He immediately flew to Switzerland as a result though.
After 15 years of exile Brecht returned to Germany in 1948 and spent a year in Zurich working on Sophocles ANTIGONE and on his major theoretical work A LITTLE ORGANUM FOR THE THEATRE. After Zurich, Brecht moved in 1949 to Berlin where he founded his own Marxist theatre named, the Berliner Ensemble.
In Brecht's essay titled "On Experimental Theatre" (Brecht, pp 130 - 135), Brecht traces through the modern theatre the two lines running from naturalism and Expressionism. Naturalism he sees as the "assimilation of art to science" which gave the Naturalistic theatre great social influence, but at the expense of artistic elements:.
Brecht writes, "The assimilation of art to science undoubtedly hamstrung some major artistic capacities, notably the imagination, the sense of play and the element of pure poetry." (Brecht, p 132).
On the other hand, he writes - Expressionism "vastly enriched the theatre's means of expressions and brought aesthetic gains that still remain to be exploited" (Brecht, 132). But this theory proved incapable of shedding any light on the world as an object of human activity, and the theatre's educational value collapsed. Brecht recognized the great achievements of Piscator's work where he states that "they were striving towards an entirely new social function of the theatre," (Brecht p, 131) but he proposed a further advance in the development of epic theatre.
Brecht's Marxist political convictions led him to propose an alternative direction for the theatre that would fuse the two functions of instruction and entertainment. In this way the theatre could project a picture of the world by artistic means and offer models of life that could help the spectators to understand their social environment and the master it both rationally and emotionally.
Brecht was opposed to Aristotelian drama and its attempts to lure the spectator into a total identification with the hero, resulting in feelings of terror and pity and ultimately an emotional catharsis.
