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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 particular, 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 reflects 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 correspond 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
