About the work
Bertolt Brecht's first full-length drama was written in 1918 and premiered in 1923 in Leipzig. The play, a reckoning with Hanns Johst's Expressionist drama "Der Einsame", shows Brecht still before his turn to epic theatre — wild, lyrical, amoral. It exists in several versions, which Brecht continued to revise into the 1950s.
Plot
The poet Baal is an untamable, devouring character who craves women, men and the world alike. He seduces the young Johanna, who thereupon drowns herself, drives his friend Ekart to his death, and lives on the margins of society as a vagrant and murderer. Marked by syphilis and alcohol, he dies alone in a forest hut. His last words are for the starry sky and the world he never wished to tame.
Cultural significance
Baal is Brecht's wildest text and a key work of late Expressionism. The figure of Baal is regarded as a literary counter-design to bourgeois morality — poet, predator and saint in one. The play challenges directors and actors to this day, because it permits neither sympathy nor condemnation. Brecht's repeated reworkings testify to how deeply this early figure occupied him throughout his life.