On 4 November 1989, at the historic demonstration on the Alexanderplatz in East Berlin, the text that playwright Heiner Müller initially planned to read from the podium was an extract from Bertolt Brecht’s Fatzer that calls on the statesmen and their henchmen to release the state that no longer wants them. Müller’s view of the GDR as a failed experiment and his view of Brecht coalesce in his extended critical engagement with Fatzer, and both Fatzer itself and its simultaneous presence and near-absence in GDR theater are important elements in an understanding of Brecht in the GDR. Accordingly, this essay considers the distinctiveness of Fatzer even within Brecht’s work and the influence this had on its delayed reception in the GDR, Fatzer’s importance for Heiner Müller and vice versa, those productions by GDR directors that did eventually take place, and finally the links between the GDR as a failed socialist experiment and the new significance Fatzer has acquired since 1989–90.

By his late twenties, in the middle years of the Weimar Republic, Brecht had seen the dramatic expansion and cyclical crises of industrial capitalism, war’s brutalizing effects, the shortages that set in with the “Rübenwinter” (turnip winter) of 1917, military collapse, the revolution of 1918–19 and its ruthless suppression, economic turmoil, and Germany’s acute version of the paramilitary lawlessness that was widespread in early 1920s Europe. In the cities of Weimar Germany, Brecht had encountered the anarchic, amoral potential and the sometimes nightmarish, sometimes liberating energy of violence displayed by human individuals, collectives, and masses struggling to survive in a world in the throes of dissolution and transformation. It is the grimly violent world of Max Beckmann’s painting Night (1918–19) or of Alban Berg’s dystopian intensification of Büchner’s Woyzeck in his opera Wozzeck (1922). By the late 1920s, moreover, fascism, promising answers to these traumas of modernity, was on the rise.

This landscape of material and moral upheaval is the setting for Brecht’s Fatzer, not a finished play but 500-plus manuscript pages of drafts, notes, and commentaries (BFA 10.1: 387–529).