Proletarian Theater as a Site for Education
Texts by Asja Lācis and Walter Benjamin, with an introduction by Andris Brinkmanis
In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are.
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Reformers of theatre have reformulated Plato’s opposition between choros and theatre as one between the truth of the theatre and the simulacrum of the spectacle. … Since German Romanticism, thinking about theatre has been associated with this idea of the living community. … the community as a way of occupying a place and a time, as the body in action as opposed to a mere apparatus of laws; a set of perceptions, gestures and attitudes that precede and pre-form laws and political institutions. … Hence reform of theatre meant the restoration of its character as assembly or ceremony of the community. Theatre is an assembly in which ordinary people become aware of their situation and discuss their interests, says Brecht following Piscator. It is, claims Artaud, the purifying ritual in which a community is put in possession of its own energies. If theatre thus embodies the living community, as opposed to the illusion of mimesis, it is not surprising that the desire to restore theatre to its essence can draw on the critique of the spectacle.
—Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator
Demonstrators holding aloft masks in Leningrad, May 1, 1924. Slogan, left: “I buy from the private merchant”; slogan, right: “I buy from the cooperative.” Krasnaja Gazeta, May 2, 1925
What are the forms of culture still capable of assuming the shape of a chorus, an assembly? Which cultural forms might help build communities in which a multitude of diversities might be expressed as a collective force, as a voice able to articulate its discourse, its desires, and give shape to its politics, even if just for a specific period of time? And might such experiences produce knowledge that resists the infinite separation imposed by capitalism and bring one back to self-determined vita activa (praxis)?Indeed, what tools for a positive dialectics do we still have at our disposal and where shall we look for them?
To revisit the intellectual legacy of early twentieth-century Germany and Soviet Russia means to revisit the “ruins of yesterday where today’s riddles are solved,” as Walter Benjamin once put it. It also means to face wounds and confront ghosts that this time might become allies in our attempt to decipher what can be learned from their haunting presence. To cope with these phantom limbs and ghostly presences of modernity, sometimes violently blasted out of the collective memory, and to oppose the anosognosia of our time is perhaps the task of the materialist historian today. To learn to understand what a body—a social body—was once able to do and still can or cannot do, may provide the necessary awareness to lay the ground for art forms and politics yet to come.
During the hot 1968 season, the name Anna Ernestovna “Asja” Lācis (1891–1979) unexpectedly reemerged among young leftist cultural “archaeologists” as an unearthed ruin of a historical “dream city.” A crucial missing element of a certain political-cultural trajectory had been rediscovered. With it, Benjamin’s short essay “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater” regained the character of a concrete and dialectical political-aesthetical pedagogical praxis, based on real experience. His writings on childhood and pedagogy thus assumed a programmatic character too: to oppose the dominant “bourgeois” education and behavioral models by all means, locating the very foundations of the capitalist ideological edifice in early childhood education.
In 1967 and 1968, while working on Alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion editions dedicated to Ben-jamin’s writings and thought, German literary critic Hildegard Brenner stumbled upon an incredible source of direct testimony in remote Latvia: one Asja Lācis, a Marxist children’s theater director, thinker, and actress who had been a close friend of Benjamin’s. Like so many, Lācis had fallen victim to Stalin’s repressions, but she had actually survived. Yet Lācis’s name was rarely encountered in official historiographies of twentieth-
century European political theater. After her return from a Stalinist gulag in Russia to Latvia in 1948, most of her achievements were vanished from history due to her status as a former political prisoner. Because of the decade-long break in her professional career due to that internment, her theater work had to be started again, almost from scratch.
To go back a bit: Lācis completed her early education in Riga, where her working-class provenance begat many unpleasant confrontations with the bourgeois realities of the period. However, Lācis’s true ideological and artistic formation occurred in St. Petersburg and Moscow. She took courses at the Bekhterev Psychoneurological Research Institute, which she followed with studies at the Fyodor Komissarzhevsky Studio in 1916. This education, along with her being a witness to the revolutionary events of 1917 and a member of the core group of avant-garde artists, poets, theoreticians, and theater directors—among them Eisenstein, Mayakovsky, Meyerhold, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Stanislavski, Tairov, and Vygotsky—became cornerstones of her future engaged practice.
In 1918, the Russian village of Orel became a stage for Lācis’s important experience with Besprisorniki, as the Russian war orphans were then called. Her experimental children’s theater helped the local children overcome the trauma and violence of the postwar period through improvisation, performance, and play. It was a children’s theater made by and for children. The theater emphasized process rather than result, a praxis where participative and collective dimensions became more important than the final spectacle. This empowering venture laid the basis for her methodology, which she would later use in her proletarian and political theater ventures in Riga and elsewhere. Her work in Orel was an open, collective form of theater built upondiscussion and elaboration of plot, improvisation, performance in public spaces, the direct involvement of the audience, and the inclusion of music, dance, and cabaret.
