by Peter Weiss
As the reports came in of the German victories, of England’s and France’s entry into the war, we were reviving the era of Margaret’s arrival on the stage of history. In order to assure his military ascendency, directly after his accession to power Albert organized the expansion of the mines in Jarnberaland, the old iron-producing region. Letters of privilege were handed out to the owners of the mines and smelters, who were all presided over by the treasurer Jonsson Grip. In order to spur production in the industry, which comprised more than fifty pits and their attendant smelting facilities, labor power first had to be enticed through the promise of incentives. Thus, starving and rudderless, peasants and maidservants, freed prisoners, adventurers, and vagrants moved into the region around Kopparberg and Norberg, and they were promised not only rations of grains, butter, meat, herring, and salt, but also goods to the value of three marks, which they were allowed to pick out once a year from the local merchant’s stock. Outlaws received the right of asylum, even those who had been accused of theft and murder could find employment, the recruiters weren’t overly conscientious, the bounties being offered were smaller than the premiums they received for complete workforces. But soon enough the incentives alone were not sufficient to guarantee willing workers; wherever extra hands were needed, peasants were dug up: bailiffs decided on the profitability of a farm, and if it wasn’t producing enough they would drive man, woman, and children from their land and force them to take up quarters at a pit for six months to a year. German miners were employed to dig and build adits; as experts in surveying, draining, and ventilating the pits; in the processing and smelting of the ore. Their rations were twice those of the unskilled workers and carriers, and, on top of that, they received their wages in cash. With their capital, German merchants also had stakes in the extraction, the local traders supervised the mining shares, and, with the stiff competition between the groups, those who had acquired specialist knowledge were able to increase the productivity of their lots. Through the competition among these early corporations, concerns began to form, new class strata began to emerge, of industrialists, financiers, tradespeople, and the masses who had just been freed from enslavement. The potential for large profits required increases in security personnel, the wage slaves had to be held down by mercenaries, subjected to continual threats and exemplary punishments. In the medieval mines, the masters and miners had worked together cooperatively in mutual agreement; the new division of labor provoked violent antagonisms between the original bosses of the mines, who issued from the landowning class, and the encroaching aristocrats, the royal inspectors and shareholders, the foremen and the carters, load carriers and charcoal burners; and beneath, the rebelliousness of the scattered masses was fermenting, stored in miserable huts around the pits and smelting furnaces. Only those who were skilled in mine surveying were allowed to possess weapons, only the directors got about in armor and helmets, and any servants caught carrying a knife or a dagger were flogged. Nevertheless, certain rules of peasant society were maintained in Dalarna: the townships had their own governing assemblies, the ownership of the forests was untouchable, and the landowners preserved their independence from the royal household. And yet because privileges only ever applied to the upper classes, indignation began to grow among the oppressed, who, having made it a rung higher than their former, beastly existence, were now edging toward self-consciousness. Why, we asked ourselves while listening to the radio reports, were we not hearing about any Soviet response to the German invasion; and why were the Western powers doing nothing to come to the aid of Poland. The Soviet Union might have been caught unawares, or might have consented to the German offensive; perhaps England and France only wanted to give the appearance of a willingness to intervene while they waited for the clash between the German troops and the Red Army. Meanwhile, the Party revealed itself to be just as clueless as we were, being unable to report anything in its press except declarations about the imperialist character of the war, in which Sweden’s main priority ought to be maintaining neutrality, national freedom. Albert had sent out his fleet squadron and laid waste to the Danish coastline, troops from Mecklenburg and Sweden had invaded Norway, Haakon was unable to cobble together any kind of defense, Atterdag was forced to capitulate, in thirteen seventy a peace was negotiated in Stralsund which forced both conquered countries to hand over key harbors and forts and to recognize Hanseatic control over maritime routes. Just as today’s Germany projected an image of invincibility, the Hanseatic League, comprising seventy-seven cities, then stood at the height of its power. It had possession of Visby, on the island of Gotland, and of a number of trade centers in southern Sweden that had previously been ruled by the Danish. Even Stockholm had become part of the Hanseatic League. In the depiction of the events of the years before Margaret fully assumed