ABSTRACT
Brecht was never a very good driver, but he understood the nature of cars, which is to say that he grasped their use. Brecht understood, as most of us do, that cars are a means of transport. As metaphors, then – but metaphors for what? In the passage cited above, the car is his epic theatre, jolting its passengers awake with its internal combustions. Elsewhere, as when he writes of “cars that can no longer be driven and are therefore dismantled so that the component parts can be sold” (BOF 179/21:488), the metaphorical freight is the market’s systematic dismantling of the organic work of art. In both instances, the play of contraries that the automobile embodies – artificial yet natural, mechanical yet organic, useful yet beautiful – allows the auto to serve as an emblem for art. Brecht’s old car projects, with the clarity of twin beams of light, the very dialectic that the Festspielhaus sought to hide in darkness, and that the Bauhaus theatre exposed in form but not in fact. His goal was neither the iconic synthesis of the Festspielhaus nor the crystalline unities of the Totaltheater, and yet his goal was often inseparable from the dream of the total work of art.
