Gossip, Ghosts, and Memory Mother Courage and the Forging of the Gitta Honegger

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Plays are magic sites. They hold not only the characters waiting to be brought to life onstage; they are also haunted by their production histories— by their authors, directors, designers, and, most prominently, by the actors, dead or alive, who embodied the roles throughout the centuries. Memories of past performances are passed on through generations. They are refracted, consciously or unconsciously, in the experience of the live production. Any performer taking on the part of Mother Courage takes on not only the ghost of Helene Weigel, whose performance of the role made theatre history, but also the history of the famed Berliner Ensemble with its Weimar Republic roots, which Weigel assembled together with her husband, , under Soviet patronage amidst the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust. Brecht’s definitive production of the play, which he wrote in Denmark in 1939 on the run from the Nazis, opened at Berlin’s historic Deutsches Theater in the Soviet-occupied zone on 10 January 1949. An earlier version of Mother Courage played in Zürich’s Schauspielhaus in 1941, while the Brechts were in exile in California, with Weigel’s good friend in the title role. Though a great admirer of Giehse, Brecht was concerned about the deeply moved critical responses to the tragedy of the “mother animal” and adjusted the text to avoid Courage’s emotional appeal (Knopf 2001:396–97). (In 1951 he himself directed Giehse in the Munich Kammerspiele production of the play. Weigel detractors claim that he preferred his fellow Bavarian’s cabaret-trained intelligence to his wife’s susceptibility to tearful hyperbole [Lutz 2005]). In any event, it was the Brecht-Weigel production that prepared the ground for the celebrated, if controversial Berliner Ensemble (BE), which was officially founded in April 1949, a few months before the division of Germany into two separate states. The Ensemble was headed by Weigel until her death in 1971. Among the initial company members were returning Jewish and Communist refugees, anti-Fascists who had been imprisoned by the Nazis, Jews who survived in hiding in Germany, young men who were drafted into the FLAK (anti-aircraft units) in their early teens, as well as theatre professionals who continued to work in Nazi Germany and survived the bombings of Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and other major German cities. Their conflicted biographies reflect the traumatizing events of the first half of the 20th century. The forging of a model ensemble from this ragtag assembly of survivors, who would soon be torn apart by the Cold War, is deeply embedded in the play. The company members’ individual and collective histories refract the cataclysms of the 20th century. They are part of the heavy load every Mother Courage drags along in her cart of merchandise. Most prominently, there is Helene Weigel’s own complicated journey from the collapsed Habsburg Empire to Communist East Berlin: born in 1900 in Vienna, the daughter of Czech Jews, Brecht’s much-tested wife, model performer, and tough-assed heir of his estate. Though she did not originate the role,

Figure 1. (facing page) Helene Weigel at the May Day parade on Marx-Engels-Platz, East Berlin, 1962. (Photo by Maria Steinfeldt

Gitta Honegger is Professor of Theatre at Arizona State University. She received Guggenheim and

Fulbright/IFK fellowships for her biography of Helene Weigel, which will be published by Yale The Berliner Ensemble University Press. They will also publish her biography of 2004 Nobel laureate for literature Elfriede Jelinek and her translation of Jelinek’s opus magnum The Children of the Dead. She holds a PhD in Theaterwissenschaft from the University of Vienna and as an actress was a member of the Vienna Burgtheater, the Schauspielhaus Zürich, and several German repertory companies. She served as resident dramaturge of the Yale Repertory Theatre, where she also directed, and as Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama. Her book Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian (Yale University Press, 2001) received the Austrian Cultural Forum’s biannual book award and was published in her German translation by Ullstein/Pantheon, Berlin.

TDR: The Drama Review 52:4 (T200) Winter 2008. ©2008 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 99

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Weigel’s Courage has become an icon for the devastation of war and its problematic survival: a small figure towering over her cart as it is pulled by her children; a solitary creature in the end, bent almost to the ground, harnessed to her vehicle, which she refuses to give up. Peddling her wares to the soldiers on both sides of the devastating Thirty Years War (1618– 1648) cost her both her sons and their mute sister. As Brecht would have it, ’s relentless pursuit of profit on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder stands for the greed that sustains all wars. Weigel's experience when she lived in Santa Monica during the 1940s of “heroes’ mothers” displaying their fallen sons’ Figure 2. The first production ofMother Courage, Zürich Schauspielhaus, medals together with 1941, directed by Leopold Lindtberg. From left: Therese Giehse (Anna Fierling), candles in their windows Erika Pesch (Kattrin), Karl Paryla (Swiss Cheese), Wolfgang Langhoff (Eilif). shaped her critical perspec- (Courtesy of Stadtarchiv Zürich) tive on the role (heightened, no doubt, by the fact that her son Stefan was drafted into the US army in 1944) (Tenschert 1983). A picture in the paper of an Asian mother screaming over her son’s dead body inspired Courage’s legendary silent scream after denying the corpse of her son Swiss Cheese, whose death she had caused by haggling too long over the ransom money requested by the enemy. Brecht’s famous demand for critical distance notwithstanding, audiences everywhere identified with the tragic predicament of women and children during times of war (Hecht 2000:18). As the head of the Berliner Ensemble, Weigel came to personify Mother Courage: the woman who navigated her company through the tempests of East German politics, just as she previously navigated her family on their 14-year odyssey in exile. According to Weigel, or “Helli,” as she was generally called—the name became as iconic for the quasi-intimacy of her management style as “die Weigel” did for her prestige as an actress—it was her husband who told her that she must run the ensemble. The way she organized their complicated moveable household during the ordeals of emigration—which included their two children, Stefan and Barbara, the playwright’s library, correspondence, papers, and works-in-progress, as well as his indispensable mistresses—was in his eyes the best qualification for the job ofIntendantin , the head of the company. (Taking on a leadership position relatively late in life, without training and experience in the field, was something she had in common with the emerging leaders of .) The story fits Weigel’s dislike of big words and self-important postures. Moreover, it has all the trappings of a Brechtian fable of common sense winning over standardized education. True to the spirit of Brechtian dramaturgy, the motherly image distracted from its strategic advan- GittaHonegger

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 tages: The Berliner Ensemble (as a mom and pop shop so to speak) would be represented by two voices. If the GDR had to grudgingly put up with Brecht’s authority based on his international reputation, however uncomfortable they were with his work, they had to also include Weigel as the chief administrator of his theatre. She brilliantly manipulated all levels of the Communist hierarchy with her Mother Courage mystique and people skills, even when Brecht would loose his dialectical cool. Cultivating her Viennese accent, peppered with Yiddish expressions, Helli schmoozed, pestered, or wept, if necessary, to get her way. Most effectively, she fed her targets into submis- sion with her legendary Schnitzel, her Kaiserschmarrn (literally, the Emperor’s mess; thick pancakes torn into pieces and topped with steamed plums), Zwetschenknödel (dumplings filled with plums and rolled in buttered breadcrumbs), cheese crepes, and lemon cakes. In addition, Weigel shared treasured recipes with the wives of cultural apparatchiks who had a special knack for censorship. Weigel’s culinary virtuosity seemed at odds with her petite bony frame and haggard features, which made her Mother Courage a timeless icon for the ravages of war. Her husband’s misunderstood Verfremdungseffekt notwithstanding, Helli might have devel- oped her own existential Verfremdungs technique, an act of containment as a method of surviving and as means to distance herself from both the cataclysmic events of her times, which directly affected her family—her father died in the concentration camp of Lodz in Poland—and the painful demands of her marriage and exile. Only on rare occasions did she reveal her deep, personal pain, as in a conversation with Werner Hecht, former BE dramaturge and head of the Brecht archives: And then there were all these affairs with the women [die Weibergeschichten], they were quite unbearable for me at times, I never understood what he got out of them [. . .] What we had between us was a great love relationship. And all of this hurt very, very much! It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t. (Hecht: 2000:53–54)

