Mary Kathryn. “An Analysis of the Concept of >Attitude< as a Basis for Mime.” Diss. CUNY 1984. Ann Arbor: Univ. Microfilms, [1984?].
1. This essay would have been difficult to write or even conceive without the stimulating surveys by Haffad on love as productivity and by Steinweg on pedagogy and learning in Brecht. Except where otherwise noted, all translations are mine, with thanks to my students Andrew Wood and Caroline Schütze who helped to translate some of the Me-Ti stories. I have added punctuation and caps when translating the notes from the Brecht Archive, and made some changes in other translations. My thanks also go to Marianne Conrad, Joachim Fiebach, Dorothea Haffad, Wolf Haug, Walter Hinck, Ishida Hiromi, Franz Norbert Mennemeier, Tilman Reitz, and Cornelia Thiels. Parallel and often overlapping arguments are to be found in a number of my items listed below, especially in “Brecht and Subjectivity.”
2. Benjamin was the first and remains the best commentator on Brecht’s Haltungen; another full study would be needed to do justice to his rich discussion of Brecht’s plays and poems (cf. also Steinweg Brechts 403 and 491).
3. The “military connotations” and “conservative tradition” of Haltung are discussed in Nägele 141-57. Very usefully, he connects its use in Brecht both with Halt! (Stop!) and Verhalten (behaviour), as well as with the usage in Benjamin who stressed more the stop or caesura, and concludes that Haltung represents “an intricate economy of movement and rigidity.” Earlier important investigations are to be found in Steinweg, especially 134-39. I should mention three interesting though subsidiary clusters of meaning, possibly of special interest to a playwright and the author of St. Joan of the Stockyards. First, an old one pertaining to the “holding” of festivities: “Haltung eines Spils mit grosser Versammlung des Volks, celebratio ludorum” (vgl. “Verhalten” in “das V., gestus, motus corporis...”—Kasp. Stieler, Der teutschen sprache stammbaum..., Nürnberg 1691: 746, cited in the Grimms 25: 514). Brecht’s important though somewhat opaque concept of Gestus could to my mind only be clarified within this semantic field: Nägele adopts, after Benjamin and Steinweg, the idea that Gestus is “the smallest element of a Haltung” (152). Second, a newer semantic cluster indicating the momentary “stand” of affairs and of prices on the market, including the stock-market: “Spiritus in steigender, festen, flauer, weichender, sinkender Haltung” (Weserzeitung 1853); in Meyer’s Konversations-Lexikon of 1908 (671), this is the only entry s.v. Haltung: “it means the course of affairs,” for example “matte, feste, abwartende Haltung.” Third, a tradition within mime which used “attitude” as its basic theoretical term, intricately connected with arrested emotion, see Wylie, esp. 48-52.
4. Brecht cherished the Chinese cultural sphere precisely because of its rich culture of clear stances (he planned to write a play on Confucius). For example in Japanese kamae means physical-cum-psychological “assuming an attitude” or “attitude assumed” both in formal arts such as judo, flower arranging or tea ceremony and in everyday life, and it is defined as “action in [the] reduced form [of]...a single moment.” The parallel between “Tu Wishes To Learn Fighting...” and the famous swordsman Musashi’s instruction to a novice—itself in all probability heavily indebted to Chinese models—is so close that it amounts to an overlap (see Lee 55 and 57).
5. I find with pleasure that this conclusion has been earlier arrived at by Dümling (626), whose excellent book is most useful for discussing Brecht’s bearings—not only as concerns music.
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