In this blog post, we will examine key issues by tracing the progression from Brecht’s early individualistic works to his didactic and epic theater, linking his dialectical aesthetics, his intention to “train in posture,” and the context of the Hitler era.

Brecht and His Theater

The works and aesthetics of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) generally follow a three-stage progression. In line with trends commonly evident in early 20th-century European intellectual and artistic circles, a tendency to focus on human pleasure and the underlying sense of nihilism is concentrated in his early works (e.g., ‘Baal’ and ‘The Drum in the Night’). During this period, the individual was prioritized over the collective, and the conflicting values of intense human pleasure and nihilism were highlighted under the influence of an unsettling reality. Scholarly research typically attributes this tendency to the historical context of World War I and Nietzschean influences.
Subsequently, in stark contrast, works characterized by strong political engagement emerged, set against the backdrop of the communist movement in Germany during the mid-to-late 1920s. Brecht himself read Marx’s ‘Capital’ in 1926 to understand the mechanisms of capitalism. The works from this period, often referred to as “educational plays,” highlight the superiority of the collective over the individual while simultaneously emphasizing the individual’s rebirth within the collective. For example, in ‘The Affirmers and the Negators’, an individual voluntarily sacrifices himself when he becomes an obstacle to the collective’s survival and interests.
Of course, the annihilation of the individual was not Brecht’s ultimate message. The playwright did not intend to glorify individual sacrifice and rebirth within the collective for their own sake, a point generally acknowledged in existing scholarship. In other words, what Brecht sought in the didactic plays was the dismantling of rigid, ideology-tinged thinking; it cannot be denied that he used the relationship between the individual and the collective as a dramatic device to achieve this. However, considering that he harbored high hopes for the communist revolution at the time and intended to use theater to “train one’s posture” in preparation for the revolution, the rebirth of the individual within the collective holds undeniable significance in his mid-career works. Representative works from this period include ‘The Lindberghs’ Flight’, ‘Baden’s Learning Play on Consent’, ‘The Affirmers and the Negators’, and ‘Measures’.
However, the experiment with the didactic play did not last long. The revolution, which he had expected to materialize soon, was thwarted by Hitler’s rise to power, and Brecht was forced into exile. This occurred around 1933, and from that point on, it became impossible to experiment with “training in posture” for actors through theater. In a situation where even performances were uncertain, Brecht had no choice but to write scripts “to put away in a drawer,” and above all, overcoming Hitler’s National Socialism became the more urgent task.
Brecht viewed Hitler as “a great work of propaganda and agitation” and devoted himself to exposing his true nature. He was convinced that National Socialism, as embodied by Hitler, was a variant of capitalism in crisis and an apocalyptic phenomenon; therefore, exposing Hitler’s true nature was, in essence, the same as revealing the true nature of capitalism. Brecht scholars refer to this period as the “Third Period” and classify the works of this era as “epic theater masterpieces.” Major works from this period include ‘The Life of Galileo’, ‘The Mother’, ‘The Good Person of Szechwan’, and ‘Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti’.
The fundamental reason Brecht developed a new type of theater in opposition to traditional drama was his ambitious intention to change the world through theater. Although the idea of changing the world through theater may sound romantic, it was a very serious endeavor for Brecht. He harbored the expectation that actors during the “Learning Plays” period and audiences during the “epic theater” period would recognize the contradictions of reality through their performances and viewings, and would immediately work to overcome those contradictions.
The view that reality is always composed of contradictions is directly linked to Hegel’s dialectic and served as the central principle of Brecht’s works, enabling dialectical thinking. Dialectical structure reveals that reality is composed of contradictions, and the playwright sought to arouse the audience’s interest and surprise so that they would recognize those contradictions. Brecht, who viewed traditional theater—based on Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’—as suppressing critical thinking by inducing audience immersion, advocated for a form of theater that stimulates the audience’s active thinking to help them discover the contradictions of reality more clearly: the epic theater.
The prototype of epic theater was already clearly evident during the era of the didactic plays. As mentioned earlier, the fact that the didactic plays sought to break down stereotypical thinking—that is, thought steeped in ideology—suggests that the didactic plays themselves contained elements of epic theater. This paper focuses on two works that clearly illustrate the roots of the archetypes in Brecht’s mid-to-late period plays: ‘A Man Is a Man’ and ‘The Threepenny Opera’. ‘A Man Is a Man’ prominently illustrates the theme of the individual being reborn within a collective, while ‘The Threepenny Opera’ exposes the collusion between the police and a robber, thereby criticizing the dichotomous thinking that pits police against robbers and demonstrating dialectical thinking. Let us now examine each work in greater detail.

