Brecht Collected Plays: 6: Good Person of Szechwan; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui; Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (World Classics)

by Bertolt Brecht

  • • •

  It must be remembered that Brecht was writing before the time of the ‘Final Solution’, and many of the horrors which we now associate with the Third Reich were still to come. Even such historical events as are covered by the play had to be cut and compressed, and the ‘certain incidents in the recent past’ which loom up relentlessly at the end of each scene are far from giving a complete picture of the period: in other words Hitler’s triumphant career from 1932, the last year of the Weimar Republic, up to his unopposed takeover of Austria in 1938. It would be wrong to attribute the gaps in this story primarily to shortcomings in Brecht’s own understanding of events, since it is generally accepted (and borne out by the Fear and Misery sketches and such poems as ‘The Last Wish’, written in 1935), that he made a relentless effort to keep himself informed.

  Among his more substantial sources would probably have been Konrad Heiden’s pioneering life of Hitler, which appeared in Switzerland in 1936, but above all the remarkably detailed and well-illustrated ‘Brown Books’ compiled in Paris by the brilliant Comintern propagandist Willi Muenzenberg and a whole team of writers including Arthur Koestler and the clever but untrustworthy Otto Katz, former business manager of the Piscator company with which Brecht had been associated in Berlin. The first of these documents appeared as early as 1933, and made a strong case against the Nazis – and particularly Goring – for having themselves originated the Reichstag Fire. The second dealt with the trial of the alleged Communist arsonists, the third with the Nazi subversion and propaganda network in Austria and other countries subsequently swallowed by Hitler. All three contained liberal evidence of beatings and murders, already naming Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Dachau and other now notorious concentration camps.

  What Brecht left out of his historical outline, as appended on p. 213, was in the first place the role played by the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov, who with two of his compatriots was among those framed in the show trial before the Leipzig Supreme Court. This is surprising since Dimitrov became a great left-wing hero as a result of his accusatory confrontation with Goring; he was the principal figure of the second Brown Book. Propaganda value apart, however, this episode was less important than the previous dismantling by Von Papen of the Socialist-run Prussian provincial government and state apparatus: a crucial step in smoothing the way for a right-wing dictatorship which Brecht, once again, curiously omits. Yet neither of these points seems to have disturbed his critics so much as his failure to refer to Hitler’s persecution of the Jews or to allow for any kind of resistance by the German people. Not that the latter omission should surprise anyone today, when a more realistic view is taken of popular support for the Nazis than prevailed among their opponents at the time. But the decision to say nothing whatever about the racial issue does seem a little odd considering the big part which it had played five years before in The Round Heads and the Pointed Heads.

  Otherwise the analogies set out in the outline are pretty well correct. The Dock Aid scandal of the early scenes refers to the Osthilfe, a form of state subsidy to the Junkers or East German landowners – Brecht’s Cauliflower Trust – one of whom, a baron Von Oldenburg-Januschau, was a friend and neighbour of President Hindenburg and had got up the subscription to buy him the former family estate of Neudeck – the country house of scene 4 – as a tribute for his eightieth birthday in 1929. For tax reasons this was put in the name of Colonel Oskar von Hindenburg, the old man’s son and heir. Late in 1932, during the chancellorship of Oskar’s slippery friend Franz von Papen – Clark of the Trust – the facts leaked out and threatened to upset Hindenburg’s system of government by like-minded ex-officers and gentlemen, industrialists and landowners, by-passing the Reichstag thanks to his use of presidential decrees.

  Hitler – Ui – whose party had been returned with 38% of the seats in the July Reichstag elections, was at that time still regarded by the president as a pretentious (non-commissioned) upstart unfit for high office; moreover by that autumn even his popular support showed symptoms of decline – the occasion for Ragg’s mock-lamentations. Papen however had legalised the SA, Hitler’s brown-shirted private army under the leadership of Ernst Röhm – Roma – the former officer who was the party’s ‘Chief of Staff’. The gang was again free to threaten and brawl, while their leader started canvassing the industrialists and other influential conservatives on behalf of his precariously-financed party. That winter, with Papen and his successor Schleicher both unable to govern, Hitler’s chancellorship appeared the only practical solution, so long as he and Goring could be contained within a cabinet of Papen and other orthodox nationalists. So enter Ui in scene 5, with his ‘Hi, Clark! Hi, Dogsborough! Hi, everybody!’ The upstart was on top.

