Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle: A Triumph of Marxism as an Ideal Model

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was a German dramatist, poet and theorist born in Augsburg, Germany where his father worked at a paper company. Although his father was a catholic and his mother a protestant, both parents influenced him immensely. Brecht abandoned his medical career and became a theatre critic. From 1922 onwards, he made several visits to Berlin, the centre of theatrical activities. Samuel Leiter says that Bertolt Brecht’s first directorial job was Arnot Bronnen’s Patricide in 1922. Thereafter, his play Drums in the Night opened in Munich at the Kammerspiele and later at the Deutshes Theatre in Berlin. He was awarded the prestigious Kleist prize for young dramatists. Bertolt Brecht initially read Karl Marx’s works but Marxism did not become a determining factor in his works until the 1930s when he started writing didactic plays. These plays were of dramatic economy. He fled from Germany in 1937 with his major actress and later wife Helen Weigel and their three children as a result of the Second World War. Bertolt Brecht’s theatre and Marxist aesthetics are an investigation of the theatre’s apparatus, political efficacy and theatrical contours. Brecht’s theatre epitomizes his radical desire to change the world, replacing it with a higher level of sane humanity. This paper examines Brecht’s fascination with the Marxist bug and how this ideological bent is brought to bear in his dramatic oeuvre, especially The Caucasian Chalk Circle, a parody of war and the torpedo of capitalist materialism which is the seedbed of greed, corruption and oppression of the poor and vulnerable. The paper submits, therefore, that with Brecht, the world has witnessed an open theatre which is characterized by its leftist and liberalized theatre practice which remains dateless.