her role, Brecht began his search for a form that corresponded to the rhymed chronicle, in which—drastically, boldly—a new event was described with every line. He had in mind a procession that progressed quickly through its stations—ballad singers, choruses, pantomimes, and dances—to the music of hurdy-gurdies and bagpipes. Details from the wealth of historical events were picked up and sketched out: the battle of Albert and the Swedish knights against the Danish monarch; the Danish preparations to recapture their lost holdings; the burgeoning rebellion among the Swedish nobility against the Hanseatic hegemony and the high-handedness of the king; the disappointed expectations in the country; instead of a stabilization of trade after the initial military success, a continued anxiety due to the expanded armament and new campaigns; instead of the shoring up of capital investments, tax decrees from which even the wholesale merchants were not exempt; instead of the alleviation of penury, new starvation diets for the people; instead of a restoration of agriculture, plundering and pillaging by gallivanting mobs of soldiers; instead of a strengthening of national unity, an intensification of disputes among all segments of society. Accompanied by the images of the devastated fields and ruined cities in Poland, of the imported masses of prisoners, the dismembered corpses, the continual keening, faced with the terrifying thought of what would happen if the German troops reached the sphere of Soviet influence, we turned to the Sweden that had become a colony of Mecklenburg, where foreign lieges and bailiffs fleeced the autochthonous landowners unless they were among the privileged few allowed to line their own pockets, like Grip, who had now amassed two thousand estates. Brecht was fascinated by the thieving steward and chief judge, who, deformed by rickets, was able to stab rivals to death unpunished, even before the altar of the monastery church in Stockholm, who possessed a monopoly on the trade in grains, in sable-fur goods, and in candle manufacture, who was in charge of the mint, and who eventually, having grown too strong, fell out of favor with his royal ruler. Now that Albert—having been driven to war by Grip and used as cover for his raids—wanted to take a portion of Grip’s ill-gotten goods away from him, Grip found himself haunted by the fear of being murdered by the regent, who was deeply indebted to him through loans, and he set about assembling co-conspirators in the Council of the Realm, this time to rid himself of the foreigner. Yet he died before the time was ripe for the uprising against the Mecklenburger, a victim of his own insatiability. Following Grip’s death, Albert seized his country estates and ore mines, which, now that the great magnate had fallen, led to a rebellion among the Swedish nobles. Brecht made a number of attempts at depicting this phase, which stretched over two decades, and he demanded a concentrated dramatic form that could nevertheless make the power relations transparent. But no simplifying structure could be laid over the chaos: again and again, that which was arising produced new foundations, exhibited new lines of development. The expansion of the northern Germans, the disunity of the Swedish nobility and the big merchants, on the one hand interwoven with the interests of Hanseatic high finance, on the other animated by the desire to found their own Scandinavian cartels; the battles among the knightly families for influence in producing a convincing claimant to the throne; the growin
g influence of the patricians over the affairs of the government, the hunger for progress among the bourgeoisie and tradespeople, the impatience of the urban and rural workforce—all of these were harbingers of an erosion of the old form of the state, the rise of a revolutionary movement. Grip had replaced the traditional patriarchal rule with the rule of the supremacy of money, he had made use of all forms of economic compulsion to maintain the privileges of his class, had militarized the government bodies; then, once the patron of the rich he had deployed had grown too big for him to control, he called together the oligarchies he had always denigrated and turned toward Denmark, with whom he had only moments earlier been feuding, to win them over for an alliance against the dictatorial king. After this flickering, hectic, still fragmentary moment, in which grafters and underhanded assassins skulked around one another, in thirteen eighty-six, on the thirteenth of July, Margaret, who had been Norway’s regent since Haakon’s death, met with Albert in Lübeck for the diet of the Hanseatic League. Margaret brought her sixteen-year-old son and heir to the crown, Olaf. All motives for the meeting had to be considered. Albert, weakened by the opposition in the country, was turning to the German princes to fill his coffers, to bolster his army, his fleets. Margaret was concerned with establishing business relations, securing peace on the seas, and guarantees for the possessions that had previously been pledged to the Hanseatic League and since bought back. Albert, aware of the Swedish plans to topple him, attempted to win over the woman who dazzled the assembly of senators, though the assertions that he was vying for her hand in marriage were questionable. Yet there was theatrical