Brecht’s ‘Threepenny Lawsuit’ and the Culture of the Case
2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/oxartj/kcy013
ISSN1741-7287
Autores Tópico(s)Law in Society and Culture
ResumoBertolt Brecht was fascinated by court cases. Legal proceedings of various kinds appear in many of his works – in Mahagonny (1930), Die Maßnahme (The measures taken, 1930) the film Kuhle Wampe (1932), and others. Sergei Tretyakov described him as ‘obsessed with goings-on at court’ and ‘a skilled and cunning casuist’.1 ‘In 1932, when Brecht was in Moscow’, Tretyakov recounts further, he told me of his idea of establishing in Berlin a sort of panopticon-theatre, where he would stage the most interesting trials from the history of mankind. ‘The theatre must be set up like a courtroom. Two trials every evening, an hour and a quarter each. For example the trial of Socrates. Or a witch trial. The trial against Karl Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung. George Grosz’s blasphemy trial for his caricature Christ with a Gas Mask’.2 As Brecht indicates, artists and writers often had to defend themselves before a court of law – for blasphemy, like Grosz and Carl Einstein, or for indecency.3 And also, like Marx, for political reasons: the Weimar years saw many trials for the new offence of ‘literary treason’.4 In 1926, for example, Johannes R. Becher’s recently published political novel Levisite was confiscated by authorities in Berlin and the author charged with this crime.5 It was a serious matter until the charges were dropped two years later, but there was a lighter side. Walter Benjamin reported to Siegfried Kracauer in a letter as follows:
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