BERTOLT BRECHT
Of all the great modern dramatists, Bertolt Brecht is the most enigmatic — at once both direct and hidden, at once both simple and complex. The great bulk of his work is designed to be an impersonal and schematic contribution to Marxist myth-making. Yet, despite his unambiguous commitment to the Communist cause throughout most of his career, Brecht is an extremely divided artist, whose works, for all their ideological intentions, remain peculiarly enticing and elusive. This reminds us of another Marxist dramatist, Bernard Shaw, and, superficially, Shaw would seem to be Brecht’s closest companion in the theatre of revolt. Both support a “non-Aristotelian” theatre, characterized not by cathartic emotional effects but by preachment, protest, and persuasion. Both are absorbed with the materialistic motives behind human ideals. Outwardly, both are social rebels, attempting the salvation of mankind through a change in the external environment. And both involuntarily overcome the narrow utilitarian limitations they impose on their art. Still, for all their surface similarities, Brecht is even further removed from Shaw, temperamentally, than Strindberg is from Ibsen. Whereas Shaw’s revolt is modified by the geniality of his character and the meliorism of his social philosophy, Brecht’s is intensified by his savage indignation and his harrowing vision of life. Shaw is a suppressed poet who rarely breaks the skin of the unconscious; and though he calls himself a Puritan, he cannot bring himself to contemplate evil in the soul of man. But Brecht is a lyrical, dramatic, and satiric poet of fierce intensity; and few Puritan theologians have been more fascinated than he with the brutal, the Satanic, and the irrational aspects of human nature.
Brecht’s obsession with the darker side of man stems from his struggles with his own character, and so does his relationship to ideology. While Shaw’s Fabianism is the extension of his cheerful, rationalistic personality, Brecht’s Communism is a discipline imposed, by a mighty effort of will, on a self which is essentially morbid, sensual, and anarchical. Beginning his career as an existential rebel, abnormally preoccupied with crime, blind instinctualism, and decay, Brecht becomes a social revolutionary only after he has investigated all the blind alleys of his early nihilism. The Communist ideology helps him to objectify his feelings and rationalize his art; and it encourages him to attribute an external cause to the cruelty, greed, and lust that he finds in life; but it is never fully adequate to Brecht’s metaphysical Angst. Brecht may try to convince us that man’s aggressive instincts are an outgrowth of the capitalist system, but he never seems wholly convinced himself, especially when his own aggressive instincts are so difficult to control. Even at his most scientifically objective, Brecht continues to introduce a subjective note; even at his most social and political, he remains an essentially moral and religious poet. In his relentless attacks on the inconsistencies and incongruities of Christianity (invariably phrased in Christian imagery), he generally seems more heretic than unbeliever. And though he supports a political orthodoxy which promises social order and benevolence through revolutionary change, he never quite suppresses his sense of the fixed malevolence of nature as reflected in the voracious appetites of man. Brecht’s revolt, therefore, is double-layered. On the surface, it is directed against the hypocrisy, avarice, and injustice of bourgeois society; in the depths, against the disorder of the universe and the chaos in the human soul. Brecht’s social revolt is objective, active, remedial, realistic; his existential revolt is subjective, passive, irremediable, and Romantic. The conflict between these two modes of rebellion issues in the dialectic of Brecht’s plays; and the conflict is not fully resolved until the very end of his career. Part monk, part sensualist; part moralist, part diabolist; part fanatical idealist, part cynical compromiser, Brecht is a compound of many different simples; but he combines the discords and uncertainties of our time into a product which, being dramatic poetry, is always more than the sum of its parts.
The existential aspect of Brecht’s revolt, while present in most of his writings, can be most clearly detected in his early work — the poems and plays which precede The Threepenny Opera. Here Brecht reveals affinities with two other German dramatists, separated in time but not in temperament, Georg Büchner and Frank Wedekind.1 Together with the plays of these two dramatists, Brecht’s early plays comprise what we might call a German Neo-Romantic movement — a tradition defined by its opposition to the lofty moral postures and messianic stances of the early German Romantics. (Even late in his career, Brecht, like Büchner, seems to be writing his work in reaction to the Olympian idealism of playwrights like Schiller.) Negative and ironic, scrupulously antiheroic, anti-individualist, and anti-idealist, Brecht shares with this movement a determinedly low opinion of human nature, fastening on the criminal or abnormal side of life, and charting these subterranean avenues in searing, distended images. In contrast with Titanic Supermen of German Romanticism, the central characters of his early plays are usually figures from the lower depths of society, caught in a scene of bondage and frustration, or imposing these conditions themselves.
For if the German Romantic exalts the natural man as an instinctive aristocrat, the German Neo-Romantic invariably finds him to be a much darker and more conditioned character — at best, a helpless thrall, victimized by an inhuman world; at worst, a brutal animal, rampaging through the fragile restraints imposed by civilization. Nature may be a paradise to the Stürmer-und-Dränger, but to Brecht, it is a jungle — and man is the cruelest of the beasts. Not that this is the stimulus of humanitarian concern. It is the pride of the Neo-Romantic that he can regard the predatory nature of man without flinching or moralizing. Brecht’s mentor, Wedekind — like his mentor, Strindberg — for example, finds the joy of life in the cruel struggles of mankind, declaring in the preface to Pandora’s Box: “If human morality wishes to stand higher than bourgeois morality, then it must be founded on a profounder knowledge of man and of the world.” It is as a tough-minded natural historian that Wedekind turns his gaze on creatures from the underworld — swindlers, whores, pimps, white slavers, beggars, lesbians — those “who have never read a book in their lives [and] whose actions are dictated by the simplest animal instincts.” And it is as a disciple of this “ugly, brutal, dangerous” man2 that Brecht investigates the underside of life, exploiting — also like Wedekind, and like Büchner, too — the popular entertainments, culture, and expressions of the lower classes: proverbs, vernacular poetry, idiomatic speech, the variety theatre, the circus, the cabaret, and the streetsinger’s ballad, the Moritat.
Despite the studied indifference with which Brecht affects to examine life in this period, however, he cannot disguise his sense of horror at it. To adapt Joyce’s phrase about Stephen Dedalus’s Jesuit conditioning, he has the cursed Lutheran strain in him, injected the wrong way. Like Büchner, whose disgust and hatred are clear enough — and like Wedekind, whose fixation on the more perverse sexual appetites shows a revolt against bourgeois morality chaneled through a diseased Christian consciousness — Brecht exposes, through his exaggerated view of human nature, a strain of disappointed Romanticism — the identifying mark of the Neo-Romantic. This strain is particularly evident in the obsessive concern of all three with deliquescence, isolation, and the weakness of the human will. Apparently agonized by the failure of Romantic ideals of unlimited human freedom, the Neo-Romantic is inclined to see man as wholly determined by external and internal forces, his aspiration mocked by animal instincts and physical decay. Images of rot, stench, and decomposition pervade this drama; characters deteriorate under a peeling shell of flesh. Under the spell of this Augustinian vision, Büchner perceives the “horrible fatalism of all history,”3 a horror which Brecht introduces into his early drama, where man is merely an excremental object of no value, a “creature eating on a latrine.”
The typical development of the Neo-Romantic drama, then, follows the progress of human deterioration — the gradual stripping away of morals, ideals, individualization, and civilized veneer until the human being is revealed in all his naked cruelty or insignificance — accompanied by sex nausea, hatred of the flesh, and ill-disguised sado-masochistic feelings. The masterpiece of the genre is Büchner’s Woyzeck — at once the most typical and the most original of Neo-Romantic plays — and one which exercised a powerful influence on all of Brecht’s early writings. In this series of fragments — written in 1837 but not deciphered and published until 1879 — Büchner takes up an actual historical case; that of a regimental Leipzig barber who had murdered his mistress in a fit of jealousy. At the time, a debate had ensued over whether the barber was mad; Büchner handles the problem by ignoring it completely. Woyzeck is certainly mad, but then so is the entire world. Manipulated by a cold, unfeeling environment, and buffeted by his own uncontrollable impulses, Woyzeck seems human only in his ability to suffer; but in comparison with the brute beasts who make him suffer, Woyzeck is very human indeed. Frustrated and inarticulate, Woyzeck represents humanity in its crudest form; he is the natural man, untaught, unmoral, incorrigible. Lectured by his condescending Captain on the need for virtue, Woyzeck replies: “People like us can’t be holy in this world — or the next. If we ever did get into heaven, they’d put us to work on the thunder.” To such born victims, morality is an extravagance and virtue a luxury — or as Brecht will put it a hundred years later, Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.
Like Brecht’s, however, Büchner’s social judgment has a metaphysical foundation; it is not just the social system but life itself which inspires Woyzeck’s misery. To Büchner, society is merely another form of nature; and in the state of nature, man is simply another one of the beasts. At the fairgrounds, Woyzeck observes his natural cousins in a monkey dressed as a man, and a trained horse who “puts society to shame.” When he becomes the experimental object of a proto-Nazi Doctor who holds that natural man is superior to the animals because he can control his urine, Woyzeck urinates against a wall — like a dog. Even the Doctor’s Pelagian view of human freedom, limited though it is, is contradicted by Woyzeck’s wayward flesh. The natural man is without control, and nature itself is chaos, madness, and disorder: “When Nature gives way,” observes Woyzeck, “the world gets dark, and you have to feel around with your hands, and everything keeps slipping, like in a spider’s web.” Büchner further evokes this sense of dislocation through the accidental, unconnected form of the play — Woyzeck moves blindly from episode to episode like the prey of the spider being dragged down its web. His frenzy increasing over his mistress’s infidelity, Woyzeck falls into a “beautiful aberratio” (as the Doctor gleefully calls it), and in the grip of a lucid, Shakespearean madness, he begins to visualize the sexual act — the act of nature — in images of bestiality, foulness, and defilement: “Why doesn’t God blow out the sun so they can roll on top of each other in filth. Male and Female. Man and Beast. They’ll do it in broad daylight. They’ll do it on your hands, like flies.” It is the language of Shakespeare’s Lear perceiving the whole of life dominated by unrestrained appetite. It is the form of nature (anarchy and madness) discovering the essence of nature (lust and frenzy). And acting on this terrible perception, Woyzeck cuts his mistress’s throat. Later, trying to wash the blood from his hands, he is drowned himself; and as some children heartlessly fling the news (“Hey, your mother’s dead”) to the woman’s orphaned child, the cycle of inhumanity begins anew.
Much the same inflamed vision of man in nature burns through Wedekind’s Erdgeist where — this time with the author’s energetic approval — domestic animals are transformed into wild beasts, degenerating under the influence of Lulu, an amoral spirit of the Earth; it permeates the film The Blue Angel, where a highly respectable teacher is totally dehumanized through a sordid relationship with a cabaret singer; and it accounts for the lurid horrors and ghastly rot in so much Expressionist painting. It is this vision which inspires the caricatures of Brecht’s frequent collaborator in the Weimar days, George Grosz, who describes, in his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No, the excremental quality of his early drawings:
My drawings expressed my despair, hate, and disillusionment. I had utter contempt for mankind in general. I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon; men who had murdered women, sitting on their coffins playing skat, while within the coffins could be seen their bloody victims. . . . I drew a cross-section of a tenement house; through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife with a broom; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies.
In these drawings, as in all Neo-Romantic art, human flesh takes on the quality of pork and beef, and all the natural instincts seem vile, gruesome, and ugly. It is a vision which the Nazis were to actualize and the photographs from Belsen and Buchenwald were to illustrate — the underground art peculiar to a country where purity and idealism have alternated with the most atrocious barbarism, and strong appetites have been brutalized by a repressive authoritarianism.