potential in his attempt to woo her, his efforts to outbid the Swedish nobles and to convince Margaret of the benefit of a union between Mecklenburg and Denmark. Margaret’s cool rejection. An antagonism which was an expression not only of a financial contest but also of a battle of the sexes. A royal drama in the Shakespearean sense. While Albert passionately enumerated the advantages of a union, Margaret was calculating what she could extract from an alliance with the Swedish nobility. The funds for a military campaign had to be raised, but in terms of populace and agricultural production, Denmark was still the richest land in the North. A year of doubled taxes would cover the military costs. In exchange for her military assistance, the Swedish emissaries had promised her not just the throne but also a large number of estates, palaces, and castles. Secretly she was negotiating for the mines in Dalarna to be signed over to her. The Swedish entrepreneurs had to weigh Margaret’s stipulations against Albert’s ambitions of being restored. In either case, the greater portion of the industrial capital would remain in the hands of Hanseatic bankers. They preferred Margaret’s rule because she, governing from Denmark, would be further away and would consequently be able interfere less in their affairs than a king residing in Stockholm. Securing a partnership in the mining enterprises was also a topic of discussion between Margaret and the North German councillors. Though she may have been buying their favor, they too had an interest in forming a bloc with Denmark at a time when, in the west, the competition from Burgundy was growing, and in the east the Polish-Lithuanian Union was on the rise, and both Russia and England too were making moves to increase their trade rights. The financiers therefore made concessions to Margaret, while still hoping to profit from Albert’s rule for as long as possible. Until it had been decided who would be the victor in Sweden, they supported both. Knowing she had secured Hanseatic backing, Margaret returned to Denmark, and Albert traveled back to Stockholm with a fleet full of soldiers provided to him by the Margrave of Brandenburg. The city, he announced, was to be transformed into an impregnable fortress. After his creditor died and he was able to tear up his borrower’s notes, he sent his henchmen out to plunder the country ruthlessly and to sow chaos in anticipation of the Danish invasion, with the intention of making organized local attacks against him impossible. One last time, before Margaret gave her troops their marching orders, a classically condensed vision of royalist power emerged, shot through with obstinacy toward the members of one’s own clan, with the resolve to stop at nothing. Educated by the rod, castigating herself yet filled with ambitions to trump her late father and achieve everything that her sickly spouse had left unfulfilled, she showed her son, the young heir to the throne, a severity which ultimately broke him. Olaf died at seventeen years of age. The material provided by this incident allowed Brecht to sketch out a scene that revealed the perversion of the autocrat. Embodying a principle in which the worldly and spiritual powers pervaded one another, she alternated between giving her power a veneer first of religious fervor, then of national utility. Thus, she began to present herself in heraldic mourning, her face made up white as chalk, no eyebrows, her mouth a stroke of black. Having grown up in the cult surrounding Bridget, she knew how to imitate the saints; she stood there like a ghost, holding her dead son in her arms, stretched out on his back, and, but a moment after she had handed him over to the priests to be laid out, she summoned her commanders with a wave of her hand, had them unfurl their field maps, and set out the directions of the attacks. A battle on the stage could no longer be portrayed through yelling, swishing sabers, and dying men falling to the ground. Even abstractions in the form of hauling onto the stage panels outlining allegiances, the kind and number of troop units, would seem too playful in light of the military actions now being shown in the newsreels. Any attempt to act out a massacre would have been an affront, and the incorporation of the audience into some overpowering event was to be rejected out of hand. During the war, it is only possible to talk about war, said Brecht, if the aim is to investigate its causes. Wars had always, as people said, descended upon the people. Today too, the people had allowed themselves to be driven blindly into calamity by higher powers, hoping right up until the last minute for mystical salvation. Even the Party itself had considered the outbreak of war impossible on its very eve. Lacking Soviet communiqués, their press indulged in speculations about the aggressiveness of the Western powers, which had declared war on Germany, and about the openness to peace of the German army, which on the third of September stood at the Vistula, on the ninth in Warsaw, crossing the San on the eleventh on their way toward the Curzon Line. Then came the first murmurs within their commentary that Poland’s right to exist was questionable, because it had stolen its western border from the German Reich and its eastern one from Russia. They’re trying to prepare us for an agreement to