» The 1974 Montreal Brecht Congress as Political Theatre
Joerg Esleben, University of Ottawa
Discussion paper presented at the seminar “States of Performance” at the Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, Portland, Oregon, 3-6 Oct. 2019
This paper examines the 1974 Congress of the International Brecht Society (IBS), held at McGill University in Montreal, in order to understand why, how, and with what consequences the event functioned as a venue for political performance by becoming the site and catalyst for a number of intertwining contestations: over the role and future of the IBS; over the politics of language; over appropriate ways of linking Brecht’s work to politics; over relations between academic theatre scholarship, professional theatre, and non-professional theatre; over international cold war and national and local Canadian politics. The evidence for the case study comes primarily from the pages of the Communications from the International Brecht Society (henceforth Communications for short), where the above mentioned contestations were carried out or reflected.
Here, to start with, are the facts concerning the conference. It was the third congress of the IBS, after previous ones in Milwaukee in 1970 and at Rutgers University in 1971. The Montreal congress took place under the theme “Brecht and Weltanschauung” from October 2nd to 6th, 1974, organized by the Departments of German and English at McGill in collaboration with German scholars at other Montreal universities. The conference program contained panels and roundtables by Brecht scholars from East and West Germany, the USA, Canada, and a number of other countries, held on the campuses of McGill and of the Université de Montréal. As well, the program included the following artistic events: a Lehrstück performed in English by the McGill Theatre Group under the direction of M. D. Bristol, a performance of Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti in German by the Deutsches Theater Montreal, a Brecht cabaret with songs in French performed by Pauline Julien, and a production of Baal in English by Théâtron Montréal. The originally proposed program had also announced a performance of Brecht songs in German by Renate Richter accompanied by the Günther-Fischer-Quintett from East Berlin, but this seems not to have materialized.
The event was inserted into a volatile moment for the IBS. In the same issue of Communications where the conference with its venue, theme, and sub-themes was first announced, Manfred Wekwerth, the prominent member and later director of the Berliner Ensemble, published an opinion piece on the Society, which the editor framed as a potential spark for discussions on the role of the IBS. In the piece, Wekwerth argues that the perspectives of the IBS and those in its publication Brecht Heute, exemplified by the work of Brecht scholar and translator John Willett, are not dialectical and thus not appropriate for understanding Brecht or his ideas for a Diderot Society (Wekwerth), ideas on which the IBS was to be modeled. This polemic was countered in the next issue by Willett, who criticized Wekwerth’s concerns about dialectics as typical for German scholarship and overly rigid and simplistic. In the following issue, which contained the full tentative program for the Montreal congress, R.G. Davis, the founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, added his voice to the debate, denouncing what he perceived as the IBS’s related tendencies to restrict its communications to German, turn Brecht “into an object of private ownership” (Davis 5) of a few academic insiders, and promote with its conservative politics an apolitical attitude towards performing Brecht and promoting his work in the English speaking world. (Davis 5-6)
This debate over the role of the IBS formed one context for the congress and was referred to during the event and in its aftermath. Another key political context was wrangling over the participation of GDR citizens. In her conference report, Vicki Hill recounts that prior to the event “an article by Hans-Dietrich Sander, author of a volume on GDR literature and of a paper which was rejected by the program committee of the Brecht Congress, appeared in Die Welt. Sander described the membership of the Society as a collection of ‘... ‘DDR’-Kommunisten und amerikanischen und westdeutschen Linkssozialisten’” and as “‘eine politische Propagandaschau.’” (Hill 8) This attack is made somewhat ironic by the fact that several GDR participants were in fact prevented from attending by being denied visas. This is certainly the case for the theatre scholar Ernst Schumacher, and could also be the reason for the cancelation of the musical evening with Renate Richter. So, to the fault lines between German and Anglo-Saxon academic approaches to Brecht were added aspects of the Cold War and of the East and West German tug-of-war over Brecht’s Erbe.
These ingredients were taken up and enriched with further dimensions during the congress. The strongest overtly political statement, explicitly directed at the event itself, came from the American dramatist and Brecht translator (and nudism activist) Lee Baxandall in his introductory remarks to the panel “Brecht and the American Left”. After criticizing Western governments for having now prevented delegates from meeting GDR colleagues at all three Brecht congresses to date, Baxandall denounced what he saw as the elite and backroom politics of the Montreal event itself:
"First is the composition of this very panel. It contains no women. No non-intellectual workers. No non-whites. It contains no native inhabitant of this province where we are meeting. I find these deficiencies to be striking, glaring, and indefensible. They would be counter to conscience and to intelligible politics in the spirit of Brecht, even if our panel were meeting on questions other than those before us. […] I felt that at least those political choices could be shown by us, here and now, to include the very nature of the International Brecht Society, as it has evolved in this way which seemingly severely cripples its relevance to the issues which motivated Brecht's own writing." (6-7)
Baxandall’s critique, which incidentally sounds surprisingly current and shows how long the struggle for equitableness, intersectionality, and openness towards societal contexts has been going on in our disciplines, also includes a linguistic dimension. He turns toward the choice of performances to be included in the conference program and complains that there is to be no play performed in French as the language of the meeting site, marking, in his view “a total failure of mass politics […] relating the meeting to the polis, in this case the polis or city of Montreal” (8), which failure he relates to the perceived academic elitism of the IBS (14). Baxandall does not count the cabaret evening in French with Pauline Julien performing Brecht songs and Quebecois political chansons, which Hill cites as emphasizing “the fact that the Congress took place in a predominantly French speaking part of Canada with its own political concerns” (6).
