Morning Comrades!
A few bits and pieces before we get into this poem / concept by the Bertolt Brecht - I am taking next week off from writing as I am going on holiday for my birthday. I am certain everyone will do just fine without me for that week but just so that everyone knows.
Also, lest we forget, new tunes, for those that didn’t catch this on Monday.
Despite the fact that I live here in Germany, and now have done so consecutively for 16 years I missed out on most, if not all socialization, especially the academic kind. My parents were not academics, far from it and paying attention to the arts and culture was never on the table growing up. That all happened later when I moved, first to Warsaw and then when I started University back in London, both content and quality are questionable but here we are.
One of the few pre- and post war “cultural” icons of this country is Bertolt Brecht, and sadly is not taught far and wide. I also missed out on his work, sadly and am slowly catching up with learning about his huge body of work.
He was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a lifelong collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the Verfremdungseffekt.
During the Nazi Germany period, Bertolt Brecht fled his home country, first to Scandinavia, and during World War II to the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI. After the war he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator, actress Helene Weigel. Just to give you a little background. Essentially, he is considered to be an absolute power house in anti-fascist art with a brilliant mind and even more brilliant pen.
The other day I came across one of his poems, entitled “Der Kommunismus ist das Mittlere”, that roughly translate into “Communism is the middle ground” that really caught my attention. “Middle Ground” isn’t entirely right, as “das Mittlere” plays on the concept of political centrism. That for context. As we tapped into this idea of what is radical and radicalism on Monday, this is important context to understand what is radical and what isn’t. Let’s get into it.
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