divide the country, said Brecht. In thirteen eighty-nine, on the twenty-fifth of February, on the plains of Falan in Västergötland, the main bodies of the armored knights approached one another in rectangular formations, the infantry trudging through the snow behind them. Yet nothing could be seen or heard of the clash of the warriors. A horrible silence and gloom prevailed. In the foreground, sitting backward on the shoulders of knights, Margaret. Brecht wanted to show that on both sides it was individuals who hurled the countless, nameless masses to their annihilation. In this first part of the play, he was concerned with making evident the enormous rift between those who were swallowed up by history and the crowned heads that rose up as historical markers. The image of history as a history of the rulers was intended to cause the audience members to think about the necessary inversion intended for the play’s second part. There were still four decades before Engelbrekt would appear, before the popular uprising. But in looking at our situation today, having once again been duped, fallen into the trap, we could already sense how dark and divisive this phase would be as well. Individuals still determined our fates. Before Brecht set about depicting the effects of the war on the lowly and their behavior, he demonstrated what kind of people it was who were leading and deceiving them. He highlighted the selfishness of the two figures, the ridicule they heaped on each other. Instead of the turmoil, the reddening snow, he sketched out two instants, one at the beginning and one at the conclusion of their struggle. While Margaret was biding her time, sending out scouts, she was brought a whetstone on a cushion, a gift from Albert, addressed to King No-Pants, with a
message that the recipient should give up governing and go back to sharpening her sewing needles and scissors. Later, after her troops had been victorious and her captive enemy had been hauled in, she had him dressed in a fifteen-cubit-long jester’s cloak, placed a cap with brightly colored trains on his head, and had him brought to her curtained canopy bed, his hands and feet in chains. The humiliation of the man who had offered himself to her as a spouse surpassed the joys of a wedding. A new emblem of power, the standard of the Swedish realm, was handed over to Margaret. The coat of arms, originally produced for Albert, bore three golden crowns over a blue background. Three crowns: the first for the country’s grandeur, the second for its honor, the third for its riches. The toppling of the foreign regent was followed by the execution of transactions that had been previously set out in contracts. The Swedish nobles named Margaret their rightful ruler and pledged to faithfully serve her and her appointed heir. A series of castles and fortified harbors on the west coast were bequeathed to her to consolidate her dominance over the Kattegat and the Öresund. She received the majority of Jonsson Grip’s estate, which extended from Kalmar and Öresten across half of Sweden up to the ore mines around Falun, Kopparberg, Norberg, and over to Vyborg in the Finnish east. Meanwhile, Stockholm sealed itself off from her; even with the incarceration of Albert and his sons in the fort at Falköping, the war did not end; it would continue for the better part of ten years before the capital’s garrison would fall and Sweden was liberated from the Mecklenburgers. Key moments from the material that we had collected from the libraries and inspected: countermeasures by the Hanseatic League to force the extradition of the imprisoned nobles from Ruppin, Stargard, and Schwerin; arrival of an expedition corps from Rostock; total maritime blockade, to make clear that it was still the Hanseatic League that controlled trade; the country ruined by rampant theft and war; the security of the coasts compromised by Mecklenburg privateers; murder or exile of everyone in Stockholm who did not remain loyal to Albert; Margaret’s negotiations for a ceasefire and for the conditions of release for Albert and his son; stipulation of a sum of sixty thousand marks in silver; until the sum was provided, Stockholm as collateral; efforts of the Mecklenburgers to persuade the grand master of the Teutonic Order to advance them the ransom money; Stockholm this time used as bait by Albert’s adherents; Albert’s release; installation of the Hanseatic League as the neutral protecting power of Stockholm; arrival of the occupying troops from Lübeck, Stralsund, and Greifswald, from Danzig, Elbing, and Thorn; a forest of flags, solemn speeches, citizen demonstrations; Albert and the princes of the Order plot their revenge; preparation of military activities; conflict with the Hanseatic merchants who demand the resumption of trade; finally, on Trinity Sunday, the seventeenth of June thirteen ninety-seven, the act of union in Kalmar, in concert with the coronation of the young Eric of Pomerania, nephew of Margaret, whom she had made her pupil and selected as her successor. Just as Brecht had dealt in detail with the postures, the gestures, of the protagonists when delivering the whetstone and during the humiliation of the defeated king, he meticulously set out the sequence of the movements in this scene. The behavior and the gestures of the figures, their distribution on the stage, the