On the other hand, the Intendatin could instantly break into tears, as recalled by many company members, especially when they would ask for a raise. She would weep as she replied— in her characteristic Viennese lilt that wrapped itself irresistibly around Prussian hearts—that she would gladly oblige but she simply didn’t have a penny to spare. As an actress, she would occasionally irritate Brecht when she lapsed into tearful sentimentality, which he commented upon under his breath in Bavarian idiom, “Today she’s sniveling again” (Lutz 2005). But to the public, in life and onstage, die Weigel was the authoritative performer of Brechtian theatre—which begs the question: Who learned what and from whom in their epic relationship? Her real life performing skills informed by her Communist convictions—by all accounts more solid than her husband’s—made her the designated negotiator with the government, from Wilhelm Pieck, the GDR’s first president, to the host of watchful bureaucrats not necessarily sympathetic to her and her husband’s artistic project. With her characteristic mix of charm cum chutzpah she pulled all political strings to secure apartments for company members—no small task in the bombed-out city—and even furnished them with exquisite antiques she acquired for bargain-basement prices, which she neverthe- less deducted from their paychecks. Notoriously stingy, she made up for it with her cooking. Nothing like goulash and dumplings, Palatschinken and torte to calm the staff of frisky young assistants into a state of sated obedience. Undaunted by the scarcity of food and goods, she was quick to locate supplies as soon as they became available. There are countless anecdotes about The Berliner Ensemble the time everyone, including the children of company members, suddenly received gifts of green clothing—slacks, skirts, shirts, jackets. It turned out that she got her hands on surplus bales of green corduroy, which she expertly put to use. Like a mother, she kept a close watch on her employees’ mating and drinking habits with a surprisingly puritan rigor. She checked out new lovers, meddled in adulterous affairs, but also

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 found new living quarters for separating spouses. To make sure her performers arrived at the theatre on time for Sunday matinees after a Saturday night of heavy rounds of drinking she dispatched her loyal secretary “Blacky” Bork on Sunday mornings to personally get them out of bed and drive them to the theatre (Bork 2002). She also arranged for alcoholics in the company to get paid leaves for medical treatment. Her concerns went beyond the immediate needs of the Ensemble. When she found out that the poor quality of children’s shoes affected the proper growth of their feet, she successfully campaigned for the production of correctly designed footwear (Wekwerth 2007). Weigel’s passionate concern for others was at the heart of her commitment to the new socialist state. However, since she achieved international prominence only during the last stage of her career in East Germany, the impact of her Viennese roots on her social consciousness is generally overlooked. She attended one of the most progressive schools of that time. Named after its legendary director Eugenia Schwarzwald, a Jewish educator from Czernowicz, it focused on preparing young women for a university education, most importantly young Jewish women who, like Weigel, experienced the growing anti-Semitism at public schools. Many of the most progressive artists and intellectuals—such as the architect Adolf Loos, the composer Arnold Schönberg, and the painter/playwright Oscar Kokoschka—taught at the school. As Vienna tumbled from its fin-de-siècle aesthetic of self-absorption into World War I and towards fascism, Schwarzwald was a ubiquitous figure. Short and plump, an exuberantly affectionate, ample-bosomed mother hen, she not only ran the school but hosted, together with her husband (an influential financial expert) her legendary salon. Her guests included the likes of Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, and Robert Musil, who immortalized Schwarzwald in their books—not always flatteringly—for her dowdy appearance, her chatty devotion to genius, and the indefatigable energy of her social activism (Musil [1942] 1996; Canetti [1986] 2000; Kraus 2005). Fraudoctor, as she was affectionately called, received her PhD from the University of Zürich, when women were still barred from higher education in Austria, where her degree was not recognized. She also organized soup kitchens, homes for returning soldiers, fresh air camps in Switzerland for children during World War I, and summer colonies for her students, faculty, and artists, where the fees paid by wealthy guests covered the expenses of the needy. It was Schwarzwald who arranged for Weigel, one of her favorite students, to audition— against her parents’ wishes—for Arthur Rundt, the artistic director of Vienna’s Freie Volksbühne, the Free People’s Stage, which programmatically played to working-class audiences. With Fraudoctor’s blessing, Weigel left school to embark on an acting career in Germany (after a brief, girlishly romantic affair with Rundt, whose wife Recha, a trained art historian, was also associated with the Schwarzwald school and circle). Schwarzwald continued to play an important part in Weigel’s life, even after her schooling. Schwarzwald’s international network of extraordi- nary women, among them the bestselling feminist novelist Karin Michaelis and the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, helped save the lives of her students, friends, and protégés, including the Brechts, during the Nazi regime. Michaelis not only offered the Brechts (and many other émigrés) their first refuge in her home on the Danish island of Thurø, she also, over the years, lent the Brechts the substantial sum of 52,000 crowns for the purchase of their own house in nearby Svendborg and to cover other family expenses, including Brecht’s trip to the USA in 1935 (Brecht 1937). Last but not least the “Schwarzwald women” with their own professional lives and compli- cated marital arrangements, provided a solid personal support system for Helli, who found herself trapped, in exile, without a job, and in a troubled marriage. No doubt the Schwarzwald experience prepared the ground for Weigel’s artistic development, her social concerns, and her maternal leadership style. Helli’s popularity as the new East Germany’s mother of Kinder, Küche, and Kommunismus (Children, Kitchen, and Communism)—replacing the third element of the traditional domestic trinity of K’s: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, and Church)—made her invincible to GittaHonegger

