The Voice from the 10th Row Carl Weber and the Berliner Ensemble an interview by Branislav Jakovljević, Keara Harman, Michael Hunter, Jamie Lyons, Lindsey Mantoan, Ljubiša Matić, Ciara Murphy, Jens Pohlmann, Ryan Tacata, and Giulia Vittori Carl Weber’s career spanned over six decades and two continents; he was an actor and director in post-WWII East Germany, an assistant director and actor (among other things) in Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, a director in Western Europe and the United States, one of the premier translators of Heiner Müller’s dramas, and an accomplished theatre pedagogue. During the 2011/2012 academic year, a group of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students at Stanford University organized a series of interviews with Professor Weber, which received support from the Stanford Humanities Center’s Theodore and Frances Geballe Research Workshops. In these interviews we focused on Weber’s work in the Berliner Ensemble during Brecht’s final years. The participants in the workshop were: Branislav Jakovljevic´ — convener, faculty at Stanford’s department of Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS); Leslie Hill — video documentation, faculty at TAPS; Lindsey Mantoan — graduate student, TAPS; Michael Figure 1. From left: Wolfgang Pintzka, Helene Weigel, and Carl Weber, Berliner Ensemble, 12 May 1960. (Courtesy of Bertolt Brecht Archive) TDR: The Drama Review 62:3 (T239) Fall 2018. ©2018 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 55 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00773 by guest on 25 September 2021 Hunter — postdoc, Introduction to the Humanities Program; Ciara Murphy — graduate student, TAPS; Jens Pohlmann — graduate student, German Studies; Giulia Vittori — graduate student, TAPS; Ryan Tacata — graduate student, TAPS; and Keara Harman — graduate student, German Studies.1 In the workshop, we revisited the following Berliner Ensemble productions: Brecht’s own Caucasian Chalk Circle, Mother Courage, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, and Trumpets and Drums, which he wrote in collaboration with Elizabeth Hauptmann; Werner Hecht’s Katzgraben; and Carl Weber and Peter Palitzch’s The Day of the Great Scholar Wu. While select members of the workshop were in charge of each play we investigated, all were present for each session and participated in the interview process. Branislav Jakovljevic´ conducted the inter- view about Caucasian Chalk Circle, Giulia Vittori and Ryan Tacata lead the conversation about Mother Courage, Lindsey Mantoan about Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Keara Harman about Katzgraben, Jens Pohlmann on The Day of the Great Scholar Wu, and Michael Hunter and Ciara Murphy on Trumpets and Drums. We used a range of documents and techniques in the inter- views: plays and written accounts, still images, slide projections, and film and music recordings. In their interview about Trumpets and Drums, in addition to archival documents, Hunter and Murphy staged a scene from the play with student actors, which Weber then revised to demon- strate rehearsal procedures that he carried with him from the Berliner Ensemble. All interview sessions were recorded on video. In the end, we produced some 12 hours of high quality video footage. The Geballe grant provided administrative support and finan- cial resources for gathering documents necessary for the workshop, and Stanford Art Institute helped us with the transcription of the interviews. Soon after we conducted the interviews, Professor Weber moved to an assisted living facility. We managed to arrange a follow-up inter- view about The Caucasian Chalk Circle, for which Ljubiša Matic´ joined Jakovljevic´. Jamie Lyons joined the team in the final editing of the interviews for publication. In the end, this extensive interview was a collaborative effort between Weber and a group of his colleagues and students. For us, spending time with him was in itself an exercise in the kind of collaborative work that Erwin Piscator initiated in his theatre with Brecht as one of his dramaturgs, and which Brecht 1. All positions listed here were current at the time of the interviews (2011–12). There were numerous collaborators on this project, both for the interview and the supplementary information in the footnotes. Not all of the notes have citations, and due to the time that has passed since the participants worked on this material, we are unable to backtrack and retrieve all of the materials we consulted in prepara- tions for interviews. The information was taken from numerous sources, including many of those listed in the references, as well as online sources, such as Wikipedia. Of particular importance for this research were Barnett (2015), Fuegi (1987, 1994), Hayman (1983), and Willett ([1959] 1977). Branislav Jakovljević, Professor, Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University. [email protected] Keara Harman, PhD Candidate, German Studies, Stanford University. Michael Hunter, Senior