Antione1.0114_Brecht

Antione1.0114_Brecht

Apollodorus Library 3.7.1
Sophocles Antigone Jebb translation

Bertolt Brecht,Die Antigone des Sophokles, a tragedy in a modern setting: Berlin 1942), after Hölderlin's translation. First performed 1948, Chur, Switzerland.

Judith Malina's version from 1966 of Brecht's Antigone was performed in sixteen countries over twenty years, including Ireland, Franco's Spain, Poland, and Prague, all at politically crucial times." M. McDonald, The Living Art of Greek Tragedy (Bloomington, 2003), 81.

Reid lists a variant: Antigone-Legende, epic in hexameters.

cf. Anouilh's 1944 Antigone (occupied Paris).

A haunting, dark watercolor painting of several figures, some masked, one holding a child, with German text below

Brecht "showed Creon overtly as Hitler, along with his aggressive son Megareus, who continues to fight and finally brings defeat on Thebes, an allusion to modern Germany. He succeeds in his Verfremd-ungseffekt (alientation effect), distancing us from all the characters, including Antigone. This alienation is a technique for distancing the audience members so that they can make an objective assessment of the action they are seeing and come up with a moral judgment. Brecht wants to enlist minds over emotions, but he does not always succeed. Brecht objected to what he saw as Antigone's pacifism. He thought she did a disservice to the memory of the German partisans who fought against the Nazis." McDonald, op cit.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University and other contexts.
This resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.