„Alles hat zwei Seitn…“ Brechts Schweyk und seine Vorbilder
“There are two sides to everything…” Brecht’s Schweyk and his idols

Summary/Abstract: To this day, Brecht is often seen as a communist and representative of a socialist society. The reality looks different. From the beginning, he had always percieved the freedom of the individual and of art as a maxim. He had reservations about any totalitarian structures absorbing the individual. Out of his perception of the First World War, Brecht developed a lasting understanding of the revolution as a continuation of the war under another ideological, now red flag. He expresses this idea through, among other things, the specific design of soldier figures, who are doomed to destruction or apply survival strategies that Brecht himself has appropriated as an artist: those of moral flexibility, of tactical “manoeuvring”, of the ambiguity, of ambivalence. With his Schweyk Jaroslav Hašek created almost a „brother in spirit“ of Brecht. The fact that he considered this material further and brought it into the form of a drama in 1943 seems almost inevitable. Schweyk is a seasoned survivor par excellence and the play is a statement against any totalitarianism, no matter what kind of political ideology.

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