Brecht Plays 8: The Antigone of Sophocles; The Days of the Commune; Turandot or the Whitewasher's Congress: The Antigone of Sophocles , The Days of the Comm (World Classics)
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TUI sighing: All right. You drive a hard bargain. He sings the ballad. When he’s done: So that’s it, nothing more? Many thanks, ladies, and good evening. Exits.
A WASHERWOMAN: He could have done it for nothing just as well.
SECOND WASHERWOMAN: That sort won’t wash their feet for free you know.
THE TUI AND THE PORTER
A porter is groaning under the weight of a column. A Tui follows close at his heels.
TUI: Dear friend, do you know what it is you’re carrying?
PORTER: Must be at least eight stone, sir.
TUI: A particularly fine example of a column, choice marble, not that modern hollow stuff.
PORTER: Not a bit of it, sir.
TUI: Wouldn’t you like to learn a thing or two about such an outstanding work of art, my good man?
PORTER: What do you mean? Uh, it’s heavy.
TUI: Indeed, it is also no light thing to teach a person a genuine artistic sensibility. I could do my best, of course. But then I don’t know if you can afford the ten or twenty yen it might cost, what do you say?
PORTER: What is it that’s supposed to be costing me?
TUI: Well. I could tell you something about the great artistry of this capital. You probably haven’t had a closer look at the capital at all, am I right?
PORTER: Yes, I’d like to know something about the capital. But I don’t have ten yen.
TUI: Do you have five?
PORTER: I could give you three, if you could say a bit about the capital.
TUI: Are you interested in the historical angle, my friend?
PORTER: Everything. But you’ll have to talk quickly, the thing weighs a ton, and if I set it down I’ll never get it back on my shoulder. You’re far too weak to help me. The money’s here in my pocket.
The Tui takes it out of his pocket.
TUI: Well now, the capital dates from the seventh century, it’s from the school of Wang-ho, and shows the famous overlapping intersections, but the decoration doesn’t employ any animal or human motifs. Good evening. He walks away quickly.
PORTER: Hey! You haven’t told me anything about the capital! Stop, stop!
THE BLANKET TUI
At a street corner there’s a small shop with a window display of blankets. A Tui is talking to a passer-by, a poorly dressed man. He has his stall, a market umbrella, set up opposite the blanket shop between the houses.
TUI: Would you care to buy a blanket, my good man?
MAN: Yes, I could do with a blanket, mine’s old and too short.
TUI: Well let us have a look at this display here together. What do you say to these blankets?
MAN: Too short.
TUI: They are, aren’t they? Too short! They’re all made too short. To save on cloth. I’ll wager you can’t think how to cover your feet if you want to pull a blanket like this up to your chin. It’s a scandal.
MAN: It certainly is.
TUI: And do you know who’s to blame when you shiver?
MAN: looking around nervously: I don’t want anything to do with politics.
TUI: That’s just what I say too. Loudly: I’ll tell you who’s to blame, my good man. I shan’t guard my tongue; there’ll be no dark secrets in my heart. That hushing-everything-up, that keeping-your-headdown, that’s not my style. Should I tell you who’s to blame, or not?
MAN: You can tell me, but it wasn’t me that asked.
TUI yelling: You!
MAN: What?
TUI: You’re to blame!
MAN: HOW come?
TUI triumphant: Because you can’t draw your feet in! Eagerly: That surprised you, eh? You would never have thought it was so easy, would you? I can tell you, this simple solution cost me years of contemplation until I’d grasped it. Without this brainwave I would never have been able to set up my stall here.
MAN: Why? What do you sell at your stall?
TUI: Instructions.
MAN: For what?
TUI: Instructions for the use of the blankets. Oh yes, I know you’re thinking, all right, I just buy myself a blanket, and that’s that. You don’t look any further. And when that cold draught comes whistling round your feet, then you’re taken all unawares. And what’s the reason for the cold draught?
MAN suggests: Because the blanket’s too short.
