eJournals Colloquia Germanica 39/3-4

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/91
2006
393-4

LAURA BRADLEY: Brecht and Political Theatre: The Mother on Stage. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. xii + 261 pp. $ 125.

91
2006
Olaf Berwald
cg393-40421
Besprechungen / Reviews 421 ing piece, «Kultur als Exil,» dramatically widens the comparative perspective from particular authors and experiences of exiles to «culture» and «exile» as such. He contrasts the transnational biographies and cultural achievements of neglected migrants, refugees, and exiles with the oppressive logic of national identities and conceptions of Heimat, which he reduces to their manipulative «geopolitical function[s]» (125). Culture, he asserts, is «a medium of absence» that exists only in conjunction with exile (129). Hovering over much of the volume is the suggestion that Benjamin’s figuration and conceptualization of exile could be seen as having paradigmatic significance for understanding what Goebel calls contemporary «global postmodernity.» Witte, going even further, characterizes our world as one that may be becoming «an enormous site of exile» in which exile may be losing «its specific contour» (34). But the further the volume goes in the direction of this sort of abstraction, the more attenuated its insights. When speculation ranges into characterizations of «the» experiences of exile as an allegory of modernity per se, a cipher for an allegedly universal process of progressive alienation, it sacrifices the texture and specificity that the conjunction of Benjamin and exile might make possible. This volume’s best insights can be found in the middle ground between biographical specificity and overreaching generalization: in Witte’s insights into Heine; where Hellwig discovers genuinely new things about the figure of the little hunchback; where Heidelberger-Leonard asks us to look at Benjamin and Améry and think again; or where we test Benjamin’s poetics of memory in readings of other exile texts. Goebel’s essay includes a call for work in this middle ground, but the temptation to overreach sometimes proves difficult to resist. Unexamined in this volume is the full variety of Benjamin’s own complex experiences of exile and estrangement from any sort of «home.» After all, Benjamin fled Germany regularly from 1917 onward. He began living an extraterritorial existence long before becoming a political exile. In the 1920s, he felt more «at home» in Paris than in Frankfurt, a city he dreaded. His compulsive travel and self-dislocation before 1933 must be taken into account if we want to grasp how his work registered the experience of political exile. As Herwig points out, Benjamin described it as the purpose of Berlin Childhood to inoculate himself against the illusions of homesickness. «Home,» he discovered, had prefigured the broken experiences of political exile. University of Oregon John McCole L AURA B RADLEY : Brecht and Political Theatre: The Mother on Stage. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. xii + 261 pp. $ 125. Bradley’s revised dissertation examines the volatile production and reception history of Brecht’s play Die Mutter, arguably his most openly communist «Stück,» from the early 1930s to the early twenty-first century. Frequently quoting from archival materials, theater reviews, and interviews, she dedicates the first chapter to the genesis and premiere of the play (1931-32), which was based on a novel by Gorky and written by Brecht in collaboration with Günter Weisenborn, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and the composer Hanns Eisler. The second chapter discusses Brecht’s shifting performance 422 Besprechungen / Reviews praxis and cultural-political strategies, and the Berliner Ensemble’s appropriations of Die Mutter from 1951 to 1971. Competing cold war performances in West Berlin (1970, directed by a team that included Peter Stein) and East Berlin (1974, directed by Ruth Berghaus) are the focus of Chapter 3. Following this, she discusses international stagings of Brecht’s play, in particular the 1935 New York Theatre Union production and the Irondale Ensemble Project version that premiered in New York City in 1997. In the same chapter, she also outlines the most multilayered French adaptation, Pierre-Etienne Heymann’s 1979 staging of La Mère in Lille, a production whose set design by Yannis Kokkos not only incorporated explicit references to Eisenstein and Bertolucci, but achieved an unprecedented degree of reflexivity by exhibiting artifacts of revolutionary history in glass cases that the audience was invited to inspect during the intervals. This chapter also briefly presents British and Irish stagings of Die Mutter, including John McGrath’s Yobbo Nowt, written in 1975, and John Arden’s and Margaretta D’Arcy’s rewrite, composed in 1983 and 1984, which re-conceptualized the plot and put it into the context of the IRA’s fight against the British occupation of Northern Ireland. Chapter 5 examines productions from 1988 to 2003, including stagings at the Berliner Ensemble by Manfred Wekwerth (1988) and Claus Peymann (2003), performances that responded not only to Brecht’s text, but also to the end of the GDR regime and to German reunification. As Bradley points out, Peymann’s version of 2003 called for resistance against the Bush regime’s war against the people of Iraq, and