German Neo-Romanticism culminates in the early work of Brecht, where it takes the form of extreme antipathy to the social and natural world. As Herbert Ihering observed of Brecht when the poet was only twenty-four, “Brecht is impregnated with the horror of this age in his nerves, in his blood. . . . Brecht physically feels the chaos and putrid decay of the times.” Much of this physical revulsion pervades Brecht’s early poems, collected in his volume Hauspostille (The Domestic Breviary, 1927), where he deals obsessively with such Neo-Romantic themes as the meaninglessness of individualism, the inescapable isolation of the natural man, and the vileness of the natural functions, besides displaying a typically Germanic interest in decay and death. Putrefying corpses, drowned girls, dead soldiers, and murdered infants populate the balladic structures of these verses. “There are hardly two or three out of these fifty poems . . . in which something is not rotting,” notes a hostile critic, Herbert Luethy. And in his moving autobiographical poem, “Concerning Poor B.B.,” Brecht openly reveals his conviction that human beings (and he includes himself) are “strangely stinking animals,” while proceeding to describe the beauties of nature in these rhapsodic images: “Towards morning the fir trees piss in the gray light/ And their vermin, the birds, begin to cheep.”
This obsession with man and nature in a state of putrefaction is also central to Brecht’s early drama, where he deals with lower forms of humanity, deteriorating in a terrible environment. In Baal, for example, Brecht — employing the ecstatic imagery of Büchner and the cynical indifference of Wedekind — follows the career of a ruthless, bisexual poet, who satisfies his instincts without conscience, and finally dies in swinish degradation amidst offal and urine, declaring that the world is merely “the excrement of God.”4 In Drums in the Night, he dramatizes the anarchy and isolation of the central character, a returning soldier named Kragler, who rejects the heroic demands of the Spartakus revolution in order to follow the safest and most comfortable way: “I am a swine, and the swine go home.” Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities illustrates the disorder of the universe and the gratuitous cruelty of mankind, also concluding with the passive acceptance of evil. And in A Man’s a Man, he demonstrates the insignificance of the individual by showing how the meek, Woyzeck-like water carrier, Galy Gay, is transformed into a “human fighting machine” by three brutal soldiers — meanwhile illustrating the violence of human instinct in the martinet sergeant, Bloody Five, who can discipline his sexual appetite only by castrating himself.
Much of this savagery and cynicism is deliberately designed to shock; and John Willett has ably described how Brecht — along with Joachim Ringelnatz, Walter Mehring, and the Berlin Dadaists — was eager to outrage the maddening complacency of the Weimar bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, Brecht’s mordant attitudes are deeply rooted in his own nature — so deeply, in fact, that he feared this Bitterkeit would affect his creative powers. In “Concerning Poor B.B.” he writes: “In the earthquakes to come it is to be hoped/ I shan’t allow bitterness to quench my cigar’s glow.” Like Strindberg, whom he so much resembles in this period, Brecht tries to deal with his own desperation by turning it into art: Baal, Kragler, Garga, Shlink, Bloody Five, Galy Gay, almost all his early characters are aspects of himself, projected into semiautobiographical form. These characters can be roughly divided into two main types: the active and the passive, those who create violence and those who seek to avoid it — but whether victimizers or victims, almost all of Brecht’s characters find themselves repelled by their own instincts, and seek to achieve a state of calm beyond the turmoil of the appetitive life. Brecht, who is remembered as an incorrigible womanizer, almost invariably associates some dire penalty with the indulgence of the appetites; for him, physical satisfaction leads directly to catastrophe — which may explain why Bloody Five in A Man’s a Man, and, later, Lauffer in The Tutor, resort to such desperate expedients as self-castration in order to control themselves. Not only sex but passions of any uncontrolled kind seem to be a source of anxiety to Brecht: anger, outrage, panic, revenge, violence, all are vital elements of his work, and all stand condemned.
Brecht is probably trying to master these emotions in himself, for his work exposes his desire for absolute submission, a state of being in which he can conquer his unbridled feelings, and, instead of engaging himself with the external world, merge with it. Brecht’s favorite symbol for this passionless state is the condition of the child in its mother’s womb. In “Concerning Poor B.B.,” he speaks of how “My mother carried me to town while in her womb I lay,” and he refers repeatedly to the pleasant passivity of this kind of prenatal transportation. A recurrent image in Brecht’s writings, as Martin Esslin has observed, is that of drifting helplessly with the tide — and water, we should note, is very often associated with the mother’s womb:
You must, of course, lie on your back quietly
As is usual and let yourself go on drifting.
You must not swim, no, but only act as if
You were a mass of flotsam slowly shifting.
You must look up at the sky and act as if
A woman carried you, and it is so.
(“Of Swimming in Lakes and Rivers”)
To lie still in this water is to give oneself up to existence; to flail about in it is to involve oneself — sexually, socially, actively — with the external world. What Brecht really desires is the Buddhist Nirvana — but his own physical needs and his rebellious spirit continually press him back into material life. Brecht’s unremitting attempts to control his rebellious instincts by surrendering to a discipline outside himself are to issue, later, in his submission to the Communist orthodoxy, and, still later, in his aspiration towards Oriental impassivity, where one becomes a vessel of the universe — acquiescent, will-less, and obedient. But whatever form it finds, Brecht’s desire for impersonality and control reflects his need to escape from the pulls of the flesh, to subjugate the instincts which force him into unwilling participation in life.
At this point in his career, Brecht openly reveals his existential horror of life and loathing of the instincts. Like his Neo-Romantic predecessors, he fastens on a world of total bondage and total cruelty. In such a world, self-indulgence is equated with sadism and self-realization with death, and Romantic individualism is a sentimental illusion: “What’s all this bother about people,” asks one of the soldiers in A Man’s a Man. “One is the same as none at all. You can’t even speak of less than two hundred at a time.” As for personality, how can one believe in that when Copernicus has shown “that Man is not in the middle of the universe?” Though Brecht shares Nietzsche’s assumption that Copernicus banished the gods from the heavens, he sings not the Übermensch but the Untermensch, the man without possibilities. And his concentration on the more insuperable human limitations, the source of his quarrel with existence, leads him to attack not only the God of the Christians but the God of the Romantics as well: “The good god,” as he puts it in Baal, “who so distinguished himself by joining the urinary passage with the sex organ” — in short, the God of nature. Choking on the same bone that stuck in the throat of Strindberg, Brecht cannot swallow the fact that man is born inter faeces et urinas; and his pronounced excrementalism makes him fiercely antagonistic to all Romantic aspiration. GLOTZT NICHT SO ROMANTISCH (“Don’t goggle so romantically”) reads the placard hanging over the action of Drums in the Night, accompanied by another affirming that JEDER MANN IST DER BESTE IN SEINER HAUT (“Each man feels best in his own skin”). In this stage of his career, and probably throughout it, Brecht cannot convince himself that this “strangely stinking animal” is capable of heroism, morality, freedom, or anything more than the cynical pursuit of his own advantage and survival. In short, he leaves open no avenues of idealism; his is a negative assault of thundering aggressiveness. Yet, for all his scorn of Romanticism in its more positive forms, his own Romantic temperament can still be glimpsed in his subjective poetic attack, in his ferocious bitterness and disillusionment, and, especially, in his unremitting rebellion against the straitened conditions of modern existence.
Brecht’s existential revolt is best illustrated in In the Jungle of Cities (Im Dickicht der Städte), his third play, completed in 1923 when he was barely twenty-five. Extremely puzzling and sometimes incoherent, this work is often hastily dismissed as an obscure experiment; but for all its difficulty, it is clearly a major achievement of a poet genius which batters at the nerves even when it is baffling the mind. Here Brecht is at his most frenzied and diabolical, displaying that “prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses” which Rimbaud held to be the special attainment of the visionary and seer. Rimbaud’s influence, in fact, is unmistakable throughout the play, which embodies long quotations from Une Saison en Enfer, and even a central conflict recalling Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine. In its ecstatic, strained, audacious imagery, however, the play is more reminiscent of Büchner’s Woyzeck, which also influences its philosophy, its tone, and, especially, its form: In the Jungle of Cities consists of eleven scenes, some extremely brief, essentially disconnected, but held together by a single sustained action. Characters act upon each other with no apparent cause-and-effect motivation, as in a dream. Its atmosphere, dreamlike also, is permeated with a thick, harsh, oppressive glow — the hot tones and fiery illuminations of a feverish hallucination.
The general location of the play is Chicago, during the period from 1912 to 1915. With each scene identified by a brief legend (in his early work, Brecht uses legends primarily to fix locales), the action moves from the business section to the slums to Chinatown to the shores of Lake Michigan. Yet, all the settings are mythical; Brecht’s Chicago, for example, is a seaport, and his seedy Chinese bars and hotels seem to have come out of Anna May Wong movies or Charlie Chan novels.5 Brecht is fascinated by Chicago because it strikes him as the archetypical “city of iron and dirt” — Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is undoubtedly influential here — the source of those predatory images which the concrete metropolis always evokes in his imagination. Brecht’s interest in American cities is also inspired by the coarser texture of American society, its mixtures of racial types, its shameless materialism, its idiomatic speech and jazz culture, and, especially, its love of sport. The central image of the play, in fact (if we discount the numerous jungle images), is a metaphor from the world of sport: “The inexplicable boxing match between two men.”6 And the eleven scenes of the play represent the ten rounds of the combat, with an extra scene devoted to the victor, after the other combatant has been “knocked out.”
The motives of this seemingly gratuitous conflict have been the subject of some speculation. Martin Esslin, noting the Rimbaud-Verlaine parallels, assumes a homosexual relationship between Brecht’s two antagonists; and Eric Bentley, detailing Brecht’s borrowings from The Wheel, J. V. Jensen’s Danish novel of homosexual murder and struggle, agrees — though he emphasizes the sado-masochistic nature of the combat. Brecht, himself, is elusive. In his foreword, he tries to discourage speculation about motives, urging the spectator to concentrate on other matters: “Don’t rack your brains over the motives for this fight but note the human stakes, judge without prejudice the style of each contestant, and direct your interest to the finish.” And towards the conclusion of the play, one of the antagonists also appears to rule out a purely sexual basis for his behavior: “I wanted the boxing match. Not the physical contest but the spiritual.” There are, undoubtedly, strong homoerotic overtones in the play, and, as usual with Brecht, sadism and masochism play their part. But more important than the psychological aspects of the work are the philosophical ones; and in my discussion, I shall assume that the conflict between the central characters is less physical than metaphysical. The theme of In the Jungle of Cities is the impossibility of establishing permanent contact between human beings — not only sexual contact, but social, oral, and spiritual contact, too.
Before discussing this theme, however, the play itself needs some exposition and interpretation, for it is extremely devious and highly assumptive. The opening scene, which takes place in a rental library, initiates the conflict — between the fifty-one-year-old Malayan merchant, called Shlink, and the young librarian, George Garga. Under the pretense of buying a book, Shlink offers money to Garga for his opinion of a mystery story. But though Garga is willing to give his opinions freely — or to sell Shlink the opinions of “Mr. J. V. Jensen and Mr. Arthur Rimbaud”7 — he absolutely refuses to make his own intelligence an object of barter. Actually, Shlink’s offer has been carefully calculated to lead to combat. Garga is penniless, and his family is starving; but he has somehow preserved his Romantic insistence on personal freedom. Like Brecht, who moved from “the black forests” to “the concrete cities,” Garga has come to Chicago from the spacious prairies; his love of freedom is intimately associated with his natural origins. To sell an opinion is to become a bought thing; and thus, as Shlink continually raises his offer, Garga becomes increasingly incensed and humiliated.