relationships between the different individuals and groups were to be so emphatic that words would scarcely be necessary. The economy of the dialogue also corresponded with the turn toward the cantor or chorus, which commented upon or summarized the plot. We discussed how Margaret could be viewed by the people as a liberator. She had alms distributed among the poor. The fact that those who had always had every last thing taken from them were given a coin, a little bag of flour, or a loaf of bread must have made the donor seem like a savior. She presented herself as pious and penitent, had her servants carry around an image of Bridget. A chorale about her pilgrimage to Vadstena, to the Abbey of Our Lady and of Saint Bridget. The nuns and monks made it known that in that very place she had kissed their feet. The prelates stuck the bribes she had given them in their pouches and sang a mass in her honor. The lowly looked up to her as to a sovereign. Finally, hope for peace and calm. The elite also expected peace from Margaret’s regency, and it was peace that they needed to consolidate their positions. The praise she received from the upper echelons was not a response to her but to the chance to lay the foundations for expanding their estates. The poor’s expressions of deference were like a hurried prayer born of enduring need. Only the country folk now stood mute once more, evincing a hint of their threatening force yet incapable of voicing their demands in the face of this growing power. The council of the spiritual and worldly rulers had always chosen the sovereign according to their own interests. They would not let themselves be outfoxed again, as they had with Albert. Their collective goal was now to overpower the Mecklenburg soldiers that were still marauding through the land, to neutralize the pirates on the seas, and to achieve independence from the Hanseatic League. The advantages of a union of the three Nordic realms caused the conflicts among the noble houses and dynastic interests to subside. Scandinavian unity could counter the North German efforts at expansion. Within the alliance, each of the three states harbored the desire for ascendancy; the Swedish aristocrats were forced to bend to the will of the Dane, not so much because of their agreement with Margaret but because of the supremacy of her fighting forces on land and at sea. As the victor and founder of the union, she could afford to speak of equality, yet she and her courtiers knew that she would give her own country priority. Above all, the participants at the meeting could revel in presenting the immutability of their status as a superior class once again. Only the nobles took part in the meeting. The advance of the bourgeoisie had been halted, and they had been relegated to their position in the urban economy. The necessity of the Nordic alliance was underlined further by the fact that Gotland was then occupied by an army of the Teutonic Order. The news that forty-two warships had landed in Visby intruded upon the ritual of the coronation. Present at Kalmar Castle were the archbishop of Uppsala, ten bishops, four other high-level church dignitaries, and over fifty representatives from the most distinguished families, with Eric knighting one hundred thirty-three lords. But Eric, though he was king, had to reckon with being able to exercise his reign only after Margaret’s death. She had secured her power over him contractually. The goods and industries that had come into her personal possession were likewise untouchable. As before, when her son was still alive, she reigned in the stead of the actual king. Thanks to her diplomatic skill, as the creator of the Scandinavian trinity, she was rewarded with being allowed to rise above the installed king. Brecht rejected the suggestion of further elaborating the conflict between the strong mother and the weak son. He was afraid that to do so would cause the play to plunge too deeply into tragedy, which would cause it to depart from its balladic character. He was more interested in showing how Margaret’s almost modern-seeming intentions were deformed and disabled by old-fashioned self-interest. It made an impression upon him when Ljungdal read out the charter that was drafted in Kalmar. It could have led to an enduring union if the people who laid down this text under Margaret’s leadership had already belonged more to the modern age, rather than still being largely rooted in the Middle Ages. The document, with its nine key points, in which the ideals of equality and justice resounded, was based on the decision-making power of the elite and ignored the demands of the people. Though it also dealt with the powers and responsibilities of the states in a far-sighted fashion, it excluded the fates of the great majority of their inhabitants. It provided a clear image of how an intellect could be directed at the future and yet be unable to transcend the conditions of its society. The notion of centralization was expressed in the dictate that the three realms were to be joined together for eternity under one king. Alongside this bond, which served to maintain peace and harmony, the integrity of each individual realm was guaranteed through the retention of their own laws and jurisprudence. The military and political side of the alliance was revealed in the stipulation that, in th