TUI: Rubbish. The blanket’s just as long as any other blanket in this town. In the price range you can afford. Just buy yourself one of my little instruction leaflets – I can let you have one for a mere twenty yen – and you’ll feel no more draughts. Look, this blanket will cost you eighty yen. A longer one would cost – he measures him with a glance- a man of your height at least a hundred and fifty yen. The short blanket and the instructions, and no more draughts, would cost a mere hundred yen. Is that a deal, or what?
MAN: So what’s in your instructions?
TUI: You get a little diagram, how to arrange your legs; and then of course you have to practise.
MAN: But isn’t it uncomfortable?
TUI: Only at the beginning. After a few years you won’t want to lie any other way. You won’t be able to. If someone was to give you a longer blanket, you’d just cut the end off.
MAN: Well, I have to have a blanket.
TUI pushing him into the shop: That’s for certain.
After a while they come back out. The Tui gives the man, in exchange for twenty yen, a piece of card with a drawing on it, and takes the blanket from under his arm. With a nail he bores a little hole in one corner of the blanket.
TUI: And now you see what I’ve done here. That’s the trick. You put your big toe through this hole, and that’s how you hold the blanket down. Even if you have a restless night you’ll never shake it off. And the beauty is, the trick can be repeated no less than four times: if your hole rips, you still have another three corners to make a fresh one.
[BFA 9, pp.193-6. Brecht’s Turandot is unfinished; we cannot be sure what else, of the substantial material in the archive, should be counted as belonging to the play. These three scenes are the only additional ones which Brecht actually completed. They might possibly have found a place in the play, or they may be conceived as quite independent sketches. Elsewhere Brecht talks of another ‘sequence of small plays’ (see below). There are similarly independent versions of Ke Lei’s performance in scene 5a, entitled ‘The Tui and the Audience’, and of the ‘Tuis Soliciting Custom’ in 4a (BBA 559/124 and 125).]
TWO SONGS FROM THE ‘TURANDOT’ COMPLEX
BALLAD OF THE EMPEROR
As things stand, we shouldn’t be complaining
Seems we could afford a little laugh
Those who take the strain on our behalf
Show every sign that they’ll continue straining.
All the years it’s been this way
No one ever shouted Ho!
Where precisely does it say
How it’s been it has to stay?
Just maybe, maybe
Things won’t always be just so.
SONG OF THE PARTICULARITY OF THE LIMESIAN TUI
Elsewhere of course it may not be like that
It’s only what I know that I can speak
All men are creatures of their habitat
Perhaps our Tuis here are quite unique.
I can only speak of what I know
All men are creatures of their habitat
But one thing that I’m confident I know:
Our Tuis here are very much like that.
They bicker heatedly like grand pretenders
And marvel how intelligent they are.
Like the emblem bolted to the fender
Which always likes to think it drives the car.
[BFA 15, pp.273-5. These are among the songs that may have been intended for the play.]
PREFACE TO ‘TURANDOT’
At the beginning of the summer in which I wrote the play in question, a terrible event had shocked every intelligent person in the Republic. Since the end of Hitler’s war, which had led to t
he Soviet occupation of this part of Germany, socialist measures like the expulsion of the war-mongering Junkers, the nationalisation of many factories and the admission of workers’ and peasants’ children to higher education had effected a powerful change in the way people live. They had not succeeded, of course, in effecting an equally great change in the way people think. There were many reasons for this. First of all, the economic system had to be transformed at a time when the economy had been weakened by the war. Hitler’s regime had exhausted the last reserves of national prosperity, and the economic restoration, tackled conscientiously and ingeniously by workers and peasants, also suffered initially from the necessity of making amends for at least some of the monstrous devastation which the German people had perpetrated during their invasion of the Soviet Union under Hitler’s regime: this country too had reached the limit of its resources.
Furthermore, the socialist measures were new; those who were putting them into practice had little or no experience in such matters, every step was an experiment on virgin territory, even with Russian support. Everywhere, mistakes were made, people were harmed or had their feelings hurt, expensive detours or expensive short-cuts were taken, again and again decrees took the place of persuasion.
