Study Guide to Baal and Other Works by Bertolt Brecht

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645424253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Bertolt Bretcht, the creator of epic theatre. Titles in this study guide include The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Good Woman Of Setzuan, Galileo, Mother Courage, The Measures Taken, St. Joan Of The Stockyards, The Threepenny Opera, A Man's A Man, In The Swamp, and Baal.As a playwright, theatre director, and poet of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, Brecht forever changed dramas by creating epic theatre, a theatrical movement that interrupted the storyline in order to allow the audience to critically engage with the performance.Moreover, his modernist approach to theatre pushed drama as a medium of art. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Bertolt Brecht's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

BERTOLT BRECHT

INTRODUCTION

PREFACE

Few figures in the modern theatre have aroused as much interest and discussion as the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s influence, both as an artist and as theoretician, continues to be felt throughout the world. This study guide is undertaken with the hope of aiding the reader in the study of some of Brecht’s major works and of suggesting the nature of Brecht’s importance for the modern theater and for modern literature and thought in general.

The guide is divided into five major parts. The first, introductory section includes a brief summary of the major events of Brecht’s life and a discussion of his theories of the theater. Brecht’s theories have received such widespread attention that many readers who are all but totally unfamiliar with his plays can speak knowledgeably of his theories. This is an unhealthy situation and one that Brecht would deplore. While some knowledge of Brecht’s is desirable, it is secondary to an understanding and appreciation of his plays. It is especially unwise, and false to Brecht’s theory intentions, to read the plays as mere illustrations of the theories. In fact, the reader is advised not to concern himself with Brecht’s theory until he has read, and read thoroughly, at least some of the major plays. Our most profound attention must be reserved, not for Brecht the theoretician, but for Brecht the playwright.

In the present guide Brecht the playwright is most fully represented in the second and longest section. This consists of summaries of and comments upon ten of Brecht’s dramatic works. The summaries aim to present clearly and concisely the major action of the plays. The comments deal with matters of structure and meaning and with analysis of major characters.

The plays are analyzed in the order in which they were written, but five are singled out for especially detailed consideration. Of these, four - Mother Courage, Galileo, The Good Woman of Setzuan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, are generally regarded as Brecht’s masterworks, and the fifth - The Threepenny Opera - has been his greatest popular success. All ten plays chosen for analysis are readily available in English translation; it is hoped that interest in Brecht is not limited to students of German.

The third section of the guide consists of a short critical discussion of Brecht’s work as a whole. This discussion attempts to suggest the overall design of Brecht’s career, pointing out recurring themes and techniques and indicating evidences of change and development in the various periods of Brecht’s life.

A fourth section of the guide includes a series of study questions, aimed at helping the reader to review Brecht’s work. Finally, a fifth section contains an annotated bibliography, suggesting where the reader may find the most important works on Brecht available in English.

This guide is in no way intended as a substitute for the plays themselves. Reading of the analysis of any play should follow intensive reading, and precede intensive rereading, of the play itself. It is with the plays that we begin and to them that we must return.

A NOTE ON FORMAT

In the section of the guide devoted to analysis of the plays, the first title given for each play is that by which it is best known in English, after which the original German title and alternate English titles will be found in parentheses.

THE LIFE AND CAREER OF BERTOLT BRECHT

Many of the changes that have helped to shape the modern world and the issues that have divided it are reflected in the eventful life of Bertolt Brecht. Born in the united Germany of Bismarck’s Reich, he died in the divided Germany of the Cold War. The offspring of bourgeois parents, he allied himself with the revolutionary forces of his age and spent his last years in Communist East Berlin. To this day, the nature of Brecht’s allegiance to communism remains a matter of speculation. That he turned his back on the West is clear; but whether he had any real hope in the East is uncertain. At any rate, Brecht’s ambiguous relationship to the central political issues of his time - and ours - is one source of his continuing fascination for us.