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 government forces. Weigel’s civil image became as clichéd as her mythologized onstage mothers—the latter going back to Weimar Berlin, where she originated the title role in the 1931 production of Brecht’s Marxist Lehrstück (learning play), The Mother. The production’s final tableau showed the diminutive woman carrying a red banner that is much larger than her frail body, surrounded by the comrades of her slain son. The image made her the figurehead of the early Communists’ utopian idealism, which was soon to be betrayed by Stalinist realpolitik. No wonder East German politicians were uncomfortable with the play’s revival in 1951. According to their official scenario, the revolution had been accomplished with the successful construction of the German Democratic Republic, Germany’s “first workers’ and peasants’ state,” modeled after the Soviet Union. Any suggestions of resistance were no longer welcome. Poignantly enough, the Mother would also be Weigel’s last triumphant performance with the Berliner Ensemble in Paris, a few days before her death in 1971. With her Viennese mix of charm and chutzpah, Helli cajoled old friends and colleagues, fellow émigrés, and new talents who were hesitant to work in the Soviet sector. Erich Engel, Brecht’s old friend who directed the triumphant breakthrough premiere of the The Threepenny Opera in Weimar Berlin, came on board right away to codirect the 1949 production of Mother Courage. The production was cast from the Deutsches Theater resident company. Like Courage’s cart, the production was haunted by history. The artistic director, Wolf- gang Langhoff, had played Courage’s son Eiliff in the earlier Zürich production. A veteran Communist actor and writer who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, Langhoff wrote Die Moorsoldaten (The Peat Bog Soldiers, 1935) about his experience in concentration camps, and the book made him a cult figure in the anti-Fascist underground. The song “The Peat Bog Soldiers”—for which Langhoff and Rudi Goguel, a fellow inmate, wrote the lyrics, with music by their comrade Johann Esler, later adapted by Brecht composer Hanns Eisler—became a battle cry of Communists in the fight against Hitler. The couple’s connection to the Deutsches Theater—under Max Reinhardt’s epochal leadership—dated back to 1922, when Weigel played a small (unidentified) role in Brecht’s Drums in the Night, unnoticed, it seemed, by the author. Things had changed by the time Brecht did a brief stint as one of the theatre’s dramaturges in 1924, just in time to help support his (rather unconventionally) growing family. Weigel was expecting their first child, Stefan, while Brecht was still married to the singer Marianne Zoff, with whom he already had a daughter, Hanne; he also continued his relationship with his first love, Paula (Bi) Banholzer, the mother of his first-born son Frank. Weigel was a member of the Deutsches Theater’s company for the 1925/26 season (when Brecht had already taken on another affair, with his intelligent assistant and collaborator Elizabeth Hauptmann) without getting to play significant roles or, for that matter, getting to see much of her fellow Viennese, Max Reinhardt. The celebrated director was somewhat overextended as the head of the Deutsches Theater and several other Berlin theatres as well as of Vienna’s Theater in der Josefstadt. With the Nazi takeover in 1933, the Deutsches Theater came under the direct control of Hitler’s Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels, who envisioned it as his national theatre, in fierce competition with Berlin’s Prussian State Theatre under the patronage of the Prussian Ministerpräsident Hermann Goering. (The State Theatre’s controver- sial artistic director was the renowned actor and Goering protégée Gustav Gründgens, featured as the title character Mephisto in his former lover Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel and the award- winning 1980 film by Istvan Szabo.) The Berliner Ensemble Goebbels’s choice for artistic director of “his” theatre, Heinz Hilpert, followed Nazi orders to fire all Jewish company members. Most of them had already fled the country, among them some of the era’s greatest actors. The reorganized company included prominent stars of the Weimar Republic such as Erich Ponto and Rudolf Forster, respectively Brecht’s first Mack the Knife in the stage production and in the 1933 film version ofThe Threepenny Opera; as well as Erich Engel, Brecht’s trusted director. During Hitler’s regime, Engel also directed a series of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 popular, light entertainment movies. After the end of the war he made a few distinguished films for DEFA, the East German Production Company, while dividing his time as a stage director between Munich and Berlin. After Brecht’s death in 1956 Weigel made Engel the BE’s artistic leader while Brecht’s eager disciples fought their own war of succession, a backstage variant of the War of the Roses. Many actors who kept working under the Nazi regime continued their careers after the war in film and onstage at leading theatres in German-speaking countries—next to their gradually returning Jewish colleagues—in Vienna, Hamburg, Berlin, and Zürich. From 1950 to 1966 Hilpert headed the municipal theatre in the relatively small university town of Göttingen, where he developed one of West Germany’s most respected resident companies. Therese Giehse, for one, could not forgive him his ambitious career during the Nazi terror, however volatile it turned out in the end. Weigel, though Jewish herself, was more pragmatic in her dealings with colleagues who adapted to the regime, drawing the line at those who declared themselves to be Nazis, denying them permission to perform Brecht’s plays. For many Communist Jews returning to East Germany, their racial identity was second to their belief in a class-free society, beyond nationalistic, ethnic, or religious divisions. How to deal with former Nazis and their sympathizers was a heavily contested issue, both at the top level of Communist leadership and among the people struggling to clear some common ground to start over. Brecht had no illusions that there were Nazis and sympathizers on both sides of the East/West divide. He was ready to accept that he would have to try to reeducate them. Nevertheless, not even he was prepared for what was in store for him. Max Frisch recounts in his journal Brecht’s first excursion to Germany after his return from US exile, in August 1948 (1997:39–40). As a German refugee and Communist suspect, he was still stateless and could enter only with a one-day visitor’s pass. The Swiss architect and budding playwright walked with his admired colleague across the Swiss border to nearby Konstanz to attend the opening of one of Frisch’s plays. The production was directed by none other than Goebbels’ former protégée, Heinz Hilpert, the founder and then artistic director of the Konstanz company, which he had named Deutsches Theater after the historic Berlin theatre where he had worked during the war. On their way home that night, in an unexpectedly vehement outburst, Brecht ripped apart the actors’ work. Shocked how they could go on performing in the same old style as if nothing had happened, as if the theatre could go on unscathed by history, Brecht apparently fully realized for the first time what it would mean to start all over again. Shrewdly enough he wrote Hilpert a letter congratulating him and his young company and suggesting they should work on The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Brecht’s darkly vaudevillian retelling of Hitler’s rise, set in the Chicago gangster milieu) as a reminder of Germany’s recent past (Brecht 1948). Three months later, when Brecht arrived in East Berlin to begin with the preproduction work for Mother Courage, he was equally disturbed by the first performance he saw at the Deutsches Theater, as he noted in his journal on 27 October 1948: “Miserable production, hysterically tense, completely unrealistic” (in Hecht 1997:835, my translation). Before he could start his own company he would have to work with these actors who were not accustomed to his insistence on socially constructed rather than psychologically motivated behavior. Consequently, what was to become the world famous Berliner Ensemble production of Mother Courage was not the 1949 production but the recast version of 1951. Announced both as a new staging and as the 100th performance of the original production, it was “new” in the sense that the performers, artistic team, and the supporting staff of dramaturges and assistant directors were now members of the Brechts’s own company. The production remained in the BE’s repertory until 1961, with more than 400 performances and countless tours around the world. In 1954 the production was invited to the Paris Festival International d'Art Dramatique. The Ensemble’s triumphant performance at one of the most prestigious Western theatre festivals, for an international, albeit politically deeply divided audience, radically influenced the course of Western theatre for the second half of the 20th century. GittaHonegger

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Figure 3. The production of Mother Courage in repertory, Berliner Ensemble, directed by Bertolt Brecht (n.d.). From left: Ernst Kahler (Eilif), Angelika Hurwicz (Kattrin), Helene Weigel (Anna Fierling), Wolfgang Kaiser (Recruiting Officer), Gerhard Bienert (Sergeant). (Photo by [BBA FA 48/29]; courtesy of Ruth Berlau/Hoffmann)

