Bertolt Brecht, Dramatist
Author(s): Berthold Viertel
Source: The Kenyon Review , Summer, 1945, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Summer, 1945), pp. 467-475
Published by: Kenyon College
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Berthold Viertel
BERTOLT BRECHT, DRAMATIST
EVEN those who have never seen or read a play by Bertolt Brecht
know his name and associate it with Epic Theatre. Though it does
not exist in any country nowadays as an established style Epic Theatre
has made its presence felt. The concept is a paradox. Two diametrically
opposed species-Epic and Dramatic-are united. Of course everyone
vaguely remembers that the Greek dramatists and Shakespeare took their
material from Homer and Holinshed but without taking over the Epic
form. The Epic matter is condensed and crystallized in dramatic form.
The dramatist brought his Epic material up to date, often interrupted the
flow of historical reporting, purging it of most narrative residues. Such was
the European drama in its classic perfection, and until recently every psy-
chological thriller on Broadway adhered to the formula. Even today a
marketable play follows the old rule of concentration, achieving classic
unity of time and place. The old rules still have some possibilities; and,
more to the point, they keep down the cost of production. This old re-
gime has of course been challenged more than once. The modern stage,
particularly in Russia and Germany, profited by the destruction of the old
frontiers. Nevertheless the question might be asked: Is not the return to
Epic form another chapter in the decline and dissolution of the drama?
The idea of Epic Theatre has never been systematically expounded.
But fragmentary statements and more than fragmentary achievements
serve as a working hypothesis. Pass in review the collected works of
Bertolt Brecht and you will be struck by the multiplicity of his styles. He
is a dramatic Picasso. His ideas are derivative, but he puts together the
ideas of earlier theatres in completely new combinations and for his own
purposes. He will hang up, for oxample, the inscription tablet of the
Elizabeth theatre, but he will write it on his own dicta. In Epic Theatre
the tablets as well as the narrator who interrupts the flow of the action
address themselves directly to the audience. Characters in the play do the
same, though they retain their character when discussing their experience
with the audience. Pirandello used such devices in order to intermingle
appearance and reality; this was a game; and everything took on an air
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468 KENYON REVIEW
of unreality. In the Brechtian theatre, on the other hand, our impression
of reality is strengthened, reality meaning the world outside the theatre.
Naturally the typically theatrical illusion, the illusion of having escaped the
outside world, will be shattered. Moreover the identification of the spec-
tator with a stage character is either entirely destroyed or realized in a
manner that excludes passivity.
There is a difference however between the style of Brecht and the
political theatre of Erwin Piscator. All the work of Brecht is intensely
personal. And his personality is pungent. Moreover Brecht has his own
manner in politics. He develops his ideas while teaching others. The
propagandist theatre has usually aimed at dynamic effects; Brecht aims at
the creation of a critical consciousness.
Brecht is very canny. There is always more to his remarks than meets
the eye. There is an irony, a method of argument, a definite yet indefin-
able tone which is Brecht. All his diverse abilities, acquired over a long
period of time and indefatigably tested in practice, have been put at the
service of his dialectic. He has learned from Rimbaud, Villon, Kipling,
Wedekind, Buechner, and above all from Karl Marx. He has mastered
the form of operetta, including couplet and ensemble, and at the other
extreme, of Shakespearian blank verse, which he puts into the mouths of
captains of industry. This last touch of parody is very Brechtian. In his
hands, it is no sophomoric game. It is an ironic accompaniment to capital-
istic catastrophes. Equally characteristic: the serious discussion of economic
problems can in the Brechtian theater be conducted in everyday language
and can lead without transition to a perfectly sincere love scene.
As Brecht gets older his dramatic parables gain in depth. The Lehr-
stuck is growing richer and riper. What Walter Benjamin has cailled the
"shock effect" is becoming less frequent, while the poetic aura surround-
ing Brecht's strange new creations is becoming more and more important.
The techniques of Brecht can easily be imitated. But after all he was
himself an imitator when he put masks on his actors and reintroduced
monologues, "couplets," arias and satirical verses into realistic business.
It was, perhaps, Brecht's use of these things, rather than these things in
themselves, which attracted attention. As a director Brecht is self-willed
and original, practical and inspired. His ideas are becoming common
property. The Brechtian narrator, for example, has been taken over by
the contemporary stage and even by the movies; the Brechtian attitude,
however, has not. Yet one cannot say, looking at Kurt Weill, Hanns
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BERTHOLD VIERTEL 469
Eisler, Marc Blitzstein, Thornton Wilder
Green, that his attitude has been wholly a dead letter. How much his
collaborators, the musicians especially, have contributed to Brechtian
drama need not be discussed here.
