Barbara Brecht - Schall

Barbara Brecht-Schall, Guardian of Father’s Plays, Dies at 84 By BRUCE WEBERSEPT. 2, 2015 Photo

Barbara Brecht-Schall in 1993. She performed with the Berliner Ensemble, the troupe founded by her father in 1949. Credit Nihad Nino Pusija/ullstein bild, via Getty Images Continue reading the main storyShare This Page Email Share Tweet Save More Continue reading the main story

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

Barbara Brecht-Schall, a daughter of the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the guardian of his literary legacy, died on Monday in Berlin. She was 84.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Johanna Schall.

Mrs. Brecht-Schall was an actress who performed with the Berliner Ensemble, the distinguished company founded by her father in 1949 in what was then East Berlin. Her mother was Helene Weigel, Brecht’s second wife, an actress and the director of the company who oversaw the publication and production of Brecht’s work after his death in 1956.

Ms. Weigel died in 1971, and though management of the ensemble ostensibly passed from the family, Brecht’s three children became his literary heirs and thus maintained a measure of artistic control. His son, Stefan, and a daughter from a previous marriage, Hanne Hiob, asked Barbara, who was married to one of the company’s actors, Ekkehard Schall, to assume the lead role as administrator of their father’s oeuvre.

“It seemed to all of us that I, like my mother, would be good at taking care of such things,” Mrs. Brecht-Schall said in an introduction to a volume of her father’s poetry, “Love Poems,” published in English translation in 2014, “although some people were furious that a woman could decide what could and could not be done with plays.”

The Berliner Ensemble was created to produce Brecht’s stylized, politically leftist and deliberately audience-provoking plays, among them “Mother Courage and Her Children,” “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” “The Good Woman of Setzuan,” and “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” It still focuses on his work, though not exclusively.

It has long been one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in Germany, where Brecht’s stature as a dramatist and poet is unexceeded, and perhaps because of that it has seen its share of turmoil over the decades.

Political realities intruded on the company, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when its director, Manfred Wekwerth, a communist, was dismissed by the Berlin minister of culture. There followed a chaotic period in which the theater’s leaders and potential leaders — at one point the theater was being run by a five-member board — squabbled over its direction.

By then Mrs. Brecht-Schall had made a reputation as a fierce protector of her father’s theatrical predilections, earning the ire of many German theater artists for standing in the way of Brecht productions around the country.

At the Berliner Ensemble, she was insistent on her right to approve the director, principal actors and designer of productions of Brecht’s work, and she was thus often in conflict with those whose creative input she felt marred or muted Brecht’s intentions.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story Advertisement

Continue reading the main story “As the protector and guardian of her father’s legacy, Barbara Brecht-Schall was a forceful and courageous, often difficult negotiating partner,” the Berliner Ensemble said in a statement after her death.

Richard Garmise, a friend and a lawyer for Bertolt Brecht’s interests in North America, said in an interview that Mrs. Brecht-Schall was not averse to creative stagings of her father’s work.

“What she didn’t want was people changing the text,” he said. “She was not a fierce person, but she had a job to do.”

Barbara Marie Brecht was born in Berlin on Oct. 28, 1930. With the Nazis’ rise to power, the Brecht family left Germany in 1933 on an odyssey that took them to Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and the Soviet Union before they settled in Los Angeles.

The family returned to Berlin after Brecht was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. In his testimony, he said he had never been a member of the Communist Party.

Ekkehard Schall died in 2005. In addition to Johanna Schall, Mrs. Brecht-Schall is survived by another daughter, Jenny Schall-Dizdari, and two grandchildren. Johanna Schall said she and her sister are to share oversight of their grandfather’s works with the two children of Brecht’s son, Stefan, who died in 2009.

Mr. Garmise said Mrs. Brecht-Schall was especially pleased by the publication of “Love Poems,” because though Brecht is revered as a poet as well as a playwright in Germany, English-language readers are largely unfamiliar with his poems. Robert Weil, editor in chief of Liveright & Company, the division of W. W. Norton that published “Love Poems,” said a more expansive volume of Brecht’s poetry is scheduled to appear in 2018.

Correction: September 4, 2015 An obituary on Thursday about Barbara Brecht-Schall, a daughter of the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the guardian of his literary legacy, misstated part of the name of one of Brecht’s plays. It is “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” not “The Irresistible Rise of Arturo Ui.”