The theatre of East Germany has come of age. There are now 60 professional theatre companies, including six permanent puppet-theatres, in the tiny land, 40-50 permanent amateur theatres (mostly companies of workers and farmers), nearly 150 other non-professional theatres, three permanent student theatres (Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden), and about 30 “Pioniertheater” or school-theatres. There has been a steady increase in the number of theater-goers in the last few years, and statistics show that there are now 12to 12½ million attendances yearly, over half of them by young people. Seen as a politically and socially useful art which serves all the working population and which is produced and consumed collectively, as a means of mass-communication (and not as a mass-medium!), the theatre commands a lot of attention. It is assumed that the theatre has a function which, thanks to Marx and Lenin, is theoretically defined and, thanks to Brecht, both theoretically and practically defined.