Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
last resting place topped by an appropriately florid monument; John Heartfield,
Dada luminary and interwar photomontage exponent, under a headstone decorated
with a runic H; philosopher Georg Hegel, whose ideas influenced Marx; author
Heinrich Mann; former president Johannes Rau; journalist Günter Gaus; and
many Berlin worthies. A plan detailing who lies where is located beside the
cemetery administration o
ces (on the right at the end of the entrance alley).
he Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof also encloses the
Französischer Friedhof
(entrance on Chausseestrasse and closer to Oranienburger Tor), originally built
to serve Berlin's Huguenot community.
Brecht-Weigel-Gedenkstätte
Chausseestr. 125 •
Museum
Tues 10am-3.30pm, Wed & Fri 10-11.30am, Thurs 10-11.30am & 5-6.30pm, Sat 10am-3.30pm,
Sun 11am-6pm, guided tours at least every hour • €3
Archive
Tues, Wed & Fri 9am-5pm, Thurs 9am-7pm • U-Oranienburger Tor
he
Brecht-Weigel-Gedenkstätte
preserves the final home and workplace of the
playwright Bertolt Brecht and his wife and collaborator Helene Weigel. Guided tours
take in the seven simply furnished rooms - an absolute must for Brecht fans, but not so
fascinating if you're only casually acquainted with his works. here is also a Bertolt Brecht
archive
and the basement is home to the
Kellerrestaurant im Brechthaus
(see p.191), which
dishes up Viennese specialities, supposedly according to Weigel's recipes.
A little way past the Brecht-Haus stands a brutal pillar commemorating the
Spartakusbund, the breakaway anti-war faction of the SPD formed by Karl Liebknecht
in 1916, which later evolved into the KPD, Germany's Communist party. he
inscription, a quote from Liebknecht, says “Spartakus means the fire and spirit, the
heart and soul, the will and deed of the revolution of the proletariat.”
4
BERTOLT BRECHT
1898
1956
Bertolt Brecht
is widely regarded as one of the leading German dramatists of the twentieth
century. Born in Augsburg, the son of a paper-mill manager, he studied medicine, mainly
to avoid full military service in World War I. Working as an army medical orderly in 1918,
his experiences helped shape his passionate anti-militarism. Soon he drifted away from
medicine onto the fringes of the theatrical world, eventually winding up as a playwright
in residence at the Munich Kammerspiele in 1921. It wasn't until the 1928 premiere of the
Dreigroschenoper
(“The Threepenny Opera”), co-written with the composer Kurt Weill, that
Brecht's real breakthrough came. This marked the beginning of a new phase in Brecht's
work. A couple of years earlier he had embraced Marxism, an ideological step that had a
profound effect on his literary output, leading him to espouse a didactic “epic” form of
theatre. The aim was to provoke the audience, perhaps even move them to revolutionary
activity. To this end he developed the technique of
Verfremdung
(“alienation”) to create
a sense of distance between spectators and the action unfolding before them. By using
effects such as obviously fake scenery, monotone lighting and jarring music to expose the
sham sentimentality of love songs, he hoped to constantly remind the audience that what
they were doing was watching a play - in order to make them judge, rather than be drawn
into, the action on stage. The result was a series of works that were pretty heavy-going. In
1933, unsurprisingly, Brecht went into self-imposed exile, eventually ending up in the States.
His years away from Germany were among his most productive. The political message was
still very much present in his work, but somehow the dynamic and lyrical force of his writing
meant that it was often largely lost on his audience. Returning to Europe, he finally settled
in East Berlin in 1949, after a brief period in Switzerland. His decision to try his luck in the
Soviet-dominated Eastern sector of Germany was influenced by the offer to take over at the
Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, where the
Dreigroschenoper
had been premiered more than
twenty years earlier. However, before heading east, Brecht first took the precaution of
gaining Austrian citizenship and lodging the copyright of his works with a West German
publisher. The remainder of Brecht's life was largely devoted to running what is now known
as the Berliner Ensemble and facing up to his own tensions with the fledgling GDR.