included additional monologue scenes that consisted of quotations from Rosa Luxemburg. While useful throughout - the book contains eleven helpful photographs that provide visual information about the history of Die Mutter on stage - Bradley’s study is also a missed opportunity. What starts out as a highly promising work that could have stimulated fruitful scholarly exchanges on historical tensions regarding the interplay of didactic theater and aesthetic experimentation soon turns into a booklength review-style string of information. Bradley points out the sterile dichotomy between the «political,» on the one hand, and what she repeatedly calls «postmodern pastiche,» though she does not provide a nuanced discussion of it. A brief glossary tries to engage readers who might be unfamiliar with basic key concepts, but it includes a definition of «dialectics» that is not only disappointingly conventional, but borders on unintended parody. I expected something more than a gathering of secondary material along a linear overview narrative, and at least some first attempts at vigorously thinking through the various ways in which diverse methods have been (often simultaneously) grafted upon Brecht’s theater text. But Bradley’s book does not offer this, opting instead for a one-dimensional series of reviews of reviews. In sum, this study, while containing at times useful information, neither offers a substantial documentation of the aesthetic and political debates that engendered, and were in turn generated by productions of Die Mutter, nor does it invite independent thinking about the intricate ways in which appeals to direct action and various modes of de-familiarization, Brechtian as well as post-Brechtian, have been, and continue to be at odds and/ or reconcilable with one another. Another striking omission is the lack of any occasional comparative glance at the production histories of other Brecht plays. Past and present uses of Die Mutter did not take place in a vacuum, and an Besprechungen / Reviews 423 outline that contextualizes this play within the internal dynamics of productive metamorphoses and re-framings of the whole body of Brecht’s work, or at least a brief comparative discussion of the production history of one or two other Brecht plays, would have been highly useful. Bradley’s volume reminds the reader of a stimulating lacuna - the lack of a scholarly path that combines thorough documentation of a play’s production history with fresh, lucid and dialogic conceptual work. There is no reason to be timid when writing about and responding to Bertolt Brecht. University of North Dakota Olaf Berwald N ADJA H ADEK : Vergangenheitsbewältigung im Werk Martin Walsers. Augsburg: Wißner Verlag, 2006. 205 pp. € 14,80. Die bundesrepublikanische Literatur hat sich seit 1945 kontinuierlich mit ihrem Verhältnis zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus beschäftigen und einen Umgang mit der eigenen Geschichte finden müssen. Dass dieser Prozess noch nicht abgeschlossen ist und immer wieder Anlass des Hinterfragens bleiben wird, zeigen unter anderem die im vorigen Jahr erschienenen Autobiographien von Günter Grass Beim Häuten einer Zwiebel und Joachim Fest Ich nicht und die darauf folgenden Debatten. Mit ihrer Dissertation Vergangenheitsbewältigung im Werk Martin Walsers, hat Nadja Hadek sich eines Schriftstellers angenommen, der in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten hinsichtlich dieses Themas für besondere Aufmerksamkeit gesorgt hat. Auf knapp 160 Seiten Text verschafft sich Hadek einen panoramaartigen Überblick über Walsers Werk, wobei sie Dramen, Romane, Essays und Reden gleichermaßen mit einbezieht. Dadurch wurde ein Beitrag geleistet, die Beurteilung von Walsers umstrittenem autobiographischen Roman Ein springender Brunnen und seiner kontroversen Friedenspreisrede 1998 in einen zeitlich größeren Rahmen zu setzen und sie im Licht derjenigen Walserwerke zu sehen, die das Thema deutsche Vergangenheit schon vorher verarbeiten. Mit einer solchen Verfahrensweise können Kontinuitäten oder Brüche im Denken und Schreiben Walsers freigelegt werden. Da das Gesamtwerk Walsers von einem nicht unbeträchtlichen Ausmaß ist, wählt Hadek diejenigen Werke, die sich ganz oder teilweise mit der Problematik beschäftigen: die Dramen Eiche und Angora (1962) und Der schwarze Schwan (1964), die Romane Halbzeit (1960), Die Verteidigung der Kindheit (1991) und Ein springender Brunnen (1998), sowie die Essays und Reden Unser Auschwitz (1965), Auschwitz und kein Ende (1979), Über Deutschland reden (1988) und Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede (1998). Als Ziel der Arbeit wird angegeben, «die Wandlung im Werk des Autors […] nachzuzeichnen […] und in die literarischen, geschichtlichen sowie biographischen Zusammenhänge einzuordnen» (9), aber auch der soziokulturelle Aspekt soll dabei bedacht werden - ein umfassendes Programm, das durch eine Abgrenzung gewonnen hätte. Die konkreten Forschungsfragen sind, welche Formen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung der Autor in der gegenwärtigen Gesellschaft (in Politik und Alltag) sieht, wie er sie bewertet und welche alternativen Wege er für die Auseinandersetzung mit der Vergangenheit vorschlägt (10). Nach der Motivation der Werkauswahl, in der Synopsen und thematische Schwerpunkte präsentiert werden und der Forschungsstand zusammenfassend gebündelt