In the organizer's words:

Talk with Peter Berz and Helmut Höge
Moderated by Karin Krauthausen. Opening Hans-Christian von Herrmann and Alexander Karschnia

"The Education of Millet", Brecht's long poem first published in 1950, is a lyrical celebration of increased agricultural production, as promoted in large-scale real-life experiments by the Moscow Academy of Agricultural Sciences under its president Trofim Lysenko, who was closely associated with Stalin, from the 1930s onwards. The poem, set to music by Paul Dessau as a "musical epic", takes a firm stand in favor of Soviet agrobiology, which relied on the modification (or "education") of plants through the technical shaping of environmental relationships rather than genetic engineering. The opening evening of the Brecht-Tage 2026 turns to this text, which was mostly met with incomprehension and rejection in its reception, based on an archive recording from 1954 and places it in the context of both the history of works and the history of science. Artistic collaboration: Vettka Kirillova

Presentation of a radio recording of the musical epic "The Education of Millet" by Bertolt Brecht and Paul Dessau from 1954, followed by a discussion with Peter Berz and Helmut Höge on the biological-historical and agronomic sources of the poem.