Title: Proletarian performance in Weimar Berlin : Agitprop, chorus, and Brecht /
Authors: Bodek, Richard, 1961-
Publisher: Camden House,
Year: 1997
Subjects: Brecht, Bertolt, Criticism and interpretation.; Agitprop theater Germany Berlin.; Workers' theater Germany Berlin History; Theater Political aspects Germany Berlin
Abstract: The late years of the Weimar Republic were a time of political disillusionment and economic disintegration. Nowhere were the forces competing for the political allegiances of the working class more active than in Berlin. Bodek's study examines the interplay of socialist and communist politics with the world of the working class (and particularly its young people) in the forms of agitprop theater, workers' chorus, and the modernist theater of Brecht. Using sources such as newspaper articles and reviews, the texts of agitprop plays, festival and concert programs, and police reports, Bodek provides a new angle on the cultural and political forces at work in the proletarian sphere during the period, and shows how the theater of Brecht draws on many of its aesthetic assumptions. Bodek examines the very different aesthetics and political assumptions of Social Democratic workers choruses and Communist agitprop theater.^
Contents: The not-so-golden twenties: the world of Berlin's working-class youth -- Red song: social democratic chorus in the late republic -- Agitprop theater in the working-class world -- We are the Red Megaphone! Agitprop theater on the proletarian stage -- Bertolt Brecht's agitprop and the circulation of ideas in the late republic.