Brecht Collected Plays: 3: Lindbergh's Flight; The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent; He Said Yes/He Said No; The Decision; The Mother; The Exception & the ... St Joan of the Stockyards (World Classics)
Page 42
In all this the Black Straw Hats personify public opinion.
[Gisela E. Bahr: Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe Bühnenfassung, Fragmente, Variante, pp. 9–10. Edition Suhrkamp, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1971. The specified date of 1900 was later omitted.]
NOTE TO ‘SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS’
To clarify the course of business events, headlines can be called out by newsboys running across the stage or through the auditorium.
p. 208, before 2(d):
‘Meat Kings in Bloody Battle!’
‘Meat Price Plummets!’
‘Mauler and Lennox – Battle of the Meat Titans!’
‘Mauler – Lard Ten Cents a Kilo!’
‘Lennox Offers Eight! Warned by Banks! Will Lennox Hold Out? Lennox or Mauler: Who’ll Win?’
p. 212, after ‘Where are we to turn?’:
‘Disaster hits Stockyard Workers!’
‘Lennox Shutdown, Mauler Next! Half Chicago’s Yard Workers Jobless! Winter Threatens!’
p. 243, before scene 6 ‘Catching the Cricket’:
‘Pierpont Mauler a Speculator!’
‘Guarantees Buy Up Total Meat Production!’
‘Stockbreeders Flummoxed! Buyers Holding Back! Expect Fall in Stock Price!’
p. 250, before scene 7 ‘The Money Changers are driven out of the Temple’:
‘Strange Developments on Livestock Exchange!’
‘Secret Buying of Illinois and Kansas Stock!’
‘Stock Price Rises! Yard Workers Uneasy after Five-Week Lockout!’
‘Meat Packers Plan Aid! Frantic Activity of Charitable Groups!’
p. 258, before scene 8 ‘Mauler’s Speech on Indispensability’:
‘Still No Work at Yards!’
‘Growing Poverty Hits Masses! Shopkeepers Stuck for Rent! Who’s Cornering the Stock? Mauler Interviewed – Does Not Know Secret Buyer!’
‘Snow Coming! Chicago Under Snow!’
p. 265, before ‘Joan’s Third Descent into the Depths’:
‘Storm at Livestock Exchange! Stock Prices Rocket!’
‘Black Hat Girl Joan Dark Says Won’t Quit Yards Till Work Resumes!’
p. 266, before The Packers: ‘Heavens! The tariff repealed . . .’:
‘Tariffs Cut in South! Export Stock in Sudden Demand!’
‘Unforeseen Collapse of Tariffs!’
p. 267, after ‘Get his arse bitten’:
‘Tariff Cuts in South! Export Stock Sought! Where Has The Stock Got To? No Livestock in Ill and Ark!’
p. 271, before 9(e) ‘Another part of the Stockyards’:
‘The Secret Buyer? – MAULER!’
‘Socialists Step Up Yards Action!’
‘Agitators Exploit Agony of Locked-Out Workers!’
‘The Locked-Out Workers – City Utilities Employees Plan Sympathy Strike! Police Chief Forsees Chicago Anarchy If Livestock Chaos Lasts!’
p. 273, before 9(f) ‘Livestock Exchange’:
‘Amazing Sensation on Livestock Exchange!’
‘Pierpont Mauler’s Giant Corner Sinks Packing Plants!’
‘Bankrupting Threatens Major Plants! Thousands of Shareholders’ Savings Lost!’
p. 274, after ‘How can we pay him eighty for his livestock?’:
‘General Strike Threat! Scores Livestock Exchange Manoeuvres! Chicago Without Light and Power in Four Hours! Can Wall Street Destroy Chicago?’
p. 280, after ‘selling to the packers in spite of the rising prices’:
‘Pierpont Mauler Unblocks Livestock! New Swing on Livestock Exchange!’