A Man Is a Man

History and Plot
“A Man Is a Man” premiered on September 25, 1926, in Darmstadt, Germany. The protagonist, Galli Gai, is a packer who doesn’t know the word “no.” One morning, he leaves home to buy fish for lunch to give to his wife. However, this journey, undertaken without a second thought, brings about major twists and changes in Gali Guy’s life, and he eventually becomes a completely different person.
On his way to buy fish, Gali Guy meets Beckbig, a widow who sells alcohol to soldiers near a military facility. The gentle and unassuming Gali Guy helps her carry her load and forgets that he needs to buy fish. He then encounters three soldiers from an automatic weapons squad of the British Army stationed in India. These soldiers had been robbing the Indian temple “Hwangin-sa” when one of their comrades, Zeraiya, had his hair pulled out; they had hidden Zeraiya in a local kiln and were now searching for a “fourth man” to stand in for him during roll call to avoid detection.
They approach Galli Guy and, using every means of persuasion and intimidation, ask him to play the role of “the house” during roll call, as their lives could be in danger if even one person is missing. Charles Fairchild, who has a strong sex drive, tends to become lecherous when it rains, and the widow Beckvic redirects his attention to help carry out their scheme. After meticulous persuasion and threats, Galli Guy agrees to become the House of Jeraiya and is incorporated into a group called the “Automatic Weapons Squad.”
One of the temptations luring Galli Guy into the group involves a business dealing in elephants, and he cannot easily shake off this temptation. His transformation into a member of the Zeraiya House is carried out with extreme thoroughness; Galli Gai even denies his own identity in front of a wife who has come looking for her husband, who has not returned home. Just as parts are assembled to build a machine, he abandons his identity and is assembled into a member of the group.
The play features an interlude that metaphorically explains this process. “Brecht asserts, ‘A man is a man. Anyone can claim this, but he proves it, demonstrating that he can accomplish many things as a human being. Tonight, right here, a human being is being assembled just like a car.” This description emphasizes Galli Gai’s transformation.
The full process of his transformation into the collective is described in the greatest detail in Chapter 9, which is structured like a play-within-a-play and consists of six smaller sections. Gali Guy joins a business involving an elephant, but it is eventually revealed that the elephant was a fake made of paper; he is arrested on charges of fraud and sentenced to death. When the order to execute him is given, a shocked Gali Guy faints, but upon waking—because the fired bullet was a dummy—he has become a completely different person.
Upon waking, Galli Gay renounces his identity, volunteers to become “Home,” and even recites a eulogy for himself. Meanwhile, in parallel with Galli Gay’s transformation into a member of an automatic weapons squad, the violent soldier Fairchild gradually transforms into a civilian—an ordinary individual unable to control his sexual urges.

