I am an artist and filmmaker. I think of my work as a process of drawing timelines between past and present that might help us imagine a future against the grain of reactionary ideology. For me the best place to start is with fragments: ideas cut short; abandoned victims of forces beyond their control; forces of culture, politics, and economics.

I find myself drawn back to a certain time in history, roughly from the 1920s through the 1940s. I believe we can learn from the work of artists and filmmakers who attempted to communicate with a mass audience in a way that was both critical of the status quo and optimistic in that they wanted to show that things can be other than they are. It was during the economic crisis of 2008 that I started to think that Brecht's writing might help us understand what was going on. And it seemed to me here in the United States that the best place to look to him for guidance was in Los Angeles. As I researched his work in Hollywood, I became intrigued by his sketches for films that he had not been able to realize. One in particular caught my attention, A Model Family. Only a few typed notes and some scrawled notebook entries remain. One reads as follows:

A MODEL FAMILY

Brecht based his idea on an article in Life magazine from 1941, “A Model Family in a Model Home,” that describes how an Ohio farm family won a prize, a week in a model home at the state fair. The drawback was that the home was open to the public twelve hours a day. I felt that its themes, architecture as a representation of social and economic relations, surveillance, spectacle, and the commodification of family life resonated in our century.

Brecht's work in Hollywood has often been considered a failure. On the contrary, I would like to suggest that his ideas were merely lying in wait for us.

Collaboration

From the beginning of their collaboration in 1943 through to 1956, Paul Dessau was Brecht's most innovative and experimental musical collaborator. During Brecht's lifetime he provided the music for productions of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children), Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle), Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechwan), Mann ist Mann (Man Equals Man), Herrnburger Bericht (Report from Herrnburg), Die Erziehung der Hirse (The Cultivation of the Millet), for the opera Die Verurteilung des Lukullus (The Condemnation of Lukullus), alongside dozens of songs and occasional pieces including what is purportedly the most-sung political song of the German Democratic Republic, the “Aufbaulied der FDJ” (Reconstruction Song for the Free German Youth). Dessau was also, through to his death in 1979, the most important avant-garde composer of the GDR; its leading practitioner of serialism; a noted composer of film music (not least for four documentary films of Andrew and Annelie Thorndike); and a mediator between East and West, bringing Luigi Nono, Hans Werner Henze, and others to East Berlin and arranging performances of their works. Some of his own compositions were suppressed or censored; he was a tireless supporter and protector of younger, experimental composers (including Friedrich Goldmann and Reiner Bredemeyer); and a longterm collaborator with Brechtian writers including Heiner Müller, Volker Braun, and Karl Mickel. Müller wrote in his obituary for the composer:

Er hielt für lernbar, was gebraucht wird… . Ich habe viel von ihm gelernt. Das Beispiel seiner Arbeitshaltung. Sie hatte den Ernst des Kinderspiels. Das die avancierteste Weise der Produktion ist, Arbeit auf höchstem Niveau, ein Vorgriff in das Reich der Freiheit.

Recycling

There is hardly a more appropriate theme than recycling—the stubborn return of the “same”—that exemplifies the fundamental gesture of culture and even more so of the theater. Almost the entire repertoire of art consists of repetition, copy, and variation. Shakespeare invented not a single one of his numerous subjects. Reading a modern guide to dramas can seem like leafing through an encyclopedia of mythology. Réécriture—rewriting—is the law of culture: quotation, not originality in terms of content. The theater in particular repeats, quotes, copies, frequently oscillating between pastiche and parody, preexisting themes, subjects, figures, the entire course of narrative events. Since this process crosses not only the boundaries of language but also those between cultures and genres, we are confronted with a sort of translation in the broadest sense of the term—Übersetzung as Über-Setzen, carrying over.

With the modelbook of the 1948 staging of his Antigone, Bert Brecht provided a further dimension to the productive quality of copying. It must be immediately obvious that to see the modelbook as a guide for slavish imitation is to misunderstand it completely. The model is to be treated with confidence; it lives on only through adaptation. From the perspective of language Brecht's adaptation of the Sophoclean tragedy is based on Hölderlin's translation. With unusual modesty Brecht chose the title The Antigone of Sophocles: A Version for the Stage after Hölderlin's Translation. From the perspective of content Brecht's adaptation is certainly a radical reinterpretation of the classical plot. Antigone became for Brecht a play about Hitler's fascism. Creon is called “my Führer.” Like Hitler, at the end he wants to take Argos down with him: “And it shall fall …” He indirectly kills his own child. For Brecht, Haemon is supposed to be Creon's weapon of war in the final hour, like Hitler's “generation of 1929.” Creon's hope for a final victory—“another battle”—is a deceptive illusion (and propaganda), just as it was for the Nazis. Here it is a question of the suicidal or suicidally inclined state. The real “attraction” of the Antigone play is rather “the role of violence in the breakdown of the state authority”—that is, something with little relation to the Sophoclean tragedy.