‘Packing Plants To Return To Work Tomorrow! Labour Unions Call Off General Strike!’
p. 284, before 9(h) ‘Street Corner in Chicago’:
‘Mauler Sales Rumour Denied. Stock Price Still Going Up!’
p. 285, before 9(i) ‘A deserted section of the stockyards’:
‘Latest from the Livestock Exchange: Chicago Meat Business Busted!’
‘Mauler Went Too Far – Is Bust Too! Plants Stay Shut. Workers Quit Yards, Expect Work Tomorrow! Firms Not Opening, But No General Strike!’
p. 300, before 11 ‘Stockyards’:
‘Result Of Meat War: Main Packing Plants Merge! President: Pierpont Mauler! Labour To Be Rationalised, Meat Pile Slashed! It’s Back To Work!’
[Appendix to Gesammelte Werke Band 1, Malik-Verlag, London 1938.]
MEANING OF ‘SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS’
In times when the prevalent social system, controlling the employment and livelihood of vast masses of people, is the cause of intolerable hardships, it should surprise no one if those same masses (whether in person or by the medium of those who speak for them) question the great intellectual systems which set out to shape the moral and religious aspects of their living standard. From the point of view of the institutions embodying these systems – churches, schools and so forth – it looks thus. Great sections of the working class, discontented with the prevalent social system, see the institutions in question as intellectually and organisationally bound up with a social order that denies them all possibility of life. And so they turn their backs on certain moral and religious trains of thought.
IS ‘SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS’ A REALIST WORK?
Persons uncertain of the difference between realism and materialism are unlikely to consider this a realist work. It is even doubtful if they would describe it as a materialist one.
The formal aspect alone might well mislead them.
Apart from the nature of its subject-matter, it sets out various historical methods of representing this, with the result that the work incidentally becomes an investigation of such methods – something that is clearly a confusing factor. To link a particular kind of human behaviour with its means of expression (to be found in art – as notably in the final scene) may indeed be a source of confusion; but this is how certain forms of representation get demolished, in that their social function is made manifest. And this is an act of realism.
At the same time stylisation is in itself a factor which operates against realism, particularly when it is our own time that is being stylised. (Whereas earlier imaginative works often appear realistic when they contain a strong dash of stylisation.) Incidents in the natural world take a recognisably different course – recognisably so because their portrayal is unhampered by the tacit short-cuts of the normal draughtsman’s perspective. Stylisation lacks an element of multiplicity that is present in the real world. It is removed because ambiguity is to be avoided. But ambiguity too is an essential part of reality.
Without dialectics, indeed, stylisation cannot produce realistic works. A certain superficial abstraction is no business of the realist. All the same he abstracts. The formula ‘transformation of the imperialist war into the civil war’ along with its corollary ‘imperialist war as a manifestation of civil war’ is a stylisation. Only its expression in more concrete detail will characterise the realist; its association with practice – his own or other people’s – be realism.
Investigating the effectiveness of behaviour such as that of Joan and Mauler in our own time is unquestionably the enterprise of a realist, even when the field where it all happens is artificially constructed.
NOTES TO ‘SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS’
The play was evolved from Elisabeth Hauptmann’s play ‘Happy End’, with the collaboration of Hauptmann, Borchardt and Burri. Use was made of classical models and stylistic features: certain episodes were portrayed in the form historically assigned to them. In this way the aim is to show not only the episodes but also the kind of literary-theatrical treatment to which they have been subject.
1
‘Saint Joan of the Stockyards’ is a piece of non-aristotelian dramaturgy. This is a dramaturgy that demands a quite specific approach on the part of the spectator. He has to be in a position to adopt a specific and learnable attitude, absorbing the events on the stage and grasping them in their multiple relationships and complete progression. This with a view to a
radical review of his own conduct. He is not allowed to identify himself spontaneously with particular characters in order merely to partake of their experience. So he does not set out from their intuitively grasped ‘Being’, but uses their statements and actions to piece together the overall process. (He is not always led suggestively to this approach by the work of art itself; he may have to get at it by some other route, by first hand experience or study or whatever.)