Lācis’s first visit to Germany, in 1922, saw her as a flag bearer of a successful revolution, which led to her meeting major German intellectuals including Lang, Piscator, and Brecht, with whom she would later collaborate. Brecht would go on to synthesize some of her ideas and reflections in his Lehrstücke form. Her collaboration with Piscator, meanwhile, through agitprop theater circles, provided ideas that she incorporated into her own theater practice. But it was in Capri, in 1924, that her friendship and mutually stimulating relationship with Walter Benjamin began. Their copublished article “Naples,” which appeared on August 19, 1925, in Frankfurter Zeitung, condenses this productive exchange. Metaphors of “constellation” and “porosity,” used by both, became concepts important to Adorno, Kracauer, and others. Lācis offered Benjamin what he himself defined as “an insight into radical communism,” which influenced the direction of his subsequent research. Benjamin traveled to Riga in 1925 and to Moscow in 1926. His book One-Way Street begins with a dedication to Lācis: “This street is named Asja Lacis Street after she who like an engineer cut it through the author.”
Beginning in 1928, Lācis’s interests shifted toward children’s cinema, and she worked in collaboration with the widow of Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaya. One of the first cinema theaters for children in Moscow, called Balkan, was the fruit of this joint effort. Lācis became the official representative of the Soviet trade mission in Germany for children’s and documentary cinema, frequently organizing presentations of Soviet culture and film, including Kino-Eye works by Vertov. Her account of this time is narrated in her book Deti i kino (Children and cinema), cowritten with Keilina and published in Moscow in 1928. This was also the year that, upon a request by Becher and Eisler from the Karl Liebknecht Haus, Benjamin would complete a “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater,” which summoned Lācis’s experience, a fact later to be forgotten. In the following years, Lācis continued her work with children’s theater as well as with proletarian theater groups and within the more conventional professional Latvian theater Skatuvein Moscow.
Like numerous other intellectuals of her time, Lācis would be accused and arrested on false charges by the Russian secret police in 1938. She served her sentence first in the Butyrka prison and then at forced labor camps in Kazakhstan. Yet her biography simply states: “I had to spend some time in Kazakhstan.” Little is known of that period in her life, apart from some sporadic memories testifying that Lācis was able to organize a women’s theater collective in her prison camp, notwithstanding its extremely harsh and physically exhausting conditions. Upon her release from prison in 1948, Lācis moved to Valmiera, Latvia, where she worked as the director of the Valmiera Drama Theatre until her retirement in 1958. Only after her rehabilitation did she manage to reestablish her contact with Brecht and to find out Benjamin’s fate. During her retirement she worked on her memoirs and theoretical articles in Russian, Latvian, and German. Lācis passed away in 1979.
The book Revolutionär im Beruf: Berichte über proletarisches Theater, über Meyer-hold, Brecht, Benjamin und Piscator (published in Munich in 1971)would be her only “Western” publication, translated as it was into Italian, French, and Spanish. The work came into being through a series of interviews and correspondence published in Brenner’s magazine. Those materials were edited later by Lācis and included a partial reprint of her previously published Russian book on German revolutionary theater (Revolucionnyj teatr germanii, published in Moscow in 1935). The book became a crucial contribution toward the reconstruction of the history of German intellectual life of the Weimar era, as well as the often overlooked history of the workers’ political theater movement in Germany, including groups like Proletkult Cassel.
If it were not for this rediscovery through Brenner and Lācis’s aforementioned book of memoirs, Revolutionär im Beruf, Lācis’s work might have remained largely unknown to Western scholars. The relative isolation of Cold War Latvia kept these two worlds distinctly separate too. Furthermore, the 1955 edition of Benjamin’s collected writings saw her name removed from the essay “Naples,” as well as from the opening page of One-Way Street. The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research also decided that his Moscow Diary would only be published after Lācis’s death. Her depiction by the Frankfurt School scholars as a “Bolshevik girlfriend” who brought on Benjamin’s turn toward Marxism and his “downfall” was made possible through inaccurate interpretation and a lack of research materials, especially published writings by Lācis herself, which would have immediately dismissed such stereotypes.
