ABSTRACT
M y argum ent in earlier chapters has been tha t Brecht consistently drew upon dialectical m aterialism in developing his political aesthetic. T he distinction I believe we ought then to go on to m ake is not so m uch betw een the absence or presence of dialectics, as betw een the degrees of explicitness w ith which Brecht conceived of parts or the whole of his theory in term s of it. T he early ‘D ialec tical d ra m a ’ brings the theatre and a politicised audience face to face with the econom y which then, or so this essay im plies, would itself need to change in o rder for a fully dialectical theatre to come into being. In which case we can understand why in the hostile years of Nazi G erm any and world w ar the term dialectics as a com prehen sive and explicit description of theatre receded beh ind the actually m ore esoteric, if dialectically conceived, vocabularly of ‘ep ic’ and Gestus and Verfremdungseffekt. P rio r to the fall of H itler dialectics was not surprisingly draw n into the shadows of the ‘dark tim es’.
