Lecture Performance with
Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremic´

Lecture performance at Rosa-Luxemburg-Saal, 2016, Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, Berlin

WORKER BECOMES WRITER, MASCH, AGIT PROP, MARAGERET STEFFIN

The lecture performance of artists Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremic´ and Ina Wudtke consists of texts by Berlin working-class writer Margarete Steffin and an introduction to agit prop and the marxist workers’ schools in the 1920s and 1930s. The performance was produced in 2016, in which the hundredth birthday of Peter Weiss was celebrated. In his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, Peter Weiss describes the encounter of his literary alter ego with Brecht and Steffin in exile. Before 1933, Steffin was a part of workers’ choirs and agit prop groups, for which she also wrote song texts and poems for agitation. Steffin became acquainted with Brecht at the MASCH which was founded at the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus in Berlin. She would become Brecht’s closest assistant from 1933 until her early death in 1941. Within Brecht’s writers’ collective, she was supposed to translate his texts into „worker’s language“. While in exile in Denmark, Brecht and Steffin wrote the most important texts of the German resistance against fascism.

Lecture performance at Rosa-Luxemburg-Saal, 2016, Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, Berlin

Lecture performance at Rosa-Luxemburg-Saal, 2016, Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, Berlin

Lecture performance at Rosa-Luxemburg-Saal, 2016, Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, Berlin