Berliner Ensemble

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History of the Berliner Ensemble

The Berliner Ensemble was founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel in 1949, following the much acclaimed production of his play Mother Courage. After Brecht's return from exile the company first worked at Wolfgang Langhoff's Deutsches Theater (Schumannstrasse).

In 1954, it moved to its own home at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, a theater with a lavish, neo-Baroque interior that had survived the war without much damage and was home in 1928 to the premiere of Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Here Brecht directed his plays The Caucasian Chalk Circle and, together with Erich Engel, The Life of Galileo. His students Benno Besson, Egon Monk, Peter Palitzsch, and Manfred Wekwerth were given the opportunity to direct plays by Brecht that had not yet been staged. The stage designers Caspar Neher and Karl von Appen, the composers Paul Dessau and Hanns Eisler, and the dramaturge Elisabeth Hauptmann were among Brecht's closest collaborators. After Brecht's death in 1956, Helene Weigel continued as the company's artistic manager. Young directors including Manfred Karge and Matthias Langhoff started their careers with the Berliner Ensemble. The company made its mark with such productions as The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui starring Ekkehard Schall as Ui and with Helene Weigel's memorable performances in Coriolan and The Mother.

When Ruth Berghaus became artistic director in the 1970s, there was a chance for political and artistic renewal. She directed Cement by Heiner Müller, much of whose work had been banned until then from the GDR stages. Young directors including B.K. Tragelehn and Einar Schleef and the stage designer Andreas Reinhardt questioned the traditions of Brechtian theater. The political establishment did not accept the challenge of Berghaus's more experimental ways, and Manfred Wekwerth replaced her as artistic director in 1977. Nevertheless, new drama did find its way onto the stage. Writers including Volker Braun and Georg Seidel, and Horst Sagert's production of scenes from Urfaust, brought new life to a repertoire otherwise handicapped by restrictive official policies.

In 1992, under the new artistic management of Matthias Langhoff, Fritz Marquardt, Heiner Müller, Peter Palitzsch, and Peter Zadek, the Berliner Ensemble changed from a state-owned theater into a private, limited company subsidized by the city government. Heiner Müller's production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, with Martin Wuttke playing the title role, became one of the most successful in the history of the Berliner Ensemble. His program "Brecht - Müller - Shakespeare" remains the guiding legacy of the Berliner Ensemble.

On April 30, 1999, the curtain came down on the final production of Heiner Müller's "Die Bauern" at the Berliner Ensemble, an early end to the theater's season that also marked the end of the institution as we know it. Established by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel in 1949 (first housed in the Deutsches Theater), the Ensemble finally moved into the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in March 1954. After reunification in 1990, the Ensemble was transformed into a public corporation with an enormous city subsidy and a collective management team of well-known directors. This team quickly disintegrated, and Heiner Müller, probably Brecht's most critical but also most loyal heir, became the manager and artistic director. When he died in December 1995, the difficult decision about who would manage this highly symbolic cultural institution was exacerbated by another problem: the theater building itself was in the process of being bought by a nonprofit foundation in the hands of dramatist Rolf Hochhuth, who seemed to have his own plans for re-opening the theater. After the city of Berlin negotiated a settlement to everyone's satisfaction, the search for a new director / manager began. Claus Peymann, the provocative and successful manager of the Burgtheater in Vienna was finally appointed to the position and opened the theater in January 2000, after extensive renovations were completed during the next months. Peymann assumed his role with a commitment - like Brecht's - to producing political theater for our times, but his point of departure, his definition of what is political and what our times need, is certainly different from Brecht's.

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