e case of an attack on one of the realms from abroad, all were obliged to provide assistance with all of their might. But in other provisions—that those banished from one realm were also banished from the others; that everyone must collectively support the king against all those who rose up against the accord—it became clear just who was claiming the right to protection here. The binding of the realms and the assurance of their supranational defense was a deed well ahead of its time. But the realization that the rapid development of world trade demanded a concentration of power in states was still a far cry from the acknowledgment that it is the working populace who carry the small class of leaders. After establishing unity as an abstract ideal, Margaret immediately went on to vitiate it in practice. She entrusted her local lackeys with vacant posts and employed them as administrators in the castles and forts. Though she did leave a number of the posts to the Swedish councillors, in order to stem their dissatisfaction, taxes were collected for her by Danish lords and bailiffs. From the moment the Kalmar letter was sealed, it was clear that Sweden would once again find itself under foreign rule, that the domestic peace would be pregnant with revolt. The solemnly celebrated meeting of the worldly and spiritual aristocracies, said Brecht, was to be concluded by a procession of peasants, returning to their daily hardship, still blinded by all the dazzling pomp. During those days, around the fifteenth of September, such pressure descended upon us that we were scarcely able to follow Brecht’s exhortations to continue with the conception of the play. All of our fears were now being confirmed. Molotov declared that two weeks of war had demonstrated Poland’s untenability. The Red Army had been issued with the order to move into the country to protect the populations of Belarus and western Ukraine. A collective communiqué announced that it was the duty of the Soviet and German military forces to provide peace and order in the fallen Poland. The Soviet decision was welcomed in the Party press and by Rosner in the Comintern’s paper as an active intervention in the interests of peace, and they spoke of the liberation of the peasants and workers who had been held down by the feudalist Polish regime. But Brecht was disturbed by the similarity between the Soviet and German programs; he found a treacherous echo in the nationalist talk of provinces having been occupied which had once belonged to the Russian Empire. Once again, he said, it was the government that had decided for the people, and not the people for themselves. In anticipation of the confrontation between the fascist and socialist armies, Steffin noted down what we managed to summarize, and I too filled my notebook with suggestions that I worked up in the evenings from memory. The central theme of the play as the first part drew to a close would be the truce reached after a century plagued by war. Margaret had absorbed Stockholm into the realm, chased the buccaneers from the seas, and sold off Gotland to the Teutonic Order for eighty thousand marks. The restoration of agriculture and trade, the recommencement of production in the mining regions, the formation of a collective army and fleet, the glorious appearance of the regent; all of this added to the security of the lands of the Nordic union and lent them a new impetus. Though hardship might not yet have been resolved, a wide-ranging national development was nevertheless taking shape in Sweden. It was not just the large landowners and industrialists who could expect profits; merchants, tradespeople, and business owners were also able to reassert themselves. The aristocracy and the bourgeoisie alike learned to recognize the rule of the Dane. As long as she presided over the three-state realm, the disagreements among the noble houses receded into the background. During the last ten years of her life she was the guarantor of peace, and this reputation clung to her, despite the amount of conflict concealed within the peace she created. Thus, her death, which befell her aboard her ship in Flensburg Harbor, was bemoaned not only by the upper classes, who had managed to turn their loyalty to their own advantage, but also by the people, for whom the freedom from war must have been a relief; while King Eric and his counselors were now poised to fully unfurl their power. Margaret had made sure to resolve the conflicts arising from the foundation of the Nordic alliance through negotiations. The times of war had taught her that diplomacy could often achieve more than military enterprises in which she would lose many of her best knights. She maintained her strong army to lend force to her claims. Her realm of unity stood out from the rest of Europe, which was riven by unrest. Union feuds were taking place on the Iberian peninsula; England was at war with France and simultaneously facing insurrections among the rural population; revolts had begun in Bohemia, and in Lübeck the tradespeople were rising up against the patricians. She saw that the antagonistic forces in her countries could only be held in check by a precisely balanced alternation between threats and concessions, attacks and evasion. She made gifts to the aristocrats of goods that she had originally taken from them, she flattered the