Since Brecht already assumes the total determination of modern city life by economic necessity, Garga’s Romantic idealism is his Achilles heel — and Shlink proceeds to goad and prod it. When Garga announces that “I can afford opinions,” Shlink asks caustically, “You come from a family of transatlantic millionaires?” “That you go on having opinions shows your failure to understand life,” affirms Shlink’s henchman, Skinny, and Shlink adds, “Please observe the way things are on this planet, and sell.” Garga finds himself helpless before Shlink’s “aggressions.” Though he recognizes the vulnerability of the Romantic idealist in the city jungle (“We grew up on the plains. . . . Here we’re up for auction”), he stubbornly refuses to be a “prostitute.” And Shlink, cheered to have found a real “fighting man,” begins the match by “rocking the ring.” First, he arranges to have Garga’s girlfriend, Jane Larry, turned into a prostitute by another of his henchmen. And then he has Garga fired: “Your economic security! Watch the boxing ring! It’s shaking!” Forced into action against his will, Garga begins quoting from Rimbaud, rips off his clothes, and runs into the streets, still begging for his freedom. He is prepared to sacrifice everything to defend his personal independence. And the fight is on.
For in order to recover his freedom, Garga must destroy his opponent — a turn which Shlink, who desires to be destroyed, had shrewdly foreseen. “When I heard of your habits,” he tells Garga, “I thought: a good fighter” — for Shlink knows that Garga is a man without limits, a Romantic who will go all the way to keep his self inviolate. To aid in his own destruction, and to equalize the odds, Shlink becomes Garga’s thrall: “From today on, Mr. Garga, I place my fate in your hands. . . . From today on, I am your creature. . . . My feelings will be dedicated to you alone, and you will be evil.” Garga plays on this advantage to plot Shlink’s downfall, first haphazardly, then more cunningly: pouring ink over his ledgers, making him contract a fraudulent lumber deal, firing his employees, shutting up his business. When a Salvation Army man enters for a handout, Garga gives him Shlink’s property — on the proviso that he permit the Malayan to spit in his face. Brutality and violence are beginning to enter the combat — “You wanted prairie life,” Garga tells his opponent, “you can have it.” But just when the match is beginning to get warm, Garga decides to leave the ring and embark for Tahiti.
Garga’s decision — soon to be reversed — is based on his growing awareness that the freedom he is fighting for is a chimera:
We are not free. It starts with the coffee in the mornings, and with whippings if one acts like a fool, and the tears of the mother salt the soup of the children, her sweat washes their shirts, and one is secure until the ice-age sets in, and the root sits in the heart. And when a man is grown, and wants to do something and give it everything, he finds that he is already paid for, initiated, certified, sold at a high price. And he is not free to go under.
Garga’s realization that all human actions are limited and determined — by childhood conditioning, economic necessity, metaphysical bondage, and the desire for filial security — is not enough to make him abandon the struggle. But it does make him resort to less heroic tactics. When Shlink comes to work like a coolie for Garga’s family and Garga’s sister, Marie, falls in love with him, Garga changes the course of the conflict by forcing her on the unwilling Malayan. And this act, in turn, forces Marie, made desperate by Shlink’s indifference, into a life of prostitution.
It is in the cold, loveless scenes between Shlink and Marie that the Malayan’s motivations begin to emerge. Shlink’s masochistic desire for pain, and ultimately for annihilation, are the result of a “disease” which he contracted during his youth on the Yangtze junks, where the rule of life was torture, and man’s skin grew so thick that only the most violent probes could pierce it. Garga has been hired to be his executioner, “to stuff a bit of disgust or decay in my mouth so I’d have the taste of death on my tongue.” For only through torture, disgust, and death will Shlink be able to feel. Garga fights blindly. But he, too, is learning “how hard it is to injure a man! And to destroy him, quite impossible! . . . Graze up and down this world of ours. You will find ten bad people but not one bad deed. Man is destroyed by trivial causes alone.” In his efforts to perpetrate a really bad deed — to penetrate the armored hide of Shlink — Garga uses increasingly desperate devices. Having prostituted his sister, he marries Jane Larry, now a drunkard and a whore herself. And finally, when Shlink’s lumber fraud is discovered, Garga decides to take the blame on himself, and go to jail.
Garga’s three-year imprisonment results in the utter downfall of his family. But every blow is a blow against his “hellish husband,” Shlink. For on the day of his release, the police open a letter from Garga, accusing Shlink of the various crimes which Garga had forced him to commit: the seduction of his sister, the pursuit of his wife, the destruction of his family, the insult to the Salvationist, and, finally, his own unjust imprisonment. Instead of executing Shlink himself, Garga has thus handed the yellow man over to the white lynch mob. In the metaphor of the match, this is a very low blow; Chicago is throwing in the towel; and Shlink’s associates begin to count him out. But another of Shlink’s henchmen, Worm, soon reminds us of the horrible durability of human life: “A man is not finished all at once but at least a hundred times over. Each man has all too many possibilities.” Further evidence of this comes in the comic suicide attempt of the Salvationist — now disgraced and consumed with self-disgust. After reading a whisky list while a nickelodeon plays the “Ave Maria” (a perfect example of Brecht’s blasphemous irony), he shoots himself in the neck, uttering the famous last words of Frederick the Great. But the bullet is wide of the mark and causes only a slight flesh wound. He, too, “has too thick a skin” for a clean and satisfactory end.
Shlink, hanging on the ropes, demands that Garga fulfill his pledge and finish him personally. And the tenth scene (the last round of the match) takes place in an abandoned railroad tent where Garga, like Judas, spends three last weeks with his sacrificial victim.8 Here Shlink expresses his love for Garga, and filled with the darkest despair, explains the symptoms of his “disease,” the dreadful loneliness he had suffered for forty years. Now at the end, he has fallen victim to “the black mania of this planet — the mania for contact,” to be reached “through enmity,” the Romantic form of love. But even this final will-to-life has failed:
The endless isolation of man makes even enmity an unattainable goal. Even with the animals it is impossible to come to an understanding. . . . I have watched animals. Love — warmth from bodily proximity — is our only grace in the darkness. But the union of the organs is the only union and it can never bridge the gap of speech. Still, they come together to beget new beings who can stand at their side in their inconsolable isolation. And the generations look coldly into each other’s eyes. . . . The jungle! That’s where mankind comes from. Hairy, with the teeth of an ape, good beasts who knew how to live, everything was so easy, they simply tore each other to bits.
In this beautiful and appalling speech, Brecht combines Büchner’s sense of the anarchy, chaos, and isolation of nature with Wedekind’s and Strindberg’s perception of man as a wild beast. But Brecht denies even that possibility of a clean kill that one finds in Woyzeck, denies even that ecstasy through cruelty that informs Erdgeist and Miss Julie. In the jungle of cities, man’s hide has accumulated so many layers of defensive skin that even the contact between clawing, ferocious beasts is no longer achievable: “Yes, so terrible is the isolation that there isn’t even a fight.”9
Garga, however, averts his face from this nihilistic abyss. Having lost interest in Shlink’s “metaphysical action,” he has determined to escape with his “naked life.” For him, survival has become the summum bonum — “a naked life is better than any other life.” The course of the combat has taught him that the end of such struggles is always the same: “The younger man wins . . . the old yields to the young, such is natural selection. . . . It is not important to be the stronger one, but to be the living one.” This Darwinist conclusion signifies that the last bubble of Garga’s idealism has evaporated. Accepting determinism, abandoning his belief in freedom, he has turned into a cynical compromiser, taking the nearest way. And he engenders Shlink’s instantaneous scorn: “That gesture shows you are unworthy to be my opponent. . . . You a hired boxer! A drunken salesman! . . . An idealist who couldn’t tell his legs apart, a nothing!” But Garga is unmoved. Idealism, heroism, individualism, freedom, significant combat — all are “words, on a planet which is not even in the middle.” And leaving the ring, he carries his “raw flesh into the icy rains,” as Shlink — kayoed — falls to the floor. For Shlink, it only remains to finish himself; and he commits hari-kari, the howl of the lynch mob in his ears, after a burst of surrealist prose. As for Garga, he survives. In the last scene, he has sold Shlink’s business — along with his own father and sister — and with the proceeds, is preparing to enter the jungle of New York. Accepting the consequences of living on a second-rate planet, he has turned his back forever on prairie Romanticism. He has repudiated his combative need for personal opinions; his passion is spent; he will fight no more. But even as he holds the prize money in his hand, he reflects, with a little nostalgia, on the conflicts of the past: “To be alone is a good thing. The chaos is used up now. It was the best time.”
The philosophical conclusions of this work are much too bleak to sustain an artist for long — there is nothing in the suicidal nihilism of Shlink to inspire the process of creation — and so it is not surprising that, a few years later in 1927 or 1928, Brecht begins to take instruction at the Marxist Worker’s College in Berlin. Brecht’s decision is clearly foreshadowed in the development of Garga. For like his semiautobiographical hero, Brecht has repudiated the quest for identity and the need for personal opinions; like Garga, he is pursuing, though somewhat less cynically, the path of his own survival. If subjective individualism leads to chaos, then the subjective consciousness must be expunged; if personal rebellion leads to madness, then one must learn to conform. For him, the way out of existential despair lies along the ideological path of Communism: “Not madness,” as Brecht characterizes it in Die Mutter, “but the end of madness . . . not chaos but order.”
In the Jungle of Cities powerfully suggests the madness Brecht perceives in nature and the chaos he senses in the universe; and it is certainly true, as Martin Esslin observes, that Communism “dissolved the nightmare of absurdity” for the dramatist, and “dispelled the oppressive feeling that life was ruled by vast and impersonal forces.” On the other hand, the play also suggests that the anarchy he describes is projected from inside, and the aggressions of his central characters are a crucial element of his own nature. His attraction to Communism, therefore, can also be ascribed to the fact that it offers a system of regimentation, a form of rational control over his frightening individualism and terrifying subjectivity. Brecht’s desire for passivity, in short, stems from his fear of activity. And his rage for order is really an extension of his desire to drift with the tide, for Communism represents a tide with a meaningful direction. As Lion Feuchtwanger has observed in a fictionalized biography of the author, Brecht “really suffered from his personality. He wanted to escape from it, he wanted to be only one atom among many,” later adding the interesting reflection that he was “singularly deficient in social instincts.” For such a one, Communism could be the ideal creed, because it couples antisocial rebellion with the promise of true community — and more important, because it encourages the escape from personality, offering the most impersonal and selfless discipline since primitive Christianity.