The legacy of this revolutionary female theater director of the early twentieth century, who experienced the events of 1917 and herself became a trait d’union between the “Theater of October” and leftist Weimar-era Germany, is still largely unexplored and unfamiliar, except to a small community of scholars and academics. Despite the fact that her work has inspired many post-1968 tendencies in art and theater, from Germany to Italy and in the United States, her work remains underrated and unknown. Many crucial documents are dispersed or locked in archives. A serious reevaluation of Lācis’s work is only in its initial phase. Those who have contributed notably so far include Beata Paskevica, Jack Zipes, Susan Ingram, and Latvian theater director Māra K¸Ķimele, the granddaughter of Asja Lācis. Perhaps the centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution provides a symbolic occasion to reassess those vanguard intellectual efforts interrupted and affected by the disaster of the Stalinist regime in Russia, Nazism in Germany, and the ensuing Cold War politics.
To that end, what follows is a previously unpublished article by Lācis from 1921, titled “New Tendencies in Theater,” together with an account of her experience with children’s theater in Orel. Accompanying these two texts is Benja-min’s Lācis-inspired essay “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater.” Lācis’s theatrical and pedagogical approach emerges through these texts as a synthesis of life, aesthetics, and politics, with a strong emancipatory charge. This might explain why her practice was never fully appreciated in the Soviet Union, while the stricter and more conventional ideology of Makarov or Sats became the regime’s indoctrinatory darlings.
In our present global circumstances of crisis, shock, and a seemingly permanent state of emergency—all lucidly foreseen by Benjamin—and with entire generations deprived of the right to self-determination and forced to face extreme violence, Benjamin’s and Lācis’s program of empowering political-aesthetic education, written many decades ago, encapsulates an enormous potential. As Benjamin has suggested, “What is truly revolutionary is the secret signal of what is to come that speaks from the gesture of the child.” And as Lācis herself noted: “In times of struggle, art has to be both an ally and friend of those in conflict.” Benjamin’s text underlines the plan of the “building” that Lācis could not complete during her lifetime. Yet the ruins of Lācis’s work speak more impressively than the well-preserved edifices of some of her better-known colleagues.
Poster for a discussion about workers’ theater at the Club of the Central Office of the Riga Trade Union, introduced by Anna Lācis, November 1, 1925, offset print, 98.5 × 69.5 cm. Literature and Music Museum, Riga
New Tendencies in Theater
by Asja Lācis
Art is not an end in itself, yet it helps to achieve the ultimate goals of humankind. In this sense, art and socialism have to walk hand in hand.
“Making art is similar to that of making explosives; a day will come when this dynamite of art will be thrown against the walls of the prison of faith. The walls will explode and this prison will be transformed into life,” wrote Andrei Bely.
This new life will be united with art.
Art and life will become one.
Life is creative, always in motion and moving forward; life is a dynamics. Art is part of this movement; once it starts to become motionless, it becomes catastrophic. Everything that becomes stationary in life becomes unnecessary, including art. Everything that becomes immobile becomes historical, noncreative, drained of its life rhythm. Now when such reassessment of values has begun all over the world, we may see it distinctly.
In times of struggle, art has to be both an ally and friend of those in conflict. In this century of struggle, we look for art in the magnificent, free life. In it the creative process reveals itself through an intense and free action of the spirit, throughmasses that flow united by a common exhilarating rhythm. This kind of art-making also finds frequent and manifold expressions in the theater of the century of struggle. Theater in its essence is a collective experience; it is a synthesis of arts, directed toward the future. Theater has an enormous impact on the masses, but in comparison to other art forms, such as painting, it has progressed to a much lesser extent, explored less, developed fewer traditions, especially here in Latvia.
When theater started to become stationary under the weight of capitalism, reformers of theater emerged, looking to banish this immobility. Many instrumental reforms derived from circles of amateurs, artists, and literates, rather than professionals. Such reformers were Stanislavski, Fuchs, Reinhardt, Craig, Evreinov, Komissarzhevsky, Tairov, Meyerhold. Stanislasvki had already expressed everything with his naturalism, and his pupils in Russia (3rd Studio) are elaboratingnew forms of theater. These above-mentioned revolutionary theater directors have already created their traditions, their schools. Tairov, in his chamber theater piece Princess Brambilla, has created a synthetic play, where all performing arts are merged together: comedy, tragedy, ballet, circus, operetta, all coadunatedby a common rhythm. Today’s theater is a kind of cabinet of experimentation that generates new traditions.
