Piscator supported the failed German Revolution but retained his strong socialist beliefs. In October, 1920, he established the Proletarian Theatre in Berlin. Piscator was the founder of the left-wing agitprop theatre, and regarded the stage above all as an instrument for mobilizing the masses. "Comrades! The soul of the Revolution, the soul of the approaching society of the classless and communal culture represent our revolutionary feelings. The Proletarian Theatre wishes to ignite this feeling and help keep it alive. The experiences awakened in us by socialist art fortify us in our consciousness of the seriousness and the greatness of the historical mission of our class." (7)

Radical plays written by people such as Franz Jung that were put on by Piscator upset the authorities and in March 1921, the Berlin police refused to renew the theatre's licence. Over the next couple of years he directed plays written by left-wing writers such as Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, Leo Tolstoy, Hans Rehfisch, Berta Lask and Rudolf Leonhard. (8)

In 1924 Piscator directed Fahnen, about the Haymarket Bombing by Alfons Paquet. In 1886 several members of the International Working Men's Association were arrested and eventually, were found guilty of an offence they did not commit. Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg and George Engel were given the death penalty. Whereas Oscar Neebe, Samuel Fielden and Michael Schwab were sentenced to life imprisonment. Before being sentenced Spies said: "The contemplated murder of eight men, whose only crime is that they have dared to speak the truth, may open the eyes of these suffering millions; may wake them up. Indeed, I have noticed that our conviction has worked miracles in this direction already." (9)

In the play, Piscator provided short sequences of action that were strung episodically together and reviewing the production in the Leipziger Tageblatt, the theatre critic, Alfred Döblin, called the play "a stepping-stone between narrative and drama", adding that this form provided refuge when "the coldness of a writer's feelings stops him from identifying with the characters' fates or the story's development". (10) Piscator claimed that "in a certain sense Fahnen represented the first Marxist drama and the production the first attempt at laying bare the materialist motive forces of the action." (11)

As Martin Esslin has pointed out: "Piscator sought a topical, highly political theatre. He relegated the author to a relatively minor position, and was often content to compile his productions out of newspaper reports or documentary material. Piscator put these spectacles on to a constructivist stage and used graphs of statistics, explanatory captions, lantern slides of photographs or documents, newsreels, and documentary film sequences to convey the political or sociological background of the play, while the propaganda lesson was drawn by choruses, spoken or sung, on stage or in the auditorium, so that the spectators were inevitably drawn into the action. His aim was a theatre that would be political, technological - and epic. By the latter term he meant a drama which would be utterly different from the conventional 'well-made' play: a kind of illustrated lecture or newspaper report on a political or social theme, loosely constructed in the shape of a serious revue: a sequence of musical numbers, sketches, film, declamation, sometimes linked by one or several narrators." (12)

George Grosz designed sets and costumes for Erwin Piscator. Grosz wrote in his journal that "Erwin has created a great new era for the graphic artist to work in, a veritable graphic arena, more tempting for graphic artists of today than all that stuffy aesthetic business or the hawking around of drawings in bibliophile editions for educated nobs... What a medium, though, for the artist who wants to speak to the masses, purely and simply. Naturally a new area requires new techniques, a new clear and concise language of graphic style - certainly a great opportunity for teaching discipline to the muddleheaded and confused!" (13)

Piscator argued that in Fahnen he had "crossed the threshold from the theatre of art to the theatre of the age" and that he had tried "to lay bare the roots of the case in the epic elaboration of the material". This was a play which documented its period: "it is not the inner arc of the dramatic event that is essential, but the epic course of the epoch from its roots until its last effects are represented as precisely and comprehensively as possible." Piscator wrote no scripts, but he created drama in the way that a film director created cinema. Bertolt Brecht later claimed that "after me, Piscator is the greatest living German dramatist". It is no doubt that in the long term, Brecht had more influence on acting style than Piscator but he owed a great deal to his earlier work. (14)

Brecht was greatly influenced by the work of Piscator and like him wanted a scientific, Marxist drama, loosely constructed so as to make it possible to explain the wider social and historical background of the play. He followed Piscator's example he used posters and placards, songs and choruses. "But while Piscator attached little importance to purely literary values, Brecht laid great stress on the poetic aspects of such a drama. And so, although Brecht became a close collaborator of Piscator's, although he worked on many adaptations of plays for his theatre and they discussed several joint projects, Piscator never tackled one of Brecht's own plays." (15)

