1920
May: death of Brecht’s mother in Augsburg.
1921
Brecht leaves university without a degree. Reads Rimbaud.
1922
A turning point in the arts. End of utopian Expressionism; new concern with technology. Brecht’s first visit to Berlin, seeing theatres, actors, publishers and cabaret. He writes ‘Of Poor BB’ on the return journey. Autumn: becomes a dramaturg in Munich. Première of Drums in the Night, a prize-winning national success. Marries Marianne Zoff, an opera singer.
1923
Galloping German inflation stabilised by November currency reform. In Munich Hitler’s new National Socialist party stages unsuccessful ‘beer-cellar putsch’.
1924
‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ exhibition at Mannheim gives its name to the new sobriety in the arts. Brecht to Berlin as assistant in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater.
1925
Field-Marshal von Hindenburg becomes President. Elisabeth Hauptmann starts working with Brecht. Two seminal films: Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin. Brecht writes birthday tribute to Bernard Shaw.
1926
Priemière of Man equals Man in Darmstadt. Now a freelance; starts reading Marx. His first book of poems, the Devotions, includes the ‘Legend of the Dead Soldier’.
1927
After reviewing the poems and a broadcast of Man equals Man, Kurt Weill approaches Brecht for a libretto. Result is the text of Mahagonny, whose ‘Songspiel’ version is performed in a boxing-ring at Hindemith’s Baden-Baden music festival in July. In Berlin he helps adapt The Good Soldier Schweik for Piscator’s high-tech theatre.
1928
August 31: première of The Threepenny Opera by Brecht and Weill, based on Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.
1929
Start of Stalin’s policy of ‘socialism in one country’. Divorced from Marianne, Brecht now marries the actress Helene Weigel. May 1: Berlin police break up banned KPD demonstration, witnessed by Brecht. Summer: Brecht writes two didactic music-theatre pieces with Weill and Hindemith, and neglects The Threepenny Opera’s successor Happy End, which is a flop. From now on he stands by the KPD. Autumn: Wall Street crash initiates world economic crisis. Cuts in German arts budgets combine with renewed nationalism to create cultural backlash.
1930
Nazi election successes; end of parliamentary government. Unemployed 3 million in first quarter, about 5 million at end of the year. March: première of the full-scale Mahagonny opera in Leipzig Opera House.
1931
German crisis intensifies. Aggressive KPD arts policy: agitprop theatre, marching songs, political photomontage. In Moscow the Comintern forms international associations of revolutionary artists, writers, musicians and theatre people.
1932
Première of Brecht’s agitational play The Mother (after Gorky) with Eisler’s music. Kuhle Wampe, his militant film with Eisler, is held up by the censors. He meets Sergei Tretiakov at the film’s première in Moscow. Summer: the Nationalist Von Papen is made Chancellor. He denounces ‘cultural bolshevism’, and deposes the SPD-led Prussian administration.
1933
January 30: Hitler becomes Chancellor with Papen as his deputy. The Prussian Academy is purged; Goering becomes Prussian premier. A month later the Reichstag is burnt down, the KPD outlawed. The Brechts instantly leave via Prague; at first homeless. Eisler is in Vienna, Weill in Paris, where he agrees to compose a ballet with song texts by Brecht: The Seven Deadly Sins, premièred there in June. In Germany Nazi students burn books; all parties and trade unions banned; first measures against the Jews. Summer: Brecht in Paris works on anti-Nazi publications. With the advance on his Threepenny Novel, he buys a house on Fyn island, Denmark, overlooking the Svendborg Sound, where the family will spend the next six years. Margarete Steffin, a young Berlin Communist, goes with them. Autumn: he meets the Danish Communist actress Ruth Berlau, a doctor’s wife.
1934
Spring: suppression of Socialist rising in Austria. Eisler stays with Brecht to work on Round Heads and Pointed Heads songs. Summer: Brecht misses the first Congress of Soviet Writers, chaired by Zhdanov along the twin lines of Socialist Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism. October: in London with Eisler.
