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Brecht's Fear and Misery of the Third Reich 
and the Status of Gestus 
Contrary to Georg Lukacs' early reading of one of its scenes as 
Aristotelian theater, Brecht's Fear and Misery of the Third Reich is an 
avant-garde project without a center, or a clearly established structure.
It 
is organized around the notion of the gestus; more specifically, around a
type of gestus Brecht developed largely in the decontextualized poetry of
A Reader for Those Who Live in Cities. In these poems the gestus is 
present in the gestures of distancing, veiling, masking, of anonymization
and erasure. After the Reader poems a re-semantization of the gestus 
occurs, from Fatzer and The Measures Taken to its central role in Fear 
and Misery. Its functioning in Brecht's anti-fascist play rests on concepts
such as reality, history, causality, reason, progress, etc., concepts which
have come under attack by postmodernist theories. 
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