Description: The late years of the Weimar republic were a time of political disillusionment and economic disintegration, and nowhere were the forces competing for the political allegiances of the working class more active than in Berlin. This book examines the interplay of socialist and communist politics with the world of the working class (and particularly its younger people) in the forms of agitprop theatre, workers' chorus, and the modernist theatre of Brecht. Drawing on sources such as newspaper articles and reviews, the text of agitprop plays, festival and concert programmes, and police reports, Professor Bodek provides a new angle on the cultural and political forces at work in the proletarian sphere during the period, showing how the theatre of Brecht draws on many of its aesthetic assumptions, and highlighting the different aesthetics and political theories of Social Democratic workers' choruses and Communist agitprop theatre. Particular attention is given to the latter, whose troupes wrote and performed their own material, thus acting as a surrogate mass medium for communication of the Communist Party's political line: to understand the troupes, the life of working-class youth of the time is investigated, describing and analyzing unemployment, housing, education, and leisure activities, and examining its relationship to the Weimar state through its members' own eyes.

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