The influence of Bertolt Brecht - Brecht on Art and Politics - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Dec, 2003 by Anthony Radice

Brecht on Art and Politics. Bertolt Brecht. Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles, editors. Methuen. [pounds sterling]25.00. 354 pages. ISBN 0-413-75890-7.

It could be argued that a writer's influence on the way in which we think has become most widespread and most thorough when the thought in question is no longer attributed to its author. Such may be the case with Brecht, whose struggle for unification of word and idea lead him into paradoxes that have become so familiar as to be almost ordinary for contemporary thinkers such as Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Likewise, the often contradictory breadth of his interests, once a mark of an extraordinary range of thought, may well appear quite firmly at home in a climate of cultural analysis that is insistently applied to anything and everything. Postmodernist thinking could make it easy to accept Brecht's comment that 'A man with one theory is lost. He must have several, four, many!' But would an ability to accept such dicta be indicative of Brecht's strength as a writer, or of our weakness as theorists and critics?

The editors are keen to dispel any misconceptions that readers may have been under about the doctrinal unity of Brecht's thought. Indeed, as they also point out, it could be considered part of the purpose of this volume to dispel any such illusions. If there were any unity, it would be found most clearly in the theatrical theory; the purpose of these translations is to present Brecht 'on everything else'. In other words, precisely to demonstrate a varied range of thinking.

The breadth is not only cultural: the writings collected here also span the whole of Brecht's lifetime. This selection offers, among other things, the opportunity to engage with the more chaotic, youthful enthusiasm of the years before definite Marxist-Leninist conviction. The young Brecht was more aesthete than theoretician. He was barely involved in the manifesto-making, revolution-declaring fever and excitement of the years immediately after World War One. In those years his concerns were almost completely literary, and his anti-bourgeois, anti-patriotic stance had more to do with what one editor calls 'a sort of chaotic iconoclasm' than with any definite doctrinal commitment. In a volume of this kind, we have the opportunity to observe the development of Brecht's thought from such chaos into its later, clearer focus.

We should remember too that the notion of eclecticism, not only in the production, but also in the presentation, of material does not originate with these editors. Brecht himself followed a similar principle (if principle it be) in his pamphlet series of publications, entitled simple Versuche (Experiments). In any case, Brecht never quite succeeded in leaving his audiences completely cold and, perhaps because energetic argument is never without emotion, the writings collected here do not alienate. Theoretical and critical writing can rarely be described as a pleasure; but the experience of reading Brecht is rich, because as the theories develop, the youthful vigour never quite departs.

It would be a sign of weakness to attempt to create a postmodern Brecht: later theoretical commitments must outweigh earlier experimentation. But neither should we disregard the aesthetic pleasures to be had from a broader reading of his oeuvre. This volume makes a useful contribution towards creating such a balanced perspective among Brecht's anglophone audience.