On Teaching and Learning: Brecht in our time.

Monday, August 17, 2026

Brecht in our time.

“Hello, Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956 was one of the greatest European playwrights of the 20th century. His aim was to make the familiar strange. With plays such as Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, he wanted his audiences not to sit back, but to engage, observe and discover the contradictions in life and act on what they learned.”

“he starts developing those ideas. But the key idea that he encounters in the mid 1920s is Marxism. He moves to Berlin and he gets exposed to Marxism.

And Marxism comes to him in sort of various ways. One of them is a fairly sort of moral way about supporting the oppressed. But in a far more concrete way, he encounters dialectics.

What does that mean in terms of his reception of it?”

“Dialectics is full of complex philosophical ideas, but we can boil it down into a belief that reality is not harmonious, but built on contradiction. And it's important perhaps to differentiate conflict from contradiction, because you could say that the soul of drama is conflict, where people disagree about this and that. Whereas contradiction is a little bit more precisely defined as two things that shouldn't be able to exist at the same time, but do.

So you could say we have the capacity in this world to feed everyone, and we live in a world of mass starvation. That would be a contradiction, for example. But there is also contradictions between the individual and society, that if you said that an individual has wants and needs, and society has availability and scarcity, you can already see that contradictions develop there too.”

Quote. “contradictions are our hope. And by that he means that because contradictions run through our reality, if we're not happy with that reality, we can look to the contradictions as a way of changing things.”

“why are they called the learning plays?

Well, Brecht called some of them Lerstuck, and some of them he gave other titles to, and Lerstuck, when he translated, it could be translated as teaching play, but when he translated it into English, he called them learning plays. He wants to take the theatre into schools and factories and working places as well and attract a new audience, and he also wants to make them think, as David and Laura have already said, about social issues. So to do this, he thinks he needs a new form of theatre, and that new form of theatre is one in which the audience, to a greater extent than is traditional, are part of the experience.

They participate actively.”

“so he develops a whole way of interrupting empathy with a view to making our perception of what's going on on stage more difficult. And so in your introduction you talked about making the familiar strange, which, the term, FFREMDUNG in German is used, and making the familiar strange is itself a dialectical process. So in the theatre we would recognise something, and it's familiar.

The theatre then makes it strange, so we don't recognise it any more, we see it in a strange new way, and as audience members we then complete that dialectical process by getting a new understanding of that thing.”

Inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wedekind