Despite Bertolt Brecht's skepticism about the political and cultural policies of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the 1950s, he was among the most active participants in the attempt to build institutional structures for a socialist public sphere in the first decade of the German Democratic Republic, as recent accounts of his work with the Berliner Ensemble and the Academy of the Arts demonstrate. In his writings after the war, Brecht is insistent that such a public sphere would necessitate a break with the perspective of subalternity that had been characterized by voices on the German left since the nineteenth century as the deutsche Misere, or German misery. For Brecht, though, this perspective was at once a problem for the GDR's nascent public institutions and also one of Haltungen, which is to say, of social attitudes and their articulation in habits of thought, expression, and behavior in postwar, post-fascist Germany. Brecht's postwar work, I argue here, continues a shift from a critique of the production and manipulation and a certain kind of emotionality by bourgeois and capitalist cultural apparati to a tentative meditation on the possibilities of a new affective disposition anchored in the pleasures of the liberated social and individual productivity that he hoped might animate the public sphere of a socialist Germany. With a nod to recent work by Lauren Berlant and Fredric Jameson on the vicissitudes of our affective attachments to social and historical conjunctures, this essay looks at this changing deployment and pedagogy of affects that can be extracted from some of Brecht's commentaries—particularly those of the 1950s—on theater, comedy, and specific Berliner Ensemble productions. Thus, what follows must be taken as a reflection on possibilities that Brecht explored in the early GDR and measured against the historical development that socialism took in East Germany, which did not bear out Brecht's hopes. Nevertheless, Brecht's postwar speculations on the possibilities of a postcapitalist affective realm remain suggestive today.

Placing Brecht's work in relation to affect and affect theory is itself not a simple task.