our epoch, the pragmatic orientation toward concrete situations of human relationships (Situationsbezogenheit) and the need to present them as alterable entails that texts should be experimental, and that they present Haltungen that unite the subject’s body-orientation in spacetime with that body’s insertion into major societal flows of things.
The preoccupation with Haltung, present from early on (cf. GKA 19: 285-91), underwent a first crystallization during the great economic and political crisis of 1929 to 1933, when Brecht focussed on a vanguard which should teach others the proper ways of such a union of personal orientation and collective location. Parallels to the Leninist concept of a political vanguard are clear, and may indeed help to explain Brecht’s conditional adhering to Lenin’s central notion of the Party—alongside with Brecht’s lifelong adhesion to Rosa Luxemburg’s notion of worker’s councils; yet Brecht gave it a characteristically heterodox twist by positing a theatre (and radio) vanguard. This meant, first, allotting theatre an at the time totally new (though historically well-known) function, that of a teaching-cum-learning apparatus or Pädagogium, a term denoting “educational institution” but to which Brecht provided a new connotation on the model of Planetarium or Laboratorium. Obversely, it also meant planning “a chain of experiments which used theatrical means but did not need theatres proper” (GKA 22.1: 167), so that it might perhaps be better to categorize it within the superordinated category of spectacle or public show.
Brecht envisaged a wide spectrum of educational practices in such a radically new institution. However, for reasons both of practical organization and of self-clarification, Brecht began writing fictional performance texts for these “pedagogical experiments” which he called Lehrstücke. His term was somewhat misguided in its kinship to Lehre (doctrine) or lehren (instructing), concepts which were not at all central for Brecht, so that in 1936 he insisted to have it translated into English as “learning plays” (GKA 22.2: 941, Steinweg Lehrstück 48).
At the height of such work, expecting a civil war and revolution in Germany, Brecht envisaged two different forms, the Great Pedagogy and the Small (or Initial?) Pedagogy. A note in the Brecht-Archiv (further BBA with file/leaf numbers) reads:
The Great Pedagogy utterly changes the role of playing. It abrogates the system of player and spectator. It knows only players who are at the same time students.... The mimetic playing becomes a principal part of pedagogy. The Small Pedagogy in the transitional period of the first revolution, on the contrary, merely democratizes theatre: the division still fundamentally exists, but the players should if possible be amateurs (the roles should be such that amateurs have to remain amateurs), the professional actors and the existing theatre apparatus should be used to weaken bourgeois ideological positions in the bourgeois theatre itself, and the spectators should be activised. Plays and way of playing should turn the spectator into a statesman....The actors must estrange figures and events for the spectator, so that he finds them remarkable. The spectator has to take sides instead of identifying himself [with the figures and events]. (BBA 521/996, ca. 1940, in Steinweg Lehrstück 23-24)
As is made clear from a number of passages, the Great Pedagogy presupposes a post-revolutionary state of democratic socialism based on a dialectics between the vanguard and the self-organizing masses, the lineaments of which Brecht saw in the Soviet 1920s on the model of Lenin’s program in The State and Revolution (cf. GKA 21: 398 and Steinweg Lehrstück 207-10). In such a dynamic state of permanent cultural revolution people’s acts would no longer be constricted by overriding Not (necessity and misery) but they would be educatable through learning new bearings (cf. GKA 18: 34; BBA 112/54, ca. 1929, in Steinweg Lehrstück 18). All this should have been developed in an extensive theory of pedagogy which at that point Brecht was planning (cf. GKA 24: 90 and both the Steinweg titles). One is titled “Theory of Pedagogies”:
Bourgeois philosophers make out a huge distinction between those who act and those who reflect. The thinker does not make this distinction.... There is no distinction between true philosophy and true politics. A result of this understanding is the thinker’s proposal to educate young people through theatre playing, that is, to make of them simultaneously those who act and reflect, as it is proposed in the guidelines for the pedagogies.... (GKA 21: 398)
A defining and fundamental characteristic of the learning process Brecht envisaged was his enmity to a closed “world view” or systematized doctrine. For one thing, knowing is necessarily dynamic: “in the teaching, the learning must be preserved. The Lehrstücke are not simply parables that provide an aphoristic moral with emblems, they also investigate.” (BBA 827/13-15, ca. 1930, in Steinweg Lehrstück 23) As Benjamin formulated it, the traditional, Schillerian statement that the stage is an ethical institution is justified only if a theatre does not only communicate cognitions but also produces them (18); Benjamin went on to perspicaciously characterize Brecht’s whole theatre by connecting investigation with the gestual attitudes.2
Even more important, however, Brecht diametrically counterposed two kinds of learning. One, using theatrical means, engages the whole body without splitting the sensorium from the brain and dovetails emotion and reason precisely under the concept of bearing or behaviour (Verhalten, cf. for example GKA 21: 421-22); this makes it possible to fruitfully use contradictions. The other kind is a learning through systematized notional constructs, which tend to false harmony and univocity, for Brecht necessarily present in any doctrine. Therefore, “the teaching should not spread a specific cognition but carry out a specific bearing (Haltung) of people.... When taking up a proper bearing, truth, that is the right cognition of circumstances, will manifest itself.” (BBA 827/07, ca. 1930, in Steinweg Brechts 101) Brecht is astonishingly modern in such considerations, pitting the juggler-philosopher as educator against the priest, and again best exemplified through some Me-ti stories. One of them, “Vorsicht bei der Verwahrung von Erfahrungen” (“Prudent Custody of Experiences”) distinguishes between experiences and judgements, and calls for great caution not to take the latter for the former: “A proper technique is necessary to keep the experiences fresh so that they can remain a permanent source of new judgements.—Me-ti called that kind of experiences best which resembled snowballs. They can serve as good weapons but they do not keep too long. For example they cannot be held ready in the pocket for long.” (GKA 18: 90-91) Another, crucial Me-ti story warns forthrightly, “Make No Image of the World”:
Me-ti said: The judgements which are won by dint of experiences usually do not correlate with each other as the events which led to the experiences. The unification of the judgements does not give an exact image of the events lying beneath them. When too many judgements are tied to one another, getting back to the events is often very difficult. It is the entire world which generates one image, but the image does not include the entire world. It is better to associate judgements with experiences than with other judgements—if the judgements should serve the purpose of governing things. Me-ti was against constructing overly comprehensive images of the world. (GKA 18: 60)
Across a quarter century, very little had changed when the director Brecht in the 1950s carefully grounded the believability of each stage event on analogous events possible in everyday life, that is, “vertically” athwart and against any pre-established harmony of the syntagmatic notional and textual, “horizontal” concatenation (cf. Bunge 332 and passim).
Of course, Brecht’s goal was to influence people and society as a whole. Furthermore, the determining context of all of his “pedagogical” exertions was the clear realization that the education he wanted was only feasible if favoured by the general drift of society: “Thus the lack of bread in the shack educates to stealing, or the Bible educates to hungering. He who has to have a potato must bow down, because the ground demands it or the boss. Such is the education to bowing down.” (GKA 22.1: 55) Brecht’s pedagogy is one for stormy but favourable winds. A provisional summing up, provided in a short note called “On the Theory of the Lehrstück” (GKA 22.1: 351-52), did not at all aim at a transmission of judgements, even of general or parabolical ones, but at a critical appropriation of a way of thinking, of a
