A History of the Berliner Ensemble

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The Berliner Ensemble (BE) is a theatre company founded by Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel in 1949 in what was soon to become the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The company quickly established itself as a high-quality producer of theatre, and this was attributable to two main reasons: i. the novelty and effectiveness of Brecht's radical approaches to making theatre and ii. the way in which the BE was structured. Brecht and Weigel sought to engage all members of the company and thus developed a fully functioning ensemble which attacked professional hierarchies in the name of collective production methods. After successful tours to Paris (1954) and London (1956), the BE gained an international profile and this attracted interest from Europe and beyond as theatre-makers sought impulses and ideas from a company devoted to Brecht's ideas. The theatre continued to engage with and expand upon Brecht's ideas after his death in 1956, and the dynamism of its approach and its willingness to make use of collective creative energy led it to become a new model for how theatres could be organized. The BE was not without its problems, of course, and periods of innovation were matched by those of stagnation and confusion. Yet, the BE nonetheless remained one of the most interesting companies in Europe and focused on its Brechtian legacy as a way of negotiating the complexities of the GDR and, after 1990, the Federal Republic of Germany. It is thus surprising that no scholarly study exists of this remarkable company. Perhaps this is because there is simply so much archival material available, without consultation of which a history cannot be properly researched. Brecht himself insisted on full documentations of his work and indeed that of others who directed at the BE, and this practice was maintained after his death. After all, the BE saw itself as a motor for generating approaches to making theatre politically, and sought to export its findings to other theatres, not least through full production dossiers. In addition, the BE was not free to choose its own repertoire or develop its own programme: the GDR was a dictatorship which sought to control cultural production centrally through its Ministry of Culture and other organs. There are thus also forty years of government papers which need to be consulted and evaluated, including those of the Stasi. The authorities constructed an extensive network of informers who worked for the Ministry of State Security. The Stasi archive also provides a fecund source for understanding the interaction between the covert intelligence community and its effects on the BE. This pioneering study of the BE will thus seek to address some central issues concerning not only how radical theatre is made to the highest standards but how it also intersects with government policy and interference while trying to maintain its own distinctive approaches. After twenty months of archival study in Berlin, supported by a British Academy Research Development Award, I plan to write up my findings with an AHRC Fellowship. The broad scope of the study suggests that I should present the results in two volumes: 1949-1971 (from the BE's founding to the year in which Weigel dies and the first phase of the BE ends) and 1971-1999 (from the injection of new blood when Ruth Berghaus becomes Intendantin until the appointment of the current Intendant, Claus Peymann). The project will offer readers not only an authoritative history of the institution but also a series of case studies illustrating first how Brecht established a coherent but flexible method of making theatre and then how his successors took on his ideas only to develop them further.