Berta Lask was born in
Wadowice, Galicia (the city became part of Poland after WWI.) She moved to Berlin in 1901 following her
marriage to Louis Jacobson, a physician. During the early years of her
marriage, she had four children. She also wrote poetry from 1910 to 1920. Two
collections of her poetry were published after World War One. She rapidly gained
recognition as an Expressionist poet.
Her concern with political
issues was awakened as she became active in the women’s movement. She expanded her political interests and became
increasingly radical following the 1917 October Revolution in Leningrad and the
1918 November Revolution in Berlin. She began to write plays as a result of wanting
to convert German workers to socialism.
She firmly believed that workers and women could build better lives under
this social order.
Lask started writing plays
around 1919 prior to joining the recently established German Communist Party. 1923 marked both her formal commitment to the
Party and her first major stage success titled The Dead Are Calling. This
dramatic poem pertains to the death of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, both
leaders in the Spartacist League. These are the same individuals that Lask
featured in several of the Liberation
tableaux. The Dead Are Calling (Die Toten rufen) received more than
thirty performances in venues throughout Berlin.
When Berta Lask wrote Liberation (Die Befreiung) in 1924, she
was experimenting with ideas that expanded beyond Expressionism. She was testing new ways of telling the story while attempt to stir audiences to political
action. This emerging theatrical style became labelled Agitprop Theatre. Agitprop
is a fusion of intellectual propaganda and emotional agitation. Its aim is to stir audience members to action
once they leave the theatre through being informed of real events. They have
been exposed to a possible solution to their misery and are hopefully motivated
to utilize it.
Agitprop theatre was
performed by Workers’ Theatre groups who were usually amateur ensembles. Erwin Piscator created one of the earliest groups of this
type in Berlin. Liberation was written using the basics of the Agitprop style, but
it embellished the written style and pushed the production values into a new
style of staging that was of interest to Piscator. Erwin Piscator wanted to stage Liberation during the 1925 theatre
season.
Piscator cast this play
from his Workers’ Acting Group and he used Berlin’s Central-Theater (1865-1945)
to stage it. He had managed this theatre during the 1922-1923 season, but he merely
leased it for Liberation. This old
theatre seated about 1,000 persons. Piscator was rapidly establishing himself
as an innovative and significant professional director at this time.
Liberation
suited Piscator’s purpose for theatre since he wanted to awaken the audiences’ consciousness
by theatrically presenting recent political events and forwarding a bit of the
ideology that supported the movement. He wanted his audiences to gain a new
awareness of the political situation so they would willingly become involved with
the Party once they left the theatre. Lask’s script closely follows some of the
events relating to the Russian and German revolutions. She demonstrates how these
movements changed the lives of ordinary citizens, with a special emphasis on
the plight of women.
She also incorporated the
use of some of the newest stylistic innovations. She used the Expressionistic
style of depersonalized characters, who have generic names such as woman or
soldier. Lask also incorporated a few
characters who are named individuals. These characters are in stark contrast as leaders to the
unnamed. Lask also utilized short rapid scenes that was becoming a feature of
the Agitprop style. She developed an immediate relationship between life on
stage and the audience with her Prologue: a woman located in the house of the
theatre begins to question the Theatre Director about the play. This same woman interrupts the tableaux one
more time to focus the story in the direction of her interest. These are a few
of the most obvious features Lask incorporated into Liberation.
Liberation
also required a different presentational approach and some of these ideas she
incorporated into the script. One example is Lask wanted each tableau to be
introduced on stage in a manner that immediately identified the location and
date of a scene. This information may
have been flashed on a screen or written on a sign that was shown to the
audience. Her intent was to immediately draw the audience into each moment as
if witnessing the actual event. She was
writing about relatively new political ideas as well as writing for a new style
of theatre production. Piscator, in
1925, was involved with expanding a style of theatrical production that utilized
projections and new staging techniques. Staging Liberation fit perfectly into Piscator development as an innovative
theatre director who would eventually be recognized as one of the creators the
Epic Theatre style.
Lask continued to write
political plays and while her 1926 script titled Leuna 1921 was in rehearsal, it was banned by the authorities. Lask was repeatedly accused of treason during
this period, her published plays were seized by the government and performances
banned. Some scholars of Lask’s dramas believe that Leuna 1921 is her best work. As a result of Lask’s problems with
the government during the 1920s, her reputation as a dramatist began to fade.
After the
national socialist were voted into power in 1933, Lask spent a brief time in prison. Following
her incarceration, she was allowed to emigrate to Moscow. After many years of
living in various cities in the Soviet Union, Lask wanted to return to Germany.
In 1953, she moved to East Berlin. In 1955, she penned a fictional autobiography
titled Silence and Storm (Stille und Sturm).
I searched for evidence
of her plays being presented in the United States and Great Britain. The only information
I found was a notice in the Brooklyn
Eagle on March 30, 1939. It was asking interested actors to be interviewed
for roles in Lask’s play Torch-bearers.
It was to be the “first English production at the co-operative Summer theater.
. .” I do not know if this production
ever materialized.
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