Brecht Days 2026 - Literature Forum at the Brecht House

It is the year 1944, the time when ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’ is also written. The questions of land use, irrigation and yield increase determine the framework of the plot.

A little later, in 1950, the long poem ‘The Education of Millet’ follows, celebrating the achievements of the Moscow Academy of Agricultural Sciences under its notorious president Lysenko.

During the Cold War, the industrialisation of agriculture expands into a global project known as the ‘green revolution,’ in which breeding, chemicals and machinery work together. Tractors arrived in the GDR via the USSR, which cooperated closely with the USA in the agricultural sector. Heiner Müller's Die Umsiedlerin oder Das Leben auf dem Lande (The Resettler or Life in the Countryside, 1961) picks up on this thread with its comedic view of the period between land reform and the collectivisation of agriculture. A few weeks after the Berlin Wall was built, B. K. Tragelehn's play premiered and became one of the biggest theatre scandals in the GDR.


Today we know that the ‘green revolution’ is one of the strongest drivers of the climate crisis. The Brazilian landless movement, one of the largest social movements of our time, is fighting against the effects of this development. But even in the global North, there is a growing awareness of how unstable the food system has become. Eco-Marxist Jason Moore argues that the class struggle of the 21st century will be fought over industrial food production. ‘When starving and when eating / Forward, don't forget: / Solidarity!’



Brecht's work offers a surprising number of points of reference for responding to this situation. This is not only due to his Marxist-influenced insights into technology and the sociology of science, but also stems from his goal of a poetic ‘effort to improve the planet’ on which humanity, freed from capitalism, should settle down. Here, Brecht's writing touches in a surprising way on the popular scientific text and image production of utopian science fiction, as found, for example, in the Soviet magazine Technika – molodjoschi (‘Technology – the Youth’) since the 1930s. This context also includes admiration for Stalin's large-scale hydraulic projects, which, in accordance with the ‘Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature,’ advanced into the realms of terraforming and climate engineering. Mr Keuner, on the other hand, is reminded by the sight of trees in the streets of large cities of the need to set limits on the comprehensive exploitation of nature. This offers points of reference for a ‘metabolism policy’ (Simon Schaupp) that recognises the importance of embedding all forms of human labour in ecological networks. For contemporary eco-socialists such as Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese, the authors of the manifesto HALF EARTH SOCIALISM (2022), Brecht thus becomes an important reference point for a Marxism that breaks with the productivist pathos of construction.


The Brecht Days 2026 take this complex finding in Brecht's work, which has hardly been examined in detail until now, as their starting point, on the one hand to make visible the connections between Brecht's planetary poetics and the ‘long green revolution’ (Jason Moore), and on the other hand to follow, together with experts and authors, the lines of connection to current debates on the impending climate collapse and the restructuring of industrial society in the Anthropocene.


Project management Hans-Christian von Herrmann and Alexander Karschnia


In cooperation with the Network for Natural Sciences at the Museum of Natural History Berlin, the Zeiss Großplanetarium Berlin, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the Department of Literary Studies at the Technical University of Berlin and andcompany&Co.


(Language:German)