2
So what is being discussed in the play ‘Saint Joan of the Stockyards’, as an instance of this dramaturgy, is not ‘the inner being of religion’, faith, the existence of God. It is rather the approach adopted by religious persons (in so far as it can be understood from outside), the talk of God, the efforts people make to instil belief. The aim of the play – to communicate a profound and practically active awareness of the great social processes of our time – would be distorted by blaspheming ‘God’ or showing the religious approach in a contemptible light. For what matters from this point of view is tracing the effects of the religious approach as seen in quite specific situations of our time, along with those of a quite specific and currently observable historical approach.
3
The play claims to be necessary if one is to judge religious institutions and their conduct (e.g. the sect of the Black Straw Hats), or grasp such a movement as a whole. This movement is shown as inherently full of contradictions. Inseparable among them are religious inspiration (Joan Dark) and the apparat (Paulus Snyder and the rest of his group). But the spectator should not get too involved in the clash between them. For instance he must not approve Joan and reject the apparat, nor vice versa. He must make his criticisms of the totality of the institution, for it is as a totality that the social process encounters it along with its inherent contradictions. Neither Joan nor the apparat in isolation could bring about those effects which are to be felt in reality. Similarly the ‘other world’ of the stockyards forms a self-contradictory whole, and there is a sense in which Joan and Mauler, particularly when confronted with the locked-out workers – which is where the play first establishes its main critical point about the intolerable nature of our conditions – join with the Black Straw Hats and the owners of the chief means of production to form a single unit.
4
Catholics have reacted to Joan Dark’s last desperate warning -
So anyone down here who says there’s a God
And that even if no one can see Him
He can, invisibly, help us all the same
Should have his head bashed against the sidewalk
Until he croaks –
with various degrees of outrage, but one cannot understand it unless one takes it literally and sees that she is not speaking about God at all but about talk of a God, or, more precisely, about specific talk in a specific situation, and specific remarks about God. She is in fact speaking about talk to the effect that God need have no function whatever in social matters, and that those who believe in such a God are called on to accomplish nothing in particular. It is enough if they have certain inner sensations.
The faith thus recommended is without effect on the world around us, and Joan defines such recommendation as a social crime.
[From GW 17, 1968. Schriften zum Theater 3, zu ‘Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe’. The introductory section of the last of these three items is adapted from the first edition of the play in Versuche 5, 1932. In the 1938 Malik edition Emil Hesse Burri figures under the pseudonym ‘H. Emmel’, to hide his identity from the Nazis. Hans Hermann Borchardt, whose name is omitted there, seems to have been an intermittent adviser, particularly concerning the business manipulations. He took refuge in the USSR, taught at Minsk University from 1934–36, was deported to Nazi Germany at the time of the purges, interned at Dachau and extricated by the efforts of his friends. He settled in New York.]
ABOUT THE DRAMA’S WAY OF DEPICTING BUSINESS MATTERS
There are two kinds of people: those that do business and those that read books. Those that do business do not understand much about reading books; those that read books, not much about business. This is one reason why it is so difficult to write books about business – and to make a business of doing so.
The mutual incomprehension of the two categories usually swells into positive contempt. The history of the German republic provides an example worth thinking about.
A certain political party thought (quite rightly) that one of the most effective arguments for its candidate in a presidential election was to suggest that he had never read a book. He was promptly elected, after which the other section, the book-reading category, obstinately refused to acquaint itself with his policies. The result was devastating.
Suppose a writer nowadays writes a dramatic (or belle-lettristic) work featuring business matters, then he must accept that anyone capable of understanding what his play (or book) is about is not going to read it, while anyone who reads it is not going to understand what it is about.