In 1925 Piscator produced Despite All, a presentation that traced the history of revolutions from the outbreak of the First World War to the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. For the first time, film was organically integrated into the staging; documentaries derived from the national archives, authentic photos of the war were shown against a gigantic stage set, consisting of terraces, inclines, stairways and platforms on revolving planes. (16)

Ernst Toller, was imprisoned as a result of him being one of the leaders of the German Revolution. While in prison he wrote a series of plays that established him as one of the country's most important writers. By the time he left prison in 1924, plays such as Transformation, The Machine Wreckers, Hinkemann and Masses and Man had been performed all over Germany. After leaving prison Toller wrote Hoppla, Such is Life (1927) which was directed by Piscator at the Theatre am Nollendorfplatz. (17)

Piscator was not too happy with the first draft of the play as he found it too lyrical and subjective for a documentary exposition of social reality. "All our efforts in the subsequent course of the work were directed towards providing the play with a realistic substructure." (18) Piscator proposed a number of changes which were the subject of lengthy and sometimes heated discussions. He recalled that there were arguments that sometimes turned into heated discussion. (19)

Eventually, Piscator persuaded Toller to rewrite most of the play. Piscator later recalled: "Toller scarcely ever left my apartment. He had made himself at home at my desk and filled page after page at incredible speed with his huge handwriting, consigning the sheets to the wastepaper basket with equal rapidity. And all the while he kept lighting my most expensive cigars and stubbing them out again in the ashtray after a few drags." (20)

The production is one of the landmarks of the early Epic Theater. "Toller’s dissection of political conspiracies, failed revolution, feminist emancipation and class solidarity suggest one answer: it is only in the constant struggle against power that we are alive." What impressed critics and audiences alike was not so much the writing and acting as the use of film, set and sound effects. The play was interrupted with film interludes or illustrations projected on the tall screen in the middle of the stage. The film had been made, on a script written by Toller, using newsreel material and specially shot scenes with the actors. (21) The theatre critic, Herbert Ihering, claimed that "an amazing technical imagination has worked miracles". (22)

At the end of the first performance - which lasted four hours - a section of the audience rose to sing the Internationale. One critic wrote that Piscator had extended the boundaries of theatre, another that he, just as much as Toller, deserved to be called the author of the evening. Some critics suggested that Piscator's production had saved a rather mediocre play. Stefan Großmann, one of Germany's leading critics, commented that it was a triumph for Piscator: "A master of the theatre now has his home. He will allow neither supporters nor authors to distract him." (23)

Erich Mühsam wrote in support of Piscator: "Agitational art is good and necessary. It is needed by the proletariat both in revolutionary times and in the present. But it has to be art, skilled, spirited, and glittering. All arts have agitational potential, but none more than drama, In the theatre, living people present living passion. Here, more than anywhere else, true art can communicate true conviction. Here, the idea of a revolutionary worker can be materialized.... Arts must inspire people, and inspiration comes from the spirit. It is not our task to teach the minds of the workers with the help of the arts - it is our task to bring spirit to the minds of the workers with the help of the arts, as the spirit of the arts knows no limits. Neither dialectics nor historical materialism have anything to do with this; the only art that can enthuse and enflame the proletariat is the one that derives its richness and its fire from the spirit of freedom." (24)

Piscator read The Good Soldier Schweik, a novel by Jaroslav Hašek. The unfinished novel (Hašek died in 1923) was a collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in the First World War that was a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures. With the help of Bertolt Brecht and Felix Gasbarra, Piscator decided to turn the work into a play that was first produced in 1928. It has been argued by Frederic Ewen that this play "proved to be the most lasting and certainly the most important of all Piscator's efforts." (25)

It has been argued that Brecht created a character that he was to use several times in his career. "Schweik is more than a mere character: he represents a basic human attitude. Schweik defeats the powers that be, the whole universe in all its absurdity, not by opposing but by complying with them. He is so servile, so eager to please and to carry out the letter of any regulation or command that in the end the stupidity of the authorities, the idiocy of the law is ruthlessly exposed... Many of the characters in his later plays show features of this ironic servility." (26)

Max Pallenberg, played the role of Schweik, and George Grosz was employed to design the sets. "Grosz... drew whatever was needed in his characteristically spiteful, yet light, comic, economic style: cut-out marionettes, projected backgrounds, sequences of cartoon film. Though some real film shots were worked in - of the streets of Prague, for instance - the general effect was of a highly mobile show being illustrated in passing by one of Europe's most brilliant draughtsmen. It opened with a cartoon-film prologue: Grosz's wriggling line tracing a German and an Austrian general, a death's-head judge and a priest juggling with a crucifix, symbolising the forces with which Schweik has to contend." (27)

