Bertolt Brecht's Paper War—Reading Newspapers during Wartime

Summary

If you had read the newspapers attentively as I have

You’d bury your hopes

That an improvement is still possible.

Such was the view Bertolt Brecht expressed, farsightedly, towards the end of the 1920s in his Reader for City Dwellers—and he was proved right: in the coming years there was certainly no sign of improvement. In 1933 he was forced to leave Germany, with wife and children, and for fifteen years he was a refugee. However difficult the living and working conditions were in the many countries he passed through, there is one thing Brecht seems always to have managed in the various stations of his exile: to be an attentive newspaper reader. Two of his most important and artistically progressive projects in the exile period owe their existence precisely to this attentive newspaper reading: the Kriegsfibel (War Primer) and the Journal. The two projects provide the materials out of which the exhibition Brecht's Paper War is compiled. The two works engage, so to speak, “in real time” with the events that were unfolding around him. This is remarkable for an author whose most important theater works are situated in the Thirty-Years War (Mother Courage) or the Renaissance (Life of Galileo). In the American Journal, Brecht the author appears as both reader and commentator. He is of course also a theoretician of the theater and of social conditions, but above all he is revealed as a media practitioner who, equipped with scissors and glue pot and with his critical intelligence to hand, works his way regularly, with alternating distance and proximity to his various objects and employing the principles of historical materialism, through the pages of a great many newspapers.

Exhibition

The exhibition Brecht's Paper War is the preliminary output of my research to identify and re-contextualize the magazine and newspaper photographs used in the American Journal and the “photo epigrams” of the War Primer. I was able to start on this work during the tenure of a Copeland Fellowship at the German Department of Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and now the work is completed. With very few exceptions, I have been able to identify all the montaged material in the American Journal.