The Lehrstücke and Beyond

Abstract

When a writer makes a major change of direction in the course of his development the critic is faced with the tricky problem of accounting for the change and analysing the relationship between the different phases in the writer’s work. The simplest way of explaining the fact that in 1929 Brecht began to devote his talents to promoting the cause of the communist revolution is to say that he made a rational and moral choice. He had been interested in Marxism for some years, so that his decision, when it came, was a considered and informed one. The delay between his first serious reading of Marxist theory (1926) and his integration of the methods and values of dialectical materialism into finished imaginative works (1929)¹ may help to explain his lifelong adherence to these principles once he had adopted them. It is reported that the event which precipitated his moral commitment to Marxism-Leninism was the brutal suppression by the police of communist demonstrators on May Day 1929 in Berlin.² It is certainly very plausible that the increase in political violence in that year, together with the severe deterioration of social and economic conditions in capitalist countries, made it seem necessary to set aside irony and ambivalence in favour of clear and firm political decisions. However, the commitment to revolutionary communism was only one of a range of options which, in theory at least, could be chosen on moral and rational grounds.