A revolution had not taken place; not even in the last days of battle had the population risen against a regime which had plunged them into misery and crime. The German proletariat, disunited, weakened by unemployment, terrorised by a militarised petty bourgeoisie, formed underground fighting troops which achieved the superhuman but did not go beyond passive resistance. Many of its best leaders were murdered. Towards the end of Hitler’s war, the bombing raids on the cities also annihilated new organisations which might have been able to seize power during the collapse. Whatever measures for reconstruction were instigated, they were undertaken for the majority of the population but not by them.
It is, particularly in the chaos of military defeat, in a highly civilised system with a high degree of division of labour, impossible to do without a state apparatus, but difficult to establish an entirely new one. So, under the new commanders, the Nazi apparatus once more set itself in motion. Such an apparatus cannot be imbued with a new spirit through control from above; it needs control from below. Unconvinced but cowardly, hostile but cowering, ossified officials began again to govern against the population.
[BFA 24, pp.409-10. This foreword to Turandot was written in late summer 1953 at Brecht’s summer retreat in Buckow at the same time as his Buckow Elegies. (Compare also the Journal entry for 20 August 1953.) It represents arguably the most significant of Brecht’s statements on the workers’ uprising in East Berlin on 17 June 1953, and suggests surprising ways in which he may have thought his work on the play relevant to current events. In particular, Brecht identifies bureaucrats and civil servants as a reactionary force within the GDR undermining the project of East German Socialism. At first sight the essay may not seem to have much to do with the play, but in fact this context was crucial for Brecht. The connections he establishes between the Nazi regime and the GDR bureacracy, and the fact that the GDR was not the product of a popular revolution such as that which concludes the play, provided the urgent justification for revisiting the old Turandot project.]
NOTES
The stage must be transformed quickly; the scenes ‘A Street’ and ‘In the Courtyard of the Imperial Palace’ can be played in front of the small curtain. The buildings must be weightless, poetic and realistic suggestions.
The Whitewashers’ Congress will work best on a revolve, so that the stage can move smoothly between vestibule and cloakroom, without a curtain.
The Tuis are characterised by small hats after the style of Tibetan or European priests. The hats differ according to the importance of the Tui, more or less decorative, and of different colours.
The costumes can be mixtures, based on the Chinese.
The performance must be quick.
[BFA 24, p.410. Typescript of summer 1953.]
‘TURANDOT’ AND THE INTELLECTUALS
The play Turandot or The Whitewashers’ Congress is part of a substantial literary complex which for the most part consists still of plans and sketches. It includes a novel, The Downfall of the Tuis, a volume of stories, The Tui Tales, a sequence of small plays, Tui Farces, and a little volume of treatises, Lickspittling and Other Arts.
All these works, which have occupied the author for decades, are concerned with the abuse of the intellect.
[BFA 24, p.411. Summer 1953. Brecht had been putting together material under these headings since the 1930s, but not all of the works listed here are identifiable. See also the Introduction.]
REMARKS ON ‘TURANDOT’
I devised the plan to write a Turandot play back in the 1930s, and during the exile period I did some preliminary work towards a novel, The Golden Age of the Tuis. Above all after writing Life of Galileo, in which I had portrayed the dawning of an age of reason, I wanted to portray its evening, the dusk of that variety of reason which, at the end of the sixteenth century, had launched the capitalist age.
[BFA 24, p.411. Summer 1953.]
TUI SKETCHES
Point of view
1 The people doubly cheated. Tui-thinking is wrong (damaging or useless). The solution: Thinking is wrong.
2 The Tuis of the Potsdam Republic: You saw where you got by thinking! The Tuis of the Weimar Republic: You’ll see where you get with not-thinking! (The thought of distinguishing between correct and false thinking is missing.)
3 The Tuis in exile then cry out: Things are so bad, because we are gone and H is there! Those who remain, the fully adapted fellow travellers: Things are so good, because we and H have stayed and the others are gone!