What I am suggesting is that Brecht responded as eagerly to the Communist discipline as to the Communist dogma; there is something almost religious about his attachment to his new creed. Like most new converts, his fanaticism begins to exceed that of the orthodox; using “science” and “reason” as ritualistic passwords, he turns to ideology as if it were theology, and enters politics as if he were joining a monastic order. Brecht’s monkishness is expressed not only in the new simplicity of his poetry, which grows more functional and clipped, but in almost every aspect of his behavior. He begins to wear a simple worker’s uniform as if it were a monk’s habit; he crops his hair short; his surroundings become more stark and austere; and his private life more ascetic. Most important, he begins to urge the complete extinction of the personality, accompanied by total obedience to a higher order. As Esslin has noted, the word Einverständnis (acquiescence or consent) begins to run like a leitmotiv through his work, especially through those five Lehrstücke he writes in quick succession from 1928 to 1930. A few of these plays, in fact, are wholly concerned with the teaching of acquiescence to a rebellious individual, climaxing at the moment when the central figure renounces his personal feelings, denounces his insubordination, and accepts the death sentence imposed by his judges. In The Measures Taken (Die Massnahme), for example, a sympathetic Young Comrade, having permitted his hatred of injustice to jeopardize the mission of his fellow agitators, is taught the dangers of individual rebellion and instinctual reactions, and consents to his own liquidation. It has been observed that the rigid orthodoxy of such a play is probably more of an embarrassment than a service to the Communist cause; and under pressure from the party, Brecht withdrew The Measures Taken from performance, commenting that nobody could learn anything from it except the actor who plays the Young Comrade. On the other hand, one begins to suspect that Brecht writes such works less for the enlightenment of other ideologues than as a self-disciplinary measure. The Young Comrade is probably himself; the subjective, instinctual, and individual qualities he is trying to punish are his own. Even in the act of celebrating impersonality and obedience, Brecht is likely to betray his personal conflicts, inadvertently remaining the hero of his own work. In their harsh, incantatory quality, Brecht’s agitprop plays seem like the “Aves” of a novitiate, paying penance for a recurrent sin. In his efforts to renounce this sin, Brecht tries to apply the hair-shirt of reason and control to the disobedient passions. But his subjective anarchy is never quite subdued, and his probationary period never really comes to an end.
Brecht’s Communism, then, is less a substitute for his early Neo-Romanticism than a layer superimposed on top of it — his rational ideology emerges as the dialectical counterpart of his irrationalism and despair. Brecht’s new commitment permits him to function as an artist, but his political solutions are fashioned for essentially metaphysical problems. To be sure, Brecht’s assumptions are now more hopeful and optimistic. Where he once identified evil with fate and assumed it to be fixed, he now identifies it with bourgeois society and assumes it to be changeable. “According to the ancients,” he writes in his notes to an adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone (1948), “man is powerless before the workings of fate. In the adaptation of Bertolt Brecht, man’s fate is in the hands of man himself.” His despairing belief in Darwinist science (natural selection and determinism) has been replaced by an affirmative belief in Marxist science (class war and revolution) — his despondent feelings about the future of the individual have given way to more cheerful feelings about the future of the collective. Sociological interpretations have grown more important than biological ones; materialistic explanations prevail; and instead of finding everything ruled by blind instinct, Brecht begins to reveal more faith in reason and will. Whatever his expectations of the future, however, Brecht continues to focus on the bleaker aspects of present-day reality. While he refuses to reach tragic conclusions, he is still primarily occupied with tragic conditions. Human deterioration may now be attributed to the social system, but rot still catches his eye, even if it is now called by the name of Capitalism.10 As for the natural environment, Brecht now believes that “science is able to change nature to an extent that makes the world appear almost habitable” (the “almost” is good); but he still finds man victimized by the external world — still lost in the emptiness of the Copernican universe.11
Brecht’s characters, however, are also victimized now by a cruel society. As we might expect, his Marxist orientation puts social-economic concerns at the center of his art. The rebel against the chaos of nature has turned into a rebel against the social system. And while his existential revolt found its literary roots in a German Neo-Romantic tradition, his social revolt is influenced by a more international group of writers — I refer not only to the Communist dialecticians but also to pre- and post-Marxist dramatists in a Jonsonian tradition; Ben Jonson, William Wycherly, John Gay, Henri Becque, Henrik Ibsen, and (to a lesser degree) Bernard Shaw.
Even here, however, we can see that Brecht has not so much changed his old assumptions as assimilated them within a new intellectual structure. For between the Neo-Romantic dramatist and the Jonsonian satirist there is one important point of agreement — that man (to use a Renaissance adage) is a wolf to man. If nature is a jungle to Büchner, Wedekind, and the early Brecht, then to Jonson, Becque, Ibsen and the later Brecht, it is society which harbors the wild beasts — Volpone and The Vultures, in fact, each use animal imagery to suggest the kinship of human beings with such rapacious creatures as the buzzard, the crow, the raven, the fly, and the fox, all picking each other’s bones in an orgy of greed and acquisitiveness. “Lions, wolves, and vultures don’t live together in herds, droves, and flocks,” observes Lockit in an important Brechtian source work, The Beggar’s Opera. “Of all animals of prey, man is the only sociable one.” John Gay takes us on a tour of this social jungle, cheerfully exposing the universality of human venality; Wycherly and the Restoration dramatists depict man as a Hobbesian marauder, plundering and seducing without ever breaking the rules of the social contract; and Ibsen’s social plays contrast the selfish motives of power-minded, avaricious men with their pretensions to altruism and lofty moral ideals. These authors generally resemble Marx in their negative critique of society. For if they are silent about the perfectability of man, the class struggle, and the classless society, they all visualize a world dominated by economic determinism, where the true god of man is Plutus, the god of gold.
Brecht himself seems to be more responsive to the critical than to the Utopian side of Marx — at least, in his plays. Interpreting life as dominated by the search for food and the lust for money (he wanted money and food to replace sex and power as the central subjects of the drama), he also conceives of man as an aggressive beast of prey who grows fat by battening on the flesh of his victims. “What keeps a man alive,” asks Peachum, in a song from The Threepenny Opera, “he lives on others — by grinding, sweating, defeating, beating, cheating, eating some other man.” “Man does not help man,” concludes the Chorus in the Baden Didactic Play: On Consent. And in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, the hero, Jimmy Mahoney, is forced to learn that the only capital crime is the lack of money. In Saint Joan of the Stockyards, human beings are sold on the exchange like so many cattle: “Oh, everlasting slaughter,” cries the sentimental plutocrat, Mauler. “Nowadays/ Things are no different from prehistoric times/ When they bloodied each other’s heads with iron bars!” Life proceeds by “one man coldly stripping off another’s skin,” and even the virtuous person must turn “wolf,” suppressing all kindly impulses in order to survive. Brecht’s inexhaustible gallery of thieves, swindlers, soldiers, whores, brothel madams, gangsters, landowners, Nazis, and businessmen form the population of a human bestiary, concealing behind their charming smiles the razor teeth of the shark. For whether like the brute beasts of Neo-Romantic drama, or like the opportunistic cheaters of Jonsonian satire, they are largely dominated by animal appetite, their world regulated only by a jungle morality.
On the other hand, Brecht’s Communist orientation does make him ambivalent about which human faculty creates evil — for here the views of his double inheritance are in conflict. The characters of Neo-Romantic drama — Büchner’s Woyzeck, Wedekind’s Lulu, Strindberg’s Laura — are usually driven by the unconscious, while those of satiric drama — Jonson’s Volpone, Gay’s Macheath, Becque’s Monsieur Tessier — generally follow the path of their “rational” self-interest, impervious to all drives besides greed and lust. Brecht’s early characters, as we have seen, are clearly at the mercy of anarchical impulses, but his later characters seem to alternate between emotional chaos and rational control, intermittently dominated by and dominating the instinctual pulls of their natures. Many critics, and most notably Esslin, have commented on the omnipresent Brechtian conflict between reason and instinct as personified in split characters: Shen Te and Shui Ta in The Good Woman of Setzuan, the two Annas in The Seven Deadly Sins, Puntila drunk and Puntila sober in Herr Puntila and His Servant, Matti. But, in a sense, all of Brecht’s later characters are split, vacillating between reason and instinct as dizzily as Classical heroes vacillate between love and duty. These conflicts suggest some of the contradictions inherent in Brecht’s double revolt. As a Marxist, Brecht is convinced that society is based on rational self-interest, and believes that a more unselfish use of reason will bring about a more perfect man and a more benevolent world. As an existential rebel, however, he is more dubious about the power of human reason; and his own vestigial anarchism forces him to deal with the wildness of the instincts and the irrationality of life — in short, with imperfectability.
Consider his ambivalent treatment of his central conflict. On the social-objective level of his plays, Brecht is drawing a clear-cut moral: Man’s instincts are healthy, compassionate, kindly, and courteous, but in a competitive society, he must suppress these natural feelings, exercising selfish reason in order to survive. The emotional Anna of The Seven Deadly Sins, for example, can build her kleine haus’ im Louisiana only by squelching her impulsive decency and charity (identified with Christian “sins”), and following the practical advice of her rational sister; the kindly Shen Te is saved from bankruptcy only by the intervention of her cold-hearted alter ego, Shui Ta. Since unselfishness comes naturally and instinctually, selfishness is an extremely difficult discipline. “Terrible is the temptation to goodness,” notes the Storyteller in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, while Brecht, in a poem, observing the swollen veins of a Japanese demon, reflects: “What a strain it is to be evil.” Nevertheless, the nature of the system demands that man suppress his brotherly feelings, and realistically look after himself. “For when feet are bare and bellies empty,” goes a verse in “The Invigorating Effect of Money,” “Love of virtue always turns to greed.” Or as Peachum puts it: “We would be good, not coarse and crude/ It’s just that circumstance won’t have it so.” Man is good, the system bad; ergo, conform to the system, or change the world.12
This is the Marxist Brecht speaking — but the Lutheran Brecht is much less sanguine about the healthiness of human instinct. For though Brecht may insist that man must eat before he can become a moral being, he cannot always disguise the fact that the process of ingestion fills him with a little disgust. Das Fressen, one of the most important activities in Brechtian drama, invariably seems singularly unappealing on his stage. (Eric Bentley, who notices this, also notices that “Brecht’s word both for commercial entertainment and for the sensuous, thought-inhibiting, action-inhibiting high art of our era was: culinary.”) Certainly, Anna’s gluttony, her craving for crabmeat, pork chops, sweet corn, and chicken, is depicted as the least attractive of her “healthy” instincts; Galileo’s wolfish appetite, as Brecht tells us in The Little Organon, is the key to his moral flabbiness; and Jakob Schmidt of Mahagonny, so gluttonous that he wants to devour himself, expires after stuffing his stomach with three whole calves. Not only das Fressen is accompanied by a hint of nausea, but die Liebe as well — more often than not, Brecht’s lovers are merely lechers and whores. Objectively, Brecht may associate instinct with virtue; subjectively, he identifies it with appetite — and appetite, generally, of a debased kind. A fetid hothouse sensuality runs through most of Brecht’s work. And instead of positive Marxist heroes, amoral, appetitive types like Baal continue to dominate his plays, still seen through the hideous focus of the excremental vision. In short, Brecht remains unconsciously convinced that man is a creature eating on a latrine. And just as often as instinct issues in economic bankruptcy, it issues in spiritual bankruptcy — decay and death. In Mahagonny, for example, Jimmy Mahoney opens the city to total license after a typhoon. His motto (like that of Rabelais’s Abbey of Thélème) becomes Du Darfst (Do What Thou Wilt). But after abandoning himself to the greedy consumption of food, sex, sport, and whisky, Mahoney discovers that his appetites have led to ruin. Politically Brecht can condemn unbridled instincts as an antisocial trait (“The sexual life,” he writes in his notes to The Threepenny Opera, “stands in contradiction to the social life”); psychologically, it probably represents his own unredeemable flaw, the main constituent of his continuingly anarchical nature.13
Brecht’s ambivalence accounts for the dialectical power and texture of his work. Through the clash of opposites, his Widersprüchsgeist (contradictory spirit), as he liked to call it, is able to find its complicated expression. Unable to resolve his contradictions, Brecht fails to create unambiguous political ideology, a lapse for which he is, curiously, chided by Herbert Luethy (“Never has Brecht been able to indicate by even the simplest poetic image or symbol what the world for which he is agitating should really look like”). Yet, his failure to be a Utopian ideologist is his triumph as a dramatic poet; like all the great rebel dramatists, he draws his power from the clash of thesis and antithesis, always skirting a fake harmonious synthesis. Whether Brecht is examining the conflict of reason and instinct, vice and virtue, cowardice and heroism, adaptation and revolt, science and religion, Marxism and Neo-Romanticism, he almost invariably concentrates on the opposition rather than the resolution of his terms; and he even suggests, as in these concluding verses from Saint Joan of the Stockyards, that life is good because it is unresolved:
Humanity! Two souls abide
Within thy breast!
