The Rationality of War: Brecht’s Theatre Experiments at the Limit of the Epic

This article traces the dramaturgy of war as a crucial concept not only for accessing Brecht’s plays but also for his experiments with the model book genre. One of the earliest model books, the Antigonemodell 1948, stands out in this context as an investigation of violence that displays the limits of epic theatre and that captures the diverse potential of Brecht’s use of models. By putting the Antigonemodell 1948 side by side with the contemporaneous War Primer (1955), this article analyzes two projects in which Brecht creates an anatomy of violence that depends on the intermedial collages of word and image. Part archive, part performance on the page, part directing scrap books, these models explore the experience of war and turn into a laboratory for developing new dramaturgies that reflect the precarious moment between two wars: WWII and the Cold War.