  Within a month of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933 the now largely inoperative Reichstag building – the warehouse of scene 7 – had burned down: pretext for a wave of repression against the left wing, who were held responsible. The Communist view at that time was that the only one of the accused to be involved was the half-crazy unemployed Dutch youth Marinus van der Lubbe – Fish in scene 8 – who was caught on the premises, having supposedly been introduced by the real incendiaries, led by a particularly vile SA officer named Heines, through an underground passage from the house of Goring, the Reichstag president. This version is now generally accepted by historians, though a book by Fritz Tobias has argued that Van der Lubbe did the job entirely on his own. What is certain is that the suppression of all opposition and union activity within Germany dates from the fire; hence the Brechts’ own departure on the following day, and hence also the symbolism of the Woman’s speech of terror in scene 9a (though originally this was placed at the end of the play).

  Next came the suppression of the quasi-revolutionary element within Hitler’s own party – interpreted by Brecht, like Konrad Heiden before him, as the Nazi leader’s attempt to legitimise himself as the declining Hindenburg’s inevitable successor. On 30 June 1934 Hitler went to attend a conference of SA commanders called by Röhm at Bad Wiessee in Bavaria – the garage of scene 11 – taking Goebbels with him; they arrived with old party friends in an armoured column. Heines was shot out of hand, Röhm arrested and later shot in a prison cell; a total of 122 dead was later reported, while another 150 or so were executed under Göring’s orders in Berlin and other, smaller, operations were simultaneously carried out elsewhere. Less than a month later, the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss – ‘a very small man’ like Brecht’s Ignatius Dullfeet – was also murdered by SS men as part of an unsuccessful Nazi coup against this Catholic-dominated country. He too had been a right-wing dictator with few humanitarian inhibitions, and although he was prepared to negotiate with the Nazis he would never do the same with the Left. For four years after his death the Austrians tried to play off Hitler against Mussolini before being finally absorbed by the former in the Anschluss (or reunification) of 1938, after which the seizure of Czechoslovakia and the German wartime conquests followed – the Washington, Milwaukee, Detroit and so on of Ui’s closing speech. All the same, the play effectively follows events only up to 1935, the year of its original conception, and Brecht never wrote ‘the utterly and universally unperformable’ sequel which he felt the itch to start in April 1941 as soon as he had finished revising: ‘Ui Part Two, spain/munich/poland/france’. The real scale of Hitler’s triumphs remains only as a prophetic threat.

  • • •

  Ui was not written for the desk drawer but, said Brecht, ‘with the possibility of a production continually before my eyes; and that’s the main reason why I so enjoyed it’. And yet only a few months after his arrival in California in July 1941 this possibility somehow slid out of reach, to be relegated to a remote corner of the back of his mind. What happened was that, having already failed to find any takers for Reyher’s translation of the Fear and Misery scenes (under the title The Devil’s Sunday), he almost at once proposed the new play to Piscator in New York with the suggestion that Oscar
Homolka, then finding few satisfactory parts in Hollywood, should play the title part. Piscator and Hanns Eisler together persuaded H. R. Hays to make a rapid translation, arguing that they had got trade union support for a production. The translation was done by the end of September, and the script sent off to Louis Shaffer, director of Labor Stage. Shaffer however (in a letter quoted by James Lyon in Brecht in America) turned it down, saying, ‘I gave the play to several people to read, and the opinion is, including my own, that it is not advisable to produce it.’

  This was of course before the United States entered the war, and in any case Hays was doubtful about giving the play to Piscator at all, and warned Brecht with some justification that his old colleague’s first New York productions had been far from successful. However, as it turned out, the money was never raised; Hays lost interest when Brecht gave up answering his letters; and Brecht, though at some point he evidently resumed his revision of the play, soon put it away and seemingly forgot it. Only a cutting in his journal for January 1942 recalls his interest: this reproduced a cartoon captioned ‘Murder Inc.’, with Hitler as a gangster, smoking pistol in his hand, followed by his henchmen ‘The Monk’ and ‘Benny the Fat’. ‘See Rise of Arturo Ui!’ says a handwritten note by Brecht, who also gummed the picture into his own copy of the script.

  There the matter rested for the next ten years or so. There is no sign of any further interest in an English-language production, and the question of a German one still did not arise. For the only theatre which might have wished to put the play on in the war years was the Zurich Schauspielhaus, and for that company, with its large complement of refugee German actors, it would have been politically impossible: there is no evidence that Brecht ever bothered to submit it. Nor would he have trusted any postwar German theatre company to stage a play on such a sensitive subject except under his own direction, even supposing that he had thought its satire appropriate to the immediate aftermath of defeat. So there was no question of bringing the play out again until after his return to Germany and the setting up of the Berliner Ensemble in 1949, and even then there were at least half-a-dozen other major plays which he wanted to stage himself and get properly established first. Ui was a problematic work, near the bottom of a very substantial pile. No part of it had been published in any form or discussed in the press, and not many people can even have known of its existence.