Brecht, then, revived some ideas, found others to his hand, and used
them all for his own ends. Because he always has his own purpose, tech-
nique is strictly a means. Brecht has been praised as a master of "mon-
tage"; what matters to him is the thing that is being mounted. Brecht is
a master of persuasion. But he is interested in the question How to per-
suade people, because he is even more interested in the question What
they should be persuaded of.
What makes things hard for Brecht is that a tradition which once was
great has not yet ceased to exist. In our time the old culture has cul-
minated in crisis. Although the forms of a new collectivism have some-
times brutally broken through, the methods of individualistic culture are
not as yet totally exhausted. (Related to my meaning is the curious mix-
ture of reactionary and progressive elements in the present war.) We are
still able to experience Shakespeare, some of his plays more, some less.
Until recently Shakespeare's plays were treated as operas or psychological
extravaganzas. Smart reviewers on Broadway and in the West End are
always saying that the play of Shakespeare which they had just seen, while
not his best, was worth doing for the sake of such and such an actor or
actress. The world crisis has improved Shakespeare's position. Both in
London and on Broadway he was found to be very actual. Richard II,
Richard III, Julius Caesar and Macbeth, all are stories of terror, the strug-
gle for power, and the downfall of tyranny. Even the Greeks won new
influence through contemporary adapters and new interpretations. Per-
haps after the war the historical plays of Strindberg will be understood.
I am speaking of course about the artistic theater which is almost
squeezed out of existence by entertainment. Yet from time to time it shows
its head, and we see real dramatists struggling to find appropriate forms.
Some think that the task is to maintain the traditions of high drama, to
follow in the tracks of Shakespeare and the Greeks. Personally, I think
that Brecht pays Shakespeare and the Greeks a more handsome compli-
ment by opposing them, by not following Aristotle. Pity and fear are still
considered the chief characteristics of tragedy, but the middle class audi-
ence finds pity boring and cultivates fear almost exclusively in mystery
and horror plays which do not claim to be serious. Perhaps the catharsis
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470 KENYON REVIEW
of the Greeks seemed to find new support in psychoanalysis. Audiences
were to be cleansed of complexes.
This is where Brecht steps in. He refuses to let the spectator pleasantly
retire after being refreshed by his quota of tragic events. He does not
want the spectator to be satisfied with tragedy. He wants him to will a
change in tragic conditions. Brecht's plays do arouse pity and fear, inev-
itably. But the premium of tragic pleasure is recoined into a sober and
exact knowledge of the problems at hand. As soon as the spectator, fol-
lowing the emotions of the actor, becomes heated, the author cools him
off and re-establishes the distance necessary to clear understanding. The
distancing ("Verfremdung") which Brecht desires is complemented by
his concreteness which makes any escape from the reality demonstrated
upon the stage impossible. A didactic and, if you will, Apollonian ele-
ment replaces the intoxicating Dionysian element. Nevertheless-and this
is a point which some of Brecht's critics have missed-the Brechtian
world is one of living men who deserve our sympathy and get it. Tragic
or not, Brecht is in the tradition of the great dramatists. His plays have
the right inexorability.
That is no reason for the Broadway businessman to produce Brecht.
Is not the wh-ole tendency of his plays against business and business-
men? Of course Brecht is not an amateur, nor is he esoteric any more; he
is a master of stagecraft, a dramatist by vocation and profession. That is
why he is dangerous. Producers and backers who speculate with plays
rightly feel that Brecht is their enemy, and that if he got the power he
would drive them out. Does he not refuse to deliver marketable goods,
and does he not disturb the universal recognition of tried forms and tried
tricks? Like every initiator Brecht is destructive. He wants to push new
values at any cost. And his values are dangerous. He is not for exploiting
present conditions; he is for changing them. The theatre as a moral insti-
tution with a tendency to social revolution! That is not for mass con-
sumption. It wouldn't sell.
The same was said of Strindberg and Wedekind, of Ibsen and the
young Gerhart Hauptmann, of Eugene O'Neill and the early Clifford
Odets. Theatre groups, militant ensembles, and newly-founded companies
have to take up the cause of such authors before they can win recognition.
Sometimes the commercial theatre accepted the plays of these men-
later on, that is, as soon as it was clear that oppositional art and the fan-
aticism of the reformer could also be good business. Two things, sensa-
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BERTHOLD VIERTEL 471
tion and scandal, were the means to success. For the commercial theatre
sensation and scandal (which of course involve sex) have proved to be
much sounder foundations than pity and fear. To these two effects Brecht
owed the resounding success of his Dreigroschenoper. But behind this
splendid entertainment lurked the disappointment of a lost revolution.