1935
Italy invades Ethiopia. Hitler enacts the Nuremberg Laws against the Jews. March-May: Brecht to Moscow for international theatre conference. Meets Kun and Knorin of Comintern Executive. Eisler becomes president of the International Music Bureau. At the 7th Comintern Congress Dimitrov calls for all antifascist parties to unite in Popular Fronts against Hitler and Mussolini. Autumn: Brecht with Eisler to New York for Theatre Union production of The Mother.
1936
Soviet purges lead to arrests of many Germans in USSR, most of them Communists; among them Carola Neher and Ernst Ottwalt, friends of the Brechts. International cultural associations closed down. Official campaign against ‘Formalism’ in the arts. Mikhail Koltsov, the Soviet journalist, founds Das Wort as a literary magazine for the German emigration, with Brecht as one of the editors. Popular Front government in Spain resisted by Franco and other generals, with the support of the Catholic hierarchy. The Spanish Civil War becomes a great international cause.
1937
Summer: in Munich, opening of Hitler’s House of German Art. Formally, the officially approved art is closely akin to Russian ‘Socialist Realism’. In Russia Tretiakov is arrested as a Japanese spy, interned in Siberia and later shot. October: Brecht’s Spanish war play Señora Carrar’s Rifles, with Weigel in the title part, is performed in Paris, and taken up by antifascist and amateur groups in many countries.
1938
January: in Moscow Meyerhold’s avant-garde theatre is abolished. March: Hitler takes over Austria without resistance. It becomes part of Germany. May 21: première of scenes from Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich in a Paris hall. Autumn: Munich Agreement, by which Britain, France and Italy force Czechoslovakia to accept Hitler’s demands. In Denmark Brecht writes the first version of Galileo. In Moscow Koltsov disappears into arrest after returning from Spain.
1939
March: Hitler takes over Prague and the rest of the Czech territories. Madrid surrenders to Franco; end of the Civil War. Eisler has emigrated to New York. April: the Brechts leave Denmark for Stockholm. Steffin follows. May: Brecht’s Svendborg Poems published. His father dies in Germany. Denmark accepts Hitler’s offer of a Non-Aggression Pact. August 23: Ribbentrop and Molotov agree Nazi-Soviet Pact. September 1: Hitler attacks Poland and unleashes Second World War. Stalin occupies Eastern Poland, completing its defeat in less than three weeks. All quiet in the West. Autumn: Brecht writes Mother Courage and the radio play Lucullus in little over a month. November: Stalin attacks Finland.
1940
Spring: Hitler invades Norway and Denmark. In May his armies enter France through the Low Countries, taking Paris in mid-June. The Brechts hurriedly leave for Finland, taking Steffin with them. They aim to travel on to the US, where Brecht has been offered a teaching job in New York at the New School. July: the Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki invites them to her country estate, which becomes the setting for Puntila, the comedy she and Brecht write there.
1941
April: première of Mother Courage in Zurich. May: he gets US visas for the family and a tourist visa for Steffin. On 15th they leave with Berlau for Moscow to take the Trans-Siberian railway. In Vladivostok they catch a Swedish ship for Los Angeles, leaving just nine days before Hitler, in alliance with Finland, invades Russia. June: Steffin dies of tuberculosis in a Moscow sanatorium, where they have had to leave her. July; once in Los Angeles, the Brechts decide to stay there in the hope of film work. December: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brings the US into the war. The Brechts become ‘enemy aliens’.
1942
Spring: Eisler arrives from New York. He and Brecht work on Fritz Lang’s film Hangmen Also Die. Brecht and Feuchtwanger writ
e The Visions of Simone Machard; sell rights to MGM. Ruth Berlau takes a job in New York. August: the Brechts rent a pleasant house and garden in Santa Monica. Autumn: Germans defeated at Stalingrad and El Alamein. Turning point of World War 2.
1943
Spring: Brecht goes to New York for three months – first visit since 1935 – where he stays with Berlau till May and plans a wartime Schweik play with Kurt Weill. In Zurich the Schauspielhaus gives world premières of The Good Person of Szechwan and Galileo. November: his first son Frank is killed on the Russian front.
