Hammering Brecht’s Theatre in the GDR: Between Political Nostalgia & Cultural Propaganda

Résumé En

WWII’s had profound aftermath on European literature. Theatrically speaking, two main responses opposed each other, much as in the cold war. On the one hand, "the theater of the absurd" could only answer to the horrors of war with a dark and abstract dramaturgy, a priori devoid of meaning and ideology. On the other hand, particularly in the Eastern bloc, a political and didactic theater is promoted, of which Brecht is the best representative and theorist. Brecht’s plays often address history and its social and political issues. For instance, The resistible Rise of Arturo Ui tells satirically and allegorically the truth about the rise of Hitler. The Soviet Union represented in Brecht’s eyes the only effective force capable of bringing down the Nazi regime and preventing its return. Many of his work praise the October revolution, the Soviet Union, or even Stalin himself. In December 1954, Brecht received the "Stalin Prize for Peace and Understanding between Peoples". Although the GDR was first reluctant toward Brecht’s work, after his death in 1956, and even more after 1961, the regime increasingly used it as a cultural weapon to promote the political regime and create social cohesion. Both on a national and international scale, Brecht’s poems and plays were instrumentalized to tell the glorious years of the communist regime with an almost ridiculous nostalgia. Brecht’s literary work was hammered to teach a certain historical truth about the glorified but “kitschified” past of the Soviet Union. However, during the 1980s, still hammering his work praising Stalin’s politics tended to make it ridiculous and killed the nostalgia. Brecht is nowadays unquestionably one of the most important theatrical theorists of the 20th century. Yet, as for a backlash, Brecht’s success on stages dwindled considerably after 1991.For this talk, I aim to present some key examples of instrumentalization of Brecht’s theater during the cold war to rewrite the historical truth about the Soviet regime, inasmuch as they epitomize theatre as a space for nostalgia.