Do not set either one aside:
To live with both is best!
Be torn apart with constant care!
Be two in one! Be here, be there!
Hold the low one, hold the high one —
Hold the straight one, hold the sly one —
Hold the pair!
Even here, the content of the statement is being dissolved by its tone — the passage is a burlesque of Goethe’s Faust. Brecht seems constitutionally incapable of creating a positive idea without somehow undermining it. Making parody a crucial element of his art, he finds his function in ridiculing the positive ideas of others — and himself; playing on incongruities, he invariably hedges his own commitment with a mocking, derisory, deflating irony.
Now irony, of course, is the literary device not of the political ideologue but of the free artist. And Brecht’s derisive tone may explain why he has never been wholly accepted in Communist countries — and for that matter, in the democracies either. He is very rarely able to make those warm affirmations so beloved by the manipulators of culture on both sides of the iron curtain. Just as he mocks the sentimentality, humanitarianism, and idealism of the liberal West, so is he curiously reluctant to celebrate the “brighter side” of Communism, to create a “positive hero,” or even to follow his own declared intention to depict man “as he might become.” Brecht’s theoretical writings are frequently characterized by optimism about the future of man under Communism; but his plays remain concerned with flawed, imperfect, and unchanging human beings, and even his theory is by no means unqualifiedly sanguine, since he often takes a strong stand against “prettification and complacency” and “facile optimism” (the ship that goes down in The Threepenny Novel is, in fact, called The Optimist). Brecht is more comfortable as a sceptic. “Scepticism moves mountains,” he declares, and “Of all things certain, the most certain is doubt.” For Brecht, wariness and mistrust are scientific attitudes, essential to an impartial examination of the world. But they are also the qualities of a Socratic temperament, suspicious from the very beginning:
I gather some fellows around me towards evening:
We address each other as “gentlemen.”
They put their feet up on my table
And say: things will improve. And I don’t ask when.
(“Concerning Poor B.B.”)
How Brecht manages to maintain his scepticism, detachment, and irony while declaring his unquestioning allegiance to the Communist cause is one of the most skillful accomplishments of dramatic literature. But it is the achievement of a man who is split in half. Committed and alienated, active and passive, hopeful and cynical, Brecht often seems much like the Poet in Strindberg’s Dream Play, torn between the purity of the ideal and the mud of the earthly reality, between a vision of the changing tomorrow and a vision of the unchanging today.
Few plays demonstrate this delicate equilibrium as well as The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), that inspired collaboration between Brecht and the composer Kurt Weill. Written in 1928 when Brecht’s Marxism had already invaded his art, this music drama is the most social, objective, and concrete work he has yet created, and is, in fact, the first complete actualization of Brecht’s theory of the Verfremdungseffekt. The theory is too well-known to be discussed again at length. Suffice it to say that, on the surface at least, its techniques are designed to create an atmosphere of scientific impartiality. Identification is discouraged. Empathy is forbidden. A more presentational style of acting increases the distance between audience and stage. And various visual devices — including projected screen titles, visible lights, exposed organ pipes, curtain wires, and placards, and blown-up Grosz caricatures — keep one always aware of being in a theatre. Scornful of the hypnotized trance induced by the “bourgeois narcotics factory,” Brecht tries to keep the spectator’s mind awake for instruction. His plays have one function — “to teach the spectator to reach a verdict.” The theatre is a courtroom (a large portion of Brecht’s plays now begin to climax with a trial scene) and the dramatic action represents the objective evidence. Brecht’s use of the jury metaphor recalls Chekhov’s manner of describing his artistic function; and though Brecht scorns the “scientifically exact representations” of Darwinian Naturalism (he calls them “empty visual or spiritual palliatives”), and prefers to call himself a Marxist Realist, he does aspire to that strict impersonality achieved by more Naturalistic playwrights like Chekhov.
Needless to say, he does not always achieve it. If Brecht’s theatre is a courtroom, then the author functions as judge, jury, and prosecuting attorney. For all his pretense at objectivity, the subjective note still sounds. Brecht’s characters are still, if more secretly, autobiographical; and Brecht himself has now entered his work as a voice and a presence — shaping opinions, manipulating the action, selecting events, heightening and distorting and exaggerating. Among the formal innovations of epic theatre is the permission it gives the author to introduce his own ideas into his work, much as a novelist uses a narrative to shape the reader’s responses to action and character. And Brecht takes full advantage of this opportunity, using narrative devices to influence the spectator’s mind. This influence leads the spectator more towards an attitude than towards a conclusion — an attitude of ironic disengagement. And Verfremdung (literally making strange) is really an instrument of the ironic mood, since it removes the observer from the thing observed, functioning, as the German critic Döblin correctly observed in 1929, when “the coldness of the author’s feelings stops him from associating himself intimately with the fate of his characters or the development of his plot.” In Brecht’s theatre, “the generations look coldly into each other’s eyes”; the metaphysical isolation of his early characters has now become the basis of his dramatic method.
The Threepenny Opera cogently demonstrates the ironic uses of the Verfremdungseffekt, since it creates an atmosphere of distance and withdrawal through the use of sharp satiric contrasts. Peachum’s religious placards, for example, like his canting dialogue, are incongruously juxtaposed with his ruthless criminal activities, just as Brecht’s rhetorical, often biblical, titles are contrasted with the argot of thieves and whores. The music serves a similar function, being either satiric in itself (Weill shares Brecht’s gift for parody) or achieving satire through the conjunction of the composer’s lyrical, nostalgic melodies with the author’s gritty, insinuating lyrics. The score features melodious forms like the tango, the Moritat, the popular ballad, and even one English air from The Beggar’s Opera (Peachum’s “Morning Hymn” is based on the traditional song “An old woman cloathed in gray,” reworked by Gay as “Through All the Employments of Life”) — but whatever sweetness there is in the tunes is totally dissipated by croaking vocal deliveries and brassy, reedy, percussive jazz orchestrations. The main purpose of these contrasts is to throw a harsh glare on the shadow that lies between romance and reality, between sentimental affirmations and the actualities of human endeavor, or between what Wedekind called “bourgeois morality” and “human morality.” The primary target of the play, in short, is hypocrisy, exposed through a burst of dissonance, brutal indignation, and controlled anger.
Brecht’s technique of satiric inversion is borrowed, of course, from Gay’s eighteenth-century ballad opera, a remarkable work which attacks many things (including opera, politics, marriage, theatrical conventions, and the English prison system), but which is mainly concerned with the manners and morals of the aristocracy. By providing a highwayman with the dash of a courtier, and whores with the graces of fine ladies, Gay suggests the vices of the upper classes without bringing a single upper-class character on stage. Brecht takes over most of Gay’s characters, some of his scenes, and even a number of his jokes (particularly those on marriage); and he preserves the Anglo-Saxon setting of the original work, updated and transformed, in Brecht’s usual fashion, into a strange and exotic locale (the play, taking place during the coronation of an unnamed Queen, moves from “Soho” to “Wapping” to “Turnbridge,” but Brecht’s England is more a compound of Villon’s Paris, Kipling’s India, and his own Berlin). Brecht’s most important borrowing — the ironic inversion of high and low life — has also been adapted to his contemporary vision. The underworld of The Threepenny Opera is a particularly savage and degenerate place, more akin to Wedekind’s world than to Gay’s: the thieves have lost their manners, the whores their graces, the delicate Polly Peachum has been coarsened into a gun moll, and instead of the cavalier Macheath, a post-Restoration rogue, Brecht creates in Mackie Messer an unmannerly, cynical ruffian, much like Baal, Kragler, Garga and the British soldiers in A Man’s a Man. As a result of these adjustments, Gay’s cheerfulness has given way to a bitter mordancy, his light wit to gallows humor, and his highly literate dialogue to vernacular thrusts of speech, generously spiced with obscenities — just as the traditional airs from Dr. Pepusch’s score have been replaced by the rasping style Weill lifted from the Berlin cabarets.
The shift in tone signifies a shift in satiric object. Brecht’s work is an assault not on the aristocracy but on the bourgeoisie. Instead of being a highwayman with the manners of a gentleman, Mack the Knife is a thief, arsonist, rapist, and murderer with the habits of a burgher — an aging, balding entrepreneur with a paunch.14 Mackie, like Al Capone, is a gangster who always prefers to call himself a “businessman”; indeed, he keeps books, worships efficiency, and puts great store by effective organization. If he dislikes blood (he is always washing his hands), then this is because wanton violence debases the dignity of his calling: “The very thought of blood makes me sick” he tells his henchmen, after they have unnecessarily broken a few heads. “You’ll never make businessmen. Cannibals — but never businessmen.” In his notes to the play, Brecht observes that the only difference between the gangster and the businessman is that the former “is often no coward”; and in The Threepenny Novel, he goes so far as to turn Mackie into a prosperous banker with a lucrative chain of stores. In the play, however, Mackie never enters legitimate enterprise, though he has very practical reasons for going straight: “Between ourselves,” he confides to Polly, “it’s only a question of weeks before I switch to banking exclusively. It’s safer as well as more profitable.” The thieves are in competition with big business and the banks — and free enterprise is edging them out. Mackie laments, in his farewell speech, that he is “the vanishing representative of a vanishing class,” being swallowed up by those with larger appetites:
We artisans of the lower middle class who work with honest jemmies on the cash boxes of small shopkeepers, are being ruined by large concerns backed by banks. What is a picklock to a bank share? What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank? What is the murder of a man to the employment of a man?
These rhetorical questions suggest the Marxist animus of the play: a number of critics have called it a dramatic illustration of Proudhon’s “Property is theft.” But Brecht cuts below the politico-economic implications of this theorem to its moral-religious implications. Making crime merely a left-handed form of human endeavor, he stigmatizes the religious hypocrisy which accompanies the right-handed forms.
The moral character of Brecht’s attack can be seen more clearly in the person of Jonathan Peachum, another small businessman engaged in criminal endeavor. An unromanticized version of Hugo’s Beggar King in Notre Dame de Paris, Peachum transforms healthy men into deformed, mutilated, and pitiful creatures through the application of artificial limbs, boils, plaster joints, and eye patches, all carefully designed to evoke the maximum of sentimentality along with the minimum of disgust. In short, he thrives by playing on the charitable impulses (which is to say, the guilt) of the rich — those who “create misery but cannot bear to see it.” Thus, if Mackie illustrates the relationship between crime and business, Peachum highlights the relationship between the self-seeking Capitalist ethic and the self-abnegating morality of Christianity. Christian brotherhood, in Peachum’s view, is simply a superfluous piety in the harsh bourgeois reality: “Your brother may be fond of you,” he sings, “But when the food’s too short for two/ He’ll go and kick you in the bum” — first comes eating, then morality. But the moral rules, as Peachum demonstrates, can also be highly profitable in a competitive society, if exploited properly. For him, a homily such as “It is better to give than to receive” suggests the path to an effective source of income. The Church, in short, is actually another “large concern backed by the banks”; Christianity and Capitalism are really in league. And like the legal system, the moral system is a hypocritical justification for greed, designed “for the exploitation of those who do not understand it or for those who, for naked need, cannot obey it.”15
Brecht’s moral satire on the bourgeoisie extends beyond its business dealings and religious ethics to all its conventions and institutions, including marriage, romantic love, and male friendship. Mack’s wedding to Polly, for example, is a typical middle-class banquet, replete with toasts, gifts, dirty jokes, and gorging guests — except that it takes place in a stable and all the furnishings are stolen. And the prostitutes in Wapping brothel sit about in their undergarments, washing themselves, playing games, chatting, etc. — a scene which Brecht, in a stage direction, calls a “middle-class idyll.” As for romantic love, this is reduced to its most sordid equivalent. In “The Ballad of the Fancy Man,” Mackie and Ginny Jenny sing of their past amour, an interlude which featured abortion, pimping, whoredom, and venereal disease — and Jenny proves her love for Mackie by betraying him, twice, for a few dollars.