1944
British and Americans land in Normandy (June); Germans driven out of France by end of the year. Heavy bombing of Berlin, Hamburg and other German cities. Brecht works on The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and with H. R. Hays on The Duchess of Malfi. His son by Ruth Berlau, born prematurely in Los Angeles, lives only a few days. Start of collaboration with Charles Laughton on English version of Galileo.
1945
Spring: Russians enter Vienna and Berlin. German surrender; suicide of Hitler; Allied military occupation of Germany and Austria, each divided into four Zones. Roosevelt dies; succeeded by Truman; Churchill loses elections to Attlee. June: Private Life of the Master Race (wartime adaptation of Fear and Misery scenes) staged in New York. August: US drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrenders. Brecht and Laughton start discussing production of Galileo.
1946
Ruth Berlau taken to hospital after a violent breakdown in New York. Work with Auden on Duchess of Malfi, which is finally staged there in mid-October – not well received. The Brechts have decided to return to Germany. Summer: A. A. Zhdanov reaffirms Stalinist art policies: Formalism bad, Socialist Realism good. Eisler’s brother Gerhart summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. November: the Republicans win a majority in the House. Cold War impending.
1947
FBI file on Brecht reopened in May. Rehearsals begin for Los Angeles production of Galileo, with Laughton in the title part and music by Eisler; opens July 31. Brecht’s HUAC hearing October 30; a day later he leaves the US for Zurich.
1948
In Zurich renewed collaboration with Caspar Neher. Production of Antigone in Chur, with Weigel. Berlau arrives from US. Summer: Puntila world première at Zurich Schauspiel-haus. Brecht completes his chief theoretical work, the Short Organum. Travel plans hampered because he is not allowed to enter US Zone (which includes Augsburg and Munich). Russians block all land access to Berlin. October: the Brechts to Berlin via Prague, to establish contacts and prepare production of Mother Courage.
1949
January: success of Mother Courage leads to establishment of the Berliner Ensemble. Collapse of Berlin blockade in May followed by establishment of West and East German states. Eisler, Dessau and Elisabeth Hauptmann arrive from US and join the Ensemble.
1950
Brecht gets Austrian nationality in connection with plan to involve him in Salzburg Festival. Long drawn-out scheme for Mother Courage film. Spring: he and Neher direct Lenz’s The Tutor with the Ensemble. Autumn: he directs Mother Courage in Munich; at the end of the year The Mother with Weigel, Ernst Busch and the Ensemble.
1951
Selection of A Hundred Poems is published in East Berlin. Brecht beats off Stalinist campaign to stop production of Dessau’s opera version of Lucullus.
1952
Summer: at Buckow, east of Berlin, Brecht starts planning a production of Coriolanus and discusses Eisler’s project for a Faust opera.
1953
Spring: Stalin dies, aged 73. A ‘Stanislavsky conference’ in the East German Academy, to promote Socialist Realism in the theatre, is followed by meetings to discredit Eisler’s libretto for the Faust opera. June: quickly suppressed rising against the East German government in Berlin and elsewhere. Brecht at Buckow notes that ‘the whole of existence has been alienated’ for him by this. Khrushchev becomes Stalin’s successor.
1954
January: Brecht becomes an adviser to the new East German Ministry of Culture. March: the Ensemble at last gets its own theatre on the Schiffbauerdamm. July: its production of Mother Courage staged in Paris. December: Brecht awarded a Stalin Peace Prize by the USSR.
1955
August: Shooting at last begins on Mother Courage film, but is broken off after ten days and the project abandoned. Brecht in poor health.
1956
Khrushchev denounces Stalin’s dictatorial methods and abuses of power to the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow. A copy of his speech reaches Brecht. May: Brecht in the Charité hospital to shake off influenza. August 14: he dies in the Charité of a heart infarct.
1957
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Visions of Simone Machard and Schweyk in the Second World War produced for the first time in Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Warsaw respectively.
