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POETIC RITUALITY AND TRANSCULTURALITY
One might think of Hugo von Hofmannsthals’ opera Elektra (1909), composed
by Richard Strauss, or Vaslav Nijinski’s production of Le Sacre du Printemps
that caused a scandal in 1913 when performed in Paris because of its ritualistic
aesthetics that deliberately violated the boundaries of classical ballet. These
forms of ritual self-sacrifice refer to both the Russian (Le Sacre du Printemps)
and the ancient Greek (Elektra) context, drawing on sacrifices as gestures of
reconciliation that ultimately aim to restore harmony, for which the ritual
unfolds the tension motivating the sacrifice, gradually bringing them closer
together and initiating reconciliation.”” Through a scapegoat, the banishment
of the scapegoat from the community, and his sacrifice, the social group can
reunite around a higher meaning. This way, the social group gains a ritualistic
center that represents the highest sacred value and demands devotion to it.
Especially in modern times and under social conditions where the suffering of
the individual cannot simply be subordinated to a higher meaning, such ritual
practices are highly provocative. However, it was also the aesthetic innovation,
the departure from a sublime — not ecstatic — and cruel aesthetic that posed
an enormous challenge artistically but also reformed, for instance, the ballet.
Brecht’s play Die Maßnahme refers in a complex way to different ritual
practices and genres of ritual theater from the Christian as well as from the
Japanese background and places them in a political context. Yet it is astonish¬
ing that Brecht — the advocate of a “theater of the scientific age,” as he called
it — made use of the ritual, for in his theoretical writings, Brecht had declared
the rejection from the cult to be the very sign of his epic and self-enlightened
theater." Above all, Die Maßnahme is controversial and problematic for the
precise reason that Brecht seems to affirmatively stage the self-sacrifice of a
young revolutionary and the justification of his killing in favor of the com¬
munist idea. The play refuses to take a clearly distant or critical approach to
the performed self-sacrifice for which the death of the young revolutionary is
glorified. It is due to this identification of dying for the communist idea with
Christian sacrifice that has led to the accusation that Brecht was a supporter
of the communist ideology. Does Brecht, in favor of a political belief, abandon
all criticism he himself made against the alliance between ritual and theater?
Is Die Mafsnahme merely the representation of the self-sacrifice one under¬
takes for the revolution? Howard Smither compares Die Maßnahme and its
Yet it is a clichéd and folkloristic idea of Russian tradition.
Jürgen Raab — Hans-Georg Soeffner: Pina Bauschs Inszenierung Le Sacre du Printemps. Eine
Fallanalyse zur Soziologie symbolischer Formen und ritueller Ordnungen, in G. Brandset¬
ter — G. Klein (eds.): Methoden der Tanzwissenschaft. Modellanalysen zu Pina Bauschs ‘Le
Sacre du Printemps / Das Friihlingsopfer’, Bielefeld, transcript Verlag, 2015, 233-250.
28 Bertolt Brecht: Kleines Organon fiir das Theater, in W. Hecht — J. Knopf - W. Mittenzwei —
K.-D. Müller (eds.): Bertolt Brecht Werke. Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Aus¬
gabe, Vol. 23, Berlin/Weimar/Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1989-1998, 67. In the following
footnotes this edition will be referred to by the abbreviation GBA.
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