Stranger than the Moon (Fremder als der Mond)

"What was he like? Where can he be found in his works? Everywhere! In every verse, in every sentence," wrote Ruth Berlau in 1958, two years after Bertolt Brecht's death. Brecht himself was ambivalent about the question of how artist and work intertwine: On the one hand, we know him as a master of self-staging, who combined a ragged smock with fine silk shirts to create an artist's look, deliberately cultivated an olfactory signature by not washing, and never lost his Augsburg accent even after a decade and a half of involuntary exile abroad. He was aware of his effect and skillfully designed the "Brecht" brand. On the other hand, he was a tireless doer who was always concerned with the "third thing" and who pragmatically noted in exile: "The fact that these notes contain so little of a private nature is not only because I myself am not particularly interested in private matters (and have hardly any means of expression at my disposal that satisfy me), but mainly because I expected from the outset that I would have to bring my notes across borders in unmanageable numbers and quality."Through his life rich in successes and privations, Fremder als der Mond features two of Brecht's "alter egos," so to speak: Katharine Mehrling and Paul Herwig. In a fragmentary collage of songs, poems, autobiographical notes, and letters, structured more according to contextual meaning than historical chronology, they show us B.B. in three phases of his life: First, in Act I, there is the young Brecht in Augsburg, Munich, and Berlin during the interwar years. Driven by an unconditional creative urge, he seeks his place as a poet and singer. His own radical nihilistic worldview must first be outsourced to the dramatic character Baal, as he himself is still "too soft." He achieves his first successes with plays such as Drums in the Night and the poetry collection Hauspostille, and finally becomes an overnight star with The Threepenny Opera. But his fame was soon overshadowed by Hitler's rise to power. One day after the Reichstag fire, Brecht left Berlin. The second act began: a long period of exile in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and finally California. He commented sharply on the devastation of the world war from a distance. In the middle of his life, he was particularly productive, but his dramatic masterpieces such as The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage, Arturo Ui, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle were all initially written for the drawer. There was no stage on which to perform them.After the end of the war – Act III – he left the USA and, after a stopover in Switzerland, returned to what was now divided Germany in 1948/49. He settled in East Berlin and Buckow and, together with Helene Weigel, founded the Berliner Ensemble, which, after a period as an unpopular permanent guest at the Deutsches Theater, moved into the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1954. Now things could really take off again for the theater revolutionary Brecht – but then death comes knocking at the door. Suffering from lifelong heart disease, he is unable to travel to London for the guest performance of Mother Courage. He dies at the age of only 58, and perhaps reconciled after all: "For quite some time now / I have had no fear of death. Since nothing / Can ever be missing to me, provided / I myself am missing. Now / I have succeeded in rejoicing / In all the blackbird songs after me too," he notes in May 1956, just three months before his death.That blackbird song—the songs of the "folk singer in the age of skyscrapers," arranged by Adam Benzwi especially for this project, are the connecting element of the evening. They tell stories in themselves, yet always reveal something about their creator. by Lucien Strauch