The Individual and the Collective

Gali Guy, remolded as a member of the collective, has become a war machine by the final chapter. He conquers the mountain fortress of Zir el Dekober, where as many as 7,000 refugees lost their lives; in that scene, a real house appears, but it is no longer recognized as a home. The scene where Galli Guy seizes the identity cards of his three comrades while crossing the Tibetan border symbolically illustrates just how firmly he has taken root within the collective.
Brecht’s conception of this work dates back to 1918, when he was barely 20 years old. It is widely believed that the historical context—an era in which the scars of World War I had not yet faded—was the very motivation behind this play. The idea that, in the course of the world war, individual identity is obliterated, and that the individual exists solely within the collective and is interchangeable with other individuals, served as the direct backdrop for this work.
As if to support this, Brecht’s diary entry from July 1920 contains the following passage: “… Citizen Josef Galgai falls into the clutches of evildoers. They commit wicked acts against him, strip him of his name, and leave him lying there, his skin peeled off. So let everyone take care of their own skin!” Furthermore, in the poem “This Man Was Citizen Galgai,” written the same year, there is the line: “Citizen Galgai / could very well be someone else.” The concept of the character “Galgai” revealed in this diary and poem illustrates the individual’s mutability and anonymity as a being that can be assembled according to the situation.
Interestingly, Brecht embraced the idea that humans can change greatly depending on their environment and that they are more human when part of a collective than as individuals—viewing this as an appealing and positive theme. Around 1924, he changed the title of the work from “Galgai” to “A Man Is a Man,” and when he finalized it as a radio play in 1927, he remarked: “Galgai is by no means a weakling. On the contrary, he is an incomparably strong person. It was only after he ceased to be a private individual that he became strong. He becomes strong only within the collective.”
This perspective, which prioritizes the collective over the individual, is repeated in his “learning plays” from 1926 onward. For example, in works from this period such as “Those Who Agree / Those Who Disagree” and “Measures,” the process by which individuals come to agree with the collective’s decisions is repeated; this structure is deeply connected to “A Man Is a Man.”
However, Brecht’s interest in the collective took a different turn, taking on totalitarian characteristics with Hitler’s rise to power. This shift was reflected in the production history as well; for instance, during the 1931 Berlin production, Brecht omitted Acts 10 and 11 on the grounds that “Act 9 of this play sufficiently demonstrated the purpose for which the transformation of the packer Gali Gai was being exploited.” Subsequently, anti-militarist—or, in other words, anti-fascist—tendencies became deeply ingrained in the process of revising the work.
The 1938 Malik edition and the 1954 revised edition, in particular, drew stronger parallels with Nazi Germany, steering the work toward an anti-militarist perspective. Brecht criticized the problems of Hitler-style collectivism and proposed, as an alternative, a “truly socialist collective” with workers in mind.
Meanwhile, between 1924 and 1925, the conception of the play underwent changes. The setting was moved to India, the backdrop shifted to the military, and the protagonist transformed from a citizen into a dockworker. These changes can be explained by the influence of Kipling, whom Brecht was reading with great interest at the time; for instance, the scene where the Zeraia family is trapped in a palanquin and the setting featuring an Indian temple unfold in a manner similar to Kipling’s novel ‘The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvani’.

Analysis and Commentary

Through the depiction of Gali Gai easily “transforming” into the Zeraiya family, the play reveals the theme of individual anonymity and the loss of individuality. In early 20th-century Europe, the collapse of individual identity and the spread of collectivism were universal phenomena of the era, and within this context, the play clearly demonstrates that an individual can be reborn within a collective.
However, the idea of being reborn within a collective has at times been the subject of serious criticism. In particular, in the 1926 version, the collective that Gali Gai joined was the military, and her cheering like a cog in the war machine after joining the collective was enough to leave a negative impression, as it was later linked to Hitler’s fascism.
This work exhibits various aspects that illustrate Brecht’s transitional period. Here, he introduced the “allegorical drama form” for the first time, a form that would later evolve into his signature writing style, leading to his masterpieces of epic theater. Furthermore, the seeds of a narrative technique that depicts the same theme in a multilayered manner—through repetition in various forms such as songs, allegories, and characters’ narrative reports—appear in this work.
For example, the use of plays-within-plays and narrative techniques (e.g., “I am Widow Beckbig. And this is my beer-selling train.”) are linked to his intention to create opportunities for rational analysis and observation through such repetition and multi-layered narration. Therefore, this work can be understood as a product of the transitional period leading up to narrative theater, including didactic plays.

