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POETIC RITUALITY AND TRANSCULTURALITY BERTOLT BRECHT’S DIDACTIC PLAY DIE MASSNAHME (THE MEASURES TAKEN) ——~<~o»—___ 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), premiered 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. + 29 +
