»Helene Weigel – revolutionary in the spotlight« | Who deserves the applause?

Tremendously emancipated: Helene Weigel Photo: New Visions No one has given mother courage as impressively as Helene Weigel. Energetic, self-confident, daring and stubborn. Perhaps because some of the characteristics that Bertolt Brecht gave to the heroine of his world-famous play, which was played around the globe, were peculiar to her. In her beliefs and attitudes, however, she had nothing in common with this figure.

Because Brecht's mother Courage is a war profiteer. The sutler Anna Fierling, who traveled through the pillaged, corpse-strewn countryside in the Swedish army's entourage during the Thirty Years' War, fears nothing more than a peace agreement. And complains: "I won't let you make the war mad for me." In the end she loses everything and even pays for her greed in murderous years with the lives of her children.

It is only logical that Maria Wischnewski frames her documentary about Helene Weigel with historical footage of the stage spectacle written by Bert Brecht in exile together with Margarete Steffin in 1938 and premiered at the Schauspielhaus Zürich in 1941, in the midst of the Second World War. The scenes, the founding documents of the Berlin ensemble that was founded in the post-war period, are familiar. In contrast, many of Weigel's photos are being presented to the public for the first time. Insights, sometimes very intimate, into their lives and thoughts are offered. The Weigels were not yet known like this. You are surprised to realize how little you know about her, who was more than “the woman at his side.”

While there are numerous publications, biographies, memories of contemporary witnesses and self-reflections on Brecht, the book market offers little about Weigel. Two well-informed biographies were published, by Sabine Kebir and Werner Hecht, as well as a photo album by Vera Tenschert, who also appears in the film. Like other contemporary witnesses, heirs and relatives, including Johanna Schall, Katharina Thalbach and Manfred Krug. You look at familiar faces: There is the great of the acting art Wolf Kaiser, who collapsed and took his own life as a result of the social reversal in East Germany in 1990, and the great Brecht interpreter Gisela May.

Wischnewski tells the Weigel story using sequences from an interview conducted over half a century ago as well as letter excerpts read by Birgit Minichmayr and August Diehl. It can be assumed that Brecht and Weigel wrote to each other more often than they spoke to each other. Which was probably not just due to the turmoil of the time: being torn apart as people persecuted by the Nazis, displaced through half of Europe and finally across the Atlantic to the USA. But it also “owes” itself to Brecht’s stubbornness or egoism. The surviving letters are a unique treasure trove of contemporary and literary history.

“I don’t let anyone dictate to me!”

He often hurt her with his faithlessness and his many and by no means discreet love affairs. But she always stood by him. Comforted him when he was desperate, encouraged him when something didn't work out, when he didn't receive any commissions abroad (like so many exiled German writers) and couldn't find a market for his works. She lifted him up and looked after him. But didn't make himself small. Weigel knew how to assert herself, to contradict him, to challenge him. Right at the beginning of the documentary, you can hear her defiantly saying to Brecht after the performance: “That was my applause!”

And Brecht also can't be without her, doesn't want to cut the bond and begs: "Dear Helli, we shouldn't widen an unnecessary gap without meaning." The "accommodation of Grete" (Margarete Steffi) is "a purely practical question." Helene can forgive that, knowing the needs of those who have become homeless. But, the begging: "Dear Helli, you shouldn't make a big deal out of it." He has a reluctance to pay attention to gossip and to be "impressed by philistines." Brecht is not embarrassed to then assure her: “But I like you. And no less than ever." Probably also typical Mann: the triumphant message from New York, where Brecht lives with Ruth Berlau, who helps him with "Schweyk in the Second World War." To Helene in Santa Monica: "Dear Helli, I'm learning to wash glasses and cups, sweep the floor, take away trash, make scrambled eggs and soup, all as a self-taught man." Was he expecting applause?

The film outlines the stages in Weigel's life: Born on May 12, 1900 in Vienna, the daughter of an authorized representative and the owner of a toy store from a Jewish family, after graduating from high school at a reform-educated girls' high school, she completed drama school in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. In the revolutionary year of 1919 she went to Frankfurt am Main. Marie in Georg Büchner's “Woyzeck” was one of her first stage successes. In 1922 she moved to Berlin, took singing lessons and studied dramaturgy with Max Reinhardt, and appeared at the Deutsches Theater and the Volksbühne. In 1923 she met Bertolt Brecht, and her son Stefan was born the following year. It wasn't until five years later that Brecht divorced his first wife, the opera singer Marianne Zoff.

The “Golden Twenties,” which were not golden for millions of Germans and therefore characterized by class struggle, flicker across the screen. Lots of agitprop. »Forward, and do not forget / where our strength lies! / While starving and eating, / forward, never forgetting / solidarity!” Brecht wrote the verses and Hanns Eisler contributed the music. Weigel is repeatedly summoned and interrogated by the police. She was probably politically sensitized and committed much earlier than the Augsburg-born poet and bohemian Bert Brecht. She is an incredibly emancipated woman; she announces early on: “I won’t let anyone dictate to me!”

On February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, Brecht and Weigel fled Nazi Germany. “Brecht received a warning,” recalls Weigel in the interview. His theater performances have been disrupted by SA thugs for years. In April 1933, his name appeared on the first “black list” of ostracized authors. On May 10th of that year, his works also end up on flaming pyres in German university towns. Expatriation followed in 1935.

The years of exile take up the most space in the film. It is the longest time of their togetherness, whatever it may be, with ups and downs, suffering and hope. “We believed we would be able to return soon,” says Weigel. Nobody knew whether it would be in 1000 years or two years. Despondency in emigration? No, claims Weigel. A little fraud adapted from heroic post-war poses? Because concern always shines through, for the son Stefan, who is going to war with the US Army, and for the daughter Barbara, who is avoiding her mother's care. And about fellow sufferers. It's a shock when Walter Benjamin commits suicide out of desperation in a small Spanish border town (even though he would have been given the necessary documents to escape overseas the next day). Small careless errors in the film are annoying; Marta, Lion Feuchtwanger's wife, mutates into "Martha Faustwanger" in a subtitle.

The cinematic narrative is peppered with numerous quotes from Brecht's poetic legacy. »You say: / Things are bad for our cause. / The darkness increases. / The strength is decreasing,” says his appeal from his Danish exile “To the Wavering One.” And: »Whoever is still alive, don't say: never! / What is safe is not safe. / It won't stay the way it is." Prophecy in "Praise of Dialectics." In the poem "To those born afterward" we ask for leniency: "You who will emerge from the flood / In which we sank / Remember / When you speak of our weaknesses / Even the dark times / From which you have escaped."

In 1948, Brecht and Weigel returned to Germany, decided on the SBZ, the Soviet occupation zone, founded the Berlin Ensemble, and led it to world fame. Brecht died on August 14, 1956, Weigel on May 6, 1971. Four weeks before her death, she shone in one of her star roles in Nanterre, France, alongside “Mother Courage and Her Children” and “The Rifles of Mrs. Carrar,” in the play “The Mother” by Maxim Gorki.

A touching film that shows us a completely different image of Helene Weigel than the one that was previously popularized by the male theater world and which survived the partly patriarchal society of the GDR: a dragoon-like BE director, domineering and merciless in her dealings with directors and actors. In Maria Wischnewski's film, Weigel appears as a delicate, delicate, modest, intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful woman who is nevertheless aware of her abilities and worth. This correction was probably necessary.

The title “revolutionary in the spotlight” may seem exaggerated to some. But she was. Helene Weigel revolutionized the role of women on the boards that mean the world. And a little beyond that.

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