This cabinet keeps collectivism useful, since its most recent plays are improvisations put on by the whole collective. Another trend, not a laboratorial one, but a life-bringing movement, advances directly toward the street and assumes the form of mass demonstrations, community festivals, and mass improvisations. The bottom line here is collectivity and amateur theater. Theater here wants to merge with life. Prophets of this new type of theater are Kerzhentsev and Meyerhold. Theater embraces the reality of life more fully than any other field of art. Music is art in time, painting is art in space. Poetry attempts to unite time and space. Theater genuinely unites time and space—creating harmony rather than fracture. Theater embraces music, dance, and a specific art of acting. All this is bound together by an artist—the director.
We cannot have a theater-life, theater-ecstasy, out of the blue. For it needs social unity. Yet we must direct our working methods toward the future and not be anchored in the past. We may work on the construction of proletarian theater at the theater workshops, encouraging (inviting) people of the working classes to join in and help. What should such theater workshops look like? These workshops must unite people who share common interests. The main value should be assigned to the collective action in order to establish a solid bond, which would then serve the common cause: to inspire the need for creative self-expression in the pupils, to locate their creative instincts, and to allow their personalities to blossom. This work must be conducted in freely accessible workshops, and the masses should be encouraged to participate, even if only as observers and critics.
Even today theater frequently is seen as only a leisure activity, an amusement. Sometimes it can become didactic, at times moralizing, like a walking feuilleton. This is not the path that a revolutionary theater should follow. As a revolutionary politician protests against the old economical and social regime, which slays the free spirit of humankind, a revolutionary artist protests against old academic and frozen forms, which have grown out of capitalism, and rather moves toward the new, fresh forms of art. Natural theater has become too narrow, too immobile to express vanguard (flaming) and exploratory ideas and endeavors. New theater is inclined toward symbols, a stylized realism and simplicity—it strives to express a maximum of thought and action with a minimum of means in a concentrated manner. Revolutionary content looks for a revolutionary form!
Like in painting, all these different “-isms”—Futurism, Suprematism—provided new truths for the understanding of the essence of painting, clearing all that was unnecessary on the way to further action, stripping everything down to the basic elements of painting, thus creating new traditions. The theater too has to pass through these purgatory flames in order to acquire traditions, without which no art sphere can exist. Tairov, in his The Veil of Pierrette, has put an emphasis on one of the main elements of the theater: the action. Yet apart from the action there is also “the word,” which cannot be banished from the theater completely.
The new theater should call into action fresh primordial forces, which will emerge, and draw them into the process of amateur performance and collective creation. Yet in order to liberate people spiritually, one should beforehand emancipate them economically and politically. The more the human spirit is inspired to strive for freedom, the more strength it will have to overcome the external barriers which obstruct the way of the formation of its identity.
Theater has to provide aid in stimulating this longing for freedom. Theater has to be that guiding star, which brings one to life—art.
Homeless children in Moscow, 1920s
Children’s Theatre Collective members’ cast for the play Alinur, Orel, Russia, July 1920. Literature and Music Museum, Riga
A Memoir
by Asja Lācis
When I completed my final exams at the [Fyodor Komissarzhevsky] Studio, the Winter Palace in Petrograd had been seized, and the Communists were in control. The revolution moved from Petrograd to Moscow. For a while small groups of junkers continued to resist here and there. The work at the studio did not stop. In the evenings as I walked home, bullets whizzed over my head. The revolution changed the relations between people and their conception of work. Totally new perspectives were opened and antagonistic groups formed at the studio. An immediate change of the repertory and curriculum was demanded. A good number of the teachers at the Latvian refugee school were convinced that the Communists would not hold out much longer. But the leftist writers, teachers, and students “sniffed the morning air.” When I read the first proclamations addressed “To the People, To the People!” signed by Lenin and posted on the walls, I was completely for the Communists. I wanted to be a good soldier of the revolution and to change my life in line with it. And all around me, I saw life changing: the theater moved out onto the street, and the street moved into the theater. The “Theater of October” burst forth.
The tempo of change in the theaters varied—some of them remained skeptical for a long time and balked at the idea of changing. In Petrograd, Meyerhold, that indefatigable experimenter, was one of the first of the theater people to support the Communists outright. He sought contact with factory workers, the Red Guard, and the Komsomol, and he organized theater circles everywhere he could. He even wore the uniform of the Red Guard. His production The Storming of the Winter Palace became a model for mass productions in the open, where thousands participated and tens of thousands watched. His productions of revolutionary plays—Mystery-Bouffe, The Earth in Turmoil, Trust D. E., and so on—continued his earlier experiments (the elimination of the apron of the stage, the exposure of theater machinery, addressing the audience, a “limited” style of decoration) and brought about important innovations: tendentious, direct journalism; sociological characterization; open revue-like dramaturgy; the constructivist stage, etc. … My own work as a director and critic owed a great deal to Meyerhold.