The many cast changes over the years—only Weigel and Angelika Hurwicz (as the mute daughter, Kattrin), continued in their pivotal roles until the production closed in 1961—brought in new generations of actors whose professional biographies reflected the changes in political circumstances, painful personal decisions, and career choices. The most significant replacements were necessitated by the departure to the West of some of the original actors, most prominently Paul Bildt as the cook and Werner Hinz as the chaplain. The changes also reflected the transition from an established performance tradition to the critical, politically engaged approach Brecht envisioned. Both Bildt and Hinz were born Berliners, both established themselves in Berlin’s major theatres during the Weimar Republic, and both also became popular film stars during the vibrant years of early movie making. They continued to work, with tragic consequences for one, in Berlin’s major state-run theatres during the Hitler regime. Paul Bildt, born 1885, was the model ensemble actor, a solid and versatile master of craft— what the Germans called a Verwandlungskünstler, a master of transformations—whose roles ranged from the classics to slapstick and contemporary experimental theatre. Not surprisingly, he was featured in some of the premiere productions of Brecht’s early plays: Baal, Jungle of the Cities directed by Erich Engel and Man Equals Man, staged by Brecht himself, who appreciated his unpretentious intelligence. Also an accomplished director, he staged the premiere produc- tion of Brecht protégée and short-term lover Marieluise Fleisser’s Purgatory in Ingolstadt at Die The Berliner Ensemble Junge Bühne (The Young Stage), with a company of young actors, some of them members of the established repertory theatres who were eager to explore new and challenging works. During the Nazi terror, Bildt was a member of the Prussian State Theatre under Gustav Gründgens. Using his ambivalent ties to Hermann Göring, Gründgens managed to protect Bildt’s Jewish wife and their daughter, just as he saved many other Jewish company members and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Figure 4. Mother Courage directed by Bertolt Brecht. Berlin, 1949. From left: Werner Hinz (Chaplain), Paul Bildt (Cook), Helene Weigel (Anna Fierling). (Photo by Abraham Pisarek; courtesy of Dr. Ruth Gross)

spouses. Bildt’s wife died of cancer in 1945, at a time when the Nazis were hunting down the children of mixed marriages. Hiding in Gründgens’s villa outside Berlin when the Russians advanced, the actor tried to commit suicide together with his daughter. While he survived the overdose of pills, his daughter did not. In 1951 he left the Deutsches Theater to work in West Berlin, Munich, and also in films. Bildt was revered by his colleagues, among them Werner Hinz, for his artistry and great humanity. He died of cancer in 1957 (Pargner 2007). Werner Hinz began his career at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater. He rose to promi- nence as a stage and film actor during the Weimar Republic and continued to perform during the Nazi regime in Hamburg and Berlin. In 1947 he returned to the Deutsches Theater before leaving for West Germany in 1950. He distinguished himself at the major resident theatres in Hamburg, Munich, Zürich, and Vienna in a wide range of leading roles from both the classic and the contemporary canons. Hinz is probably best known to American movie audiences for his performance of Rommel in the 1962 D-Day epic The Longest Day. He was also the dubbed Ger- man movie voice of Gregory Peck and Ralph Richardson, among others (Sucher 1999:106–07). Like other actors who had worked with Brecht, both Bildt and Hinz stand out in many films for their controlled performances based on precise observation of what Brecht termed the gestus—a meticulously constructed, sparse language of gestures, posture, and speech patterns that presented the character’s social constructedness—in contrast to their West German colleagues’ sentimental portrayals based on private emotions. Bildt and Hinz were replaced by Ernst Busch and Erwin Geschonneck, as the cook and the chaplain respectively, two defining members of the Berliner Ensemble. In contrast to their predecessors, both were committed to the new East German State. Both were veteran Communists and anti-fascist fighters, both survived imprisonment by the Nazis, and both remained indefatigable in their belief in the foundational ideals of the party. GittaHonegger

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 To the workers of the world, Ernst Busch sang their revolution. In Weimar Berlin’s heady artistic scene, the singer/actor became the defining voice of composer Hanns Eisler, Brecht’s close collaborator and one of the most brilliant Communist artist-intellectuals. Busch’s popular performances of political poems—most prominently by Brecht—were set to music by Eisler, who accompanied him on the piano. These concerts set the revolutionary tone of the times and united large audiences of workers with left-wing artists and intellectuals. Hero, martyr, and lifelong rebel, Busch gave a resounding voice to all phases of the workers’ struggle. He participated in the earliest anti-fascist resistance and in the Spanish Civil War. Hunted down and imprisoned by the Nazis, he was wounded in the allied bombings of his Berlin jail, which perma- nently paralyzed the left half of his face. Throughout his career he fearlessly resisted the GDR’s power elite without abandoning his faith in the Communist project. Busch’s supple tenor, capable of expressing a range of emotions from compassion to cynicism, from steely resolve to rousing assertion, made him the most popular Communist performer, threatening to both Nazis and Communists because of his influence on the masses. A brilliant stage and film actor as well, Busch’s extraordinary appeal was a blend of Nordic salt, Figure 5. Portrait of Ernst Busch as Cook in Mother Courage, Berlin (n.d). proletarian guts, and a raw (BBA Theaterdokumentation [655/594]; courtesy of the Akademie der Künste/ intelligence that sparkled Bertolt Brecht Archiv, Berlin) with debonair urbanity.

