Brecht has always been a problem for the art establishment. It is bad enough for them that the most influential playwright of the 20th century was a Communist, but what makes Brecht truly awkward is that in bringing politics to the theatre he revolutionised the theatre itself. Brecht's works stand as a challenge to all conventional notions about what art should represent.
For Brecht, writing during the upheavals of Weimar Germany between the wars, mainstream theatre was reactionary because it was mystifying. It encouraged spectators to 'swap a contradictory world for a harmonious one, one that they scarcely know for one they can dream about.' It wasn't just crude escapism he was attacking. Brecht questioned all the conventions of classical theatre, naturalistic acting, linear narrative and tragic resolution. He needed new methods for new tasks, and a theatre that would help 'to transform society, transform the state, to subject ideologies to close scrutiny.'
So the knives have been out from the start. Some critics have claimed that he stole his best material from his lovers; others that he was a hypocrite who lived the good life while preaching socialism. More sophisticated opponents recognise his achievements but try to unhook his plays from his politics. Some claim he adopted a veneer of Marxism to please his East German patrons; others that his politics just don't come across in the plays.
But Brecht's theatrical innovations were inescapably linked to his political development. As a young man Brecht experienced at first hand both the horror of capitalist crisis, and the hope that followed with the revolutionary wave which swept Europe. He was 16 when the First World War broke out and he worked as an orderly in a military hospital, amputating legs, performing blood transfusions and removing shrapnel from soldiers. During the revolutionary upsurge that ended the war he found himself elected to the Augsburg revolutionary committee which ran the city for a few days until bourgeois officers used loyal troops to restore 'order'.
His first plays register disgust at a society that didn't seem to notice or care that the world was careering out of control. A contemporary remarked in 1922 that 'Brecht is impregnated with the horror of this age in his nerves, his blood...[he] physically feels the chaos and putrid decay of the times.' Already he was experimenting. Baal and Drums in the Night discarded the formality of classical German theatre. They had rough, rebellious leads speaking an approximation of everyday language. But they also rejected the fashionable angst of Expressionist theatre with its wild despairs and emotional outcries. Brecht's voice was cool and dispassionate, even cynical.
Early on he adopted a fatalism about the machine age which he shared with other pioneer modernists. In Man is Man Brecht tells the story of one human being's transformation into a killing machine. An announcement at the beginning of the play tells us, 'This evening will show how a man is being reconstructed like an auto. More than that: one can even turn him into a butcher.' Man is Man, written in 1924, marks the emergence of one of Brecht's major preoccupations the way human beings are moulded by forces that seem beyond control. But within the grim story of 'hero' Galy Gay's degeneration hides a suggestion of something more positive the potential for humans to change.
The intensity of the political crises in Germany in the 1920s forced the German avant garde to take sides. While some of the Expressionists moved to the right and ended up supporting Hitler, artists like Otto Dix, John Heartfield and Max Ernst went beyond satire and cynicism and became socialists. Brecht discarded his fatalism gradually during the late 1920s. A friend claims that he finally decided to become a Communist after witnessing police firing on an unemployed workers' demonstration in 1929. But years before that he was starting to take an interest in the revolutionary movement. In 1927 he spoke in an interview about 'the new type of man' who was being generated by the system itself, who will 'change the machine, and no matter how he will look, above all else he will look like a human being'.
St Joan of the Stockyards, written between 1929 and 1930, is full of change and revelation. It shows a young woman moving from evangelical charity work and pity for the unemployed to an understanding that misery is caused by the machinations of the bosses. Joan is transformed precisely by understanding that society can be changed too. This play was a turning point for Brecht. It set him on the path of consciously working out a materialist dramatic approach that he would call 'epic theatre'. He had been studying Marxism at workers' evening classes for at least three years but it was research for St Joan of the Stockyards that led him to read Marx's Capital for the first time. He was deeply impressed: 'This man Marx was the only spectator for my plays that I'd ever come across.'
There's no doubt Brecht was an artistic rebel by instinct. His sympathies gave him an ear for popular idiom and in his bohemian youth he was a singer as well as a writer, so it came naturally to put popular songs into his plays. He loved boxing, Hollywood, the music hall, and always borrowed freely from popular culture in his search for a relevant, vital theatre. But his greatest plays harnessed these talents to his political concerns.
To create a theatre of human relations rather than human nature meant a complete overhaul of dramatic convention. Standard narrative was too 'closed' to suggest choice and to probe cause and effect. And anyway most storylines absorbed audiences rather than making them think. Brecht wanted an audience that was aware and critical. Rather than creating sympathy or pathos, Brecht aimed for a theatre in which 'the natural must be made to look surprising'. He wanted the spectator of his plays to say, 'I should never have thought so... That is not the way to do it... This is most surprising, hardly credible... This will have to stop... This human being's suffering moves me, because there would have been a way out for him.'
