Brecht’s Contacts with the Theater of Meyerhold

Brecht’s Contacts With the Theater of Meyerhold Katherine Eaton Vsevelod Meyerhold was bom in Russia in 1874, the son of prosperous German parents. His career as a theatrical inno­ vator began in 1905 and ended with his death in prison in 1940. Well before the October Revolution, when Bertolt Brecht, the “Einstein of the new stage form,” was still a boy, Meyerhold was known to St. Petersburg audiences as “the man with the new ideas.”! Some of Meyerhold’s ideas closely anticipated the theory and practice of Brecht. Most notable are those stylistic innovations used to destroy the realistic stage convention: film projections and posters which comment on or announce the action; interpolation of dances, jazzband style music, and songs; masks and grotesque costuming; emphasis on stage movement and gesture; the combination of realistic and stylized stage set­ tings; training of the actor to be both self and character onstage, and finally the attempt to obliterate the social and psychological distance between audience and actors. Beyond the fact that Brecht and Meyerhold were influenced by the same revolution­ ary milieu, they shared these innovations because they believed in a non-illusionistic art which served the people. Moreover, they were attracted to similar elements in the traditional theaters of the Orient and the West. Still, there remains the question of influence, direct or otherwise, of Meyerhold on Brecht. It is the purpose of this study to establish the possible links between the theaters of the two men, saving until later a comparison of their dramatic theory and practice. First of all there is the general historical circumstance. In the “Golden Twenties” and early thirties Western artists and intellectuals showed considerable interest in the Soviet Union and Bolshevik experiment. Their interest, if not always their 3 4 Comparative Drama political sympathies, was shared by the large number of Rus­ sians living abroad, a number which was growing rapidly due to the flood of new émigrés. Already by 1910 there were almost 140.000 Russians in Germany, more than in all the rest of Western Europe, and outside of Russia the largest “Russian” city was Berlin, Carl Zuckmayer has described the cultural atmosphere which he and his friend Brecht enjoyed there in the twenties. There were evenings when an unknown young writer like myself could sit at a table with writers and directors of the stamp of Eisenstein and Pudovkin—for they all visited Berlin— and listen worshipfully to their talk. . . . Thus there was the everlasting influence of the Eastern Russian temperament upon Berlin’s cultural life, and that influence was more productive, more stimulating, than most of the things that came out of the West at the time. . . . We loved the Russians and felt a kinship with them in our own intellectual and moral aspirations, and in our libertinage.2 Before the turn of the century Russians had come to Germany to sit at the feet of German university professors; after 1900, as Zuckmayer suggests, Russians increasingly brought to the West new ideas in the plastic arts, theater, literature, music, and the sciences. The modem Russian Time of Troubles—First World War, the revolutions of 1917, and Civil War—accelerated the flow of emigrants to Germany. By the end of 1919 approximately 70.000 Russians were living in Berlin and were arriving at a rate of more than 1,000 a month. They tended to settle in the southwestern section of the city, near the Tiergarten, gathering in cafes on Nollendorfplatz and on the Kürfürstendamm to talk politics, philosophy, and art, and to listen to poetry readings. Shklovsky and Bely were among the emigré writers who fre­ quented tiie Russian cafes where German artists and intellectuals also liked to gather. There were dozens of such cafes, “with balalaikas, and zumas, with gypsies, pancakes, shashlyks and naturally, the inevitable heartbreak. There was a little theater that put on sketches. Three daily newspapers and five weeklies appeared in Russian.”3 Interest among Germans for news about the Soviet Union was answered in part by German-Soviet friendship organizations such as the Bund der Freunde der Sowjetunion, which was founded in 1928 and attracted mainly working class people, and Katherine Eaton...