Business people at least are not quite so bad as the art experts. They may also take an occasional interest in art, but they have their reservations: there has to be no element of business. This insistence links them psychologically with the art lovers who otherwise are their opponents. We will leave aside the business lovers’ objection to any representation of business in art, since it is to all intents and purposes the same as that of the art lovers. One principal argument for instance is that art is too serious to concern itself with anything so mundane as business. (In these sacred halls business is not recognised.)
depiction of pierpont mauler’s business affairs
phase 1
the meatpacker mauler senses an impending sellers’ crisis on the meat exchange. he sells his shares in the yards to his crony, while undertaking to knock out his competitors before he leaves the business. (I)
phase 2
the lennox yards are knocked out by the competition of mauler and cridle, and they close. (II)
phase 3
cridle also closes, with a view to rationalising his yards. at the same time he wants to wait till prices recover.
mauler now calls on cridle to pay the money for his shares. however, since prices are very low because of the great masses of meat coming on the market, cridle will be ruined if he has to pay.
[Fragments compiled by Gisela Bahr in her Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthofe. Bühnenfassung, Fragmente, Varianten. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1972]
BUILDING UP A PART BY THE INDUCTIVE METHOD
An instance of the search for an expression: how does one rehearse Joan’s phrase ‘because you have the cruellest face’ in scene 3?
For a start one should follow the usual practice involved in reading the part with amazement, and look for other possible answers that Joan could make to the meat king’s question ‘how do you come to know me?’ For example ‘because God showed me your face in a dream’ or ‘because I’ve seen it in your corned beef advertisements’ or ‘because you have the cleverest face’. These or similar sentences should be spoken with the appropriate expression in each case. Then the phrase ‘because you have the cruellest face’, as the part has it, should be spoken in a distinctively different way.
[Published by Gisela Bahr, as above.]
DRAFT FOR A RADIO TALK
Fascism cut short the development of the German theatre and German playwriting, which had already been obstructed by the last democratic or semi-democratic governments. Piscator’s theatre, that had harnessed a whole generation of playwrights, was ruined; the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm closed, which had introduced a number of innovations and grouped such gifted actors as Oskar Homolka, Peter Lorre, Lotte Lenya, Carola Neher and Helene Weigel in an ensemble; the Volksbühne, which had remained a quality theatre for some time after Piscator left it, fell into the hands of empty-minded hacks. Small groups carried on the fight against the growing reaction, in the teeth of financial problems and difficulties with the police. The time was full of contradictions. Even as our own
theatres were closing, the State Theatre staged a new production of one of my earlier plays; but it cost the Intendant his job. Even the radio performed scenes from my play ‘Saint Joan of the Stockyards’ – the organisers were artistically inclined intellectuals who shortly afterwards disappeared into the concentration camps.
The reaction had gone too far for any camouflage. There was already a ban on anything that stood for progress, even of a purely artistic kind. We replied by sharpening our political message. A dramatisation of Gorky’s ‘Mother’ gave lessons in illegal resistance, the production and distribution of leaflets, conspiracy in the prisons, covert campaigning against war ideology. Helene Weigel, who played the mother, was hailed by the bourgeois press as one of the greatest German actresses, but the audience contained more and more policemen until finally she was arrested on stage. What a tribute by the bourgeois state to a great performer! Likewise the big workers’ choral organisations fought up to the end. The producers of a central German performance of ‘Die Massnahme’ with Eisler’s music were arrested. Their trial was extended to include the authors, and opened at the Reich’s Supreme Court. Then came naked Fascism. Actors and directors were seized, others went into emigration.
For an actor, director or theatre writer to emigrate meant the virtually complete loss of his profession. His means of production were removed at a single blow. Actors had to learn a new language. Thus Ernst Busch, one of the best proletarian actors, had to perform in Dutch; Oskar Homolka learned English. As for the plays, outside Germany they are difficult to understand and difficult to put on. ‘Saint Joan of the Stockyards’ for instance, a play on non-aristotelian lines, was the object of one or two attempted productions abroad, but none of them came to anything. Both actors and directors for this kind of work were lacking. The German theatre had attained a pretty high standard. The political objections to its production are strong ones and growing stronger.