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POETIC RITUALITY AND TRANSCULTURALITY
BERTOLT BRECHT’S DIDACTIC PLAY
DIE MASSNAHME (THE MEASURES TAKEN)
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SASKIA FISCHER
Brecht’s use of Noh theater, Greek tragedy, Christian genres, and forms of ritual
demonstrates how he developed his idea of epic theater by also incorporating a
transcultural perspective. This concept of theater is characterized by a dynamic
relationship between dramatic texts and traditions as well as between different
culture-specific theater forms and ritual performances. The revival of ritual
in modern theater, as can be witnessed in his didactic play ‘Die Maßnahme’
(The Measures Taken), can also be understood as a search for universal and
transcultural forms of expression that take up and deal with fundamental
existential as well as cultural questions and issues. While his play, premiered
in 1930, is usually dismissed in research as political agitprop, a precise look
at Brecht’s adaptation of ritual forms opens up a different interpretation, as I
will show in this paper. Brecht’s play creates an aesthetic of “poetic rituality”
by using but also distancing his theater from a non-reflective use of ritual forms
and genres, and thus also from the highly problematic ritual self-sacrifice of
the young comrade for the sake of communist revolution.
Brecht’s controversial didactic play Die Mafsnahme (The Measures Taken), pre¬
miered in 1930, demonstrates the central importance of sacralization as well
as ritual for art and culture, even in the presumably secularized modern age.
Moreover, Die Maßnahme shows the impact of ritual and sacralization, and
their constitution of meaning, where it has in fact been denied: in the midst of
materialist ideology and politics. In this article, I will explore the question as
to whether Brecht’s theater, which he so categorically separates from the ritual
in his theoretical texts, is actually fundamentally engaged with a ritualistic
aesthetic. His didactic play Die Maßnahme is a particularly impressive but also
politically highly problematic play, which I, however, in contrast to common
interpretations, will read as much more subversive — also due to its ritualistic
form. I will first situate Brecht’s ritualistic aesthetic in the historical context
of the time the play was first performed, followed secondly by some systematic
reflections on the relationship between ritual and theater in general. On this
basis, I will thirdly interpret the play and its poetic rituality in more detail.
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