The Threepenny Opera

There are two reported reasons why Brecht wrote ‘The Threepenny Opera’. First, in late 1927 and early the following year, his colleague Elisabeth Hauptmann produced the first German translation of the British playwright John Gay’s ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ (1729), and Brecht took a keen interest in the work. Subsequently, Brecht met Ernst Josef Aufricht in Berlin—who was opening a theater and planning to stage new plays—and showed him parts of his adaptation; Aufricht found it intriguing.
John Gay’s original ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ centers on the conflict between Pitchfork, a lawyer and fence, and Mackis, the leader of a gang of beggars who rule the underworld. In the original, Mackie supplies Picken with stolen goods, and Picken sells them for profit. The two are business partners, yet their relationship is marked by both betrayal and conflict. When Picken’s daughter, Polly, falls in love with Mackie, her father denounces Mackie, sending him to the gallows; thus, issues of social status, hypocrisy, partnership, and betrayal emerge as central themes. These elements aligned perfectly with Brecht’s strategy to expose the hypocrisy of civil society.

History of Creation and Influence

Premiered in Berlin on August 31, 1928, ‘The Threepenny Opera’ achieved a level of success virtually unprecedented at the time, establishing Brecht as a world-renowned playwright. While there were likely various factors contributing to its success, many believe that the music used in the play played a significant role. According to records, the early part of the performance was relatively unremarkable, but when “The Cannon Song” was sung, the audience suddenly came alive and reacted with enthusiasm.
The music used in the production was primarily composed by Kurt Weill, who collaborated with Brecht. The musical characteristics adopted in this work tended to emphasize unease and imbalance rather than harmony and balance, and this atonal atmosphere was effective in conveying the instability and satire of civil society. It also fit well with the atmosphere of the play, which features beggars and gangs from the underworld.
The success of this play, which began in Germany in 1928, spread throughout Europe and overseas throughout the 1929s and 1930s. It was performed in Zurich on January 29, 1929, in Vienna on March 9, and in Basel on May 31; it was also staged in Russia in 1930 and in New York in 1933. Thanks to the interest and criticism it simultaneously generated, the play was even restaged in Germany after the end of World War II in 1945.

