7
The brief “What was the subject of your thesis?” momentarily paralyzes Pätus. This innocent question touches him on a very sensitive spot. A point has been reached when no further philosophical explanation is possible, and when not even Kant can offer anything to justify his betrayal. His feeble answer, with its self-revealing cleverness, needs to be spoken as such. It has to be made clear that Pätus himself is not entirely easy at his carefree reply. He can laugh in places where there is nothing to laugh at, be over-emphatic where it would really be better to speak in an undertone, and so on.
8
Pätus may make a large gesture to accompany his exclamation, “Karoline is very different,” but the sour face he pulls at the ensuing “made for marriage” suggests that marriage with the well-upholstered Karoline has its drawbacks. His “Incidentally, she’s the rector’s daughter” really is remarked incidentally. Pätus no longer has inhibitions about specifying the amount of his bribe.
9
Fritz’s “So the two of you live here beside the stove” is a mixture of contrasting thoughts and feelings. This final balance-sheet of Pätus’ “roaring youth” is somewhat depressing. It strikes Fritz as peculiar that the sum total of so many heroic actions can equal nought. None the less there is something to be said for the warm stove.
Back from his Italian journey, the traveller is not entirely unmarked by self-pity either. The sight of Pätus’ placidity relentlessly reminds him of the enormous billows and tempests he must still survive on the oceans of life.
10
“I find that I’ve rather cooled toward him” is most haughtily spoken. Pätus leans back in his chair with his whole weight, blows a thick blue cloud of smoke up at the ceiling, then starts to speak with the slightly grating voice of a budding lecturer.
11
After Pätus’ “How was Italy?” Fritz jumps into the fray. He deals summarily with the obligatory part (“Divine. It’s made a man of me.”) His speech shows that he too has changed. His gait has become smooth and dignified, his voice has developed a steely edge. The actual situation may not be quite like that, but the words themselves emerge nicely turned. Like a connoisseur he negligently drops in the titbits (such as “olives,” “Pompeii,” and “headlong journey”), thereby adding to their effectiveness.
12
We tried two alternative approaches to Fritz’s collapse. First we made him fall by the door-jamb in the centre of the stage, but abandoned this because here Fritz’s slow crumpling attracted too much attention. So we settled for a faint by the window.
13
When Pätus pauses in his reading of the letter after the words “uncle’s house” Fritz impatiently says “Go on!” and stamps his foot. The criminal refuses to be blindfolded and begs the judge to deal with his case according to the rule-book.
14
At this point Pätus makes his voice hard as steel. This is supposed to encourage Fritz to take what is coming to him like a man.
15
Fritz’s furious self-criticism must be performed with the utmost Sturm und Drang. The two men have swapped parts. Where in Scene 9 it was Pätus who beat his breast in despair it is now Fritz. But now that Pätus is compromising more and more with the establishment, the friends’ lofty sentiments no longer coincide. Fritz alone survives as an idealist relic.
16
Pätus’ advice is thoroughly realistic. His vocabulary suggests that he already has his own beer-drinking circle. Such phrases as “women have got to be kept in hand” and “Women! we know what they are” show that he has progressed a good way along the road from Kant to Nietzsche. These middle-class platitudes need to be delivered in a voice redolent of beer.
17
The sound of Karoline’s footsteps takes Pätus by surprise. He quickly pops Kant into a tobacco jar. Not even the conjugal bedroom is immune from the long arm of the social hierarchy. One sees the drawbacks of a rational marriage.
18
Karoline Pätus is a very important character. When she enters the room, Rococo, Biedermeier and Art Nouveau all appear together. A paralyzing atmosphere of coffee-cups seeps in. There’s nothing else for it: it’s farewell to rebellious youth.
19
The scene originally ended with Fritz staggering off, leaving the tableau of Pätus and Karoline. The spuriousness of their idyll was underlined by the subsequent addition of “Sad, but it’s no concern of ours.” The ensuing “Come and warm yourself by the stove” is just the final nail in the coffin of the Sturm und Drang with which Pätus’ career began. The quondam moral giant and subsequent traitor withdraws to a life of bourgeois heroism.
