The Forty-Nine Steps

“Bert Brecht is a difficult character,” Walter Benjamin once noted. As indeed he was, but he has become all the more difficult by dint of being easy. Let me say it at once: I, for one, prefer to flee into the night rather than have to watch the actors once again join hands at the curtain call and speak harsh truths to an audience of ladies and gentlemen who are already putting on their fur coats while casting benevolent looks at those talented boys and girls on the stage. Like Federico Garcia Lorca, like Georg Lukács, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Cesare Pavese, Brecht has been triumphantly received for some time now as one of the heroes of a vast middlebrow culture with good and progressive intentions. And so, to read him today, one must first rid his writings of that thick crust of solemn social kitsch that has gradually settled on them. A boring job but not an overly arduous one: All one needs do is forget for the moment the plays and didactic perorations and turn instead to the poems and the Stories of Herr Keuner to refurbish the image of an enigmatic, coarse, almost disagreeable, and very, very insolent writer. And one sighs with relief: This “character” is most certainly difficult, but he is a great writer and no longer grist for well-meaning souls.

It is part of Brecht the “difficult character” that his most private and secret book—the Work Journal (1938–55)—should be subtly self-censored. In drafting these notes, for almost twenty years, in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the United States, and Berlin, Brecht was forever thinking of the possibility that an enemy eye might see and use them. And one day he noted that he actually found his own diary “much distorted due to possible undesirable readers.”

One could say that all the vicissitudes of Brecht’s life are marked by this fear of falling into the enemy’s hands. For him, the first enemy to escape from—and this is to his everlasting credit—was culture itself, understood as a manifestation of the “nobility of the spirit,” in the words of the hated Thomas Mann. Whenever he heard the majestic wing feathers of the Geist fluttering around him, that tireless spirit that, especially in German lands, never stops chewing its cud, Brecht spat on the ground—then, with his characteristic mocking gesture, put out his hand and “begged for tobacco.” By this twofold movement, Brecht repudiated the realm of essences (and therefore of Great Authors, Great Works, and the Expression of Free Culture) and at the same time declined to renounce the superfluous: “The theater, indeed, must absolutely be allowed to remain a superfluous thing, which means, of course, that it is for the superfluous that one lives.” As long as he remains enclosed in this eloquent irony, Brecht’s behavior is perfect and makes one think of certain invincible Chinese sages, “with fine and limpid hearts,” who moreover were among his secret models.

But the story of Brecht is much more twisted and murky. One of his regular vices was to lock up his many enemies in the same prison, forcing them to serve the same sentence: “slaughterers who emerge from libraries”; harmless seducers, guilty only of pleasing women (perhaps even the women who pleased Brecht); and in general all those authors whose work he considered lacking in an “Enlightenment nature.” We thus find in the Work Journal an overflowing stock of accusations, insinuations, and sarcasms striking out in all directions, at Lukács and Thomas Mann, Johannes Becher and W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Alfred Doblin. His judgments are almost always acute and almost always too acid. The same goes for certain great events: At the outset of the war, Brecht, from his solitary observation post, looked contemptuously at England and tried to equate it with Hitler’s Germany. Imperialism against imperialism, he said.

Years later, in Hollywood, he scanned the American cinema with surly incomprehension, scolding it in a manner typical of the European intellectual he abhorred so much: He accused it of being hostile to the Author, the Great Work, and Culture. Moving in the sad circle of German refugee writers in America—one must remember they were officially designated “enemy aliens”—who were often pushed aside as annoying petitioners, Brecht looked with obvious rancor on the group from the Frankfurt School, headed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, almost as though they were a bunch of hysterical college professors primarily in search of funding, servants of capitalism. And yet, in those very years, Adorno and Horkheimer were able to discern, for the first time and with unsurpassed lucidity, the outlines of the culture industry in the reality of America; by comparison, Brecht’s analyses seem rudimentary and, above all, marked by a tiresome certainty of being on the right side.