The charm of this operetta was rooted in "Galgenhumor," or the rat
poison of an anarchistic cynicism. On the eve of social destruction it was
a destructive amusement. Berlin society was as frivolous and sophisticated
as that of New York today. With the help of Brecht and Weill the Ber-
liners danced on the edge of an abyss. A dance of death. Yet the char-
acters in this operetta did not lack their own sort of social consciousness
-or joie de vivre. The Bread Song is a striking example of Brecht's
popular manner, of his extraordinary ability to go to the heart of a mat-
ter. The refrain is:
Erst muss es moeglich sein auch armen Leuten
Vom grossen Brotlaib sich ihr Teil zu schneiden.
This operetta would not have been out of place in a Reinhardt theatre,
if Brecht himself had been the director. Brecht and Reinhardt are interest-
ingly similar and interestingly different. Reinhardt also revived older
forms of European theatre from the Greeks to the miracle plays, from
Commedia del Arte to Shakespeare, from Moliere to Wilde, Wedekind,
Strindberg, Shaw and Sternheim, from impressionism to expressionism.
The basis of his theatre was high capitalism. In fact his theatre celebrates
the culmination and the end of the old capitalism. All styles were opu-
lently displayed by the great pyrotechnician in the brilliant carnival which
was the gorgeous farewell party of old Europe. How different is Brecht's
revival of the past! When Hitler came to power Brecht retreated to the
17th Century to Grimmelshausen, the epic poet of the Thirty Years' War,
and wrote his Mother Courage. This is no spectacle created for tragic en-
joyment. Brecht confronts facts and consequences, the facts and conse-
quences of war in Germany then and now. And so the question whether
Epic Theatre means decline and dissolution can be answered. It means
the decline and dissolution of an epoch; but it is a radical counter-measure.
2.
In an imaginative essay which serves as epilogue to Brecht's series of
one-act plays, The Private Life of the Master Race,' Eric Russell Bentley
1. New Directions. $2.50
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472 KENYON REVIEW
describes and examines Brecht's perso
up as follows:
This is not an age of greatness and fulfillment. It is an age of crisis and
therefore at best seedtime, an age of premonition. Brecht's theatre consists
of hints and premonitions. They must remain hints and premonitions-
perhaps even so they sound prententious-until they can be tried out, re-
jected, modified, or developed in an environment that offers real opportunity
to serious dramatists and serious actors.
Brecht himself would not object to a pointing to the future in this way;
to such an advance payment on recognition hitherto so often left unpaid.
No one knows better than the exiled, linguistically isolated dramatist that
a great part of his work must remain sketch and intention so long as it
cannot be tested in the practice of the theatre. Thus the torsos are accum-
ulating in the workshop of Exile. But The Private Life of the Master Race
is a mature work of art. Mr. Bentley must have seen this when he ven-
tured upon its translation, an undertaking rich in difficulties and
problems.
In these scenes the private lives of the people in the Third Reich are
not portrayed. On the contrary, it is demonstrated that under National
Socialism private life is an impossibility; that it is wrecked by the system;
that the system undermines and dissolves private life, frustrates its course,
hampers its every breath. Treachery creeps into every relationship: into
marriage; into the family; between lovers, friends, comrades, colleagues;
between parents and their children, teachers and their pupils; between
workers in the factory and scientists in the laboratory; between the judges
and the accused; between the minister and the dying man; even between
Nazi and Nazi. This is not the life of a master race, but rather that of a
nation of slaves. Hence the original German version of these serial scenes
was entitled: Fear and Misery of the Third Reich-with satiric reference
to Balzac's Splendor and Misery of the Courtesans. Here are depicted the
Fear and the Misery of the German people that Brecht used to know so
well and that he now visualizes under the new and different conditions.
Brecht visits these people in the uncommon and yet common everyday
life which Terror has decreed for them. He sees them in concentration
camp, an institution belonging to their daily existence under the Third
Reich; but mostly he shows them at their daily chores: in their profes-
sions, in the factory; in the city and in the village; standing in breadlines
or being herded to the radio in order to be utilized for propaganda pur-
poses; he shows how they are pressed for Labor Service; how they enjoy
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BERTHOLD VIERTEL 473
the bitter gifts of the Winter Relief. A
effects are shown, their hypocrisy, coercion, and single purpose of ex-
ploiting the people.
