"Unbewohnbar und doch unverlaßbar": Brecht in and through Berlin

Publisher： Rodopi

ISSN： 0304-6257

Source： Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, Vol.66, Iss.1, 2008-08, pp. : 153-167

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Abstract

This essay considers Brecht's relationship to, and representations of, Berlin. Drawing on a range of examples from across his works, it revises the assumption that Berlin is merely one city amongst many for Brecht, suggesting that it also has a more specific and focal role among his more or less abstracted catalogue of "Städte". More detailed cases of Berlin settings are taken from four of his works, covering a wide scope in both historic and generic terms: the poem "Vom armen B. B." from his Hauspostille collection; the texts he wrote for Weill's Berliner Requiem; the Vorspiel to his adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone; and the film for which he wrote the screenplay, Kuhle Wampe. It is argued that these Berlin settings are given an allegorical form, following the terms developed by Walter Benjamin. On the one hand, this enables a way of speaking otherwise of and through the city, achieving forms of ideological critique through engagement with its architectures and topographies. But the allegorical function is also attached to the melancholic figures of the ruin and the corpse, which are as haunting for the constructive-destructive character of Brecht's project as they are for Benjamin's.

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