Bildersturmspiele. Intermedialität im Werk Bertolt Brechts by Andreas Zinn (review)

Throughout his life Bertolt Brecht worked primarily in an audiovisual medium: the theater. The “Brecht Industry” has covered this well in the past 60 years of research. While media such as radio, music, and film have assumed their respective places, more recent scholarship has trended towards critical examinations of Brecht’s work in the area of the visual arts. A closer (and sustained) look at his media theories and his work with images is long overdue, as there is a wealth of material in Brecht’s prodigious œuvre yet to cover. The paucity of attention is, with increasing speed, starting to reverse itself: “Bild und Bildlichkeit” was the topic of the Brecht-Tage in 2010, and a number of scholars have begun to carve out a niche, among them Georges Didi-Huberman (Quand les images prennent position, Paris 2009 [Wenn die Bilder Position beziehen, 2011]), Grischa Meyer (Ruth Berlau. Fotografin an Brechts Seite, 2003), and others such as Tom Kuhn, Philippe Invernel, Welf Kienast, and J.J. Long.

Andreas Zinn’s 2011 monograph Bildersturmspiele is the latest contribution to that list. This volume is number nine in the K&N series Der neue Brecht and represents a “gekürzte Fassung” of his 2009 dissertation at the Universität Karlsruhe under the direction of Brecht expert (and K&N series co-editor) Jan Knopf. The title fore-shadows the bombardment of “intermedial” aspects under scrutiny, where texts and images quote one another and invite us to make connections. Zinn situates painting, photography, image-texts, film, architecture, and sculpture as “Referenz- oder Kombinationssysteme” (10) for the many phases in Brecht’s work and life. Zinn’s project—a “literaturzentrierte Erforschung der Intermedialität bei Brecht” (10)—iterates the need for new directions in secondary literature. His study is framed as a search for and analysis of diverse pictorial and visual sources influencing Brecht’s texts.

This review cannot discuss in detail every one of Zinn’s arguments and findings; instead, it will highlight a few noteworthy points. The study is chronologically structured and follows the typical periodization of Brecht’s artistic production: 1918–1933 (Weimar Republic), 1933–1947 (exile), and 1947–1956 (return and early GDR). The introductory chapter (titled after a 1920 quote from his diaries: “Wäre ich ein Maler!”) frames Brecht’s interest in the visual arts, drawing on tropes from the classical image-text tensions of ut pictura poesis from Horace—whom Brecht regularly read in the original Latin—to Lessing’s “prägnanter Augenblick” and contemporary media theory. Zinn traces Brecht’s developing ideas on art and culture and the relation of the artist to society. The author sets out to remedy the lack of monograph-length studies of “Brecht und Bildlichkeit”—equivalent to “Brecht and Music” or “Brecht and Politics” for example—by challenging the conception that Brecht was an “ikonophobe[r] Autor” (11). Zinn narrows his engagement with the term “intermediality” to its “Praktikabilität” for textual analyses, demonstrating this through readings of Brecht’s thoughts on the works of Pieter Breughel and Georg Grosz, among others.

Chapters Three through Five provide close readings of familiar and not-so-familiar works. Zinn’s goal is the “Analyse der jeweiligen (intermedialen) Vertextungsverfahren und der textuellen Funktionalisierung der Bezüge” (15). Chapter Three is devoted to a reading of Brecht and Caspar Neher’s 1921 film screenplay Drei im Turm, an early work that displays the psychological tensions of Expressionist cinema and critiques the commercialization of early film production. For Zinn, this is an example of Brecht’s early experimental intermediality at the intersection of painting and cinema (with “malerische Wirkung” from Francisco de Goya) that stages a “Nachstellung eines Gemäldes in extradiagetischer Weise für den Betrachter im Kinosaal” (96). Zinn argues that this is a “protointermedialer Filmtext” different from Brecht’s other more theoretical essays (most notably “Der Dreigroschenprozess”).

Chapter Four investigates the “intermediality” in various prose works by Brecht. The section “Wohnungs...