Hero or Villain? Bertolt Brecht and the Crisis Surrounding June 1953

This article examines Bertolt Brecht's career as a political intellectual in the early German Democratic Republic. It builds upon and goes beyond traditional interpretations that have tended to portray Brecht either as an intellectual traitor to the working classes he claimed to represent or as a hero who steadfastly championed the cause of a better socialism even against the political élites of the Socialist Unity Party. The author focuses on Brecht's responses to the cultural and political challenges within the political crucible of the early GDR including, especially, the crisis surrounding 17 June 1953. He sees Brecht as a specific type of German intellectual, one positioned between his exile experience in Scandinavia and the USA and his conviction that the future of Germany lay in a socialist society that could only be guaranteed by the Soviet Union after the collapse of the Third Reich. He argues that Brecht understood his creative and intellectual contribution as a commodity, in the revolutionizing sense of the term he had developed in ‘The Threepenny Lawsuit’. As he adjusted to the changing realities of life in the fledgling communist state, Brecht learned how to exercise his commodity value in order to achieve his most important, and interrelated, goals: the construction of a new socialist culture and a permanent residence for the Berliner Ensemble. Along the way, Brecht made compromises — especially in 1953 — but he nevertheless contributed significantly to the cultural reconstruction of the GDR. This article thus joins the growing historical literature on cultural reconstruction in Germany and Europe after 1945.

The article also contributes to the broader discussion about the role that intellectuals have played and should play in any modern society. In particular, the author argues that the critique of intellectuals which Brecht developed during this time around the notion of ‘Tuismus’ engages a model of the public intellectual in which the self-image of the artist and thinker as a socially and politically engaged person corresponded to the expectations of the public. Partisan without being bound to a party, independent of official institutions yet experienced in surviving within institutions, prepared to entertain risks and undertake unconventional experiments: this was how Brecht accommodated a world which he envisioned as changeable. His antagonistic worldview fed on crisis and found its most productive, creative impulse in the escalation of contradictions. For this he found plenty of material in the early years of the GDR and introduced some innovative strategies to give it form.