This essay looks into ways Bertolt Brecht recycles and exploits what could be called “ludic thinking” in his play Schweik in the Second World War (Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg) and in his Stories of Mr. Keuner. The “ludic” is a significant term in that it does not denote something merely amusing, light, unserious, or escapist (“it is just a game”); it rather signifies a structure that through the categories of play, lightness, or amusement actually grasps seriousness, reality, and ethics par excellence. Ludic thinking does not resolve the paradox of playfulness and seriousness; it respects it. As essentially heteronomous thinking, it implies an order in which one is seriously playful, both engaged and distanced, but never fully identified with one's role or totally separated from it.

My aim here is first to explain the project of ludic thinking in its broader historical and systematic context. I will mainly flesh out the ideas of Donald Winnicott and Friedrich Nietzsche, who not only introduce the important duality of seriousness and playfulness in the ludic stance, but also show how playfulness nourishes maturity in human beings. Winnicott and Nietzsche also touch upon the ethical dimension of play that is crucial in the reflection on ludic thinking in Brecht, too. Second, I will elucidate the aspects of ludic thinking in Brecht by clarifying the characteristics of the Brechtian ludic agent. I will show how the rejection of “identification with” and “separation from” relates to ludic thinking and manifests itself in Brecht's texts on Schweyk and Mr. Keuner. I will pursue the question of self-distance and distance from social norms. Last, I will formulate more generally the kind of ludic approach Brecht uses in his works in the frame of his practices of recycling. I will concentrate on the understanding of the ludic agent, ludic distance, and ludic care as they together construct a basis for understanding the ethics of the playful attitude.

The Context of Ludic Thinking

Research into the concept of play and playfulness received increasing attention in the human sciences in the twentieth century. The structure of play seemed to offer answers to new intellectual challenges after the “failure of the big narratives” and the “flop of the project of a complete human emancipation.”When resorting to transcendental principles or universal narratives for describing human beings and their social interactions became impossible, new ways of human self-understanding were needed.