20
As the lights dim and the stage begins to revolve, Karoline goes over to the stove and sits down.
[From Theaterarbeit, pp. 90–92, headed “Examples from the production notes.” These notes would appear to be Brecht’s, though they are not signed. Brecht’s term for “a life of bourgeois heroism” is “das bürgerliche Heldenleben,” an allusion at once to Richard Strauss’s tone-poem and to Carl Sternheim’s cycle of plays.]
The choice of play
In order to provide plays for the German theatre (its classical repertoire having shrunk alarmingly in these troubled times) and at the same time to create a link with Shakespeare, without whom a national theatre is hardly feasible, it seemed a good idea to go back to the beginnings of classicism, to the point where it is both poetic and realistic. Plays like Lenz’s The Tutor allow us to find out how Shakespeare might be staged here, for they represent his initial impact on Germany. In them substance has not yet been raped by ideology but develops handsomely in every direction, in natural disorder. The audience is still involved in the great debate; the playwright is putting forward ideas and provoking them, rather than offering the whole work as their embodiment. This forces (or enables) us to play the incidents that take place between his characters and keep their remarks separate; no need to make them our own. In this way the characters, instead of being either serious or comic, are sometimes serious, sometimes comic. The tutor himself claims our sympathy for being so utterly crushed, together with our contempt for letting this happen.
[BFA, vol. 24, p. 388. Written for Theaterarbeit, 1952.]
Aspects of taste in the production
Lenz’s play, with its crude subject matter, calls for unusually elegant treatment. Moreover the view given of the German Misère could not be allowed to depress the spectator, but must inspire him to help overcome it. Everything depended on the gracefulness of the movements and the musicality of the words. Colour and cut of the costumes had to be first rate, as had the furniture and any architectural elements shown. The Ensemble looked to tasteful old engravings, etc., for ideas. What emerged was by no means an idealization of the period. Its standard of taste was in fact relatively high. The maggot had not yet grown up into a dragon. Students’ rooms, village schools, and country houses still looked very different from what they do now.
The sets and costumes for The Tutor were by Caspar Neher, the projections by Hainer Hill.
[BFA, vol. 24, pp. 391–92. Written for Theaterarbeit.]
Is The Tutor a “negative” play?
The Tutor has been criticized in some quarters for being a “negative,” or unconstructive, play. In the opinion of the Berliner Ensemble this play, containing as it does three portraits of schoolmasters (privy councillor, Wenzeslaus, and Läuffer) and three of students who intend to become schoolmasters (von Berg, Pätus, Bollwerk), and being set in the period when the German bourgeoisie was evolving its educational system, offers a stimulating satirical view of this aspect of the German Misère. The production was a perfectly valid contribution to the great process of educational reform which is currently being undertaken in our republic. As can be seen from such works as Tartuffe, Don Quixote, Candide, and The Inspector General, satire is not normally concerned to set up exemplary characters as a contrast to those which it mocks; in the concave mirrors which it uses to exag
gerate and emphasize its targets the “positive” character would not escape distortion. The positive element in The Tutor is its bitter anger against inhuman conditions of unjustified privilege and twisted thinking.
[BFA, vol. 24, p. 392. Written for Theaterarbeit. The fact that the privy councillor also belongs in the educational system—at its top—emerges more clearly from the original than from Brecht’s adaptation.]
Editorial Note
Adapting Lenz
To judge from the surviving typescripts, Brecht seems to have begun with a first adaptation “by the Berliner Ensemble” which bears no marks of his own hand and could well have been prepared by his collaborators. This was very much closer to Lenz’s original than is our text, and took in large tracts of it uncut. The main differences came in the second half of the play, and were concerned above all with clearing away unnecessary characters and entanglements. Lenz, for instance, made Gustchen go away for a whole year after being caught in bed with Läuffer (which occurred in Act III, scene 1), have her child, leave it to be brought up by an old blind woman, then come back and stage her suicide in the lake. The old woman brought the child first to Läuffer, then to the Bergs, who found that by a strange chance she was Pätus’ grandmother; old Pätus, another Insterburg dignitary, had quarrelled with her (as also with his son), but in the end the family were reconciled all round. As a further complication Lenz introduced a Herr von Seiffenblase and his tutor, who visited the three students in Leipzig, carried home discreditable reports about them, and seem to have had nebulous designs on Gustchen and Miss Rehhaar alike.