Plot and Analysis

The historical setting of the play is not explicitly stated within the text. However, given that the coronation of the Queen of England serves as the backdrop—and considering that the last such coronation took place in 1837—one might superficially infer that the story is set around the mid-19th century. Yet what is more significant than the specific date is the stage of civil society development that the mid-19th century represents. The play is set in a society where the Industrial Revolution was already well underway and urbanization had advanced in rapidly industrializing regions such as Britain and France.
Furthermore, considering that Brecht, having become deeply immersed in Marxism around 1926, was convinced that literature could change the world and sought to expose the distorted ideologies of capitalist society and the false consciousness of civil society, it is reasonable to view the play’s temporal and spatial setting as reflecting the situation in Europe from the late 19th to the early 20th century, a period marked by significant progress in industrialization and capitalism.
This serves as the basis for interpreting the play’s critical perspective on the order of a sick and corrupt civil society.
Brecht adopted a dialectical perspective as his primary way of viewing the world and applied his conviction that the world is composed of contradictions to his art. Using epic theater as his theoretical framework, he sought to transform readers’ consciousness by exposing how what appears to be justice on the surface is, in reality, injustice, believing that this shift in consciousness would lay the groundwork for the development of a new society. This general strategy is imprinted throughout the entire structure of the work.
The consistent theme of this work is to expose how the order of civil society—disguised under the names of morality, welfare, and order—is, in reality, no different from the methods of a robber. By revealing that citizens are robbers and robbers are citizens, that the police—who are supposed to uphold order and justice—are in fact colluding with thieves, and that even love is bought and sold like a commodity, the author sought to expose just how flawed and riddled with contradictions civil society truly is.
First, focusing on the businessman Mackiss reveals the essence of capitalist enterprise. Those employed by his company make money through robbery, and McKiss makes a living by exploiting them. His counterpart, Peachum, also exhibits the attitude of a monopolistic capitalist by assigning exclusive begging territories to beggars and reaping profits from them. The scene where the beggars employed by Peachum ultimately have the money they collected through begging taken away from them can be read as a metaphor for the lives of workers in a capitalist society.
The relationship between the prostitute Jenny and Mackis also clearly illustrates how human relationships are commodified in civil society. McKiss, blinded by greed, abandons and sells Jenny, and Jenny ultimately betrays McKiss. Here, human beings are reduced to objects of trade—that is, commodities. Polly is no exception. Pitchin, who claims to be the poorest man in London, gathers beggars to run a begging business, and Polly takes on the role of eliciting the public’s sympathy for that business.
Pitchon, who exploits his daughter for his business, pretends to love Polly but never allows anything that might interfere with his business. The reason Pitchon vehemently discourages Polly’s marriage is his fear that marriage might distance her from her role of eliciting the public’s sympathy. Even intimate human relationships—such as family, marriage, and trust—are reduced to mere means of maintaining material interests, while the human values that should be respected in and of themselves are ignored.
When Brecht conceived of the epic theater in the mid-1920s, his goal was to provide both entertainment and a moral lesson. The lives of the social underclass—such as underground gangs and beggars—the conflicts and deals among them, and their collusion with the police provide the audience with entertainment. However, the most notable achievement of Brecht’s adaptation is how it links social criticism to a moral lesson, prompting the audience to think for themselves.
This lesson is not explicitly stated within the work. Instead, the play reveals the reality that renders a humane life impossible and, using that reality as a model, guides readers and audiences to form their own judgments. For example, whether the reason Pichon is forced to view even Polly as a commodity stems from his personal character or from a social system that prioritizes material values over human love is left for the audience to decide. The fact that police officers, who believe they are upholding justice, are in reality colluding with injustice is also linked to the structural distortions of capitalism.
Under these conditions, the audience comes to realize on their own that the cause rendering a humane life impossible is not individual moral failings, but the capitalist social structure. These elements align with the general structure repeatedly demonstrated in Brecht’s epic theater, and this characteristic can also be confirmed in the epilogue-like dialogue found in his later masterpieces.

Structural Elements: In Relation to Epic Theater

‘The Threepenny Opera’ is richly infused with the core elements of epic theater—namely, various forms of the “alienation effect.” After encountering Marxism in the mid-1920s, Brecht came to believe that literature could change the world; he viewed it as a top priority to enable people to recognize the contradictions of reality for themselves.
Brecht believed that, in order for the audience to actively perceive reality, a device was needed to make the familiar appear unfamiliar. To this end, various techniques appear in his works, the most notable of which is the deliberate interruption of the flow of the play.
Similar to Walter Benjamin’s discussion on the relationship between epic theater and film, Brecht emphasized montage-like interruptions and believed that the combination of disparate elements was necessary to prompt the audience to engage in active thinking. These interruptions take various forms, and as a result, the audience is able to maintain a sense of distance and reflect on the play rather than passively immersing themselves in the plot.
One example is the insertion of the song “Jenny the Pirate” in the middle of a wedding scene. When this song—which at first glance appears to have no direct connection to the plot—begins, the lighting changes and the flow of the stage shifts, interrupting the original narrative. The actors playing gang members on stage transform into an audience listening to the song, while the original audience becomes the “audience of the audience.” This “play-within-a-play” effect forces the audience to take a step back.
Furthermore, the lyrics of the song itself are deeply meaningful. The song, sung by Jenny, a Soho laborer, contains passages that hint at a future revolutionary upheaval. For example, it depicts a ship “with eight sails and fifty cannons” bombarding Soho, signaling the dawn of a new world. In this way, the insertion of the song interrupts the flow of the story about the underground gang and prompts the audience to simultaneously reflect on the current reality of exploitation and the possibility of future transformation.
In addition, various devices—such as scenes that directly address the audience, plays-within-plays, the appearance of a narrator, and narrative reports—are used throughout the work. All these techniques are prime examples of the “defamiliarization effect,” designed to ensure that the audience maintains a critical distance rather than becoming solely emotionally immersed.