Bertolt Brecht believed that theater should not only entertain the audience but also make them think politically. The German playwright and poet thought that to achieve this effect, the play should be shocking rather than flashy. Actors must step out of character to address their audience, and the plot must be fragmented and interrupted. In one memorable sentence, he described his ideal game as one that “can be broken down into individual parts and still be fully capable of living.”
A new exhibition at London’s Raven Row shows just how realistic the author of The Threepenny Opera was in making this description. Curated by the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin, Brecht: Fragments is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the visual material the playwright collected throughout his career, from newspaper and magazine images to photocopies of medieval paintings and images from Chinese theatre.
The collage diaries into which Brecht transformed them, many of which have never been shown before, were overlooked because Brecht’s works were archived in socialist East Germany, where he lived from 1949 until his death at the age of 58 in 1956. For material, in a reading room at Berlin’s Robert-Koch-Platz, we could only view low-quality photographs of these images, which were all cataloged individually rather than as works of art pasted together.
“You had no idea it was all on the same paper,” says Tom Kuhn, Emeritus Fellow of St Hugh’s College Oxford. “Their context has been completely destroyed.” Kuhn, who discovered collages about 10 years ago and co-curated the Raven Row exhibition, became convinced that these collected pieces constituted an important artistic project in their own right, far from being an extravagant scrapbook. “They are very clearly established,” he says. “These aren’t just materials that will contribute to something else.”
Following the chaos of World War I, Weimar-Republic Germany saw the emergence of collage as an art form, pioneered by the likes of Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch. Two of the most political practitioners of this movement, George Grosz and John Heartfield, were friends of Brecht. Although the playwright’s montages are less dynamic, the effort to suggest meaning through juxtaposition is evident. An entry in his diary about William Wordsworth’s poem She Was a Phantom of Delight (“A soul calm and bright / With an angelic light”) is accompanied by a photograph of soldiers in gas masks. It looks like a postpunk record sleeve.
In a large album known as BBA 1198, there is a page with two photographs: one of Adolf Hitler raising his fists in anger, the other of a blond pre-pubescent schoolboy making the same gesture. The juxtaposition is confusing. This makes the Führer look like a naughty child at play, but it also shows how willing Nazi Germany was to emulate his performative anger: The schoolboy is giving a speech about current events, the panel explains. The open newspaper in front of him is a Nazi publication.
Brecht is the most performed playwright in Germany after Shakespeare, and leading playwrights stand guard next to the fourth wall that Bertolt destroyed; maybe someone will consider raising it again. Elsewhere, the term “Brechtian” has become shorthand for almost any theatrical maneuver aimed at politicizing the audience.
This series feels like a refreshing antidote to the theory-first Brecht, revealing a rawer, more punk version of the author. Accordingly, pieces from experimental, unfinished plays, rather than classics, will be performed twice a day. The Brechtian tools they contain are still crude ideas rather than successful techniques.
What is clear from the images Brecht collected is that he was fascinated by gestures and how they could be used and abused. We see people begging for food and soldiers hugging their loved ones before going to the front. Hitler is also shown next to corrupt New York mayor Jimmy Walker: both wag their fingers in the same manner, the two mendacious leaders confidently reassuring the audience of their sincerity.
Many of the paintings in Raven Row were found and collected during Brecht’s years of exile. Fearing persecution, the determined socialist left Germany on February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire. When the Nazis burned his books, Brecht and his family were already settled on a Danish island in the North Sea, from where he eventually reached the United States. Brecht tried to work as a Hollywood screenwriter in California. Although he wrote Hangmen de Die, directed by Fritz Lang, with whom he was in exile, he had difficulty breaking into the industry.
But even as Brecht moved away from home, his photomontages show how the rise of fascism was never far from his thoughts, especially how it invaded German politics. Given Brecht’s status as a herald of political theatre, it is worth asking how astute his analysis appears now.
His groundbreaking play, The Threepenny Opera, explored the parallels between London’s sordid underworld and the respectable capitalist endeavors of the city’s bankers. He expanded this trope in 1941’s The Preventable Rise of Arturo Ui, describing a fictional Hitler-like Chicago gangster (and cauliflower racketeer)’s path to power. Fascism is presented as a criminal enterprise, but it is also a capitalist enterprise.
The Raven Row show features a remarkable typescript of the play illustrated with 24 photographs, including a photomontage juxtaposing news footage of gangsters and mob funerals with shots of Hitler and his lieutenants. The most remarkable image of this archival find is as plain as it is simple: an Arturo Ui typescript page with a pasted-on cutout of Hitler, looking as if he were standing in a corner in Lower Manhattan’s Five Points, his hands jauntily thrust into his trouser pockets.
The thesis that dictators are gangsters is also found throughout the BBA 1198 album. One page draws parallels with the media’s romanticization of Bonnie and Clyde (“Bonnie Good Girl Gone Wrong, Mother Says,” reads the headline Brecht cut). Another, from a Nazi publication, portrays Hitler and Goebbels as benevolent outcasts. This thesis has survived quite well. If Brecht were making these notebooks today, you’d imagine them full of Donald Trump’s tiny hand gestures, with headlines quoting his mob-style statements, not to mention the former US president’s menacing mug shot after his indictment in 2023. in Atlanta. Later volumes could be filled with powerful bare-chested poses of Vladimir Putin on horseback.
But the analysis of fascism as, as Brecht said in 1935, “the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive and most treacherous form of capitalism” has blind spots. As German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt, who admired Brecht’s plays and poetry, wrote of his politics: If you understand fascism as a continuation of class warfare, you underestimate racism as its essence. In such an interpretation, racial oppression is nothing more than an “optical illusion,” a diversionary tactic to channel proletarian anger.
But Kuhn says: “Brecht remained resolutely committed to his interpretation of fascism, and we can certainly read this as a limitation of his political analysis. “He wrote a lot about racism but underestimated the centrality of antisemitism to National Socialism.”
When Brecht returned to East Berlin after the end of the war and founded the Berliner Ensemble theater, he clashed with the ruling Socialist Unity Party and the apparatchiks it put in charge of cultural affairs. But his criticism of Stalinism and the Soviet Union remained mostly a private matter. His most frequently quoted poem, mocking the party’s response to the 1953 workers’ unrest, included the sentence: “Wouldn’t it be easier if the government dissolved the people and elected someone else?” It was not published until his death.
A publication in BBA 1198 stands out precisely because Brecht was able to say so much with so little in his photomontages. Here, he has assembled five photographs of Lenin and Stalin, but there is no juxtaposition or obvious conversation between the images. The man who turned theater into a complex political experience seemed to stop thinking for a while.
• brecht: fragments runs from 15 June to 18 August at Raven Row, London