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Brecht in Italy: Aspects of Reception SUSANNA BOHME-KUBY TRANSLATED BY GERHARD HAUCK (GERMAN) AND MARIA FERRARI (ITALIAN) The reception of a literary work -like that of any other aesthetic phenomenon - is determined by specific historical and cultural conditions. Between the two World Wars, the recognition of contemporary German literature in Italy was hampered by the different political conditions existing in the two countries. Before that time, and certainly no later than the Risorgimento, the tradition of German-Italian cultural relations, vis-a-vis contemporary literary practice. was distinguished in large part by mutual indifference, if not outright aversion . Fascism and the continuation of nineteenth-century Italian cultural traditions had blocked access to the avant-garde movements of the Weimar Republic to such an extent that even reputable literary connoisseurs such as Bonaventura Tecchi and Mario Pensa failed to take note of Expressionism. It was thanks to the curiosity and commitment of a few individuals that Bertolt Brecht's name appeared at all, at least in the context of expressionist theatre , even though his reception was less than enthusiastic.1 Thus, for example. in t923 Lionello Vincenti described German theatre, in his reviews of the Munich productions of Baal and In the Jungle of the Cities, as a "stubblefield " with "revolting and useless vulgarities of Kokoschka, Bronnen, and Brecht...2 The success, in [928, of the Berlin premiere of The Threepenny Opera had led in [930 to the production of Veglia dei lestofanti ("The Swindlers' Awakening "), arranged and translated by Corrado Alvaro, for which the Fascist censor had insisted on the surrogate title. The director of this production, A.G. Bragaglia, was the founder of the Roman Teatro Sperimentale degli Independenti (Independent Experimental Theatre), who had made a name for himself as one of the most important advocates of the international avant-garde in Italy. The innovative beginnings of this movement were stifled, however, by the subsequent political developments. Theatre critic Enrico Rocca felt that the production offered merely a distorted reflection of society ("hybrid and Modern Drama, 42 (1999) 223 224 SUSANNA B6HME-KUBY Baroque") and described Brecht's plebeian ethic as nothing but "anarchy or crass materialism:') This "expressionist misunderstanding," as it came to be known, which accompanied the early reception of Brecht in Italy until the 1950s, appears quite plausible if one considers the cultural and political situation in post-war Italy. "If one were to look for a counterpart to the postWorld War II period in Italy," writes H. Hinterhauser, "the post-World War I period in Germany readily comes to mind. There you have the same political activism, the same polemical passion, the same spiritual fervour, the same desire on the part of intellectuals to playa significant role in society.'" At the end of the Second World War, a new democratic culture developed within the framework of the anti-fascist resistance. According to programmatic statements in Politecnico, the most important literary, cultural, and political magazine of the period between 1945 and 1947, it was reputed to have the following characteristics: "No longer a culture that would take comfort in suffering, but a culture that would protect itself from suffering, that would combat and eliminate it.'" This formulation by Elio Vittorini could easily have been Brecht's. The interest in literature was focused on representatives of the anti-fascist opposition, in Italy as much as abroad. There was an enormous desire to catch up. The German communist Brecht was one of the few writers who had not merely survived living in exile, but had in fact been extremely productive while living abroad. From that point on the Italians considered him the representative of the "other" Germany, the classical land of poets and thinkers to which Benedetto Croce had bidden his farewell in 1936, and he became one of the most widely read and debated foreign authors during the next few decades. The reception in Italy of the multi-layered, continually evolving works of Brecht, which had been hampered by ideological barriers even in the Germanspeaking countries, was distinguished by specific Italian paradigms - such as the aesthetic and literary-critical views of Croce. These views had found their way into the neo-realistic and populist conceptions of...

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