EARLY LIFE

Born February 10, 1898, in Augsburg, Germany, Brecht was christened Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht. Brecht always disliked this elongated name, and as a young man took to calling himself Bertolt - or Bert-Brecht, which he seems to have considered simpler, less pretentious, and stronger than the name his parents had chosen for him.

Brecht was born into a period of great change in Germany, which was embarked on the path of industrialization that has been the basis of its power in the present century. Yet Augsburg in 1898 was still a quiet city, and Brecht’s parents were prosperous members of its respectable middle class. His father was the managing director of a local paper mill, and his mother was the daughter of a civil servant. Brecht was baptized in the Protestant faith of his mother, although his father was Catholic.

Brecht’s education was conventional enough. He attended a public elementary school from 1904 to 1908, and from 1908 to 1917, he was a student at the Realgymnasium (academic high school) in Augsburg. In 1917 he entered the University of Munich as a medical student, but he was called up for military service the following year.

In the army, Brecht served as a medical orderly. His military experiences seem to have had a great effect on him. His firsthand look at the horrors of war reinforced the pacifistic views he had already been forming as a student, and pacifism was to remain an important element of his thought for the rest of his life.

The Germany to which Brecht returned after the war was a defeated, disturbed, and disordered land, and there is no reason to suspect that the attractions of communism first suggested themselves to Brecht at this time. Communism enjoyed a brief period of dominance in Bavaria following the Russian Revolution in 1918, and Brecht found himself a member of the Augsburg Revolutionary Committee. In spite of the sympathy with communism this suggests, Brecht was by no means firmly committed to communism at this time.

EARLY DRAMATIC WORKS

In 1920 Brecht, who had already written his first play, Baal, arrived in Munich. Two years later his play Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night) was produced there, and led to Brecht’s receiving the Kleist Prize, an award given annually to the best young dramatic talent, in 1922. In the same year Brecht married Marianne Zoff; this marriage ended in divorce five years later.

In the course of the 1920s, Brecht gained wide experience in the various aspects of the theater. He held the post of “Dramaturg” (a mixture of dramatic adviser, editor, and public-relations man) in the Munich Kammerspiele theater in 1920, and later worked with Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator, two of the great German producers of the period. The work of Piscator in particular influenced Brecht’s developing theories of the theater.

Meanwhile Brecht continued to write. Among his more important plays of the 1920s are In the Swamp (1923) and A Man’s a Man (1926). In 1928 Brecht collaborated with the composer Kurt Weill in In The Threepenny Opera, which proved to be his greatest popular success. There is considerable irony in the fact that his work was much enjoyed by Germany’s middle class, who, failing to understand Brecht’s dark comedy, were not aware that their values were under attack.

By 1930 Brecht had apparently moved from the nihilism implied by plays like In the Swamp to a commitment to communism. This commitment received dramatic expression in one of Brecht’s most powerful and disturbing plays, The Measures Taken, which was completed in 1930. Also completed in this year were The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, again in collaboration with Weill, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. In the same year Brecht was working on an adaptation of Mother, a novel by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky.

EXILE

By this time the Nazi threat was becoming increasingly clear, and when Hitler gained power in 1933, Brecht decided it was time to leave Germany. He and his family (he had married the actress Helene Weigel in 1928) emigrated to Scandinavia, settling in Denmark until the summer of 1939. In view of Brecht’s Communist beliefs, some writers have wondered why Brecht chose exile in Denmark rather than in the Soviet Union, and have suggested that perhaps Brecht’s intellectual commitment to communism did not blind him to communism’s many shortcomings in practice - at least as it was practiced in Stalin’s Russia.

BRECHT IN THE UNITED STATES

By 1939 Hitler’s shadow was spreading across Europe, and Brecht decided to leave Denmark. He lived for a while in Stockholm, Sweden, and then in Finland. Finally, in July, 1940, he entered the United States. Again, his choice of a home in exile is interesting. To get from Finland to San Francisco, Brecht had to travel across Russia. We are bound to wonder why this supposedly committed Communist was unwilling to remain in the Communist’s “paradise.” Perhaps, in spite of his commitment, Brecht was unwilling at this time to accept the limits on artistic freedom that he could expect in Stalin’s totalitarian state.