In 1918, I went to Orel. I was supposed to work as a director in the municipal theater—in other words, to follow the traditional theatrical path and make my career. However, things turned out differently. On the streets of Orel, at the market places and cemeteries, in cellars and destroyed buildings, I saw gangs of abandoned children: the Besprisorniki. Among them were boys with black faces that had not been washed for months; boys with ragged jackets from which strands of padding hung loose; boys with wide, long cotton pants which were fastened by a rope around the waist; boys armed with sticks and iron rods. They always went around in gangs, had a leader, and stole, robbed, and attacked people. In short, they were gangs of thieves—victims of world war and civil war. The Soviet government attempted to place these vagabond children in educational institutions and workshops. But they constantly ran away.
War orphans, on the other hand, were given quarters in municipal homes. I visited them and saw that these children had food and sanitary clothing. They had a roof over their heads, but they looked at you like old people, with sad, tired eyes. Nothing interested them. Children without a childhood … You couldn’t remain indifferent when confronted with all of this. I felt I had to do something, and I knew that children’s songs and nursery rhymes would not be enough here. In order to get them to break out of their lethargy, a task was needed which would completely take hold of them and set their traumatized abilities free. I knew how great the power of making theater was and what it might do for these children.
At that time I was living in an elegant aristocratic house where the heroes of Turgenev’s A Nest of Nobles were supposed to have lived. The rooms had large gothic windows through which you could see the old locust trees down by the river. These rooms were just perfect for children’s theater. I went to the head of the People’s Educational System in the city, Iwan Michail Tschurin, and got him involved in my project. The rooms were made into one large hall, and the walls were decorated with frescoes. We estimated that fifty children would come. Instead, more than one hundred showed up.
I was convinced that we could wake the children and develop them through play. It would have been easy just to select a suitable children’s play, distribute the roles, rehearse with the children, and prepare for a performance. That would have kept the children busy for some time, but it would hardly have been beneficial for their development. As soon as you rehearse a given play with children, then you are working from the beginning toward a set goal: the opening performance. The children constantly feel a foreign power that leads them and compels them to do certain things—the director’s power. That way, I could not have achieved my goal: their aesthetic education, the development of their aesthetic and moral capabilities. I wanted to stimulate the children so that they could see better, distinguish sounds, and make useful things from raw material. I divided the work into sections. The children did painting and drawing in order to develop their ways of seeing. This section was led by Viktor Tschestakow, who would later become a set designer for Meyerhold. A pianist led the musical education. Then there was technical training: the children made theater props, buildings, animals, figures, etc. The other sections of my model school in Orel were rhythm and gymnastics, diction, and improvisation. We set free the children’s hidden powers through the process of work and developed their capabilities through improvisation.
The play originated as children performing for children. The system of activities was transformed into a more demanding, collective aesthetic form. Bourgeois education is geared toward the development of a special skill, a special talent. It advances the individual in a one-dimensional way. As Brecht has stated, it wants to “use up” (verzehren) the individual and his capabilities. Bourgeois society demands that its members produce goods as soon as possible. All aspects of this principle become apparent in children’s education. For example, when children play theater according to bourgeois rules, then they must keep in mind the result—the performance, the appearance before the audience. In the process, the joy in playful producing is lost. The director is constantly in the foreground as educator and drills the children. (An appropriate joke: What’s a telephone pole? A pine tree that’s been edited.)
But the goal of communist education is to set productivity free on the basis of a generally high level of education, and to do this for those who have special talents as well as for those who don’t. My working-class background as well as my studies with Professor Bechterev in Petrograd led me to this principle, and I tried to apply it to the children in Orel.
Our starting point for both educators and those who were to be educated was observation. The children observed objects, the relations of objects and people to one another, and their changeability. The educators watched the children to see what they accomplished and how far they could productively apply their skills. Observation was not only practiced and developed through drawing, painting, and music inside the studio but also outside of it. Early in the morning, and again in the evening, we went outside with the children and made them aware of how colors changed through distance and time of day, how different the sounds and noises were in the morning and evening, and how silence can sing.
There were no difficulties with the children who came from the municipal homes to the Turgenev House. However, for a long time I had troubles with the Besprisorniki. When I spoke to them for the first time at the marketplace and asked them to come to us, they taunted and threatened me and told me to go to hell. But I came again. They gradually grew accustomed to me and our disputes so that if I stayed away awhile and then arrived, they surrounded me like an old buddy and greeted me with shouts.
Meanwhile our work in the Turgenev House proceeded. We observed that the children already insisted on having their fantasies and acquired abilities realized in objects. An impor-tant stage, for this need has to be satisfied if the child’s imagination is not to be led astray. We then moved to improvisations on concrete subjects. I selected a children’s play by Meyerhold, Alinur, based on Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale The Star Child.
