Speaking (of) Brecht in the East-West Conflict: Brecht’s Changing Concepts of Gestus and the Invention of Gestic Speech in Germany in the 1970s

Summary

In the 1970s, the concept of gestic speech emerged on either side of divided Germany: In East Berlin, Herbert Minnich and Klaus Klawitter developed “gestisches Sprechen” (gestic speech) in the context of professional actor training by drawing on the concept of Gestus as formulated by Bertolt Brecht in East Berlin in the 1950s. In West Berlin, Hans Martin Ritter began working on Brecht, Gestus, and speech within the field of theater pedagogy at around the same time and later coined the term “das gestische Prinzip” (the gestic principle). In this essay I historicize the terms “gestisches Sprechen” and “gestisches Prinzip,” which are still used with reference to Brecht in contemporary theater training. The topic of “Brecht among Strangers” prompts me to do so from two complementary angles. First, I situate the recourse to Brecht in practical theater training in the 1970s during the East-West conflict and within the contradictory situation of two co-existing German states and their competitive, at times antagonistic, but also always mutually entangled relationship. In order to do so, I delineate the contours of a postwar Brecht reception within the field of professional actor training in Germany. Second, I examine which notions of Gestus are actually being employed, and how. I investigate when they were formulated by Brecht, and where and in which context they eventually surfaced within actor training in Germany. In doing so, I contrast the notion Brecht formulated in East Berlin in the 1950s vis-à-vis earlier formulations around 1940 when Brecht was in exile in Sweden and Finland.

Brecht and Actor Training in Germany after 1945

The military administrations of all four occupation zones in postwar Germany recognized theater as a major institution for transmitting culture. For the re-education and renewal programs that aimed to produce a post-fascist or anti-fascist democratic German citizen, theater became a key medium. Acting moved into the center of aesthetic discourse engaged in modelling post-fascist artists and a new German cultural identity yet to come.

This increased attention to acting is reflected in a large number of acting schools licensed by the Military Administrations in the immediate postwar years.