Technology and Poetics: Bertolt Brecht's Theater of the Scientific Revolution
2025-01-14 17:00 (America/New_York) | Social Sciences 119
In the past, the topic of technology in the work of Bertolt Brecht has been discussed primarily in terms of "Neue Sachlichkeit" and Americanism. It was mostly left unmentioned that Brecht came across the question of technology precisely through his reading of Marx and that from this perspective it took on outstanding significance for him in both artistic and political terms. The lecture aims to trace these connections and in doing so, clarify how technology, poetics and politics combine in Brecht to form a concept that he was to call the "theater of the scientific age" in his "Short Organum" in 1949. During the 1920s, Brecht had come to understand technology as a key point of reference in his practice as a writer and theater maker, starting from a position of avant-garde aesthetics. In the course of the 1930s, in connection with his play "Life of Galileo," he then developed a program of planetary environmental design that declared the technically enabled habitability of the earth to be the defining task of the present.