The 1930s were productive years for Brecht. His adaptation of Gorky’s Mother was completed and produced, but public performances of it were banned in Germany in 1932. In 1938 he completed his anti-Nazi play The Private Life of the Master Race.

The year 1939 marks the beginning of Brecht’s richest creative period. In this year he completed two of his greatest works, the first version of Galileo (a second version, for American production, was completed in 1947) and Mother Courage. A third major work, The Good Woman of Setzuan, was completed in 1941. Brecht completed his fourth unquestioned masterpiece, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in 1945.

In addition to these major works, Brecht produced several other dramatic pieces in the early 1940s. The most controversial of these is probably The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, an attempt to portray the career of Adolf Hitler by an analogy to Chicago gangsterism. The word “resistible” (aufhaltsame) is of special significance, for Brecht rejected the so-called tragic vision which sees the kind of evil represented by Hitler as inevitable. It need not have happened, Brecht cries out. Man, he insists, can make a better world if he seriously chooses to do so.

While in the United States, Brecht supported himself financially by working on a number of film scripts for Hollywood studios. On the whole, Brecht felt that his work was distorted in the films to which he contributed. The most distinguished film to which he devoted his talents is probably Hangman Also Die, set in Czechoslovakia during the German occupation of that country. The film was brilliantly directed by Brecht’s great compatriot and fellow exile, Fritz Lang; but again, Brecht was dissatisfied with what was done to his script in the final version of the film.

In 1947 Brecht’s Galileo received its first American production, which was not a popular success, but it seems to have been an artistic one. The production was directed by Joseph Losey, who has since earned an international reputation as a film director, and featured Charles Laughton, who was also primarily responsible for the English adaptation, in the title role.

Brecht’s political opinions led in 1947 to an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In parrying the Committee’s questions, Brecht played a role not unlike that he assigned to Galileo in his play. At any rate, the committed Communist seemed to fool the professional Communist-hunters. “He is doing all right,” said the Committee chairman. “You are a good example,” he told Brecht. The following year Brecht moved to East Berlin.

THE LAST YEARS

While in Berlin Brecht completed his Little Organon for the Theatre, the fullest statement of his dramatic theories. He was also active in the Berliner Ensemble, a theatrical group, staging productions of his own plays and of those of others.

If Brecht had any criticisms to make of the more restrictive features of East Germany’s Communist government, he never made them in public. In fact, he became prized by the Communists as an example of the “superiority” of Communist culture. He was awarded the East German National Prize in 1951 and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954. But in spite of the position of honor he held, Brecht on several occasions had difficulties with East German censorship.

Brecht’s last years brought with them much that might have brought him satisfaction. The importance of his work was coming to be recognized all over the world. He had the opportunity to work with a brilliant company of actors. Yet he also suffered the frustrations of the creative artist in an authoritarian society. We may never know with any assurance whether Brecht was satisfied that these frustrations were justified by the Communist ideal. Bertolt Brecht died of coronary thrombosis in August, 1956. He left behind a mass of manuscripts, including diaries. What he may have confided to these diaries, and whether the government of East Germany will ever permit them to be published, remain matters of doubt.

THE THEATER OF BRECHT

Brecht’s Theory of Theater

In any discussion of Brecht’s theory, it is important at all times to remember that he was always a practical man of the theatre, rather than an academic always aesthetician. His practical bias reveals itself in his willingness to modify his theory in the light of experience and to ignore theory entirely when it seemed irrelevant to the practical problems of an individual production. It must be kept in mind, then, that the theory discussed below grew out of many years of practical experience in the theater. A summary of Brecht’s key ideas, which is all that can be attempted here, does not do justice to the flexibility characteristic of Brecht’s mind. Brecht’s ideas developed and changed in the course of his life and would certainly have continued to do so if he had lived longer.

...