The children knew nothing about my plans. I gave them a scene from the play as a task for improvisation: robbers sit around a fire in a forest and boast about their deeds. While working on this scene some time later, the first visit of the Besprisorniki took place in our house. The children jumped up and wanted to run away from the intruders who looked terrifying with paper helmets on their heads, armor made out of branches and pieces of lead, and sticks and spears in their hands. I convinced the children to continue improvising and not to pay attention to the intruders. After a while the Besprisorniki leader, Vanjka, strode into the middle of the group of children who were acting and signaled to his gang. They shoved the children aside and began to play the scene themselves. They bragged about murders, arson, robberies and, while doing this, they all sought to outdo one another in horror. Then they stood up and looked at our children with scornful condescension: “That’s what real robbers are like!” According to all the rules of children’s education, I should have interrupted their wild and shameless speeches—but I wanted to gain some influence over them. And I actually won the game: the Besprisorniki returned and became active members of our theater.
The improvised play meant luck and adventure to the children. They understood a great deal, and their interest was aroused. They worked seriously: cut things out, glued, danced, and sang. Texts were learned. And gradually the figure of the evil Tartar boy “Alinur,” who insulted his mother and terrorized other children, took shape. When the different sections of the work moved toward a synthesis, we began to discuss the public performance. Then a demand for collective action arose—moral-political education in a socialist sense—and they wanted to present the play to the other children of the city. The public performance became a festival. The children of our studio went to the city’s open-air theater in a kind of Mardi Gras parade. They carried animals, masks, theater props, and parts of decorations through the streets, and sang as well. Big and little spectators joined in. At the end of the day, many of them followed us back to the Turgenev House.
Our method had proven itself. We demonstrated that it was correct for adult leaders to keep themselves entirely in the background. The children believed that they had done everything themselves—and they did it through play. Ideology was not forced upon them, nor was it drilled into them. They appropriated all that corresponded to their experience. We, too, the educators, learned and saw many new things: how easy it is for children to adapt to situations, how inventive they are, and how sensitively they react. Even children who seemed, at first, untalented and limited demonstrated unexpected abilities and talents. At the performance tensions were surprisingly released, and this made the wild imagination of their inventions visible.
In 1928, when I was in Berlin, I told Johannes R. Becher and Gerhart Eisler about my work. They liked the idea of a model of aesthetic education for children, and they proposed that a similar theater be built in the Liebknecht House. I was to work out the program. Walter Benjamin had already heard about my children’s theater while in Capri in 1924, and he had shown a tremendous interest in it. “I’ll write the program,” he said, “and I’ll describe your practical work and give it a theoretical foundation.” And he actually wrote it. But my theses were presented in an immensely complicated manner in his first version. The program was read in the Liebknecht House, and everyone laughed. “Benjamin must have written that for you!” I returned the program to Benjamin and told him to write it in a more comprehensible way. So that’s how the second version of the “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater” originated.
Pamphlet including Walter Benjamin’s “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater,” (Zentralrat der sozialistischen Kinderläden West-Berlin, 1969), 21 × 15.5 cm. Walter Benjamin Archives, Berlin
Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater
by Walter Benjamin
Prefatory remarks
Every proletarian movement, whenever it has for once escaped the format of parliamentary debate, finds itself confronting many different forces for which it is unprepared. The most powerful of these, as well as the most dangerous, is the younger generation. The self-confidence of parliamentary tedium springs from the fact that a parliament is a monopoly of adults. Mere catchphrases have no power over children. True, in a year you can make sure that children are parroting them throughout the country. But the question is how to make sure that the party program is acted on in ten or twenty years. And catchphrases will not have the slightest effect on this.
Proletarian education must be based on the party program—or, more precisely, on class consciousness. But the party program is no instrument of a class-conscious education because the element of ideology, important though it is, reaches the child only as a catchphrase. We are calling for, and shall not cease to call for, instruments for the class-conscious education of proletarian children. In what follows, we shall ignore the question of the teaching curriculum as such because long before children need to be instructed (in technology, class history, public speaking, and so on), they need to be brought up in a proletarian manner. We shall take, as our starting point, the age of four.