In April 1931 the Berlin police banned all agit-prop performances at political meetings. Piscator, along with John Heartfield, Friedrich Wolf, and Hans Richter moved to the Soviet Union to find work. In October it was announced that Piscator would be working for Mezhrabpom-Film, the Soviet film company associated with the International Workers' Relief Organisation. His first project, Revolt of the Fishermen, was based on a novel by Anna Seghers. The movie was originally planned to be filmed in Russian and German versions, but only the first was completed. (28)

Piscator believed that there was a need for a series of short anti-Nazi propaganda films. His idea for the first film was the real story of a senior civil servant murdered by the Nazis, whose ashes were returned to his widow with a bill fore cremation and other costs. This idea was approved by Mezhrabpom and Piscator had a two hour meeting with Lazer Kaganovitch, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, and the brother-in-law of Joseph Stalin. However, Kaganovitch insisted that the films must have optimistic endings. (29)

At the beginning of 1935 Piscator invited Bertolt Brecht to Moscow. Others invited included Hans Eisler, Maxim Vallentin, Julius Hay, Ernst Busch (he stayed for two years) and Edward Gordon Craig. Another close associate, Bernard Reich, arrived and worked under Piscator at the Soviet backed International Association of Revolutionary Theatre (MORT): "The idea in appointing Piscator president was to have an attractive figurehead. Piscator however took the cause, and himself, seriously." (30)

Piscator soon found himself in conflict with the Soviet authorities. In an article which was almost a policy statement he argued that MORT had been neglecting the professional theatre and its unions and should pay more attention to the avant-garde, including the Surrealists, who were disliked by the government: "There are artistic elements which are simply anti-fascist by their very essence." Piscator was also visited by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg of the radical Group Theatre group. However, they were much more interested in the work of Konstantin Stanislavski who had developed "method-acting" in the Soviet Union. (31)

The Soviet authorities became concerned about the direction that film and theatre was taking. Mezhrabpom-Film and International Association of Revolutionary Theatre (MORT) were both closed down. Some of those involved in these projects were arrested and accused of being followers of Leon Trotsky. The German actress, Carola Neher, who Brecht had written the role of Polly Peachum in The Threepenny Opera, was sent to a labour camp where she later died of typhus. Marija Leiko, who had also fled from Nazi Germany, was arrested and shot for belonging to a "Latvian nationalist conspiracy". (32)

In July 1936, Piscator moved to Paris. He lived in the city for two years. He worked on several different projects. His only success during these years was his marriage to Maria Ley, a wealthy widow, whose previous husband, Frank Deutsch, was connected to AEG, the great Berlin electrical engineering firm. She was also the niece of the banker, Otto Kahn and had danced professionally for the German dramatist, Max Reinhardt. "For the rest of his life, Piscator received Ley's unfailing support, both personal and financial, as he desperately tried to re-establish himself as a dramatist." In late 1938, the Piscators secured a visa and sailed to New York. (33)

Piscator wrote while he was in France that "I can only work against bourgeois society, I can never work with it or through it". (34) John Willett claims that "that to say the least, there was some self-deception involved here, for although it is true that... he never became an anti-communist or even openly critical of the Russians, old friends like Wolf and Brecht had commented on the grand style of his life in Paris, and working with and though bourgeois society was precisely what he henceforth did." (35)

Piscator was told that he would not be able to settle in the United States as a director but only as a teacher of theatre. Alvin Saunders Johnson, the head of the New School, a private research university in New York City, decided to set up a drama school, and placed Piscator in charge of what became known as the Dramatic Workshop. It began in January 1940 with twenty students attending evening classes. "Despite the heavy academic load, students spent the majority of their time working in actual productions. Piscator insisted that students could not become dramatists without writing, producing, directing, and performing their own plays. Moreover, through these student productions the Dramatic Workshops became more than a school. It became an experimental theatre." (36)

Although he was not allowed to direct he hoped his teaching would have an impact on the American theatre. The aim from the outset was to make "a school that is a theatre and a theatre that is a school", to train students for the various branches of the profession and if possible, by building up a working ensemble, "to stimulate the development of the repertory theatre as a non-commercial institution of artistic expression with the same position in our society that the symphony or the art museum enjoys." (37)