The End: The people have fallen amongst the most corrupt and scoundrel Tuis. The Idea triumphs, the Volk dies a miserable death.
Definition
A Tui is someone who can hold a head to Eugen.
Tuis are the intellectuals of this age of markets and commodities.
Mongers of the intellect. [ … ]
Tui Congress
The battle of the orators Barbusse and Gide
Gide gracious, Barbusse even more gracious, so Gide hates Barbusse and speaks like Christ.
Barbusse goes out to the toilet and sharpens his teeth with a file (with which he otherwise sharpens his sentences).
Six days of speeches
The trainers. The boxes. Women admirers. The illustrators. Massage.
The resolution is expected to proclaim freedom of speech (unfree for the last time). The world-resolution.
Next door an assembly of pig merchants. Their applause penetrates the hall.
The Kaiser wishes to protect his property (by increasing it). But this is not to happen in a completely crass way. Force should not be employed, and if it is, it mustn’t be recognised. Also the images of the good Kaiser must not be harmed, the patriarchal defender of cultural values and of wise, humble comportment. A willing compliance is called for, at least from the soldiers who, as we know, are related to the other subjects.
Only when the Tuis fail will naked force be employed.
The guilt of the Tuis: they associate culture (ethics, art etc.) with property. If it gets serious (an emergency) property will sacrifice both them and culture. Then they’ll be between two stools, in banishment.
[BFA 17, pp.153, 156-7. Brecht wrote a great many short prose sketches and outlines like this, as well as several longer stories. For the most part they were probably intended to become part of a so-called Tui-Novel, the fragments of which occupy 150 pages in the German collected edition. These extracts, just a sample of the material from the relevant folders, date from the mid-1930s.
Eugen was Brecht’s first given name. His rather obscure definition, ‘Tui ist, wer dem Eugen den Kopf reicht’, may be a variation on the German saying ‘jemandem (nicht) das Wasser reichen’, which is more or less equivalent to ‘(not) holding a candle to someone’ – in which case he is ironically
acknowledging himself to be a Tui.
On Barbusse and Gide, see Editorial Notes.]
Editorial Notes
Like so many of Brecht’s projects, the Turandot play suffered from a very long and often interrupted process of genesis. Or perhaps benefited. The richly allusive nature of the text is of course a product of the various contexts in which, successively, its material was to be made to function: as a parody of aspects of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi assumption of power (Gogher Gogh and his bandits, the warehouse fire etc.), as a satire of the German anti-Nazi exiles and their colleagues who gathered at the two International Congresses for the Defence of Culture in 1935 and 1937 (see below), of the inability of the Communists and Social Democrats to unite against Fascism (the Clothesless and the Clothesmakers), or of the Frankfurt School ‘intellectuals’ (Munka Du has some caricatural traits of Theodor Adorno, and compare Journals, pp.230-1), of the survival of a bureaucratic caste of civil servants in the young GDR, of Stanislavsky’s theatre theory (Journals, p.18) or of the performance of cultural leaders of the GDR at the Stanislavsky conference in mid-April 1953. And so on. There are even veiled references to the exchanges of such Marxist critics as Kurella and Lukács in the so-called Expressionism Debate of the 1930s, or of Erpenbeck and others in the new Formalism debate of the 1950s, to the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch-hunts (the interrogation of Munka Du), to the Chinese Civil War in 1948 (Kai Ho has aspects of Mao Tse-tung), to the controversy in the GDR about the value and function of the bourgeois cultural heritage (scene 9) and, much more sensitively, to the workers’ uprising in East Berlin in June 1953 (see ‘Preface to Turandot’, above). Scene 9 appears to engage with the cultural politics of all three: National Socialism, the Stalinist Soviet Union and the GDR. These various contexts are fleshed out in several of the essays from the 1930s and 1950s on cultural matters collected in Brecht on Art and Politics (see especially pp.157-62 and 327-31, and compare Introduction).