In line with the class position of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois education of little children is unsystematic. This does not mean that the bourgeoisie has no system of education. But the inhumanity of its content betrays itself in its inability to provide anything at all for the youngest children. On children of this age, only truth can have a productive effect. The education of young proletarian children should distinguish itself from that of the bourgeoisie primarily by its systematic nature. “System” here means a framework. For the proletariat, it would be quite intolerable if every six months a new method were to be introduced with all the latest psychological refinements, as in the nursery schools of the bourgeoisie. Everywhere—and the realm of education is no exception here—the preoccupation with “methodology” is a symptom of the authentic bourgeois attitude, the ideology of laziness and muddling through. Proletarian education needs first and foremost a framework, an objective space within which education can be located. The bourgeoisie, in contrast, requires an idea toward which education leads.
We shall now explain why the framework of proletarian education from the fourth to the fourteenth year should be the proletarian children’s theater.
The education of a child requires that its entire life be engaged.
Proletarian education requires that the child be educated within a clearly defined space.
This is the positive dialectic of the problem. It is only in the theater that the whole of life can appear as a defined space, framed in all its plenitude; and this is why proletarian children’s theater is the dialectical site of education.
Scheme of tension
Let us set aside the question whether the children’s theater of which we shall speak has a connection with the ordinary theater at the high points in its history. Yet we must state firmly that this theater has nothing at all in common with that of the modern bourgeoisie. Economically, the theater of the modern bourgeoisie is determined by the profit motive; sociologically, both in front of the curtain and backstage, it is primarily an instrument of sensation. The proletarian children’s theater is quite different. Just as the first action of the Bolsheviks was to hoist the Red Flag, so their first instinct was to organize the children. In this organization the proletarian children’s theater, the basic motif of Bolshevist education, has a central place. There is a way of cross-checking this. In the view of the bourgeoisie, nothing presents a greater danger to children than the theater. This is not just a vestige of the old bogey—the myth of traveling actors who steal children. What we find expressed is the fear that the theater will unleash in children the most powerful energies of the future. And this fear causes bourgeois education theory to anathematize the theater. We may easily imagine how it would react once the fire came too close—the fire in which, for children, reality and play coincide and are fused so that acted sufferings can merge with real sufferings, acted beatings can shade into real beatings.
Nevertheless, the performances of this theater—unlike those of the great bourgeois theater—are not the actual goal of the concentrated collective labor that is performed in the children’s clubs. One might say that here performances come about incidentally, as an oversight, almost as a children’s prank, and in this way the children interrupt the course of study that they have never actually completed. The leader is relatively unconcerned about whether or not the course has been completed. He is more interested in the tensions that are resolved in such performances. The tensions of collective labor are the educators. The overhasty, unrelaxed process of educational labor that the bourgeois director performs—far too late—on the bourgeois actor no longer applies in this system. Why? Because in the children’s club no leader would survive if he attempted in the authentic bourgeois spirit to influence the children directly as a “moral personality.” There is no process of moral influence here. There is no direct influence either. (And it is on this that directing in the bourgeois theater is based.) What counts is simply and solely the indirect influence of the director on the children as mediated by subject matter, tasks, and performances. The inevitable moral processes of compensating and providing correctives are undertaken by the children’s collective itself. This explains why children’s theater productions inevitably strike adults as having authentic moral authority. There is no superior standpoint that an audience can adopt when witnessing children’s theater. Everyone who has not quite sunk into feeblemindedness will perhaps even feel ashamed.
But even this does not take us much further. To have a positive effect, proletarian children’s theaters make a collective audience quite indispensable. In a word: they need the class as audience. Just as only the working class has an infallible intuition for the existence of collectives. Such collectives may be public meetings, the army, or the factory. But the child, too, is such a collective. And it is the prerogative of the working class to have a completely fresh eye for the children’s collective, whereas the bourgeoisie is unable to perceive it. This collective radiates not just the most powerful energies, but also the most relevant ones. In fact, the relevance of childlike forms and modes of conduct is unsurpassed. (We draw attention here to the well-known exhibitions of the latest children’s art.)
The neutralization of the “moral personality” in the leader unleashes vast energies for the true genius of education—namely, the power of observation. This alone is at the heart of unsentimental love. No pedagogic love is worth anything unless in nine-tenths of all instances of knowing better and wanting better it is deprived of its courage and pleasure by the mere observation of children’s lives. It is sentimental and vain. For the true observer, however—and this is the starting point of education—every childhood action and gesture becomes a signal. Not so much a signal of the unconscious, of latent processes, repressions, or censorship (as the psychologists like to think), but a signal from another world, in which the child lives and commands. The new knowledge of children that has been developed in the Russian children’s clubs has led to the theory that the child inhabits his world like a dictator. For this reason, the “theory of signals” is no mere figure of speech. Almost every childlike gesture is a command and a signal in a world that only a few unusually perceptive men, notably Jean Paul, have glimpsed.