With the help of Robert Sherwood, Sinclair Lewis, George Kaufman and Paul Muni, Piscator established the Studio Theatre as part of the Dramatic Workshop in September, 1940. "A Theatre of Professional Players" offering subscribers "plays which cannot be done on Broadway, because of their uncertain appeal, or sophisticated intelligence level, or overlarge cast". Piscator's intention was that the audience should be in some measure drawn into the work of the school, attending lectures in connection with the play given, listening to its first reading and going to one or more rehearsals." (38)

In 1945 Piscator was given permission to direct a play for the off-Broadway group The Theatre of All Nations. He selected The Private Life of the Master Race by Bertolt Brecht. However, when Brecht arrived from California, he attended the rehearsals and disliked what he saw and tried to have the performance cancelled. On 29th May, a fortnight before the opening at City College, Piscator walked out and refused to direct the play. Brecht called in Berthold Viertel to help him with the production. The critics found the result amateurish, though it is difficult to discover whose fault this was. Brecht told his friend, Leon Askin: "Our ideas on epic theatre are so different, that I preferred to leave him alone." (39)

Despite this conflict the two men remained friends. Brecht eventually decided to move back to Germany and wrote to Piscator that he would like to work with him again if he visited the city: "Whenever I have mentioned the possibility of a visit I have raised the question of your making one too, because without you I find it difficult to envisage a successful attack on provincialism, hollow emotionalism, etc. in favour of great, mature political theatre." (40) In another letter the following month Brecht said: "Just to get things straight, let me tell you that of all the people who have been active3 in the theatre over the past twenty years no one has been so close to me as you." (41)

The Dramatic Workshop continued to lose money and the New School board began considering whether or not to close it down. Although the end of the Second World War resulted in an increase in student numbers and between 1944 and 1947 income quintupled. However, Alvin Saunders Johnson had retired and political theatre was no longer popular. In March 1948, it was decided close the unit down. An independent board of trustees was set up, with Piscator as chairman and membership included Johnson, Kurt Weill and Robert Penn Warren. (42)

Several people who attended the Dramatic Workshop had good careers in the theatre. This included Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Walter Matthau, Tony Curtis, Rod Steiger, Ben Gazzara, Elaine Stritch, Jack Creley and Tennessee Williams. The actress, writer and director, Judith Malina, who went on to form The Living Theatre, with Julian Beck, told Piscator: "I have learned to believe what you believe in, to strive for that for which you strive. You are my teacher: the one in whom I have most faith, in whom I trust, from whom I learned and still seek to learn." (43)

Piscator found it difficult to direct plays that had a strong political message. He told The Daily Worker that he found the whole process painful because "it is the business of the theatre to deliver a social message and this is as important as that it should be 'entertaining'... Mere entertainment, 'art for art's sake', is not a reason for a theatre production." (44) He dismissed most American drama as "technically on the level of the naturalistic theatre of the 1890s" and accused the playwrights in the late 1940s of "breathing the air of an unhealthy and reactionary period." (45)

Piscator arrived back in West Germany at the beginning of October 1951. He was nearly fifty-eight and had been away for over twenty years. However, it was not until 1955 that he made his comeback with War and Peace by Boleslaw Barlog at the Schiller-Theatre. The critics found this whole approach dreadfully oversimplified, but it was a success with the public, and the following year the whole production went to the Paris international theatre festival. He followed this with Georg Büchner's Dantons Tod, but this was not a success and Piscator blamed Barlog for not giving him enough rehearsal time. (46)

On 16th June, 1953, East Berlin construction workers went on strike. The following day workers from other industries held mass meetings all over the city and voted to support building workers. Trams and trains came to a halt as transport workers joined the strike. Over 50,000, people gathered at the Lustgarten. Speeches were made attacking the government and political figures such as Walter Ulbricht, the communist leader, had his portrait burnt. Red Army tanks drove into the crowd, killing sixteen people. The rebellion spread to over 700 towns and villages but the revolt was crushed in a couple of days. (47) Piscator found it difficult to give his support to the workers: "The Berlin workers have struck their mother. An unpleasant, severe mother, and possibly a bad one, but a mother none the less." (48)

Piscator was disappointed by the attitude of the German people. He felt that most people did not appear to feel guilt about their behaviour during the years that Adolf Hitler was in control. A fortnight after his sixtieth birthday, he noted in his diary that the basic attitude of the theatre should be grounded in morality and Bekenntnis (knowledge, recognition and confession). "The theatre of the positive people - against existentialists, degenerates and those who have given up hope. I have now been in Germany for 3 years. There is no conscience." (49)

