Page 53 [53]
POETIC RITUALITY AND TRANSCULTURALITY
understanding of the world does not sufficiently satisfy the individuals need
for a meaningful interpretation of his suffering and for meaning in general.
If this is the case, the open guestion that remains is whether, for Brecht, it is
the field of art itself that can satisfy this need. After all, art remains the one
thing in the world that is perhaps least to be judged by the criterion of pure
rationality. At any rate, for Brecht, art is the place where these questions are
played out, and the ritual and the sacral are not neglected.
BERTOLT BRECHT’S PLAY WITH RITUALS,
NOH THEATER, AND MEDIA IN DIE MASSNAHME
Above all, Brecht gains deep aesthetic inspiration from the ritual. After 1945,
he sees quite clearly, however — perhaps because his didactic plays, in par¬
ticular, became a model for the National Socialist Thingspiele — that such an
aesthetic as developed in Die Mafsnahme also carries the risk of being perceived
as totalitarian propaganda. But the assumption that he would have ignored
these dangers and accepted them in order to convince the audience of the
importance of sacrifices one must bear for the communist idea, was clearly
not what he had in mind, as I have shown above. Die Mafsnahme is not a play
that favors totalitarianism, as Kiesel interpreted it,”” but one that already re¬
flects the abysses of a ritualistic theater serving political agitation. Moreover,
it unfolds an aesthetic that criticizes and puts up for discussion the devotion
to communism through a self-reflected poetic rituality.
What fascinates Brecht about the ritual is the productive aesthetic of the
ritual itself, i.e., a non-mimetic, self-referential, and strongly performative
aesthetic. He further intensifies this self-reflexive form derived from the ritual
through his references (as we have seen: Noh, Greek tragedy, new media [e.g.,
projections]). Just as in ancient theater with its choir, which observes and
comments on the events performed on stage, or in Noh theater, where the
actors and musicians are constantly present on stage, even when they are not
acting or playing music, Brecht allows the agitators themselves to perform the
action in front of the controlling choir, thereby creating a distance to what is
shown on stage. Brecht makes use of ritualistic and religious forms and genres
to evolve an anti-illusionistic, sequential aesthetic interspersed with choral
songs, commentary, lyrical insertions, and projections. Despite his criticism
of the relationship between ritual and art, which is evident in many of his
theoretical texts, certain aspects of the ritual seem at the same time to cor¬
respond to essential characteristics of his epic theater. Brecht, thus, creates a
transcultural theater by bringing together ritual forms and genres from the
7” Kiesel: Die Maßnahme im Licht der Totalitarismustheorie, 83-99.
+5] e