Betrayal, in fact, is almost a structural element of the play, because the action proceeds through a complicated series of double crosses, climaxing in the betrayal of Mackie by his erstwhile friend, the police chief, Tiger Brown. The relationship between Brown and Mackie, which Brecht added to Gay’s plot, is designed to expose the sentiment and hypocrisy Brecht finds at the root of bourgeois friendship. Both are inclined to slobber whenever they recall their army days in India; and neither can speak of the other without invoking the accents of the Romantic novel: “We were boyhood friends,” reflects Mackie, “and though the swirling tides of life have swept us asunder, although our professional interests are so different . . . our friendship has survived it all.” Actually, the survival of the friendship is based on commercial advantage: Mackie informs on other criminals, while Brown, collecting a third of the reward, reciprocates by providing him with police protection. Brown, Brecht tells us in his notes, has “genuine affection” for Mackie, and suffers from the conflict between his two selves — the “private individual” and the “official” — but the selves are united in a common pursuit of gain. Therefore, when Peachum threatens Brown with an embarrassing riot by the poor if he does not arrest Mackie, there is no doubt what decision he will make. After weeping over their broken friendship — and settling their business accounts — he sadly turns Mackie over to the hangman.
Brown’s inner conflict — a gibe at the Classical conflict between love and honor — is less satirically recapitulated in Mackie; and here the Neo-Romantic aspect of the play forces its way to the surface. For if Brown must choose between his irrational friendship and his rational self-interest, then Mackie is suspended between his reasonable desire for survival and his unreasonable appetite for women. Brown is able to choose. But Mackie’s sexual instincts, like Bloody Five’s, are compulsive and irrational; he cannot resist whores and twice is captured in the arms of a trollop. Unlike Brown, he goes against himself. In anatomizing Mackie’s blind instinctualism, Brecht permits his subjective view of human nature to contradict his Marxist convictions: Man should follow the path of his greatest economic advantage, but he cannot overcome his animal nature. This existential theme is accented in “The Ballad of Sexual Submissiveness,” where Mrs. Peachum sings of the slavery of men to their appetites, and the defeat of all spiritual, intellectual, and political ambitions by sensual desire:
Some read the Bible; others take a Law degree;
Some join the Church and some attack the State;
While some remove the celery from their plate
And then devise a theory.
By evening all are busy moralizing
But when the night is falling, they are rising.
The monk in Brecht knows full well how difficult it is to discipline the womanizer, even by abstaining from celery. And in “The Song of Solomon,” Jenny confirms this melancholy aperçu by telling how all the great of history were brought low by their dominant trait: Solomon by wisdom, Cleopatra by beauty, Caesar by courage — and Macheath by lechery. Whether good or evil, heroic or base, the irrational element in man is the destructive one. The ideal remains out of reach. The flaw is in human nature; and human nature remains the same.
Mackie, therefore, functions in two distinct ways, being both the agent of the author’s rebellion and the thing rebelled against. As an underworld figure, he is, by implication, a rebel against society. And by identifying his own activities with those of businessmen, he satirizes the criminal side of legitimate enterprise, exposing the reality behind bourgeois respectability. On the other hand, Mackie is not simply an alienated man, forced into a life by crime by a competitive system. He is also a particularly brutal hood, subject to savage impulses — and not only sexual ones. The Streetsinger’s Moritat, “Mack the Knife,” tells of his complicity in a number of violent crimes, many of them gratuitous; and, like Jenny the Pirate, whose fantasy of revenge is such that she would exterminate the entire world, Mackie is animated by powerful aggressions: “Oh how I wish that I could get them,” he signs of his captors, “and smash them with an iron maul. . . .”16 Mackie’s sadistic nature, in other words, has very little to do with the economic system under which he lives, and it suggests that Brecht’s indictment involuntarily cuts across class lines.
So does the very ingenuity of Brecht’s technique. For while the Capitalist is unquestionably the villain of the play, no wealthy bourgeois ever appears on the stage: here, as in so many Brechtian works, the capitalist is merely a lumpenproletarian or petit bourgeois with money. This ideological “error,” a sore point to Communist critics like Ernst Schumacher, suggests the various ambiguities which Brecht has not bothered to resolve. Does human evil stem from the evils of the system? Or do the system’s evils reflect the murder in the human heart? Will man’s greed, lust, and cruelty disappear in a less commercial society? Or are they fundamental defects of nature, much like original sin? An answer to these questions would commit Brecht irrevocably to Communism or Neo-Romanticism, to the social or the religious vision, to free will or determinism — but he does not answer. His point is that the world must be changed; his counterpoint is that “the world will always be the same.”
This irresolution is exaggerated by the ferocious irony of the conclusion — the famous Mounted Messenger scene — where, in order that “mercy may prevail over justice once a year,” the Queen pardons Mackie from the gallows, elevates him to the peerage, heaps him down with gifts, and extends her “royal and cordial felicitations.” Brecht’s satire on the facile endings of Classical comedy is clear enough — the Messenger comes from the last act of Molière’s Tartuffe. But the symbolic significance of the Messenger himself is more obscure. He could be the benevolent agent of a future society where justice prevails and life is benign and humane; he could also be the bright angel of that dead God who once presided over an ordered and coherent universe. Again, Brecht’s commitment is kept in shadows; only his negative comment is unclouded. For whatever reasons, the world is bad, “Mounted Messengers from the Queen come far too seldom, and if you kick a man he kicks you back again. Therefore never be too ready to oppose injustice.” The “Valedictory Hymn” echoes Peachum’s warning against facile indignation, adding a note from Ecclesiastes about the everlasting bleakness and woe of life. With the whole play inverted, and the whole world seen from its underside, even Brecht’s positive affirmations seem to come out backwards. And one finally comes away from The Threepenny Opera unbalanced by contrasts, dislocated by contradictions, foundering in the shifting perspective — secure only in the author’s unrelenting revolt as transmitted through his negative, ironic tone.
Much the same doubleness of vision and unity of tone can be found in Mother Courage and her Children (Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder), Brecht’s masterpiece and, without doubt, one of the finest works of the modern theatre. Completed in 1939, when World War II was just beginning and Brecht was in exile in Scandinavia, Mother Courage ostensibly deals with the Thirty Years War, that seventeenth-century feast of death, fire, and pestilence. But its real subject is all wars, as seen from the perspective of one who loathes military heroism. Inspired to some extent by Grimmelshausen’s picaresque novel Simplicissimus, this play, according to Bentley, can be partly construed as a reply to Schiller’s Wallenstein. It is also a reply to Shakespeare’s Henry V, Comeille’s Le Cid, Dryden’s Conquest of Granada — in short, to all works which glorify heroism or eulogize national ideals. Brecht has finally made the passive side of his nature the source of a positive position: that of a belligerent pacifism. He observes the exploits of war, like those of peace, from the underside, examining what Edmund Wilson has called “the self-assertive sounds” which man “utters when he is fighting and swallowing others.” To achieve his satire on the morality of the military life, Brecht concentrates not on the battles but on the commonplace activities of day-to-day living, as performed by the war’s orphans, truants, and subordinates.17 In the background of Mother Courage pass the victories, defeats, reversals, sieges, assaults, retreats, and advances which form the substance of history. In the foreground, the private lives of the noncombatants provide a non-heroic contrast. The external course of the conflict is narrated, like newspaper headlines, in the legends preceding each scene, but it interests Brecht only insofar as it influences local commerce: “General Tilley’s victory at Leipzig,” the title informs us, “costs Mother Courage four shirts.”
For the real struggle is over money, food, and clothing. Brecht, still examining the relationship between Capitalism and crime, is now applying his Marxist perceptions to the crimes of history itself. If the businessman is identified with the gangster in The Threepenny Opera, then he is identified with the warmaker in Mother Courage. Property is not only theft, but murder, rape, and pillage; war may be the extension of diplomacy but it is also an extension of free enterprise. Locked in endless combat, the Protestant Swedes and the Catholic Germans are told they are fighting for religious ideals, but like the Swedish King Gustavus, whose zeal was so great that he not only liberated Poland from the Germans but offered to liberate Germany as well, the crusading warlords usually make “quite a profit on the deal.” The Chaplain may believe that the war “is a religious war, and therefore pleasing to God,” but to the Cook, it is just like any other war in “all the cheating, plunder, rape, and so forth.” The God it is supposed to please is not around to help the participants; and so when it comes to a real test of the Protestant Chaplain’s religious enthusiasm, he switches sides: “God bless our Catholic flag.” Obviously, Brecht is again attacking Christian hypocrisy rather than Christianity itself; once again, he is measuring how far mankind falls short of its ideals. Religious piety, jingo patriotism, bourgeois respectability, all are merely synonyms for greed, acquisition, and self-advancement. And since war is “just the same as trading,” the morality which justifies it must be considered an evil sanction. Brecht, in short, quarrels with Christianity because its morality has been exploited, its prophecies unfulfilled. The age of miracles is past. Man must now find his own loaves and fishes, and attend to his earthly survival.
Seen from this perspective, heroism looks like a ghastly skeleton, rattling its bones in the wind; and in Mother Courage, heroic actions invariably stem either from stupidity, insanity, brutality, or simple human error. The spokesman for Brecht’s antiheroic point of view is Anna Fierling, the canteen woman known more familiarly as Mother Courage. Like so many of Brecht’s rascally characters, this salty, cunning, self-serving woman has much in common with Falstaff; and like Falstaff, she functions as a satirical commentator and comic deflator. To her, the only quality worthy of respect is cowardice; and she commands respect herself because of her consistency — she invariably chooses the most selfish, ignominious, and profitable course. Even her nickname is ironic: her “courageous” breach of the lines during the bombardment at Riga was made to keep some loaves from going moldy. As the supreme advocate of adaptation and acquiescence, Courage is extremely cynical about the motives of others. She attributes the death of General Tilley, for example, to the fact that he got lost in a fog and strayed to the front by mistake. She is probably right; in Brecht’s world, as in our own, there are no more authentic heroes. Brecht, in other words, gives us a Falstaff without a Hal or Hotspur. Courage’s unhesitating assumption about the baseness of human motives belongs to the author; and it is not modified by any contrasting ideal.