Piscator first visited East Berlin in October 1955. He was elected to the East German Academy of Arts, as one of a small group of members from West Germany. In 1957 he was invited to direct Richard III at the Deutsches Theatre. However, he was upset when the East German critic, Ernst Schumacher, in a book on Bertolt Brecht, dismissed Piscator's brand of epic theatre as "a petty-bourgeois radical theatre movement". Brecht disagreed and pointed out that "Piscator was my teacher". (50)

Piscator was introduced to Rolf Hochhuth, who had written a play, The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy, which portrayed Pope Pius XII as having failed to take action or speak out against the Holocaust. The play was first performed at West Berlin's Theater am Kurfürstendamm on 20th February, 1963. The controversial play was condemned as being anti-Catholic. Hochhuth replied: "In choosing a Jesuit for my tragic hero I strove to condemn the sin and not the sinner - that is, not the Church but its silence - and to exemplify, after a Kierkegaardian fashion, the enormous difficulty of living up to the Catholic creed and the immense nobility of spirit of those who are capable even of coming close. To read the play as anti-Catholic is not to read it at all." (51) Piscator commented that "thanks to this play, there is some point in working in the theatre." (52)

Erwin Piscator died on 30th March, 1966.

(1) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) page 13

(2) Noel Halifax, The Socialist Review (April, 2019)

(3) Erwin Piscator, Das Politische Theater (1929) page 9

(4) Peter Selz, John Heartfield: Photomontages of the Nazi Period (1972) page 136

(5) George Grosz interviewed by Erwin Piscator (1928)

(6) Noel Halifax, The Socialist Review (April, 2019)

(7) Erwin Piscator, Das Politische Theater (1929) page 54

(8) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) pages 15-17

(9) Alfred Döblin, Leipziger Tageblatt (5th June, 1924)

(10) August Spies, speech at his trial (September, 1887)

(11) Erwin Piscator, Das Politische Theater (1929) page 57

(12) Martin Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils (1959) page 23

(13) George Grosz, journal entry (1928)

(14) Ronald Hayman, Brecht: A Biography (1983) page 45

(15) Martin Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils (1959) page 24

(16) Frederic Ewen, Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art, His Times (1967) page 152

(17) Alan Raphael Pearlman, Toller Plays One: Transformation, Masses Man, Hoppla, We're Alive! (2000) page 17

(18) Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1980) page 207

(19) Richard Dove, He was a German: A Biography of Ernst Toller (1990) page 163

(20) Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1980) page 210

(21) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) page 84

(22) Herbert Ihering, Berliner Börsen-Courier (5th September, 1927)

(23) Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1980) page 218

(24) Erich Mühsam, Fanal (May, 1930)

(25) Frederic Ewen, Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art, His Times (1967) page 154

(26) Martin Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils (1959) page 33

(27) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) page 91

(28) Gerhard F. Probst, Erwin Piscator and the American Theatre (1991) page 7

(29) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) page 131

(30) Bernard Reich, Im Wettlauf mit der Zeit (1970) page 345

(31) Peter M. Rutkoff, New School: History of the New School of Social Research (1986) page 182

(32) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) page 131

(33) Peter M. Rutkoff, New School: History of the New School of Social Research (1986) page 182

(34) Erwin Piscator, written comment (18th January, 1937)

(35) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) page 152

(36) Peter M. Rutkoff, New School: History of the New School of Social Research (1986) page 186

(37) Maria Ley-Piscator, The Piscator Experiment (1967) page 104

(38) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) page 156

(39) Bertolt Brecht, letter to Leon Askin (2nd July, 1945)

(40) Bertolt Brecht, letter to Erwin Piscator (February, 1947)

(41) Bertolt Brecht, letter to Erwin Piscator (March, 1947)

(42) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) page 161

(43) Judith Malina, letter to Erwin Piscator (12th June, 1947)

(44) Erwin Piscator, The Daily Worker (12th February, 1944)

(45) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) page 173

(46) Erwin Piscator, letter to Boleslaw Barlog (4th May, 1956)

(47) Alison Smale, The New York Times (17th June, 2013)

(48) Erwin Piscator, diary entry (June, 1953)

(49) Erwin Piscator, diary entry (1st January, 1954)

(50) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) pages 174-175

(51) Walter Kaufmann, Philosophy and Tragedy (1967) page 322

(52) John Willett, The Theatre of Edward Piscator (1979) page 179