In The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny the hero is sentenced to death for failing to pay his debts. Instead of encouraging pity, Brecht had an inscription flashed up behind the stage: 'Many among you may watch the following execution of Paul Ackerman with distaste. But you too in our opinion would not want to pay for him. So highly is money esteemed in our time.'
Brecht insisted sources of lighting should remain at least partially visible to the public to dispel any illusion of reality. He discouraged actors from 'disappearing' into their characters, preferring 'cool' acting, bordering on reportage. In rehearsal actors were invited to translate their texts into the third person, telling the story they were later to act. The overall impact he called Verfremdung making strange. The aim was to 'make the spectator an observer, and arouse his will to action, to call for decisions and a world outlook.'
Contemporary accounts show Brecht's 'epic' theatre had more success than today's critics allow. The first night of The City of Mahagonny was riotous; 'the epic form of the theatre spread from the stage to the audience... War cries echoed throughout the auditorium. In places hand to hand fighting broke out.'
Before Brecht was forced to flee the Nazis in 1933, he produced some of his most openly agitational work, often with workers' theatre groups. Performances of Mother, a celebration of the Russian Revolution of 1905, were raided and then prohibited by the police. The largely working class cast continued to go through their parts without props or costumes, gaining a growing audience. The police continued to interfere, so the cast ended up reading their parts to an incensed audience surrounded by police. The lessons of Russia were being brought home to Berlin!
The experience of exile in Scandinavia and then the US led to some of Brecht's most sophisticated work. The Life of Galileo examines the link between social change and scientific understanding. The play shows how ruling classes are often hostile to scientific advance, and it also shows how individuals' choices are limited by society. By making concessions to the authorities Galileo ensures he can continue his studies, but accepts that his breakthroughs will remain secret. In the last scene a manuscript containing Galileo's discoveries is smuggled across the border while the boys playing at the frontier, who could have been Galileo's audience, are talking of devils and witches.
After 15 years away, Brecht returned to live in East Germany in 1948. Much has been made of his concessions to the Stalinist regime there which allowed him to work relatively unhindered. His earlier rejection by the US cultural establishment is less well known. During his six year stay in California, Hollywood studios rejected all but one of Brecht's 15 or so scripts, and the final version of the film Hangmen also Die was so mangled Brecht took his name off it. A friend in Hollywood described how MGM turned down one of Brecht's outlines because it ignored two Hollywood script rules there must be a love interest and there can be no class clashes. Another contemporary explained, 'Brecht could never get entirely used to American methods, American points of view, nor to the ideological approach that was needed to be followed at that particular point in history.'
There is no doubt Brecht had illusions in the postwar East German regime. But he mainly returned for practical reasons. After being frozen out in the US he could hardly turn down the offer of running his own theatre company in Berlin. Despite being used as a cultural mascot for the Stalinist regime, Brecht was regularly in conflict with the authorities. A play he wrote about the Paris Commune was banned by the government, and his War Primer was attacked for being too pacifist. He abandoned work on a state sponsored play about the Communist transformation of East Germany after the workers' uprising was crushed by the government in June 1953.
This event was a turning point for Brecht. Although he maintained critical support for the regime in public when he had to, Brecht now gave up any projects that might be read as supportive of the regime and concentrated on staging his previous works. His posthumously published poems show a deep alienation from Stalinism. In 'The Solution' he reacted icily to an official leaflet implying that the people had betrayed the government's confidence:
'Would it in that case Not be simpler if the government Dissolved the people And elected another?One of his last poems attacks Stalin in mock Soviet-heroic style, calling him 'The Honoured Murderer of The People' and accuses him of having forgotten The Communist Manifesto and of having turned his back on Lenin.
Brecht's public concessions to the regime in East Germany reflected his lack of an ideological alternative to Stalinism but they were also a product of his desperate isolation at a time when the political situation internationally looked bleak. What is remarkable is that despite this, Brecht maintained an instinctive belief in a socialist future. After his death some East German Marxist dissidents reported regular discussions with Brecht and spoke of his 'bitterness against the existing conditions of the GDR'. At the end of his life he was sadly aware that his name and work would be abused by his enemies, but he was defiant. He told a close friend, 'You at least write a candid obituary! That will make a very original effect among my obituaries... Don't write that you admire me! Write that I was an uncomfortable person, and that I intend to remain so after my death. Even then there are certain possibilities.'
The theatre has never been the same since Brecht died. His ideas have inspired radical artists from Dario Fo to David Hare and even the most prestigous theatres have been unable to ignore him. Brecht's work is a challenge to all those who claim art and politics cannot be mixed.