Yet Brecht’s all-embracing cynicism implies an ideal, for he is rebelling against a reality he despises. “The Song of the Great Capitulation” — possibly the most moving lyric in the entire Brechtian canon — reveals the history behind Brecht’s cynical attitudes. For here Mother Courage, trying to discourage an indignant soldier from endangering his safety, sings of the degeneration of her own rage against injustice. Beginning as a Romantic individualist — “All or nothing. Anyway never take second best. I am the master of my fate. I’ll take no orders from no one” — she eventually becomes the cautious compromiser, marching in time with the band: “You must get in with people. If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Don’t stick your neck out!” It is the story of how George Garga is eventually forced to repudiate his belief in freedom. And it may very well be the story of how Brecht abandoned his early Romantic idealism under the pressure of internal passions and external constraints:
Our plans are big, our hopes colossal.
We hitch our wagon to a star.
(Where there’s a will, there’s a way. You can’t
hold a good man down.)
“We can lift mountains,” says the apostle.
And yet: how heavy one cigar!
Lifting that cigar has become the whole ambition of Brecht’s heroine: her sole purpose is to keep herself and her family safe and alive. In the fulfillment of this difficult and ultimately fruitless task, she employs ruthlessness, charm, bribery, guile, and simple horse sense, always true to her coward’s creed that discretion is the better part of valor.18
Mother Courage’s bitter hostility to heroism has made her, paradoxically, a heroic figure to audiences — an image of the “little people,” beleaguered by forces beyond their control, yet resiliently continuing to make their way. Bentley observes that the alienation apparatus of the Berliner Ensemble must be “called into action as a fire brigade” to douse the natural flow of sympathy which streams toward such characters; and Esslin — noting that Brecht originally designed Courage as a “negative, villainous character” — concludes that the author was unable to control his own affection for her. There is no question that Mother Courage — like Falstaff, who was meant to be a Vice figure (Sloth and Vanity) but who somehow transcended his morality play role — got away from the author. And like the rejection of Falstaff, the pathos of Courage does begin to take on larger dimensions. Nevertheless, one must also realize that Brecht does realize his conscious intentions with the character, and that the tragedy he unintentially created coexists with the morality play he designed. The responses evoked by Brecht’s heroine are a good deal more complicated than those evoked, say, by the pathetic Nora Clitheroe, the heroine of another antiwar play, O’Casey’s Plough and the Stars: Courage is not just a passive sufferer, playing on the sentiment of the audience, but also an active source of suffering. She may be a victim of the war, but she is also an instrument of the war, and the embodiment of its evils. Brecht’s revolt, in short, remains double. Like Macheath, Mother Courage is both the agent of the author’s rebellion, and the thing rebelled against. Her determination to play it safe makes her the enemy of hypocrisy, but it also makes her cold and grasping. And though her single-minded devotion to survival is sympathetic in relation to her three children, it becomes mere aggrandizement in relation to her fourth child — the wagon. This almost human prop is a constant visual reminder that for Courage the war is “just the same as trading.” Like a stockmarket investor, she builds up profits on the fluctuating fortunes of war, buying and selling on the lives of men. Thus, Mother Courage is no Niobe, all tears, but the author of her own destruction. One of those lower-class Capitalists whom Brecht was always creating, she is, as the Chaplain tells her, a “hyena of the battlefield,” and those who live by the war must die by it.
Mother Courage haggles while her children die — this is the spine of the play. For while Courage is pursuing commercial advantage, her family is sacrificed, one by one, to the war. Eric Bentley has already commented on the tripartite structure of the work where, at the end of three discrete sections, another child is laid on the war’s altar. The offspring of three different fathers, Finnish Eilif, Swiss Cheese, and German Kattrin are an international brigade of victims, their fates foretold in the initial scene. The episode of the black crosses, like many of the songs in the play, is prophetic. But it is not a supernatural agent which strikes the children down; it is the cruel hand of man, abetted by their own self-destroying instincts. Brecht’s emphasis on the destructive power of the instincts reminds us of The Threepenny Opera; and indeed “The Song of the Wise and the Good” is a reprise of “The Song of Solomon,” adapted, as Bentley has observed, to the instincts and “virtues” of Courage and her offspring. Caesar’s bravery is identified with Eilif’s heroism, Socrates’s honesty with Swiss Cheese’s incorruptibility, St. Martin’s unselfishness with Kattrin’s kindness, and Solomon’s wisdom with Courage’s shrewdness. The dominant qualities of both the great and the common lay them low; virtue doesn’t pay: “God’s Ten Commandments” have not “done us any good.”
Brecht, however, cannot refrain from giving an ironic twist to his already ironic statement — for the “virtues” he describes are all, with the exception of Kattrin’s kindness, highly dubious qualities. Eilif’s bravery, for example, is, at best, impulsive foolishness. While the Sergeant is cunningly distracting Courage’s attention by bargaining with her over a belt, Eilif is off with the Recruiting Officer, pressed into war by his lust for glory. Eilif’s song, “The Fishwife and the Soldier,” predicts the outcome of such rashness, for it tells how a headstrong son is killed by his own bravery, despite all his mother’s cautious warnings. Impulsiveness leads to death: “The lad is swept out by the tide:/ He floats with the ice to the sea.” The song, with its typically Brechtian water images, is obviously influenced by Synge’s Riders to the Sea;19 and like Marya’s Bartley, Courage’s Eilif soon drifts with the tide of death because he ignored his mother’s advice to drift with the tide of life. Having “played the hero in God’s own war” by slaughtering a number of innocent peasants who wished only to protect their cattle (here bravery turns into sadistic brutality), Eilif repeats this heroic exploit during an interlude of peace — and is led off to be shot. Like Chaplain’s Verdoux, he discovers that virtues in wartime are considered crimes in peacetime, and that law and morality shift their ground to accommodate a nation’s needs.
Swiss Cheese, the “honest child,” is another victim of a dubious virtue. As paymaster of a Protestant regiment, he is entrusted with the cashbox; and when he is captured by the Catholics, he refuses to surrender it up. This kind of honesty, as Courage observes, is sheer stupidity: Swiss Cheese is too simpleminded to provide for his own safety. Here, however, Courage is in a position to save her child through the exercise of her Solomon-like wisdom: “They’re not wolves,” she observes of his Catholic captors, “they’re human and after money. God is merciful and men are bribable.” Her analysis of motive is perfectly accurate, but it is precisely because of her excessive shrewdness that the device does not work. Forced to pawn her wagon to obtain sufficient bribe money, Courage is anxious to reserve enough for her own security. But the Catholics are in a hurry, and her prolonged bargaining is climaxed by the terrible realization, “I believe — I haggled too long.” Swiss Cheese, the significance of his name finally clear, is carried in on a stretcher riddled by eleven bullets — to be thrown on a garbage heap because his mother is afraid to claim the body. Torn between the contradictory demands of self-survival and mother love, Courage has, in effect, killed her own child. And she suffers the consequence in terror and remorse, looking on the corpse in dumb agony, and choking back the scream which rises in her throat lest she give some sign of recognition.
Kattrin is Courage’s only truly virtuous child, the soul of kindness and the most positive figure in the play. It is a characteristic of Brecht’s attitude towards positive values that she is a mute; but through her expressive gestures and responses, the cruelty and horror of the war are most eloquently told. Even her dumbness is related to these terrors — “a soldier stuck something in her mouth when she was little” — and when she is attacked and mutilated by some vicious marauders, the war has killed her hopes for a home, a husband, and children, whom she especially loves. Because of her muteness, her serenity, and her love of children, Kattrin sometimes achieves allegorical stature — she is much like Aristophanes’s Peace, blinded, gagged, raped, and buried by war. But Brecht’s war is endless; and, unlike Aristophanes’s mute figure, Kattrin is led to enjoy no hymeneal banquet at the end. Instead of being pulled out of the pit, she is hurled into one: the war buries Kattrin for all time. Courtesans like the camp follower, Yvette, may thrive on conflict, for Yvette accepts the whore’s barrenness, so much like that of the war. But Kattrin is Kinderknarr, children-crazy, and it is her consuming love for these fruits of Peace that finally destroys her.
Once again, the death occurs because the mother is haggling. Having successfully resisted the temptation to leave Kattrin behind and find a secure berth with her lover, the Cook, Courage is, nevertheless, still looking after her profits: she has left Kattrin with the wagon while she buys stocks cheap from the frightened townspeople. While she is gone, the Catholics capture a farmhouse, preparing for an ambush of the town. The farmers, afraid for their family in the town, appeal to God to save their four grandchildren. But, to their horror, their prayers, for once, are answered. Moved by the mention of children in danger, Kattrin has climbed to the roof of the farmhouse, where she begins to beat her drum. At last, Peace has found a tongue, rhythmically commenting on its ancient, invincible enemy. To smother the sounds of this alarum, the soldiers and peasants try to create their own noises — peaceful ones, they begin to chop wood. Yet Kattrin’s drumming mounts in intensity, and in desperation. When a lieutenant offers to spare her mother if she descends from the roof, Kattrin drums more heatedly; when he backs his promise with his word of honor, she drums most furiously of all. The smashing of the wagon, the knifing of a sympathetic peasant, the threat to her own life — nothing stops this desperate tattoo. She is finally shot off the roof by a hail of musketry; but the town is saved.
The episode is simple, startling, magnificent, with a mounting emotional crescendo created primarily through the use of drumbeats. But the catharsis it accomplishes, so rare in Brecht’s drama, is followed almost immediately by grim, cooling irony. Kattrin’s sacrifice has really been in vain. The town is saved, but the sound which signifies this is the explosion of a cannon. The war will continue for another twelve years; and after this war is finished, three hundred more years of killing will follow.
Brought on stage for the threnos, Courage witnesses the utter desolation of her hopes. The fault, again, has partially been hers (“If you hadn’t gone off to get your cut,” says an Old Peasant, “maybe it wouldn’t have happened”), but she is too dazed now to know it. Thinking that Kattrin is only asleep, she sings her a lullaby; even the lullaby concerns the need for clothing and food. Her sustaining illusion is that Eilif may still be alive. Without this illusion, only nothingness confronts her — the inconsolable blankness of life, induced by a malignant universe, inhuman men, and her own flawed nature. We are out of the world of Falstaffian comedy and into the desolate world of King Lear; but unlike Lear, Brecht’s heroine is denied even the release of death. When the armies move by, singing her song about the certainty of the seasons and the certainty of man’s mortality — the coming of the springtime of life before the winter of death — she cries to them: “Hey, take me with you” — and straps herself to the wagon. She is pulling it alone now, but it is no longer very heavy: supplies and passengers have all been destroyed. Courage and the wagon merge — both bruised and battered by war, both somehow still durable. Courage has dragged it over half of Europe, learning nothing. She will drag it a good deal further before she stops, animated only by that basic life instinct: the need to survive. The smallness and the greatness of this woman are clear at the end, as they are clear throughout this monumental work, where Brecht so angrily takes away from the human race — and gives it back so much.
Mother Courage is the culminating work of Brecht’s career, but it is hardly the end of it. During the war and after, in exile and back in East Berlin, Brecht continues to create a profusion of plays — including at least one masterpiece, The Caucasion Chalk Circle. But after Mother Courage, Brecht’s savage indignation begins to leave him, his rebellion progressively cools. Even as his plays become more openly Communistic in subject matter, his approach grows more sweet and even-tempered. Virtuous, maternal women like Kattrin — Shen Te, Simone Machard, Grusha — move in to the center of the action, while his secondary characters develop deeper dimensions, and more complex motivations than simple greed and lust. Instead of castigating humanity, Brecht is beginning to celebrate it; instead of illustrating his themes through ironic comparisons, he is beginning to employ moral allegories and parables. Brecht’s later approach to character and his use of less exaggerated comparisons suggest how he is losing his need to rebel against reality; as further proof, Nature has returned to his work — no longer hostile and ugly, but calm, serene, and even beautiful. Less sardonic, more relaxed, Brecht grows more lyrical and carefree: in fact, if Brecht’s first period is Büchnerian, and his second Jonsonian, then his third is clearly Shakespearean — some of his plays have an atmosphere akin to Shakespeare’s Romantic comedies.20 Even Brecht’s theory is loosening up from the rigid didacticism of his early days. In that latter-day Poetics, The Little Organon for the Theatre (1948), Brecht finally permits himself to speak of “entertainment” in the drama, an element he used to scorn as hypnotic and culinary; and he even expresses the ideological heresy that “the easiest form of existence is in art.”
