ABSTRACT
What is the present status of Brecht as a political writer? In the German Democratic Republic (GDR) Brecht has been demoted from national author and 1s now seen as a big disappointment. In
the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) he is viewed as a pedagogue of the theatre, a rationalist thinker presenting a simplified view of reality. A still-prevailing view on both sides of the Channel is to see Brecht as moving through three phases, from an early subjectivist, or anarchist, or nihilist phase in Baal (I make the world), to a middle-period rationalist, or behaviourist or mechanistic phase (the world makes me), to a supposed dialectical resolution of the dilemmas of phase one and two in the late plays (dialectic between self and world), presumed to usher in a third and mature phase. In the past this conclusion resulted in his being seen in the West as a great writer despite being a communist, and in the East in his having achieved a proper dialectic despite his beginning with a decadent aesthetic. The English view is by and large still in support of this version, running from Esslin in 1959 to Suvin in 1984 (except for Dickson, 1978, who organizes Brecht's oeuvre by arguing for a consistent anticipation of Utopia through all his works), but there are now signs that German scholarship, for a long time equally committed to its own three-phase version, is challenging this view by interrogating anew both Brecht's work and that of his critics. 2
Common to the theories of the three phases is the notion of ultimate continuity. What is seen as the turning point in Brecht's development, his encounter with Marxism in the mid-1920s and his subsequent reversal of the first, subjectivist phase into the second, objectivist one, is painlessly assimilated in a crude notion of dialectic. This moment is given a different interpretation by East and West. The West reads the 'conversion' to Marxism as an outcome of Brecht's personal psychology: the anarchist-cumnihilist creator of Baal (regarded generally as in some sense the alter ego of the young Brecht) is searching for firm ground and promptly invents the Lehrstuck, which enables him to substitute a collective authoritarianism for a self-indulgent individualism. In the third and final phase, there is a synthesis of the two positions, resulting in the 'great' plays. This view has become more refined and sophisticated since its inception by Esslin (1959, p. 137) in Suvin's version (1984), although in an afterword to his book, he would like to amend his 1967 view of a 'non-consenting, a consenting and a mature phase', which he now considers 'too neatly Hegelian'. He is far from oblivious of the political implication of the 'Esslinian bisection into immature (read political) and mature (read aesthetic) phases', but holds that the tripartite scheme 'is probably still of some introductory value' and that 'no acceptable
alternative is yet to be seen' (Suvin, 1984, pp. 268-9). What is not immediately obvious is that this tripartite scheme is illicitly shifting an account of biographical stages onto an interpretation of the texts. It is a kind of genetic fallacy, for there is no necessity that an interpretation should be bound to a particular source of influence at a particular time. The ideology of the works is more likely to reveal itself if one attends to their textual elements without recourse to the immediate circumstances of composition.