Man equals Man
The transformation of the porter Galy Gay in the military cantonment of Kilkoa during the year nineteen hundred and twenty five
Collaborators: E. BURRI, S. DUDOW, E. HAUPTMANN, C. NEHER, B. REICH
Translators: GERHARD NELLHAUS and (for scene I) BERTOLT BRECHT
Characters
URIAH SHELLEY
JESSE MAHONEY
POLLY BAKER
JERAIAH JIP
}
four privates in a machine-gun section of the British Army in India
CHARLES FAIRCHILD, known as Bloody Five, a Sergeant
GALY GAY, an Irish porter
GALY GAY’S WIFE
MR WANG, bonze of a Tibetan pagoda
MAH SING, his sacristan
LEOKADIA BEGBICK, canteen proprietress
Soldiers
1
Kilkoa
Galy Gay and Galy Gay’s wife
GALY GAY sits one morning upon his chair and tells his wife: Dear wife, I have decided in accordance with our income to buy a fish today. That would be within the means of a porter who drinks not at all, smokes very little and has almost no vices. Do you think I should buy a big fish or do you require a small one?
WIFE: A small one.
GALY GAY: Of what kind should the fish be that you require?
WIFE: I would say a good flounder. But please look out for the fishwives: they are lustful and always chasing men, and you have a soft nature, Galy Gay.
GALY GAY: That is true but I hope they would not bother with a penniless porter from the harbour.
WIFE: You are like an elephant which is the unwieldiest beast in the animal kingdom, but he runs like a freight train once he gets started. And then there are those soldiers who are the worst people in the world and who are said to be swarming at the station like bees. They are sure to be hanging around in numbers at the market place and you must be thankful if they don’t break in and murder people. What’s more they are dangerous for a man on his own because they always go around in fours.
GALY GAY: They would not want to harm a simple porter from the harbour.
WIFE: One can never tell.
GALY GAY: Then put the water on for the fish, for I am beginning to get an appetite and I guess I shall be back in ten minutes.
2
Street outside the Pagoda of the Yellow God
Four soldiers stop outside the pagoda. Military marches are heard as troops move into the town.
JESSE: Party, halt! Kilkoa! This here is Her Majesty’s town of Kilkoa where they are concentrating the army for a long-predicted war. Here we are, along with a hundred thousand other soldiers, all of us thirsting to restore order on the northern frontier.
JIP: That demands beer. He collapses.
POLLY: Just as the powerful tanks of our Queen must be filled with petrol if we are to see them rolling over the damned roads of this oversized Eldorado so can the soldier only function if he drinks beer.
JIP: How much beer have we left?
POLLY: There are four of us. We still have fifteen bottles. So we must get hold of another twenty-five bottles
.
JESSE: That demands money.
URIAH: Some people object to soldiers, but just one pagoda like this contains more copper than a strong regiment needs to march from Calcutta to London.
POLLY: Our friend Uriah’s suggestion with respect to a pagoda which, though rickety and covered with flyshit, may well be bursting with copper surely merits our sympathetic attention.
JIP: All I know, Polly, is I’ve got to have more to drink.
URIAH: Calm down, sweetheart. This Asia has a hole for us to crawl through.
JIP: Uriah, Uriah, my mother always used to say: Do what you like, my darlingest Jeraiah, but remember pitch always sticks. And this place stinks of pitch.
JESSE: The door isn’t properly shut. Watch out, Uriah, you bet there’s some devilry behind it.
URIAH: Nobody’s going through this open door.
JESSE: Right, what are windows for?
URIAH: Take your belts and make a long line to fish for the collection boxes with. That’s it.
They attack the windows. Uriah smashes one, looks inside and starts fishing.
POLLY: Catch anything?
URIAH: No, but my helmet’s fallen in.
JESSE: Bloody hell, you can’t go back to camp with no helmet.
URIAH: Oh boy, am I catching things! This is a shocking establishment. Just look. Snares. Mantraps.
JESSE: Let’s pack it in. This isn’t an ordinary temple, it’s a trap.
URIAH: Temple equals temple. I’ve got to get my helmet out of there.
JESSE: Can you reach it?
Brecht Collected Plays: 2: Man Equals Man; Elephant Calf; Threepenny Opera; Mahagonny; Seven Deadly Sins: Man Equals Man , Elephant Calf , Threepenny Ope (World Classics) Page 5
