Подстъпи към поезията на Кестнер и Брехт
Approaches to Kaestner, Brecht’s poetry

Summary/Abstract: The article studies the fundamentals of poetry writings by Bertolt Brecht and Erich Kaestner in the context of the cultural situation in the Weimar Republic of the late 1920s and the early 1930s. The principle line of reasoning of this study is that regardless of their different worldviews and aesthetic principles, the two writes have taken a similar attitude towards poetic language and the overall socio-cultural climate of the age. Of paramount importance to placing this poetry is the fact that turn in the expectations for the capacity and the effect of the poetic took place in an environment of being awake to the crises of representation (a concept by Erika Fischer-Lichte). In this regard the study highlights the main characteristics of a principally different discourse, where the poetic subject abandons the key position in acquiring and stylising lyrical experience, introducing and connecting instead various poetic voices and roles, producing disengaging transformations of the modulation in his own voice. From this perspective, the understanding of the figure of the poetic subject as a mediator (Walter Benjamin) offers opportunities for this figure’s ambivalent comprehension as a resignative social practice and a compensatory activity, hypertrophied in the theatrical gesture. The paper relates the cognitive theatricalisation as an expression of the crisis to the interaction between the lyric poetry and the tradition of cabaret culture of the early twentieth century; it relates the basis of fair culture and the practice of the cabaret gesture of interlude to Kaestner––an author, intentionally staged himself as a verse-maker–– to the maintaining a high poetic pretence Expressionism (this paper owes it to Kamelia Nikolovaу, who related Frank Wedekind to cabaret elements).

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