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  • A History of the Berliner Ensemble by David Barnett
  • Hunter Bivens
A History of the Berliner Ensemble. By David Barnett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 507. Cloth $135.00. ISBN 978-1107059795.

David Barnett’s historical survey of the Berliner Ensemble, the first comprehensive study of the theater company, comes amid a number of publications and republications of texts by and about Bertolt Brecht in English, including Stephan Parker’s impressive Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life and the expanded and revised edition of Brecht on Theatre, edited by Steve Giles, Marc Silberman, and Tom Kuhn, as well as Barnett’s own Brecht in Practice. The narrative arc of A History of the Berliner Ensemble is perhaps not unexpected, given the many stories, rumors, and legends that float around the Berliner Ensemble and those who were involved with it, but Barnett’s account is unique in its scope and makes good use of a diverse set of archives and interviews. This comprehensive research allows Barnett to intervene into many of the discrepancies that still surround accounts of the key controversies and struggles around the Berliner Ensemble, from the machinations of key players like Manfred [End Page 419] Wekwerth and Barbara Brecht-Schall to the maneuvers of Wekwerth and the Stasi to stage Volker Braun’s The Great Peace at the Berliner Ensemble in 1979. Barnett also provides excellent accounts of the Berliner Ensemble’s responses to the critical moments of East Germany’s brief history and to the Wende.

The book begins with a chapter detailing Brecht’s own practice at the Ensemble. What emerges in this chapter is that work at the Berliner Ensemble was inductive, collaborative, and all encompassing. Rather than beginning rehearsals with a fixed vision of a play, Brecht encouraged actors to “make offers” of their interpretation of their roles and how these roles related to the overall “Fabel,” Brecht’s term for the guiding contradictions structuring a given drama. The Fabel, though, as Barnett points out, is not something readily available in a play, but must be arrived at through a long process of collaboration, or Mitbestimmung. “Brecht’s war on the individual visionary,” Barnett writes, “was based in the collective process he cultivated: an ensemble pooled its members’ many and varied experiences as a means of generating realistic material, ratified by the group, rather than fanciful singular speculation” (11). This collective process was famously documented in the Notate and Modellbücher produced by Brecht’s assistants. In general, Brecht cultivated a theater that was both flexible and precise. Noting that most accounts of the term “Brechtian” elide the question of the political, Barnett is emphatic (here following Fredric Jameson in his Brecht and Method) that Brecht’s theater be thought of as a method, and not a style or an array of effects and techniques. “Brechtian theater,” Barnett argues, “is thus one concerned with placing dialectics at the heart of its analysis, its rehearsals, and its productions” (38).

Dialectics, then, distinguish political theater, which attempts to convey an already formulated message, from “making theater politically” (62). This distinction is also important to understanding the complicated relationship of Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble to the cultural politics of the early German Democratic Republic. On the one hand, the Berliner Ensemble was part of the GDR state apparatus and quickly became the GDR’s flagship theater. On the other hand, Brecht often found himself and his associates targeted in the tense atmosphere of the cultural campaigns of the 1950s. While Brecht shared many of the fundamental assumptions guiding the cultural policy of the SED in these years, Barnett points out, “he was always concerned with process and activity, while the SED anchored socialist realism’s tenets in specific approved and consequently static forms” (120). After Brecht’s death, his own method stood in danger of congealing into approved and static forms, and already by the mid-1960s, the Berliner Ensemble was being described by some as a “Brecht Museum.” In many ways, the history that Barnett tells is one of the struggle over Brecht’s legacy between those who stood in one way or another for the preservation, or Pflege, of a sort...

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