ABSTRACT
The social and political changes in Europe in the late 1980s – including the advent of glasnost
and perestroika in Russia, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of East and
West Germany, the toppling of President Ceaucescu in Romania, and the widespread
discreditation or abandonment of Marxist political thinking and practice – provided an
exciting and challenging new context for ‘committed art’. The West, of course, was eager to
step into the political breach with its tried and tested capitalism, and to claim credit for
predicting that communism would never work. And if Marx was well and truly ‘dead’, and
history’s own demise reported if not validated, presumably Brecht, too, was an artist whose day
was done.
