Literature: Bertolt Brecht: Small buttons against great masters

Goethe is wrong here!” The philologist Heinrich Düntzer put it this way (or something similar) in the century before last. His word is a warning to us – not to judge Weimar’s classics strictly, but to warn of the hubris of science. Scientists sometimes tend to take themselves more seriously than their subject matter. Knowledge is their business, knowing better is their tactics.

Jan Knopf, known as the author and editor of numerous works about Brecht and almost 80 years old, heads the Bertolt Brecht Office, which is located at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. In a conversation with the “Badische Neuesten Nachrichten” on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the office, he said, probably resigned to the decline of the scientific institution he led, that today no one is interested in Brecht anymore. He says Brecht – and means: button.

Because Brecht enjoys a restless afterlife. The theater schedules show that demand has remained consistently high for years. It’s hard to imagine without the renewed style of epic theater on the stages today. Brecht lives on in a mediated way in visual art and film.

Probably no one has turned German-language poetry on its head like he has – until today. It was only last year that the master’s collected interviews were published to considerable response. And aren’t the recurring themes of his works, the misery of capitalism and the misery of war, involuntarily close to us? In short: Brecht is interested. No less today than yesterday.

In the same conversation, Jan Knopf explains that another thousand-pager of his will be published this year. What is it about? About Brecht, of course. Knopf is apparently not yet entirely sure of his pithy thesis. At best, a little annoyed because the Suhrkamp publishing house no longer sticks every note from Knopf’s hand between two cardboard covers and sells it.

But the Knopf case reveals something more. The rise of Bertolt Brecht’s workplace after the “reunification” also resulted from the liquidation of the GDR’s renowned Brecht Center. In the Old West, literary studies eagerly adapted to the spirit of the times. And so Knopf played a leading role when it came to completely depoliticizing Brecht. A first step towards the absurd spectacle when a professor of literary studies even declared Brecht a “counter-revolutionary” five years ago. This is how it can work if science wants, above all, to be original.

There is no reason to keep quiet about narrow-mindedness in the philology of the GDR. But whether it is progress if one replaces an overly formulaic Marxist reading with the distorted image that Brecht was not interested in politics at all remains very doubtful.

Scholars today probably have a hard time with Brecht because his progressive worldview is hard to ignore. Just as one can only praise Rosa Luxemburg today if one turns her into a pioneer of diversity management and does not take her seriously as a communist theorist, it now seems necessary to keep quiet about the attribute “Marxist” when it comes to the Marxist innovator of the performing arts.