Karin Burk's monograph Kindertheater als Möglichkeitsraum is a welcome and inspiring investigation into Walter Benjamin's 1929 “Programm eines proletarischen Kindertheaters.” Benjamin's pedagogical manifesto was commissioned by Gerhard Eisler and Johannes R. Becher in cooperation with Asja Lacis for the Karl-Liebknecht Haus, headquarters of the Communist Party in Berlin. It was intended as the conceptual basis for a proletarian children's theater in Berlin, modeled on Lacis's work in Latvia and Russia. Against the background of today's reactionary pedagogical policies with their quantitative, product-, and competition-oriented goals, Benjamin's “Programm” has lost none of its radical and provocative appeal.

Burk extrapolates Benjamin's pedagogical manifesto through an investigation of the two main intellectual influences that shaped his writing of the “Programm”: Latvian theater director, pedagogue, actress, and critic Asja Lacis, on the one hand, and Bertolt Brecht, on the other. Her monograph is divided into three parts: the first is dedicated to Benjamin's exchanges with Asja Lacis between 1924 and 1929; the second turns toward Lacis's work as a director of a children's theater in Latvia and Russia and her background in Russian avant-garde constructivist theater; and the third part offers a detailed reading of Benjamin's “Programm,” which culminates in a comparison to Brecht's concepts of Gestus and the Lehrstück. Burk's explicit interest is in the “Programm” as the conception of a children's theater that creates a space of possibilities [Möglichkeitsraum], allowing children to experience the full range of themselves and the world around them according to their own measure, free of any ideology (8).

Part 1 of Burk's book traces Benjamin's connection with Lacis: their first meetings in Capri and Berlin in 1924, Benjamin's visit in Riga in 1925, their meeting in Moscow in 1926, and their final exchanges in Berlin in 1928–29. Throughout their shared history, Burk demonstrates Lacis's crucial role in Benjamin's turn toward an experimental and praxis-based communism, as well as her impact on his aesthetic developments. In their ongoing discussion, the street stands out as a crucial topos, one that appears in the jointly written essay “Neapel” via the notion of —“porosity,” in Benjamin's Einbahnstraße (dedicated to and written under the influence of Lacis in Riga), as well as in the essay on “Moskau” and the Moskauer Tagebuch featuring Lacis as a key protagonist.

The first event of the Recycling Brecht symposium took place on June 25, 2016 (the day after the Brexit vote result was announced) at Oxford's North Wall Arts Centre, with multi-award-winning playwright Tony Kushner in conversation with Brecht scholar Tom Kuhn.

Kuhn: It's not every day that you get to introduce the greatest English-language playwright since … (maybe) Pinter! But Tony is a man whose works demand superlatives of us. His great 1994 play Angels in America is one of those truly exceptional works which is—perhaps a little bit like the Threepenny Opera—always playing somewhere in the world. In fact if you have a private jet at your disposal, you’re just in time to set off for the second half at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg.

For that play Tony won a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, and then in 2013 a National Arts Medal from Barack Obama. His plays are extraordinary in the breadth of their intellectual and formal ambition, and in their political and moral passion. I wanted to say he's created a whole new theatrical language for a generation, but I think actually there are so few people who can tread in his footsteps and develop what he's done—who have either the writerly skills or the chutzpah to bring Angels to America or a Homebody to Kabul.

He's also a great Brecht fan—which is why he's here. He's translated The Good Person of Szechwan and adapted that and Mother Courage—the latter was of course a triumph on Broadway in 2006 with Meryl Streep.

We’re here to talk about Brecht, and the importance of Brecht for your work and in your work, but I can't resist first asking you what you make of the most recent political developments in this sad country of ours.

Kushner: What do you mean? [laughter] I arrived in London on Thursday night and turned on the news at my hotel to see if any of the referendum results had started to come in. And they started to come in around ten, but by eleven my eyes were … and I fell fast asleep. And somebody, one of the Tories, had just announced that it was going to be a very good day for Remain, and so I fell asleep feeling good and then woke up to horror.