All these extra characters are eliminated in the first adaptation, as is also Miss Rehhaar’s father, who in Lenz had given Fritz lute lessons and fought a ridiculous duel with Pätus over his daughter: she herself first appearing in Königsberg, where Seiffenblase had taken her and made her pregnant. The events too are tightened up. Gustchen goes into the lake immediately after being caught with Läuffer, while the three scenes in the village school—Lenz’s III, 2, where Läuffer seeks refuge and Count Wermuth looks for him, his III, 4 with Wenzeslaus tediously expounding his rules of life, and his IV, 3 with the shooting of Läuffer a year later—are strung together into one enormous scene preceding Gustchen’s wetting, finishing with a new reference by Läuffer to the horse problem and his sex life. Then where Lenz had made Läuffer reveal his self-mutilation to Wenzeslaus before ever seeing Lise (servant, not ward, to Wenzeslaus in the original), the adaptation moved the dialogue with Lise about her suitors, etc., from the beginning of V, 10 to before the castration, adding the monologue for Läuffer virtually as in the final scene 14 b.
The other principal new passages, apart from the prologue, were the major’s remarks about Läuffer’s view of the “Hero-King” (added to I, 4); the catechism lesson at the beginning of Gustchen’s first scene with Läuffer (II, 2); the major’s wife’s singing at the start of her scene with the count (II, 6, now moved forward to follow II, 2); the introduction of Bollwerk at the beginning of the first student scene (in Lenz’s II, 3 he only appears at the end) and his references to Kant; further reference to Kant early in the second student scene (V, 6, now shifted to the beginning of Act V); a new ending to the scene where Läuffer reveals his self-castration (V, 3), which cites his letter to the major and shows his anxiety about his job; and the new festive beginning and ending to the last scene, in which Fritz and Gustchen reunite over the baby (V, 11 and 12 after the elimination of old Pätus), so that the play finishes on the song “Oh silent winter snow.” Besides the castration monologue there is also one other entirely new scene, which replaces the original II, 4. Here Lenz had two girls, Jungfer Hamster and Jungfer Knicks, reporting to Frau Hamster on the absurd sight of Pätus rushing off to the theatre in a wolf-skin with three dogs after him. Instead the adaptation introduces Miss Rehhaar, and shows Pätus being made ridiculous in her eyes by Bollwerk’s cruel exploitation of his limp.
This first (or at any rate first surviving) version was heavily reworked by Brecht in a second adaptation using about one-third of its pages as they stood, and otherwise making many changes, cuts, and transpositions. Dated “22. 12. 49” on its last page, the new typescript established the text very much as we now have it. Apart from making some massive (and necessary) cuts, what Brecht did here was partly to get the episodes into a more logical narrative sequence, incidentally scrapping the new scene just described, together with the original II, 7 (Fritz going to jail for Pätus’ debts), and throwing II, 6 and III, 1 into a single scene; partly to bring out certain elements in the situation which he had found hints of in Lenz—for instance, the notion of Fritz as philosopher and the major as would-be rustic, the sexual basis of Läuffer’s plea for a horse, Gustchen’s use of Läuffer as a surrogate for Fritz, and Pätus’ ultimate choice of the cosy life. He also introduced further quotations from Kant and, for the first time, Klopstock, and devised some good openings for the actors: e.g., the skating scene, first conceived as an episode on the Insterburg promenade, and the maid’s speech in the last festive scene.
