Agitprop

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AGITPROP.

Agitprop, short for agitation and propaganda, was a communist theatrical genre in interwar Europe, largely scripted and performed by amateurs, designed to inculcate communist values into the consciousness of workers. Its origins are debated; some scholars point toward medieval passion plays as a distant antecedent. Most, however, would agree that agitprop proper originated in Russia during the civil war (1918–1920) that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, when agit-trains carried acting troupes ("living newspapers"), pamphlets, and musicians to the largely illiterate Russian peasantry.

Agitprop's aesthetic called for scenes that were short, fast-paced, ideologically correct, current, and concrete. Whenever possible, they addressed local problems. Thus, excepting any so-called lead articles—pieces that addressed issues of interest to workers across the country—no central agency prepared the troupes' scripts. Troupes shared their work with each other. The scripts might speak to any aspect of working-class life or thought, including foreign policy, working-class organizations, and private concerns. Music and dance heightened scenes' agitational possibilities. Although pianos generally provided musical accompaniment, jazz bands were common. No musical style predominated; performances might include pastiches of both operatic arias and the most recent hits.

Costumes and other trappings were as simple as possible. Players often wore plain blue shirts matched with either black skirts or trousers and boots. Details indicated character types. For example, drunks wore red noses. As troupes prized mobility, simplicity was a point of principle; they used props only when necessary. Posters, however, were important to provide facts and figures to accompany performances. A characteristic of such work was its rejection of conventional forms as bourgeois, in favor of newer, supposedly proletarian forms. Here the troupes anticipated the style of Bertolt Brecht, interwar Germany's most important playwright.

Apart from the Soviet Union, agitprop theater was most important in Germany—the home of western Europe's most significant Communist Party—during the Weimar Republic, the period between the end of the First World War and the Third Reich. Agitprop arrived in Germany in 1927, when a Soviet troupe toured the country. The movement quickly became very popular. By 1930–1931, the Communist Party claimed approximately three hundred troupes.

German troupes were relatively small, having between six and twenty members. Most included women, but they were always outnumbered by men. Players tended to be young, often teenaged. Young workers probably joined such troupes to adopt a different personae, that is, to transform their identities from "mere" workers into representatives of the victorious revolutionary proletariat. The symbolic act of controlling their lives extended to the names the troupes adopted, such as Column Left, Curve Left, and the Red Megaphone. Agitprop theater was performed where workers lived and gathered: on the streets, in apartment courtyards, in bars, at sporting events, and at party-sponsored meetings. The most common issues addressed by the troupes included the Communist Party and Comintern (Communist International), development of the Soviet Union, religion and cultural reaction, the press, "social democratic treachery," unemployment, elections, and the police.

Communist music and literature in the 1920s and early 1930s conformed to rules similar to those of agitprop theater. The various national communist movements sponsored the writing of proletarian novels that would be cheap, gripping, and sharp. Soviet fiction of this period needed not only to be interesting but also politically acceptable and aesthetically progressive. Much of this work proved to be more politically appropriate than entertaining. It seems not to have engaged the expected proletarian audience.

This was also true in the West, where plots of such novels often centered around the growing class consciousness of urban workers who, having come to grasp their situations, affiliate with the Communist Party. Other themes included the unmasking of political enemies to show their true natures. Generally these enemies were social democrats. Fascists and Nazis rarely emerged. This weakness certainly detracted from their purported realism.

Agitprop music included street singing of protest songs, as well as the performances of organized revolutionary choruses. Singers avoided the notion of art for art's sake, replacing it with a fully politicized repertoire. As Hanns Eisler, a prominent twentieth-century composer and collaborator of Bertolt Brecht, put it, "even our singing must represent struggle" (quoted in Durus, p. 4). Nevertheless, the movement struggled with, but never resolved, the question of whether classics could be rehabilitated or needed to be relegated to the past. A second debate addressed the costs and benefits of parodying contemporary hits. In Germany the Nazi Party came to power before these issues could be resolved. Indeed, like agit-prop theater and agitational literature, agitprop music fell victim to the radical political shifts in Germany after the Nazi seizure of power.

See alsoBrecht, Bertolt; Propaganda; Theater.