Even his relations with Walter Benjamin, by far the greatest and most devoted reader Brecht ever had, reveal some fairly odious aspects, as can be gleaned from Benjamin’s notes on his stay in Svendborg. When Benjamin showed him his admirable essay on Franz Kafka, Brecht commented that it “carries water to the mill of Jewish fascism” (once again, the obsession with enemy readers). When he saw that Benjamin was reading Crime and Punishment, he promptly burst out in one of his provocatory judgments: “Brecht attributes to Chopin and Dostoyevsky an especially detrimental influence on health.”¹ Finally, when in America he received the news of Benjamin’s terrible death, Brecht noted the fact in his diary without a word of farewell to his friend and immediately went on to nitpick the manuscript of “On the Concept of History,” the last Benjamin submitted to the Institute of Sociology, concluding, “In short, this brief essay is clear and clarifying (despite its metaphors and its Judaism).”

“Despite its metaphors”: Largely untrained in speculation but with a good nose for smelling out where and why thinking becomes dangerous, Brecht tried for years and years to create an airtight artistic theory and practice that would withstand the assaults of what, with a certain clumsiness but sure intuition, he called “metaphysics.” He did not succeed, for which we can be grateful. It is still, however, of extreme interest to reconstruct how this need to defeat the invisible enemy was created in Brecht. Certainly the enemy was not, as he would have us believe, the “Aristotelian theater”; rather, it was the specter of art itself, insofar as it remains intrinsically ambiguous, elusive, and loath to lend itself to any worthy social action. “Art is on the side of destiny”: This sentence, tucked away in the dialogues in The Purchase of Brass, may perhaps hold the key to Brecht’s attitude. The side of destiny is the ungovernable side, overwhelming and divorced from will; it is the cloud of unknowing from which all writing emerges. One cannot understand Brecht’s stubborn insistence on making his theater instrumental, governable, stripped of all magic, unless one recognizes the formidable presence of his antagonist in the shadows. Brecht’s “epic theater” sought to extirpate the magic of the theater. But magic is not something that was superimposed on the theater under particular historical circumstances and that can therefore be eradicated by other techniques. Magic abides in the theater; indeed, it abides in every word, in that it names an absence. A few decades of Brechtian performances have given us experimental proof of this: Brecht has become a style of staging, a new magic—sometimes powerful, sometimes trite. Who today can honestly maintain that in attending a Brecht play, one is not subjected to that magic “torpor” that Brecht so feared in the theater?

There is still much to be discovered, however, about the peculiarity of Brecht’s magic. And I would look less at the much-abused category of the “alienation effect” than at the technique of quotation, which is in a way the esoteric face of his art. A monument of that technique, much richer than any theatrical text by Brecht, is Karl Kraus’s 770-page-long The Last Days of Mankind. Brecht derived a powerful impulse from it, one that he never openly acknowledged. But it is also true that in him the category of quotation took on new aspects, which we find throughout his work, even in the Work Journal, a paradoxical and abnormal creation, all interwoven in counterpoint between Brecht’s personal notes and the photos and newspaper clippings he glued to his pages.

By concentrating on quotation and working on preexisting materials, Brecht was accepting a fact more fundamental today than ever: the rejection of direct expression. Whoever no longer recognizes himself in a society—and this is the situation of all new art—does not even recognize the fictive ego that society grants him by inviting him, with false magnanimity, to express himself. The writer accordingly becomes an imaginary subject who no longer has available a language in common with society and who therefore is obliged to waver between a personal encoded tongue and the whole repertoire of languages and forms handed down to him by the past. By mounting these scattered fragments, making these languages and forms collide, the writer will tell the unprecedented story in which he has been allowed to participate. This explains, for example, why certain poems by Brecht, in appearance so direct, seem to have been extracted from the works of some ancient Chinese poet. And it is just this unbridgeable distance that gives these few words of “basic German” an immense resonance.

Nothing in Brecht is more valuable than his conspicuous contradictions. The man who wrote, “What times are these, when a dialogue about trees is almost a crime!” committed that crime more than once, devoting to trees some of his best poems, which remain more deeply engraved on the memory than Arturo Ui or his Galileo. The man who always harped on the need to utilize writing confesses, through his alter ego Keuner, that when leaving his house he loves to look at trees because in a society where people are “objects of use,” trees still maintain “something autonomous and therefore comforting,” for one can hope that even carpenters recognize in them “something that cannot be utilized.” And this same man, who had mocked all sublime qualities in literature, devoted to an elder tree one of the few poems of the century that can, without exaggeration, be called sublime.