Lecturer, California College of the Arts. [email protected] Jamie Lyons, independent artist/scholar/site specific theatre director. www.jamescharleslyons.com Lindsey Mantoan, Assistant Professor, Theatre Arts, Linfield College. [email protected] Ljubiša Matić, Instructor, Department of Theatre Arts, University of North Dakota. [email protected] Ciara Murphy, Director of Strategic Research and Planning, The Public Theater. cmurphy@public theater.org Jens Pohlmann, Lecturer, Stanford Language Center. [email protected] Ryan Tacata, Lecturer, Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture, Stanford University. [email protected] Giulia Vittori, independent artist/scholar. [email protected] Carl Weber 56 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00773 by guest on 25 September 2021 continued in the Berliner Ensemble with his team of assistants, one of whom was Carl Weber. We were honored to witness this important legacy. Mother Courage CARL WEBER: I came to Berlin in the Spring of ’49 and I saw Mother Courage, which is still, for me, the most impressive theatre event of my life. I still vividly remember the impact it made on me. There were many reasons: first of all, the production itself with Helene Weigel2 as Mother Courage; and secondly, when you arrived at Friedrichstraße station in Berlin and walked up the Albrechtstraße to the Deutsches Theater, you walked through ruins. That street was totally bombed out. There was maybe one single house that was livable. There was actually a bar in that building. So you walked through a landscape of ruins and then you arrived at the Deutsches Theater, which was miraculously not destroyed during the war. So you stood in front of this brightly lit, totally unharmed theatre building and that was a strange experience, really. Then you walked in and saw a landscape — not a landscape, of course, only an empty stage. Everything, all the props, a few pieces of scenery — very rudimentary scenery, and costumes, all of these were more or less gray. There’s this joke about Brecht: when someone asked him, what colors do you like, he said, all colors, as long as they are gray. Which is, strangely enough, shared by Beckett. Beckett as well preferred gray — wanted gray for everything. It is very odd that these two guys who really emerged from the same decade of the 20th century as major the- atre people had the same preference for gray onstage. Onstage you saw something that imme- diately reminded you of the ruins you had just seen outside. And these contrasts — seeing this brightly lit theatre, walking into the house, and then when the stage opened you saw again war, war-like scenery, war-like behavior. And that made — aside from the artistic qualities of the production — an incredible impression. And it’s hard to repeat, obviously. GIULIA VITTORI: Were there any scenes that you recall that particularly touched you? WEBER: The opening was stunning: Mother Courage on the wagon with her two boys pulling the wagon and singing the song. That was the opening moment on the revolving stage. So they marched downstage and then could march on the spot because the stage revolve was turning. You might say as well that this is a musical theatre scene, but none of Brecht’s other plays up to that point had used this kind of musical theatre opening. And that was another stunning thing because in Germany we knew little, if anything, about American musical theatre. By the time he staged Mother Courage in Berlin, Brecht had seen a lot of musical theatre on Broadway. He thought the scripts were terrible but that the productions and the acting were marvelous. He always wanted Ethel Merman to play Mother Courage in New York, and all of his peers were totally baffled because she was a major musical star — Annie Get Your Gun, you know, and so on. RYAN TACATA: Mother Courage had opened in Berlin on January 11th, 1949. WEBER: Which means it went into rehearsal in December. At that time, four to five weeks rehearsal was standard in German theatre. In fact, only in theatres in major cities — Berlin, Munich, or Hamburg — could you afford rehearsal periods that long. In most provincial cit- ies, plays were rehearsed two to three weeks. Later when the Berliner Ensemble sold out every night, we could have survived two years without a new play, easily. So by the time of Chalk Circle [7 October 1954], which had the longest rehearsal period of all of his productions at the Ensemble, we rehearsed for eight months. TACATA: When you arrived at the Berliner Ensemble, what were you thinking? Carl Weber 2. Helene Weigel (1900–1971) was an Austrian actress and stage director. With her husband, Bertolt Brecht, she established the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin in 1949. 57 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00773 by guest on 25 September 2021 WEBER: Having been through the war, aside from the aesthetic quality of the production which was incredibly acted and incredibly well staged, the memory of the war had an enormous impact on everyone at the time.