bishops, sent them stolen treasures, used customs perks to win over the large merchants, she renewed the letters of privilege for her partners in the ore mines, sowed gratitude among the peasants by reducing the amount of goods owed as tribute, and she awarded small plots of arable land to discharged men-at-arms. The lowest she didn’t consider. Only in her final hour would she recall the shadowy, nameless masses. She had traveled to Flensburg in order to resolve the conflicts with the Holstein nobility, who were making a claim to Schleswig, and had already sent cavalry into the Danish countryside. She was willing to cede a part of South Jutland in order to put an end to the armed clashes, but during the negotiations she fell ill with the plague which had broken out in the city. Before putting our work on hold for an extended period of time, Brecht sketched out the concluding image for us. Friday the twenty-eighth of October, fourteen hundred twelve. Margaret feverish in the cabin of the royal cog. Without a wig, her head shaved bare, she once again resembled a novice. Brecht wanted to see her divested of all external defenses. Her precious robe, her jewelry and insignia hung over a stand; in her nightshirt, wet with sweat, her face bluish and blotchy, she sat in bed, just a few confidants by her side. Now that it was too late, she was to be confronted once more with the dream of unity that her statecraft had been unable to bring about. Powerless and face-to-face with death, she was to be compelled to recognize her failures. The contradiction between her visionary vows and her betrayal of herself and her subjects was to be cruelly revealed. The fact that she had been more advanced than many later regents was no longer of any use to her; her absolutist rule could not be freed of the faults that kept it mired in its age. Even in her decay, shivering, her teeth clattering, she still attempted to pull herself together to gain a perspective of the extent of her power. The abbots of Sorø and Esrom, the bishop and the prioress of the Abbey of Our Lady in Roskilde, who belonged to her entourage, murmured over their rosaries. In order to confront the disputes in a world whose dimensions could no longer be made out, she had her adviser and treasurer, Kröpelin, a born Prussian, read out the amounts that she had at her disposal, a total of twenty-six thousand three hundred thirty-seven Lübeck marks. Every now and then overcome by wheezing and retching, she calculated the contributions that were to be given to the churches and cloisters, to fund pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Rome, and Assisi, and for Masses to ensure her salvation on Judgment Day. The clerics received her instructions with an amen and a hallelujah. Then the forces set upon her; through the windows they came, crawling out of the trapdoors, brachiating along the beams under the ceiling; they cropped up behind the pylons; pallid, grimy apparitions, some maimed, with bloodied bandages; among them peasants, laborers from the mines, women in tattered clothes carrying emaciated children; beggars, madmen, prisoners in chains. Handmaids toweled off her face, held a golden bowl to catch the sputum. While she listed the names of the courtiers to whom she wanted to leave her forts and fiefdoms, the figures crowded around her bed. Turning to Kröpelin, she said he should be the bailiff of Bohus from this day forth, in recognition of his service; and Stockholm, Kröpelin replied, he wanted to be named governor of the castle in Stockholm. Then corpses were laid on the bedding before her, han
ds grabbed her throat from behind, no, she cried, the domains and cities should belong to their residents. The clerics prayed more loudly, she wrested herself free, the duties, she cried, the duties from Öresund, from Kalmarsund, from the Kattegat should go to Denmark, and once again hands tightened around her throat, she vomited, wrong, she screamed, it was wrong to hold onto our privileges, it had been wrong to fill the highest positions with our counts, it had been wrong not to allow freely elected councils and judges to administer justice, it had been wrong to never listen to the farmers, the tradespeople, this whole belief in the indissoluble nature of the rule we had created had been wrong. The church dignitaries stepped up to perform an exorcism, waved the crucifix above her, sprayed her with holy water, attempted to drown out her screaming with litanies. The dying woman was now completely surrounded by the encroaching masses. Look at me, she cried, and the scribe at the lectern scratched out her rapid-fire words with his quill; I belong to the poorest, I am the very lowest of them, and thus I wish to perish. That which I called my property is to be distributed among those whom I aggrieved and humiliated in all the lands. My houses should go to those who have no roof above their heads, my clothes should be worn by those who are getting about in rags. I want, I want, I wanted, she cried into the choir of the prelates, I wanted to found the realm of peace on Earth, but there was nobody listening to her anymore, there was only the heaving singing, and so she turned, straining upward, to face the one who was least able to help her, pleaded with him for forgiveness, for deliverance, sank back down, nothing but a heap of festering flesh.