After the war, it was his old friend Helli who persuaded him to return to the stage in the role of The Berliner Ensemble the cook, Mother Courage’s wily suitor and equal in survivor savvy. He played the part with his cap pulled over the paralyzed half of his face. The son of a bricklayer and a seamstress, Busch was born in 1900 in Kiel, Germany’s most important naval base in the Baltic Sea, where he witnessed the historic 1918 sailors’ mutiny that set off Communist uprisings across the country. The experience inspired his own turn to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Communism from his family’s Socialist tradition. Finding himself out of work in the economic collapse after World War I, the trained machinist took some acting lessons and participated in a workers’ chorus, which quickly led to a job at the municipal theatre. Like Busch himself, many of its resident young actors would soon rise to stardom in Berlin, among them Gustav Gründgens, who would use his influence on Göring to save the singer/actor’s life. After World War II, Busch in turn testified on behalf of Gründgens for his efforts to save countless Jewish and Communist colleagues—Gründgens was jailed as a Nazi collaborator and released after nine months of “denazification.” Though frequently at odds with East German authorities for his outspokenness, Busch stayed in East Berlin, true to his convictions and nonconformist code of honor. Busch’s colleague was Erwin Geschonneck (Geschi for short), born 1906 in East Prussia, the son of a cobbler. He got his start in Berlin with amateur groups and agitprop companies while earning a living at odd jobs. Mostly self-taught, he took evening classes at the Marxist Workers School (MASCH). With its outstanding faculty of leading Marxist theorists and artists, the school attracted a wide range of adult students from all walks of life, among them young Helli, still somewhat frumpy and emotionally fearless. Geschonneck’s flight from Nazi Berlin took him to the Soviet Union where he acted in various German exile theatres until he was forced out of the country as a consequence of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The Gestapo caught up with him in Prague in 1939 and for the next six years he was moved through several concentra- tion camps. Auditioning for the Deutsches Theater in 1949, Geschonneck caught Weigel and Brecht’s attention as they were putting together their company. They hired him on the spot for the role of the savvy servant Matti in the Berliner Ensemble’s inaugural production of Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti, directed by Brecht and Erich Engel (Geschonneck 1997:147–49). His perfor- mance of the role is still considered unsurpassed by those who saw it. A low-key realistic performer, he was proud to draw upon his proletarian background, political commitment, and painful experiences in a wide range of characters. Though Brecht and Weigel treasured him as one of the ensemble’s original members, he left the company in 1956 to concentrate on his distinguished film career in East Berlin. His part was eventually taken over by a younger actor, the tall and darkly powerful Wolf Kaiser, who had already cut his teeth in the role of the recruiting officer while proving himself in several other productions. In Erich Engel’s meticu- lous 1959 revival of The Threepenny Opera he played Mack the Knife with a grizzly bear’s swiftness and nonnegotiable presence. Moody, brooding, and contentious, torn in loyalties and marginalized in the reunited Germany, in 1992 the 76-year-old actor tragically jumped from his old (formerly East) Berlin apartment to his death. Angelika Hurwicz continued her unforgettable portrayal of Courage’s mute daughter Kattrin. The young Jewish actress had survived the Nazi regime performing with a rural Czech touring company. In 1945 she joined the Deutsches Theater. She remembers her first encounter with Weigel and Brecht at their temporary quarters at the Hotel Adlon, where they interviewed actors for Mother Courage. Hurwicz came dressed in a man’s suit and wearing a monocle, which Weigel criticized as a bourgeois prop. Hurwicz’s timid explanation that she didn’t see well and that her acting teacher had recommended a monocle and also showed her how to use it, led Brecht to argue that in her case the monocle was a tool of the trade rather than a sign of the ruling class (Rischbieter 2000:76). Among her definitive roles at the Berliner Ensemble was Grusche in Brecht’s 1954 production of The Caucausian Chalk Circle. Encouraged by Brecht to direct, she chose Alexander Ostrowski’s Vospitannica (The Foster Daughter). In 1958 Hurwicz left East Germany and the theatre for a while to live in Holland. In the early 1960s she resumed her acting career at Vienna’s Theater in der Josefstadt where critics praised her for her precise, unsentimental performances. In 1966 her old colleague from the BE, Carl Weber, directed her at Berlin’s Schaubühne am Halle’schen Ufer in Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley. During the ’70s she worked as a director in Hannover and Wuppertal and briefly codirected the theatre GittaHonegger

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 of Cologne with Hans Günter Heyme and Roberto Ciulli. While she was widely respected for her social conscience, precise observations, and fine sense of humor, Hurwicz’s Brechtian, low-key approach was eclipsed by the rising directing stars of the Regie-Theater (director’s theatre) and their radical, mega-deconstructions of the classics. She retired to Holland, where she died in 1999. Her book on Brecht rehearsing The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Brecht inszeniert: Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (1964)—with detailed frame-by-frame comments on rehearsal photographs by her longtime companion Gerda Goedhart—still serves as a valuable resource for students and professionals. Friedrich Gnass, a veteran proletarian performer who originated the role of the old peasant, also stayed on in the part. During the 1920s, Gnass worked with Erwin Piscator’s experimental Volksbühne and other left-wing theatres in Weimar Berlin. (There is some speculation about an affair with Helene Weigel during that period [Kebir 2000:24].) His association with Brecht and Weigel goes back to the 1928 premiere of Man Equals Man, staged by Erich Engel, in which he played Polly, one of the soldiers, and Weigel stood out as the feisty Widow Begbick (Hecht 1997:241). In 1932 he was featured in a radio production of Saint Joan of the Stockyards, with Weigel as Frau Luckerniddle, the stubbornly timid widow of one of the workers killed in a meat-processing machine. Though harassed and occasionally jailed by the Nazis for his outspokenness, Gnass survived the war years in Berlin. With his broad, roughly hewn features, and a stout laborer’s body, he was one of the core members of the BE, an indispensable character actor until his death in 1958. He also played many supporting roles in East German films. A famously heavy drinker, Gnass was one of several BE actors Weigel had to keep an eye on. Swiss native Regine Lutz took over the role of Yvette, the whore. She was a 19-year-old member of the Zürich Schauspielhaus when Brecht cast her as the milkmaid in his 1948 production of Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti. A year later, she accepted Weigel’s invitation to join the Berliner Ensemble. Petite, perky, and intelligent, she became one of Brecht’s profes- sional and personal favorites. The final word is still out on whether she did or didn’t sleep with him, if only once. She didn’t, insists Lutz, who is still in top performing shape—at the age of 76 she starred in Harold and Maude in Berlin, then traveled to Seoul where she conducted acting workshops at the Korea National University—and chatty about her closeness to Brecht. Weigel wouldn’t have minded the liaison, her erstwhile protégé elaborates. Ever the wise, if painfully experienced organizer, the Intendantin preferred Lutz, the well-brought-up daughter from a proper bourgeois Swiss family, to the young scheming women comrades who chased the revered sage. As Lutz remembers it, Weigel more or less offered her to Brecht, insisting, for example, that she visit him when he was hospitalized, while making sure all the other pining women were kept out (Lutz 2005). Brecht adapted Farquar’s Recruiting Officer, renamed Trumpets and Drums, especially for Lutz. After Brecht’s death, she eventually expanded her career opportunities in West Berlin and performed in both parts of the city. When the commute became impossible after the erection of the wall, Lutz, a Swiss citizen, stayed in the West with Weigel’s blessing. Crucial to the consistent realization of Brecht’s dramaturgy was the identification and development of young talent not brainwashed either by Hitler Youth drills or by the newly institutionalized East German theatre training methods based on the Soviet application of the Stanislavsky system, adapted for the advancement of patriotism and communist ideology. Young actors were desperately needed to make up for the lost generation—those who came of age during the rise of the Nazis and were killed in Hitler’s wars or were unable to shake their early indoctrination. With a core of experienced “Brechtian actors” in place, newcomers The Berliner Ensemble received their training on the job. Heinz Schubert (“Schubi”), just 5 foot 4 inches tall, stepped in as Swiss Cheese, Courage’s simple-minded, foolishly honorable son. American film aficionados might best remember him for his brilliant portrayal of Hitler in Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s 1977 eight-plus-hour cult movie Hitler—A Film from Germany. The son of a fashionable Berlin tailor, Schubert was drafted

