalk Circle the armored soldiers incessantly switch allegiances, but their single activity, grinding the poor, never varies. Whom was Brecht trying to implicate here, the East german authorities were always demanding. What social clique was he epitomizing there?
Brecht spent much of his last few years explaining and rewriting, but one ambiguity seemed to replace another, and the ironies of the Alienation effect, the V-effect, retained their suspicious, double-toned resonances. His concerns now exceeded those of the Communists, his sense of the human predicament became sharp and tragic. At the height of his second career Brecht had developed from a local rebel into a figure of international significance.
Brecht. The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Johnston:This structure of melodrama was perfect for Brecht's purpose - a new theater for the people, and especially for an audience without guilt. The Caucasian Chalk Circle is Brecht's most assured, most skillful play and a brilliant demonstration of the effectiveness of the Epic Theater. One of the problems Brecht solves is how to maintain dramatic interest in a play whose characters are conceived, deliberately, one-dimensionally and simplistically. The play is what William Empsom called "a version of pastoral" in which the problems of simple characters (shepherds and shepherdesses) are presented for the entertainment of more sophisticated folk. (Shakespeare uses the form often: where the court retires to observe how simple folk go through the same love-plots, etc. as their more complex -and guilty - betters The theme is most fully represented in As You Like It and The Winters Tale.) Brecht reverses the pastoral convention - which had been to validate the values of the aristocrat order by making clear the cultural gulf between the charming but naive yokels and the sophisticated consciousness observing them. Even in yokel disguise characters like Perdita reveal the aristocratic qualities shining through. Brecht's reversal re-affirms a basic innocence and goodness found in the peasants in contrast to the guilty aristocrats and their violent, unjust world. It is interesting that Brecht likes to go back to the peasant class for his versions of pastoral: not to the more awkward industrial proletariat. Read More:http://www.coursesindrama.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=133 image:http://www.bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2007/mar/23fr.html
ADDENDUM:
Douglas Kellner:As Walter Benjamin stressed, the response to epic theater should be: “Things can happen this way, but they can also happen a quite different way” . The strategy was to produce an experience of curiosity, astonishment, and shock:, raising such questions as: “Is that the way things are? What produced this? It’s terrible! How can we change things?” Such a critical and questioning attitude was also fostered by a “montage of images” and series of typical social tableaux that Brecht called “gests” . He wanted his spectators to work through these examples, to participate in an active process of critical thought that would provide insights into the workings of society, and to see the need for and to implement radical social change.
Brecht’s epic theater broke with the “culinary theater” that provided the spectator with a pleasant experience or moral for easy digestion. He rejected theater that tried to produce an illusion of reality, claiming that illusionist theater tended to reproduce the dominant ideology and induce the spectators to identify bourgeois ideologies with reality. Brecht appropriated Korsch’s theory that ideology was a material force that served as an important tool of domination; they both saw ideology as a deluding force from which people should be emancipated and both attempted to produce works that would break people’s identification with bourgeois ideologies . Read More:http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell3.htm
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---All the Neo-Expressionists have an urgent seriousness. The self seems at risk in their images; it often seems to be taking pleasure in pain. There is an aura of unprocessed feeling and sensation, however much they are artistically processed. Neo-Expressionist painting does not completely perform what the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion calls the alpha function -- transform incomprehensible, painfully primitive feelings and sensations into manageable memories, containing them so that they can analyzed and mastered -- but it nonetheless is imbued with memory and organic cognition (as distinct from the routinized intellectualism -- a kind of pseudo-knowledge -- of Neo-Conceptualism). There is even a hint of idealism -- perhaps most noteworthily in Markus Lüpertz's so-called dithyrambic paintings (heavy objects lyrically rise, defying the gravity of history) -- however down to emotional earth the works tend to be. --- Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit8-9-06.asp
But it is in his actual work that the influence of Marxism is most apparent and important, and his major work thus presents an important example of an aesthetic theory and practice influenced by Marxism, albeit of a critical nature. Indeed, in retrospect Brecht’s faith in the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union was misplaced and Korsch’s criticisms of Stalinism and the deformation of socialism in the Soviet bloc turn out to have been more accurate. Yet it was precisely Korsch’s interpretation of Marxian theory that provided key impulses for Brecht’s own aesthetic theory and production and despite the collapse of communism many of those Marxian ideas remain useful today.
It is an irony of history that Marxian theory has proved more valuable that actual Marxian politics, in view of the collapse of the entire Soviet socialist bloc in recent years. Yet Bertolt Brecht found Marxism a productive source of ideas both to understand the work and to revolutionize art. Thus, ironically, the Marxian revolution had more fruitful results in theory and cultural practice than in actual politics. ( Kellner, ibid. )
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