“A contemplative attitude,” notes Ronald Gray, “is thus yoked with the revolutionary one that Brecht still maintained.” And this contemplative attitude, we should add, is the final development of Brecht’s existential revolt. While Brecht has remained a Marxist, he has finally transcended his Neo-Romantic horror at life. Brecht’s contemplative interests are underlined by his increasing interest in Oriental forms, characters, and subject matter — a large proportion of his poems and plays are now inspired by the East. It is true that Brecht is attracted to the Noh play, the Chinese drama, and the Kabuki theatre because of their alienation techniques; and like Yeats, he uses such conventions as masks, mime, dance, and gesture in order to restore that naïveté and simplicity that the oversophisticated Western theatre has lost. Still, Brecht has a very special philosophical affinity with the drama of the Orient, for it is a drama of submission, in which the characters recognize a universal intelligence and try to merge with it, freeing themselves of worldly desire.21
As proof, Brecht’s interest in the Oriental drama is accompanied, during this last period, by an interest in the Eastern religious thinkers — Confucius, Buddha, Lao-Tse, the philosophers of obedience through the annihilation of the physical self. It is probable that, with the advance of age, Brecht had finally subdued his troublesome passions. No longer harried by appetite, he gives himself up to that drifting and merging which he desired all his life. Like Strindberg, in short, Brecht works his way through, after a career of fierce rebellion, to a position of resignation; at last, he achieves that security and serenity he associates with the mother’s womb. In a late poem, “Buddha’s Parable of the Burning House,” Brecht returns to his recurrent image of passive suspension in water. Buddha has preached the doctrine of the wheel of desire, and advised “That we shed all craving and thus/Undesiring enter the nothingness that he called Nirvana”; and a student, trying to understand the doctrine, has compared Nirvana with floating in water, wondering whether the sensation is pleasing or “kalt, leer, and bedeutungslos” (cold, empty, and meaningless). Buddha replies with his famous parable of those who, while their house was burning, wondered what the weather was like outside; and Brecht, at the end of the poem, applies this lesson to those who would resist Communist revolution, wondering whether it was good. Brecht’s desire for revolt is still satisfied by his identification with Communism; but his desire for peace is now expressed through images of Oriental calm. Brecht, therefore, comes to terms with life only by continuing to reject it — by drifting with a political tide, he overcomes his spiritual horror and nausea. And this is the only synthesis of Brecht’s double revolt. Only by merging with evil did he feel he could still function for good; only by embracing the destroyers could he still join the ranks of the creators. The chicanery and compromises Brecht accepted for the sake of the survival of himself and his art are not always very attractive. And no modern playwright better exemplifies the dwindling possibilities of revolt in an age of totalitarianism, war, and the mass state. But if Brecht sometimes sacrificed his personal integrity to a collective falsehood, then this was in order that his individualism could still be secretly expressed. His drama remains the final measurement of this achievement — acts of bitterness which did not quench his cigar but rather kept it aglow.
1 Herbert Luethy, in his essay “Of Poor B.B.,” traces Brecht’s metaphysical attitudes back to German baroque theatre and the Trauerspiel (sorrow play). Although these are indirect sources, however, the literary influences on Brecht can be found much closer at hand.
2 This is Brecht’s own phrase, which he uses in his appreciation of Wedekind, “An Expression of Faith in Frank Wedekind,” written in 1918 after the German dramatist’s death.
3 The phrase, taken from a letter written by Büchner to his fiancée, is followed by some remarks which also seem appropriate to Brecht: “I feel as though I have been crushed beneath the horrible fatalism of all history. I find in human nature an awful sameness, and in the human condition an inexorable force, given to all and none. The individual is no more than foam on a wave, greatness mere chance, the mastery of genius a puppet play, a ludicrous struggle against an iron-clad law, which to acknowledge is the highest achievement, which to master is impossible.”
4 A comparison of Baal, who is Brecht’s Don Juan, with John Tanner, who is Shaw’s, would sufficiently establish the severe temperamental differences between these two playwrights.
5 This technique is typical of most of Brecht’s plays. His sense of place is completely imaginative. Indeed, his indifference to external verisimilitude makes him almost as cavalier about geography as Shakespeare, who also put a seaport in an inland country (the Bohemia of The Winter’s Tale), John Willett, in his valuable compendium, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht, has traced Brecht’s sources for his English and American settings — noting, by the way, that the author’s interest in Anglo-Saxon mythology is gradually superseded, as his career progresses, by an interest in Oriental mythology. Whether Brecht sets his plays in Louisiana, Soho, Finland, Chicago, Setzuan, India, or the Caucasus, however, his sense of place is usually guided less by the gazetteer than by penny novels, movies, and newspapers. Brecht himself is unconcerned about errors in external probability, being more interested in the truths evoked by the action. And to criticize this, therefore, as Ronald Gray does in his monograph, Bertolt Brecht, is to miss out on one of the more valuable functions of the Verfremdungseffekt — what Brecht calls “making the familiar strange.”
6 Brecht’s word is Ringkampf, which could mean either boxing or wrestling. The word seems to have both meanings for Brecht, since the image shifts throughout the play.
7 This is the way Brecht slyly insinuates his source materials for the play. Brecht, who was accused of plagiarism after The Threepenny Opera, steals a good deal, like all great poets, adapting his thefts to his own purposes. But he usually manages to cite his source at some point in his drama. A typical example is Arturo Ui where the prologue compares the protagonist with Richard III, apparently in preparation for a later scene between Arturo and Betty Dull-feet which Brecht adapted from Richard’s wooing of Lady Anne.
8 Brecht, in fact, has studded this play with a number of ironic Christian parallels. Shlink, the Oriental lumber dealer, for example, is meant to recall Jesus Christ, the Nazarene carpenter; Marie is a latter-day Mary Magdalene; and Worm, who repudiates Shlink when the lynch mob arrives, is, of course, Peter denying Christ. Religious imagery occurs with extreme frequency throughout Brecht’s work — in The Threepenny Opera, the Christ-Judas relationship is exploited again, for there Ginny Jenny betrays Macheath with a kiss on a Thursday.
9 There are remarkable similarities between this speech and the opening lines of Büchner’s Danton’s Death, where Danton says to his wife: “We know little enough about one another. We’re thick-skinned creatures who reach out our hands towards one another, but it means nothing — leather rubbing against leather — we’re very lonely. . . . Know one another? We’d have to crack open our skulls and drag each other’s thoughts out by the tails.”
10 Max Frisch — Brecht’s friend and disciple — inadvertently shows, in his “Recollections of Brecht,” how decay and politics now connect in Brecht’s mind: “Brecht . . . supports himself against the somewhat rotting balustrade, while he smokes a cigar. It is the rot which interests him most: he makes a joke about Capitalism” (Tulane Drama Review, Autumn 1961, p. 35).
11 This cosmic emptiness is still obsessing Brecht as late as 1939. In Galileo, a monk tries to bring the astronomer to some realization of how his invention is going to affect mankind: “How could they take it, were I to tell them that they are on a lump of stone ceaselessly spinning in empty space, circling around a second-rate star?”
12 Brecht tries very hard to keep his position consistent ideologically, even at the cost of making his most hated enemy, Hitler, better, than he actually was. In Arturo Ui (1941), Hitler is characterized as a broken-down, comical gangster put into power by businessmen in order to protect their financial interests. Because of this relentlessly economic interpretation of the rise of totalitarianism, Brecht neglects to deal with Hitler’s madness, cruelty, or evil, and makes no reference whatsoever to his virulent antisemitism. It is remarkable that a writer who was able to imagine the Nazi mentality before it was created was so inadequate before the real thing.
13 In his chapter on Brecht in Metatheatre, Lionel Abel tries to find some “definite, unequivocal conviction” in the dramatist, and discovers it in his “adoration of the body”: “What Brecht affirmed was the body, the human body in all its warmth, its weakness, its susceptibility, its appetites, the human body in its longing and its thought.” There is just enough surface truth in this remark to disguise its essential inaccuracy. But at what a cost does Brecht acquire that “consistency” which Mr. Abel demands of the dramatic poet. Abel clears away the debris of Brechtian ambiguity by ignoring the entire subterranean movement of his thought.
14 In his notes to the play, Brecht calls attention to the original English drawings of Macheath, which show “a squat but thickset man in his forties with a head like a radish, already somewhat bald, but not without dignity.” Mackie, in short, should never be cast as a swashbuckling Romantic rogue.
15 One begins to suspect that The Threepenny Opera was influenced not only by Villon’s poetry and Gay’s ballad opera, but also by Max Weber’s discourse on the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the rise of Capitalism. In Happy End and Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Brecht makes the same connection between Christianity and finance.
16 Eric Bentley has correctly emphasized the fierce aggression found in Brecht’s plays. It is a quality especially apparent in Saint Joan of the Stockyards, which concludes with the heroine’s conversion to a doctrine of force, phrased in language like this:
Therefore, anyone down here who says there is a God
When none can be seen,
A God who can be invisible and yet help them,
Should have his head knocked on the pavement
Until he croaks.
17 In his poem, “A Worker Reads History,” Brecht underlines his conviction that history is made not by emperors, kings, and generals, but rather by their soldiers, cooks, and slaves.
18 The Brecht character whom Courage most resembles is Galileo, a figure who also identifies cowardice with ease and relaxation, and heroism with death. “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero,” cries Galileo, while Courage remarks, “In a good country, such virtues wouldn’t be needed — we could all be cowards and relax.”
19 The play which precedes Mother Courage is Senora Carrar’s Rifles, a reworking of Riders to the Sea, given an activist ending, and set not in Ireland but in Civil War Spain. Synge is very much in Brecht’s mind at this time.
20 The Caucasian Chalk Circle, for example, is not only permeated with the mood and atmosphere of Shakespearean comedy, but also with some of its dramatic conventions. The prologue to the play functions as a Shakespearean induction; the main plot turns on suspense, misunderstanding, and intrigue. Grusha, like Rosalind in As You Like It, must flee the city in disguise as a result of usurpation and revolution. And Azdak, like so many of Shakespeare’s clowns, is a Lord of Misrule: Toby Belch out of Charlie Chaplin by Groucho Marx. The Storyteller is a kind of Shakespearean chorus in his manipulation of time and space; and the songs of the play, like Shakespeare’s songs, function as lyrical breaks in the action. Finally, the reconciliations at the conclusion of the work remind one of Shakespeare’s way of tying off a Romantic plot — and like Much Ado About Nothing, the play ends with a dance.
21 Cf. Makoto Ueda, “The Implications of the Noh Drama,” Sewanee Review, Summer 1961, p. 368, where the author affirms that the characters of the Noh play “lack the masculine courage and overpowering energy of the heroes of Western tragedies; they do not fight, they submit. . . . Thus the Noh drama is primarily religious — in the sense that it depicts man’s coming to recognize an absolute power in the universe and his learning to submit himself to it.” This might be a description of Brecht’s ambitions throughout his life.