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 during Hitler’s last crazed days, slightly wounded almost immediately, and caught by the British army. After the end of the war, never having completed school, he first trained to become a tailor before turning to acting. Schubi, one of the BE’s most popular leading actors, stayed with the company until the construction of the Berlin Wall made it impossible to commute to the theatre from West Berlin, where he lived with his wife and two daughters. Though it was a difficult decision to leave the BE, he resumed his distinguished stage and film career in the West. Quite ironically, he is most widely remembered as Alfred the horrible, the grouchy, arch-conser- vative head of the family—West Germany’s answer to Archie Bunker—in a popular ’70s sitcom. The young —Helli’s future son-in-law—was a trained actor from Magdeburg and member of the BE since 1952, joining Courage’s family to pull the cart as her son Eiliff. He played the short-lived hero with his characteristic physical bravura and country boy charm. Schall’s histrionic exuberance would drive generations of BE directors crazy, since he also enjoyed the fool’s privilege as husband to Barbara Brecht. A well-trained, second-generation Communist, if occasionally naughty bohemian, Schall was the company’s uncontested star and a loyal citizen of his state even after its collapse. Marginalized in the new, post-Communist Berlin, Schall continued to perform primarily in the small Theatre 89 until his death in the fall of 2005. Founded in 1989 and directed by third-generation BE alumnus Hans Joachim Frank, who left the company in 1987 to pursue his own artistic vision, the company programmatically continues the legacy of Brechtian realism and social commitment. Schall stood out with his brilliantly contained one-man performance in 2001, A Child of Our Time, adapted from Ödön von Horvath’s novel Ein Kind unserer Zeit (1938; A Child of Our Time), and as Niels Bohr in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (2003). Before his death he was preparing to play King Lear, staged by his daughter Johanna, who until 2007 was the artistic director of the Municipal Theater of Rostock. For the most part Weigel and Brecht preferred young actors without previous professional training, who performed in local amateur groups. It would soon become an inside joke that interest in the company’s work was the first, if not only requirement. “Wanting to be hired is all it takes to be hired,” , Brecht’s debonair first dramaturge reportedly snarled at the young amateur director Manfred Wekwerth, who was just hired and made the rounds to introduce himself (Wekwerth 2007). Palitzsch would become Wekwerth’s trusted codirector in perfecting the BE’s signature style of Brechtian “master theatre.” Together they would shape the BE’s artistic profile after Brecht’s death until the Berlin Wall came between them. Born in 1918, Palitzsch was the oldest of Brecht’s first generation of assistants. Drafted into Hitler’s army, he was in the occupying forces of Paris and was later sent to the Eastern front. At the end of the war he returned to his native Dresden where he survived the Allies’ final bombing of the city. Palitzsch trained as a graphic designer but eventually accepted a job as a dramaturge at Dresden’s alternative Volksbühne. When he learned that Brecht had returned to Berlin, Palitzsch asked for a meeting to discuss new plays. Brecht in turn invited him on the spot to design the advertisement for Mother Courage and followed up with an offer to join his theatre. Together they drafted the Berliner Ensemble’s famous logo: a circle inscribed with the compa- ny’s two-line name (Palitzsch 2002). Widely visible to this day, the sign continues to rotate atop the turret that crowned Brecht’s office at the Schiffbauerdamm Theatre, the Berliner Ensemble’s permanent home since March 1954. Tall and gaunt, with his ascetic good looks, low-key gen- tlemanly bearing, and soft-voiced intellectual authority, Palitzsch, according to backstage lore, became his female colleagues’ favorite artistic and personal adviser, while their husbands and partners saw in him a rival to watch out for. By contrast to Palitzsch’s cool cosmopolitanism, the much younger Manfred Wekwerth, short and wiry, was the eager, small-town kid. He was a hard worker who made up with determi- nation and discipline any lack of privilege and polish, and he quickly proved himself to the revered master. Born in 1929 in Saxony, the son of a single mother who supported the family as GittaHonegger

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 kitchen help, Wekwerth wanted to study mathematics after World War II but was assigned a job as a grade school teacher in his native town of Koethen. He staged Brecht’s The Rifles of Señora Carrar with a local amateur group and invited Brecht to see it. Weigel instead sent a bus to bring the company to the Berliner Ensemble to present their production to a select audience of prominent ensemble members and visiting cultural politicians. Though Brecht offered some strong criticism of the work, he immediately hired the young director as his assistant. Two years into his training at the BE, Wekwerth was entrusted with the remounting of The Mother with the BE cast at Vienna’s new Scala Theatre, no small feat for a novice director to suddenly find himself in charge of two legends: Helene Weigel and Ernst Busch. After Brecht’s death, in his assistants’ titanic struggle for succession, Wekwerth prevailed as Helli’s trusted associate. About a decade later he too was felled by the Ensemble’s mother in a Shakespearean clash of hubris, politics, and Oedipal resentments. Seven years after Weigel’s death he returned as the Ensemble’s powerful leader until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when his fortune turned once again. A savvy player in the East German power elite as a one- time member of the Party’s Central Committee and as president of the fiercely politicized Academy of Arts, he was persona non grata in the reunited Germany. Still a passionate, gener- ous, if categorically biased, source of information on Brechtian principles and BE history and gossip, Wekwerth continues to direct in like-minded theatres in the former East Germany, undaunted in his commitment to Marxist principles and the theatre’s political/social mission. When the Berlin Wall went up on 13 August 1961, Palitzsch was on leave from the Berliner Ensemble for a directing assignment in Oslo. Deeply torn between his commitment to a humanist socialism and the regime’s de facto imprisonment of all citizens, he did not return despite passionate pleas, followed by cutting reproaches from Wekwerth on behalf of Weigel and the Ensemble. As a leading interpreter of Brecht and as the artistic director, most notably of the Stuttgart State Theatre, Palitzsch saw his directing career flourish in West Germany. After the fall of the Wall, in another turn of history’s wheel, Palitzsch succeeded Wekwerth in 1992 at the helm of the Berliner Ensemble, now reorganized as a shareholding company—with Palitzsch and the four co-artistic directors as shareholders: Matthias Langhoff, the Zürich-based director and son of Wolfgang Langhoff; the East German playwright Heiner Müller, Brecht’s oedipal heir; Fritz Marquardt, ironically enough Wekwerth’s former directing protégé; and Cambridge- educated Peter Zadek, the son of Jewish émigrés to London, a brilliant if temperamental and controversial director who rose to fame in West Germany. The collective, or “Band of Five,” as it became known among cynics, quickly collided over political issues in the fierce cultural wars that followed the initial euphoria of a reunited Berlin. Of the five co-directors, Zadek was the only one with Western roots. Outspoken, combative, and polemical, he quickly locked horns with Müller, whom he accused of turning the BE into an “Ost Theater” (East theatre) (Merschmeier 1995). Peter Palitzsch, ever the Brecht trained, thoughtful dialectician, argued that in an interesting twist of the position held by Brecht, who never wanted the BE to be a GDR theatre, the post-Wall directors must not sweep the GDR under the rug, but instead work with its contradictory past and develop their thinking from there (Theater Heute 1996). A few days before the official inauguration of the premiere season of the new BE with Heiner Müller’s Duel, Tractor, Fatzer in January 1993, the playwright’s collaboration with the STASI (the East German secret police) became known. The revelation intensified the media campaign against the BE, which was already under attack for the generous funding its five directors received from the Berlin senate—compared to the other major theatres, each with just one

