The Legacy of Brecht in East German Political Song

Summary

The Sed’s Instant appropriation of Brecht as a revolutionary cultural icon after his death in 1956 was always too easy and one-sided. It ignored the thematic and formal contradictoriness in Brecht’s work as well as the writer’s problematic reception in the GDR in the 1950s, when his perceived formalistic tendencies sat uneasily with the tenets of Socialist Realism. In the field of political song this one-sided perception was cemented by the reception of the Brecht and Eisler Kampflied (battle song) tradition from the late 1940s onward, notably by Ernst Busch and the choirs of the Free German Youth movement (FDJ), the schools, and the army. By the early 1960s, however, the more subversive aspects of the poet’s work were being seized on by the singer and poet Wolf Biermann, who frequently adapted Brechtian lyrical motifs to comment critically on GDR political reality. Biermann was to revive a vibrant relationship to Brecht by consciously setting himself in a line of tradition with him, particularly the literary grotesque of his early work. For this the GDR cultural authorities charged Biermann with literary decadence and eventually banned him from performance and publication from 1965 to 1976.

The Brechtian influence could also be seen in Biermann’s use of music, especially the aesthetic of musical montage that Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler had pioneered in their work with Brecht. After the expatriation of Biermann from the GDR in November 1976, this aesthetic became key to new developments in GDR political song. These developments included the unique cabaret form known as Liedertheater (song theater), initiated by Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, Steffen Mensching, and their group Karls Enkel. Their interdisciplinary art form represented among other things a creative appropriation of the theatrical tradition that the GDR claimed as its own progressive heritage. This included the montage aesthetic of agitprop revue, Brechtian theater, and Eislerian song as well as socially critical clowning from commedia dell’arte through to the Munich clown Karl Valentin. What is intriguing about the art forms of both Wolf Biermann and Wenzel and Mensching is how a genre that their forefathers had deployed in the Weimar Republic to criticize the capitalist state now encountered a basic contradiction within a communist state (East Germany). Originally intended as an art form of resistance, it was now expected to work for the promotion of the state itself.