ABSTRACT
This central chapter reconstructs the Piscatorbühne’s four productions, drawing on archival research to recoup them as neglected currents of radical and experimental practice. Ernst Toller’s Hoppla, wir Leben! with its reversal of artistic binaries–between writer and director, dramatic playtext and intermediated stage, aesthetics and politics–marks a decisive end to Expressionism in the German theater, setting modern theater on a new path. Rasputin, die Romanows, der Krieg, und das Volk das gegen sie Aufstand is a prototype for epic theater and the post-World War II avant-garde, the first documentary drama as well as the first collectively devised play, with its Dada-inspired, montage-based form created by director and company in lieu of a single author. With its cinematic “engulfment” and extensions of dramatic time and space, Die Abenteuer des Braven Soldaten Schwejk suggests an epic ur-text and alternative node to epic theater practice to Brecht’s fragmentary succession of short scenes, even as the production inspired Brecht’s Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg and his subsequent understanding of epic form. Similarly, Leo Lania’s Konjunktur , long considered lost, treats modern economic complexes of subject matter with a new dramaturgical form–a decisive influence on Brecht’s embrace of Marx, epic terminology, and development of “dialectical dramaturgy.”