Occasionally, I have heard objection raised that the author, for rea-
sons of propaganda, would present only certain types, only common peo-
ple so to speak, but no personalities. To be sure, in these scenes it was
the author's intention to present the typical. From the very outset no
elevated style was being considered. Here Brecht's main concern was the
tersest, most exact reality, and the greatest possible comprehension. But
this is not mere reporting. I have tried elsewhere to define the style of
the work by the name of Dialectical Realism. What I mean by that I
could now demonstrate by any scene, but even better by the construction
of the whole; by the relation of the various scenes to each other, and by
the way they complement each other in building up the social structure,
in making the life of a nation visible and transparent.
From the first, I doubted whether a translation was possible, because
in these scenes the idiom and the dialect are indispensable for the differ-
entiation of the various types. The everyday talk of these people, the way
they have to re-hash the Nazi bombast and spit it out again: this is the
living skin and bone of these figures, which determines their movements
and gestures, and a sarcastic humor mingled with the ghastliness. Would
not an English translation reduce the work too much?
If the translator has not dispersed these worries altogether, he has
eased them considerabily. Mr. Bentley declined to reproduce the idiomatic
language; he relied upon the strength of a simple though precise and
colloquial English. That his approach proves to be successful must also
be attributed to his thorough understanding of the original. I hope I am
able to judge the shades of meaning of my adopted language. Of course
I always hear the original text, and perhaps here and there I add some-
thing of it to the translation. But throughout these English dialogues a
sound and solid keynote has been struck and maintained that makes them
alive and real. The best care was also taken in the selection of the pieces:
there are seventeen of the original twenty-eight. These seventeen short
plays of different kind and length form a dramatic unity; the structure of
the whole has even benefited by this, becoming more stageable and, in
my opinion, theatrically more effective. The new frame of the scenes,
fittingly chosen by Brecht according to the present period of time, shows
the panzer, the battle chariot on which soldiers set out for their conquests
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474 KENYON REVIEW
and their doom. Its effectiveness is yet to be tried out on the stage; it
might be exchanged for still another frame. (The rhythmic verses, which
serve as commentary to this death-ride, I find the least happy feature of
the translation.) The continuity of the scenes, from the taking over of
power to the invasion of Austria, offers sufficient dramatic development
and historic perspective.
Every piece is a complete unit in itself. There are political satires of
the first order among them, for instance "In Search of Justice" (the tragi-
comedy of the "co-ordinated" judge), or "Physicists" (a farce about
science purged of alien influences), or a dialogue with only nine short
phrases to it, "The Two Bakers" (who as convicts pass each other on
their daily walk around the prison-yard and try to exchange their furtive
communications), or the "Informer," which has already been staged in
English (about the child and the panic fear of his parents lest he give
them away); or larger scenes of a basically comic yet heartrending nature,
like "The Chalk Cross," or pathetic like "The Box" and "The Sermon on
the Mount." Each of these pieces, even the shortest and tersest, has its
own basic situation which is essential, and an ingeniously thought-out
plot. They embrace the bourgeois world on one hand and the proletarian
on the other; consequently the whole of the people arises before us, even
the ruling classes who are present at least in the harm they do. Contempt
and pity compose an explosive mixture. There is nothing far-fetched here,
nothing superfluous. Experience confirmed this feeling for me when I
staged five of these plays in the original German version in New York.
At that time the basic idea of the frame for this older version was that
of a great military review before the war-which had not begun when
Brecht composed the series.
The Private Life of the Master Race has been accused of being de-
featist, since only in a few instances, though expressly in the closing
scene "Plebiscite," does the active resistance, the underground struggle,
become visible. Nowhere, however, are the signs and symptoms of pas-
sive resistance lacking; like Morse code tapped on prison walls they are
often audible. The poet, a German in exile, in order to remain concrete
had to limit himself to what he knew for certain. But it is precisely this
concreteness that is Brecht's greatest achievement. It is the triumph of
his critical realism that while writing a historical play he cuts out every-
thing that is utopian, all happy and wishful thinking. It is important to do
that. The expressionist and activist playwrights after the first war sadly
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BERTHOLD VIERTEL 475
lacked concreteness; see that remarkable utopian dialectician, Georg
Kaiser. This lack was the typical sickness of the period. It must be
avoided this time. Brecht had to take special precautions: he tried to give
a picture of Germany (even today, with all the ghastly facts that have
become known, an unknown country) from the outside. Eyewitnesses may
soon correct him. But what he achieved is a living picture of human con-
ditions in their social context, under the impact of special deforming
circumstances, the historical meaning of which can be understood every-
where. All this comes clear in the English translation, and production on
the American stage would prove it.
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