The task of the leader is to release children’s signals from the hazardous magical world of sheer fantasy and apply them to materials. This happens in the various theatrical workshops. To take an illustration from painting, we know that in this sphere of childhood activity, too, gesture is all important. Konrad Fiedler is the first to have shown in his writings on art that the painter is not a man who sees more naturalistically, more poetically, or more ecstatically than other people. He is, rather, a man who sees more accurately with his hand when his eye fails him, who is able to transfer the receptive innervation of the eye muscles into the creative innervation of the hand. What characterizes every child’s gesture is that creative innervation is exactly proportioned to receptive innervation. The development of these gestures in the different forms of expression—the making of stage props, painting, recitation, music, dance, or improvisation—is the task of the different workshops.
In all of them improvisation is central, because in the final analysis a performance is nothing but an improvised synthesis of all of them. Improvisation predominates; it is the framework from which the signals, the signifying gestures, emerge. And the synthesis of these gestures must become performance or theater, because they alone have the unexpected uniqueness that enables the child’s gesture to stand in its own authentic space. The kind of “fully rounded” performance that people torment children to produce can never compete in authenticity with improvisation. The aristocratic dilettantism that is eager to make its poor pupils produce such “artistic achievements” ended up by filling cupboards and memory with junk, which was piously preserved so that our mementos of early youth might survive to enable us to torment our own children. But childhood achievement is always aimed not at the “eternity” of the products but at the “moment” of the gesture. The theater is the art form of the child because it is ephemeral.
Scheme of resolution
Educational work in the different workshops stands in the same relationship to the performance as a tension to its resolution. For no pedagogic wisdom can foresee how children will fuse the various gestures and skills into a theatrical totality, but with a thousand unexpected variations. Even for the professional actor, the first performance can often serve as the trigger that enables him to introduce genuine improvements into a well-rehearsed role. But in the case of a child, it brings the genius of variation to a peak of perfection. In relation to the process of schooling, the performance is like the radical unleashing of play—something which the adult can only wonder at.
The embarrassments of bourgeois education theory and of the rising bourgeois generation in general have expressed themselves recently in the “Youth Culture” movement. The conflict that this new movement is destined to hush up lies in the claims that bourgeois society (like every political society) makes on the energies of young people, which can never be activated directly in a political way. And on the energies of children above all else. Now Youth Culture attempts to achieve a hopeless compromise: it drains the enthusiasm of young people by a process of idealistic self-reflection, so as gradually and imperceptibly to replace the formal ideologies of German idealism by the contents of the bourgeois class. The proletariat must not pass on its own class interest to the next generation with the tainted methods of an ideology that is destined to subjugate the child’s suggestible mind. The discipline the bourgeoisie demands from children is its mark of shame. The proletariat disciplines only the proletarians who have grown up; its ideological class education starts with puberty. Proletarian education theory demonstrates its superiority by guaranteeing to children the fulfillment of their childhood. There is no need, therefore, for the realm in which this occurs to be isolated from the realm of class struggles. At the level of play, the themes and symbols of class struggle can—and perhaps must—have a place in this realm. But these themes and symbols cannot lay claim to a formal dominance of the child. Nor will they do so. Hence, the proletariat has no need of the thousand little words which the bourgeoisie uses to disguise the class nature of its education theory. It will be possible to dispense with “unbiased,” “sympathetic” practices and with teachers who are “fond of children.”
The performance is the great creative pause in the process of upbringing. It represents in the realm of children what the carnival was in the old cults. Everything was turned upside down; and just as in Rome the master served the slaves during the Saturnalia, in the same way in a performance children stand on the stage and instruct and teach the attentive educators. New forces, new innervations appear—ones that the director had no inkling of while working on the project. He learns about them only in the course of this wild liberation of the child’s imagination. Children that have learned about theater in this way become free in such performances. Through play, their childhood has been fulfilled. They carry no superfluous baggage around with them, in the form of overemotional childhood memories that might prevent them later on from taking action in an unsentimental way. Moreover, this theater is the only usable one for the child spectator. When grown-ups act for children, the result is archness.
This children’s theater contains a force that will annihilate the pseudorevolutionary gestures of the recent theater of the bourgeoisie. For what is truly revolutionary is not the propaganda of ideas, which leads here and there to impracticable actions and vanishes in a puff of smoke upon the first sober reflection at the theater exit. What is truly revolutionary is the secret signal of what is to come that speaks from the gesture of the child.
The Storming of the Winter Palace, Uritsky Square, Petrograd, November 7, 1920, directed by Nikolai Evreinov, set designs by Yuri Annenkov