The issue of the performances selected for inclusion continued to be controversial in comments on the event. In his critical impressions, attendee Peter Ferran from the University of Michigan, aside from echoing R.G. Davis’ concerns that a “select group of scholars seems to want to retain control of thought on Brecht” (11), complained that the conference did not fulfill the IBS’s aim of relating “the dramatic text to the staged play. Here were two Brecht plays performed and not a single formal discussion prepared to deal with either one of them.” (11) Ferran seems not to count the post-show discussions with the cast of Baal that Hill mentions in her conference report (6). In that report, Hill also lauded the “excellent performance of Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti” (6), a production that had been a strong critical success for the Deutsches Theater Montreal (see Kremer 68-69).
This judgment of high quality, however, found vigorous contradiction in another critical assessment of the congress. In the winter 1975 issue of Canadian Theatre Review, theatre scholar Don Rubin published an article entitled “Two Other Solitudes,” referring to the strained relationship between the theatrical profession and university theatre studies in Canada, and although he acknowledges some encouraging signs of collaboration and mutual benefits, he still sees major problems, particularly with regard to theatre conferences and their neglect of professional theatre. Rubin cites the Montreal Brecht congress as “perhaps the worst example of this sort of academic ignorance (and, to some extent, professional fear)” (138), criticizing the omission of properly publicizing the conference among theatre people or even non-German academics, and the linguistic confusion and lack of translation services at the event.
"But perhaps the most shameful thing about the Brecht Congress was its refusal to recognize either the political implications of meeting in Quebec […] or the struggle to develop a viable professional theatre in the province both of which would have been of interest to Brecht. […] the Conference delegates were given tickets for two rather poor semi-professional productions of Baal and Puntila. One obviously understands the desire to have Brecht devotees see Brecht but why weren’t Quebec’s leading professional companies involved. Why couldn’t TNM have staged a Brecht as part of its season or the Centaur or Theatre de Quat’Sous? The whole conference was obviously academic pomposity at its worst and at its most precious." (Rubin 138)
Thus Rubin’s critique, the relevant parts of which were reprinted in Communications later that year (“Academic Ignorance?”), adds another axis to the critical scrutiny of the politics of the conference and of the IBS, questioning the degree of theatrical professionalism that the Society does and ought to interact with. His dismissal of the productions of Baal and Puntila is strategic in this argument and can thus not do justice to the role of Puntila as the performance of a diasporic community, something Brecht with his exile experiences may have been interested in as well. Of course, on the other hand the inclusion of Puntila reinforced the perception of the IBS’s German-centric bias.
The controversies, debates, and critical assessments seem to have yielded concrete result in the orientation of the IBS. Even at the Montreal congress itself, “a group of concerned members held an informal meeting at the Brecht Congress, and discussed how to reorganize the IBS.” (Parmalee 9) Scholar and activist Patty Parmalee published a summary of the discussions at the meeting, which centered on the ideas that future congresses should put more emphasis on theatrical productions rather than scholarly papers, and that the Society should be more engaged in leftist politics and should “be a visible force in aestheticizing politics and politicizing theater.” (9) In the same issue of Communications, a large group of prominent members, including some of the congress participants cited above, issued a proposal for sweeping reforms to democratize the IBS and turn its focus to practical theatre work in promoting Brecht. (“Members’ Forum”) This proposal, which included the demand to revise the IBS constitution and by-laws, was discussed and passed at a business meeting at the MLA conference in New York City in December 1975 (“IBS Business Meeting”), pointing the Brecht Society into a new direction.
This paper does not present an exhaustive or definitive analysis of the politics of the 1974 Brecht Congress in Montreal. Its purpose is to raise some questions such as the following: How does and should theatre scholarship engage with its societal contexts? What is the relevance of Brecht’s work and politics today? What are the politics of language in the dissemination of his work and cross-cultural theatre work in general?
Works cited
"Academic Ignorance?" Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 4 no. 2, 1975, p. 5.
Baxandall, Lee. "IBS and Politics." Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 4 no. 2, 1975, pp. 6, 8, 14.
Davis, R. G. "Forum." Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 3 no. 3, 1974, pp. 5-6.
Ferran, Peter. "Montreal III." Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 4 no. 1, 1974, pp. 11-12.
Hill, Vicki Williams. "Montreal I: The Third International Brecht Congress." Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 4 no. 1, 1974, pp. 5-6, 8.
"IBS Business Meeting." Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 4 no. 2, 1975, p. 9.
Kremer, Johanna. Die Geschichte des deutschsprachigen Theaters in Montreal von seinen Anfängen 1953 bis 1997. MA Thesis, Department of German Studies, McGill University, Montreal, March 1998.
“Members’ Forum.” Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 4 no. 1, 1974, pp. 13-14. https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/german/brechtcomm/
Parmalee, Patty. "Montreal II." Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 4 no. 1, 1973, pp. 9-10.
Rubin, Don. “Two Other Solitudes.” Canadian Theatre Review 5, 1975, pp. 136-139.
"Third Brecht Congress (1974)." Conference Announcement. Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 3 no. 1, 1973, p. 5.
"Third Congress of the International Brecht Society, Montreal, October 2-6, 1974: Tentative Program." Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 3 no. 3, 1974, pp. 3-4, 13. https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/german/brechtcomm/
Wekwerth, Manfred. "Forum." Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 3 no. 1, 1973, p. 7. https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/german/brechtcomm/
Willett, John. "Forum." Communications from the International Brecht Society vol. 3 no. 2, 1974, p. 9. https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/german/brechtcomm/