In the GDR, a dense network of anniversaries was central to the construction of a German socialist culture rooted in the humanist heritage of Goethe and Schiller and connected to socialist commemorations across the Eastern bloc. Anniversaries provided an opportunity for the young state and its institutions to remember their origins, review their achievements, and set out their goals for the future. But as Geoffrey Cubitt argues, anniversaries also allow the different constituencies within a community to stake their claims to a share in the past, and in its present and future uses. This fact was evident each year from the rival commemorations held to mark shared anniversaries in the two German states, and also from the way in which anniversaries came to function as particularly sensitive occasions in the GDR. In the case of Brecht’s anniversaries at the Berliner Ensemble (BE), we are not dealing with a clear-cut conflict between state-sanctioned memory and private, oppositional memory, but rather with the interaction of a variety of interested parties, including Brecht’s heirs, his collaborators, and a new generation of East German scholars and artists. These groups subscribed to the official line that the GDR was Brecht’s cultural home, but their members held different views on how his legacy should be developed for the future.

The BE played a key role in commemorations of Brecht in the GDR. The theater drew its raison d’être from performing Brecht’s plays and applying his staging methods to works by other writers; in his last will and testament, Brecht had asked Weigel to continue the company as long as she believed that she could maintain its style (“so lange sie glaubt, den Stil halten zu können”). And initially, at least, that was relatively straightforward: Brecht’s former assistants directed productions of plays such as Arturo Ui (1941) and Die Tage der Kommune (Days of the Commune, 1948–49) to considerable acclaim. The problems came when this role was nearing completion. Weigel acknowledged in 1969 that the theater was running out of new Brecht plays, and by this time Brecht’s ideas were no longer the specialist preserve of the BE.