“She is benign, gruff, brave, and reliable. / She is unpopular. «This is how Bertolt Brecht’s poem» About a great actress of our generation «, written in 1929, ends, which shows the ambivalence of work on the stage and portrays a very specific mime: the Weigel.
Helene Weigel, born in Vienna in 1900, is one of the outstanding theater actresses of the past century. Her name is closely connected to that of Brechts. They met in 1923, and Weigel became Brecht’s third wife. The two lived together until Brecht’s untimely death in 1956.
Women of great artists often succumb to the fate of disappearing in the shadow of their husbands. But Helene Weigel was an independent, self-confident artistic personality – and she had already achieved some fame as a young woman before she met Brecht. In the 1920s she came to the theater metropolis Berlin and played there at the Volksbühne and at the Deutsches Theater. She became one of the most sought-after actresses in the Weimar Republic.
The fascist takeover made it necessary for the socialist actress, who came from Jewish parents to flee immediately. Brecht’s career reached a turning point, and yet he now had the opportunity to devote himself entirely to writing. Helene Weigel had lost the theater and her audience. German fascism also meant being banished from the stage for more than ten years. Suddenly she was thrown back on the role of the mother, the housewife, and ultimately also the manager and organizer for the changeable life in emigration. Attempts to gain a foothold in the film do not succeed either in the Soviet Union or in Hollywood.
After the difficult years of exile, Weigel returned to East Berlin with Brecht – to show the unteachable her good face, as Brecht wrote. Here Weigel fought to ensure that at least some of the years that had been lost were “given back” to her. From now on she was regularly on stage in major roles. The famous Berliner Ensemble was founded in 1949, initially as a guest at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and directed by Helene Weigel. From 1954 their own house was available, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, which bears the name of the group around Brecht to this day. Weigel remained director of the stage until her death – and one of her most important actresses. Brecht had invented the epic theater with his dramas, the epic way of playing first had to be developed by the actors. A demonstrative, gestural and yet restrained acting on the stage determined the work of the Weigel and is part of the Brechtian theater revolution.
The Berliner Ensemble was bestowed world fame and with it also its actors. In 1971, shortly before her death, Weigel was on stage for the last time with a guest performance by “Die Mutter” in Paris. She embodied the powerful worker Pelagea Vlasowa, whose final monologue ends hopefully: “Because the vanquished of today are the winners of tomorrow / And this never becomes: today.”
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