To start with Act I, he rewrote scene 1 in more or less its final form, moved the lovers’ parting (Lenz’s scenes 5 and 6, which had been telescoped to make scene 4 of the first adaptation) forward to become scene 3, then added a note:
Position of scenes 2 and 3
With this kind of construction everything depends on the sequence, on what precedes what in the story. So the LOVERS’ PARTING needs to come before TAKING ON A TUTOR; the lover has left before the educator moves in. Another reason for putting the departure scene at the beginning is that it does not carry the story further but merely sets out a situation which is decisive for what follows (daughter of the house ready for a man). Gustchen’s erotic inclination towards Fritz, aggravated by their parting, is interpreted as awakening her erotically rather than as tying her hands.
So the two were switched, after Count Wermuth’s inquiry about Gustchen, and the major’s wife’s answer, had been added to the end of the earlier scene. Most of the major’s closing speech in scene 4 (the present scene 5) was new, and the skating scene followed as the first of the second act. Then came the catechism scene and the first student scene, much as we now have it, with its new references to girls, to the unfortunate effect of Kant on university examiners, and its invocations of “Pätus, the just,” etc., building up the philosopher’s figure; the first mention of Miss Rehhaar was also inserted here. The garden scene followed virtually in its final form, with Läuffer’s two new interruptions about the horse and the privy councillor’s “Been feeling your oats?” inserted in Brecht’s writing. The act finished with the bedroom scene, more or less in its final form, and Gustchen’s exclamation “My Romeo!”
The second student scene, which introduced the third act, was new, though still lacking its opening Klopstock quotation (see our scene 9); Miss Rehhaar now appeared for the first time, together with the quite new notion that she had been made pregnant by Bollwerk as a kind of stand-in for Pätus. In the telescoped II, 6 and III, 1, which now followed (scene 11, the discovery scene), the references to farming and the major’s talk about Berlin banks and ballets were likewise new. The long composite scene with Wenzeslaus (12) was severely cut, eliminating inter alia the appearance of the village barber to dress Läuffer’s wound. Lise, now more clearly identified as Wenzeslaus’ “daughter,” made her appearance with the beer—an afterthought of Brecht’s—flung herself in front of Läuffer and repeated Gustchen’s message about the pond as in the final text, leaving the von Berg party to rush out. After the pond scene itself (13), which has Gustchen “throwing herself into the pond” with no hesitation and no backward glances, and omits the Berg servants, there is the interlude much as in the final version, but with no mention of Karoline, merely of Pätus “skating with a new girl.”
For his fourth act Brecht made a new scene 14 by taking the three consecutive village school scenes of the previous version and treating them as (a), (b), and (c), though almost without chang
es apart from the addition of Wenzeslaus’ encouraging remarks about Läuffer’s qualifications just before his letter. The fifth act then began with scene 15, third and last of the student scenes, with its new references to Fritz’s Italian journey (an allusion to Goethe’s book of that name) and to Pätus’ marriage and heating arrangements; Karoline initially being described as “née Rehhaar,” a detail which was changed in a further version which also introduced her offer of coffee. The present final scene came next, very much as now and extensively cut by comparison with the previous version, and was followed by the festive finale at the Bergs’, in which the central section was new with its speech for the maid and its long speech for Fritz; an incidental point later dropped is that the latter announced his intention of becoming a schoolmaster. The play still ended on the song, and there was no epilogue.
This second adaptation was completed some four months before the première. Leaving aside those changes which were made in rehearsal (described in Egon Monk’s notes which follow) there were few further developments. Leopold was brought into the skating scene, which was moved forward into the first act, and Pätus’ remarks on “German servility” were added to scene 6. In the bedroom scene (10) Läuffer, who had hitherto sat on the bed, was shown lying in it, while the confusion with Fritz was further underlined (e.g., by Läuffer’s “I’m not Romeo, I’m Läuffer” and the final “Oh Fritz, my love!”). The von Berg servants were brought into the shooting and pond scenes (12, 13), as were the count’s and the privy councillor’s reactions to them in the latter. In 15, the last student scene, Pätus was shown dismissing Miss Rehhaar in his pride at having married the rector’s daughter; his final invitation to sit by the stove was also new. So we can briefly summarize what survived of Lenz’s play in the final text, scene by scene as follows:
Berliner Ensemble Adaptations Page 40