Intendant. The Berliner Ensemble Marquardt quit his position even before the start of the first season, but continued as a shareholder. Langhoff resigned from both responsibilities in June 1994. When Zadek left after the 1994/95 season, Müller became the BE’s sole director until his death on 30 December 1995, with Palitzsch limiting his participation to “artistic consultant” and shareholder.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 The press, led by the influential magazineTheater Heute, continued their campaign against the BE’s continuation of East German aesthetics. The overwhelming success of Heiner Müller’s staging of Brecht’s Arturo Ui was the only exception. (The production continues to play to sold- out houses in the BE’s repertory.) Martin Wuttke, then a 34-year-old actor who played Arturo Ui in Müller’s brilliant production, was appointed the Berliner Ensemble’s new artistic director, with Palitzsch continuing as artistic consultant. Frustrated by the city’s control of the theatre’s budget and contracts, Wuttke left after 10 months (to return only for performances of Ui, which he continues to this day) and joined the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxemburg Platz. During the 1990s the Volksbühne under Frank Castorf’s provocative leadership became Berlin’s most talked-about theatre. A new interim administration was put into place at the BE until Claus Peymann was brought in as artistic director in 1999 in the hope that he could accomplish the necessary break with the past as he had done as the path-breaking, if controversial head of Vienna’s Burgtheater. Peymann began with the thorough renovation of the building, which included the transformation of Brecht’s and Weigel’s hallowed offices into gallery spaces. Even more sacrilegious, he remodeled the legendary Kantine, the company’s cafeteria/bar, which was designed and furnished by Weigel herself, thanks to her famed negotiating skills with the GDR’s rulers and aparatchiks. Most importantly, Peymann fired most of the veteran company and staff. Peter Palitzsch, maintaining a collegiate distance, occasionally directed at other theatres. He died after a long illness in 2004. While Brecht’s recruitment process was spontaneous, informal, and improvised, proce- dures became increasingly rigorous after his death. (One young actor/director who joined the ensemble in 1961 compared the regimentation of newcomers to a Jesuit college [Berliner Zeitung 2002].) However, in the beginning there were no formally stated expectations, require- ments, or audition procedures. Typically, applicants were first sent to Weigel to be looked over. Aspiring directors or dramaturges were asked to submit a detailed description of the perfor- mance or rehearsal of a scene they were invited to observe. After Weigel’s consent, Brecht would then meet the person who might be surprised, as Carl Weber was when after waiting for hours to see Brecht as arranged, the director greeted him in a hurry and sent him to Weigel to sign his contract (Weber 2003). Weber, now professor emeritus at Stanford University where he still directs, came to Berlin in 1950 via his native Heidelberg, a small university town with little opportunity for an aspiring actor. He joined the Theater der Freundschaft, a theatre for youth, before applying to the BE in 1952. Käthe Rülicke, in charge of screening applications, lost the performance report Weber submitted. She had forgotten all about it when he inquired several weeks later. Somewhat frazzled because he typed his observations without making a carbon copy—paper was scarce and expensive in East Berlin—he was casually advised to just rewrite it from memory (Weber 2003). When Brecht liked an applicant, he put the rookie to work right away, regardless of whether the person had documented qualifications for the task. Weber immediately had to take over the small role of the young peasant in scene 11 of Mother Courage. With Peter Palitzsch he wrote and directed in 1955 The Day of the Great Scholar Wu. When the Wall went up, Weber was in Poland directing the play. Like his good friend Peter Palitzsch, he did not return. Weber eventually came to the US, where he taught at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts before moving to Stanford. Besides Brecht, Weber introduced other path-breaking authors such as Peter Handke and Heiner Müller to American audiences. His devoted students include Tony Kushner and Mac Wellman. Promising talents were identified and suggested by Brecht’s trusted collaborators, colleagues, friends, and old lovers who returned to work as staff, including Elisabeth Hauptmann and Ruth Berlau. They were soon to be joined by their young successors to Brecht’s intimate favors, the Brechtian scholar and party-line dialectician Käthe Rülicke, and Isot Kilian, an actress, whose organizational and people skills soon made her an indispensable member of the BE’s production staff. Kilian was one of the BE’s earliest hires in 1949, together with Egon Monk, who would GittaHonegger

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 soon become Brecht’s dearest collaborator, the first assistant to direct at the BE and the first to leave to gain artistic autonomy. Monk grew up in a working-class family with no exposure to the theatre and was drafted at the age of 16 to aid the air defense of Berlin in 1943, when senior soldiers were moved to the Eastern front. Inspired by a classmate who planned to become an actor, Monk decided, more or less on the spur of the moment, to do just that. He enrolled in the first acting school that opened in Berlin after the war. Deeply affected by Brecht’s poems and other writings, Monk developed, together with Kilian, a performance of songs and poems. They toured the program to schools, factories—any place that wanted them, as Monk recalled in our last conversation (2006). After a post-play discussion of Mother Courage, Kilian approached Weigel to arrange a meeting with Brecht, who hired both Monk and her without having seen their program (Monk 2006). In 1953 Monk accepted an invitation from Rias Berlin to join the American-run radio station in West Berlin as an author and director of radio plays. He became a leading television director, best remembered for his 1982 filmThe Oppermanns, based on Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel of a sophisticated, prosperous Jewish family in Berlin and their diverse responses and persecution during the Nazis rise to power. Monk died in February 2007, just a few months after our meeting. Kilian, Brecht’s close assistant and “last love” (Von Arnim 2006) was at Brecht’s side on 17 June 1953 when he drafted his controversial response to the workers’ uprising, from which only the last sentence in support of the party was published. In 1961 she was pressured by the STASI to inform on the company but, as Kilian’s file at the Archives of the former East German Ministry of State Security (BstU Archives) reveal, she frustrated her contacts with her anxiety- ridden, evasive reports. Although Kilian was known for her exquisite features, countless anecdotes relate that fashionable beauty was not an asset for aspiring young actresses at the BE—a principle that apparently was applied even more rigorously after Brecht’s death (like many practices that became dogma under his disciples and their students). During the audition of one young actress, Wekwerth reportedly commented under his breath that she was too beautiful for the company. Weigel quipped: “We can fix that” (Domröse 2003). In deference to Freud, Weigel’s fellow Viennese (in fact she grew up in Berggasse, a few buildings down the street from the psychoana- lyst’s home and office), one is tempted to speculate that she remembered her own beginnings. Short, pudgy and rather unremarkable—a far cry from fin-de-siècle clichés of femininity—she made up for it with raw talent and excessive emotionality (reined in later by Brecht). Never conforming to conventional standards of beauty and pegged early on as a “character actress,” Weigel cultivated a strikingly androgynous look: lithe and slender-bodied, with her short blunt-cut hair brushed back from her narrow, sensitive, dark-eyed face. Though the GDR had a thriving film industry, Weigel never became comfortable with the medium. She only appeared in filmed BE productions, best known among them Peter Palitzsch’s and Manfred Wekwerth’s restaging of Mother Courage for DEFA, the state-owned studio. Furthermore, as the head of her company, she had to compete with DEFA for her actors, whose energy was drained from doing double duty, in the film studio and onstage. Work at the BE demanded total commitment. There were no divisions of responsibility; everyone had to be ready to do everything. Tasks were not assigned individually; everyone was expected to take the initiative and jump in. Anyone who waited to be told what to do would end up doing very little and would not be rehired. One task no BE novice was spared, as recalled by all with various degrees of amusement, was pasting rehearsal and production photographs that The Berliner Ensemble painstakingly record each scene moment by moment—in flipbook-like frames—into what would become the BE’s famous Modellbücher, model-books intended to instruct subsequent companies in the appropriate production techniques for the master’s innovative dramaturgy. The photogra- pher and supervising editor was Brecht’s former lover, the Danish actress and director Ruth Berlau. A sensuous, temperamental woman and ardent Communist (in her youth she bicycled

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 from Copenhagen to Moscow for a firsthand experience of the new society in progress), Berlau was instrumental in connecting Brecht to Danish theatre professionals. She followed him into Californian exile, where she gave birth to their son, who died shortly after—a loss neither she nor Brecht could come to terms with—then joined him in Switzerland and East Berlin. Caring, generous, and mentally unstable, she discovered and mentored several of the new ensemble members, while she herself tragically deteriorated. She was an alcoholic who was unable to free herself from her desperate, neurotic obsession with Brecht. As was the case in other professions, the Wall led to a drain of talent from East Berlin theatres, and not solely for political reasons. Many actors who worked in East Berlin’s theatres lived in the Western sector and had been able to cross back and forth with relative ease. This was no longer possible. Other actors, who lived in East Berlin suburbs that intersected with Western zones, had to make cumbersome detours around them as trains could not pass through as before. What used to be a 10-minute subway ride turned into hours of commuting. With no train service at all for several hours after midnight, returning home after performances became nearly impossible. The Wall provoked a major rift in the BE’s artistic staff. Some, like many East Berliners, at least initially accepted it as a necessary if drastic measure to prevent West Berliners from crossing to buy food and goods at much lower prices whenever they became available, thus quickly depleting the scarce supplies in the Eastern sector. Others, like Palitzsch, were unable to reconcile the government’s actions with the ideals of a humanist socialism, which they sought to promote at their theatre. By coincidence, if not without symbolic poignancy, the run of Mother Courage closed early in 1961, a few months before the wall went up. Having turned 60 the year before, Weigel explained that the wagon had become too heavy for her to pull and she could no longer keep it balanced. The same could be said about the East German government, which increasingly lost control over the mismanaged economy and responded with ever more repres- sive measures. However, artists were initially allowed more freedom of expression in the period immediately following the construction of the Wall. Sealed off as they were from any contact with the world beyond, they were given some slack, for a short while at least, to experiment. At the BE, as in other theatres, young newcomers were given greater opportunities to fill in for those who left the country. The BE’s third generation did not have the founding generation’s personal experience of resistance, persecution, and nation-building to justify sacrifice, self- denial, and self-submission. Like any new generation, they looked critically at tradition and their elders. They did not have their teachers’ filial relationship to Brecht. Having studied their Brecht, his grandchildren were ready to apply his critical method to their present, which included the GDR’s realpolitik. If Weigel was sympathetic to their passion, she was also pragmatic enough to align her- self with the rulers—fellow veteran Communists all, though always on guard against Frau Intendantin’s strategies. Not unlike Courage, she became increasingly isolated, steering the Brechtian enterprise past government interference, through negotiations with West German publishers amidst generational, political, and artistic conflicts within the ensemble. Like her wagon, the theatre became a heavy load to manage on her own. What began as an experiment had become an institution as rigid as the state apparatus that kept a close watch. What had made the beginnings of the Berliner Ensemble so heady as well as precarious was the timing of its founding, which coincided with the founding of the German Democratic Republic. It started its first season in September 1949, shortly before the division of Germany was formalized on 7 October. For Veteran Communists who considered the separation a temporary phase, it was an opportunity to begin with the concrete realization of Marx’s utopia. For Brecht it was an GittaHonegger

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 opportunity to return to the city of his greatest successes and to revitalize it as the primary pioneering theatrical center. That all major theatres were located in the Eastern section of Berlin symbolically reinforced his project. For Weigel it meant the triumphant resumption of her career in the most significant role she ever played. For the young company members who came of age during the war, it was a unique challenge to participate in the creation of a new world. Through their art they would construct an alternative reality as a model to apply to real life. Through Brecht and his contemporaries they saw themselves reconnected to the best of the Weimar Republic’s avantgarde and groomed themselves as the bohemians in this newly forged workers and peasant state—liberated, daring, nonconventional, and thoroughly anti-bourgeois— the vanguard of the new society. Not unlike their role models of the Weimar Republic, their total abandon to their artistic project led to the sort of self-absorption, which, ironically enough, may have blinded them to the political realities, despite the sociopolitical claims of their project. As Soviet pressure led to increasingly repressive measures by the East German government, especially after Brecht’s death, Weigel skillfully carved out a space where the company felt protected from the insanities that surrounded them, as one actress put it (Gloger 2002). Both audiences and company members remember the theatre as a safe space, an island, as suggested by its logo—the Berliner Ensemble enclosed inside a circle. As it turned out, it was an ambiva- lent insularity, promoting a sense of exclusivity and superiority compared to other theatres (especially the Deutsches Theater with its classical tradition and Stanislavskian practice). This was true especially among the young ensemble members for whom Brecht himself had become a myth with which no other theatre could compete. Whenever the reality of watershed events in the rapidly intensifying Cold War and their impact on the increasingly repressive state apparatus threatened to crush the enclave, Weigel skillfully and indomitably balanced her cart between artistic autonomy and shrewd compromise in dogged service to her husband’s legacy, which she singularly constructed and protected. To outside observers, the BE turned into a Brecht museum, devoted to perfection in production at the expense of productive change. To Western theatre professionals, Weigel’s rigid control over performance rights seemed as authoritarian as the state she represented to the end; but she also made sure that Brecht’s plays would be published both in the East, by Aufbau, and in the West, by the prestigious Suhrkamp Verlag. As it turned out, her theatre wasn’t such a safe place after all. Like all areas of East German life, it was infiltrated by the STASI. As the exemplary case of Isot Kilian suggests, Weigel might have even managed to outsmart the state’s all-pervasive system with company members she could count on to construct narratives with enough mundane, ultimately useless “insider” information without really damaging their colleagues or the theatre itself. In our post–Cold War era of unprecedented surveillance in the name of democracy, of a globalized capitalist war in the name of freedom, and the proposed 2000-mile wall along the US-Mexican border, Brecht’s Mother Courage and the conditions under which he wrote and directed it resonate with a disturbing new urgency. Courage’s wagon, the play’s central icon, haunted by the ghosts of history, also embodies the memory of the Berliner Ensemble. The company’s ambivalences, contradictions, clashes, and extraordinary accomplishments reflect the transition from Hitler’s reign of terror to the Cold War, from resistance and creative intervention to renewed dogmatism, both in the political and artistic arena. The actors’ performances, both in their roles and as social agents, make for the play’s invisible undertow, not to be ignored by anyone tempted to just surf its powerful tide. Beyond its more obvious parallels to the present, we should also interrogate Mother Courage—the text, its emblematic The Berliner Ensemble gestuses, and its defining performers—in terms of the theatre’s role vis-à-vis repressive govern- ments, of theatre in times of crisis and, ultimately, of theatre in crisis, be it at the mercy of ideology or of unbridled commercialism.

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