  He first seems to have dug it out and shown it to a slightly wider circle in the second half of 1953: a time when the events of 17 June – the street riots in Berlin and the intervention of the Russian tanks – had forced him to take stock of his country with its Nazi survivals and Communist mistakes. That autumn he wrote the cycle of short, closely compressed ‘Buckow Elegies’, balancing half-veiled criticisms of the continuing Stalinism of the regime against uncomfortable glimpses of the Nazi heritage, seen in the shifty attitude of the village tradespeople, the military walk, the sudden upraised arm. It was in such a mood of renewed suspicion of his own people that he discussed the script with a group of writers along the lines suggested on pp. 357–358 and also (we don’t quite know when) found himself explaining to his younger collaborators – dramaturgs and directors – why he did not think that it could yet be performed. His feeling, in effect, was that they were not mature enough to stand seeing Hitler mocked; the old sentiments were still too close to the surface. He told them that Fear and Misery of the Third Reich would have to be shown first: in other words that they could not stage Ui until they and their audience had taken the trouble to see exactly what they were mocking.

  Early in 1957 five of the Ensemble’s young assistant directors – Peter Palitzsch, Lothar Bellag, Käthe Rülicke, Carl Weber and the Pole Konrad Swinarski – staged scenes from Fear and Misery of the Third Reich against projections of historical photographs. The following year Palitzsch directed Ui’s world première in Stuttgart, West Germany, provoking his Ensemble colleague Manfred Wekwerth to the criticisms here reprinted on pp. 359–62: there was also a very interesting review by the leading West German critic Siegfried Melchinger which called the play ‘a brilliant miscarriage’ and took up the East German writer’s point that the German people had been omitted, but then stood this argument on its head by complaining that Brecht had failed to show how a majority of them had voted Hitler into power; i.e. how Ui was not a mere creature of the trusts.

  Four months later the Ensemble launched its own trumphal production – one of its outstanding box-office successes, and the first real demonstration of Brecht’s continuing vitality after 1956 – with Palitzsch and Wekwerth as co-directors. This was staged in fairground style, with ruthless verve and brassy vulgarity, and it centred on one of the great acting performances of the past thirty-five years: Ekkehard Schall’s clowning, acrobatic yet chillingly serious interpretation of the ghastly red-eyed, mackintoshed ham rhetorician Arturo Ui. Seen in Berlin, London and the Paris International Theatre Festival, it was one of the great proofs of Brecht’s theatricality, for nobody reading the play, with its crude and obviously rather dated mockery of such (happily) defunct mass-murderers, could imagine that it would be so amusing, let alone so compelling to watch. And yet it caught the spectator up and propelled him along the curves and gradients of its rickety-looking structure, for all the world like a giant switchback. The experience was inspiring: theatres and television channels in one country after another tried to emulate it, as a succession of outstanding actors tackled the Ui role: Leonard Rossiter and Antony Sher on stage and Nicol Williamson on television in Britain, Jean Vilar in Paris, John Bell in Sydney, Christopher Plummer and Al Pacino in the United States. Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?

  • • •

  Whether Brecht himself would have approved of the play’s delayed success is another matter. Always liable to say the unexpected yet blindingly obvious, he might well have been disconcerted by the happy relief with which middle-class audiences everywhere fell on this apparent evidence that the monsters who fifty years ago quite truly ‘almost won the world’ were only overgrown mobsters after all, something to laugh at and forget. Brecht had wanted to make his spectators feel uncomfortable, even as they noted the ridiculous disproportion between the stature of the Nazi leaders and the scale of their crimes; but certainly his play never achieved this in anything like the same measure as such inferior pieces of writing as Holocaust and The Diary of Anne Frank; moreover the parable might be expected to lose its sting progressively as the real-life events on which it reposes fade from the public mind. This is the dilemma facing any would-be director of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui today: he may be able to make a powerful theatrical event of it, but as he looks at Brecht’s ingeniously self-justificatory notes on pp. 355–8 he is likely – if he has any kind of political conscience – to wonder whether it is nowadays possible to make it anything more.

  The objects of Brecht’s satire are dead, and neither their surviving followers nor their more ignorant imitators have been able to recreate anything resembling their reign. For whatever we may think of the reactionary regimes still to be found in the civilised world today no great technologically and administratively advanced country is now open to the unchecked rule of demagogues propelled by expansionist ambition and what the Nazis termed ‘thinking with one’s blood’. Modern right-wing or totalitarian governments are not in the same league as Hitler’s Reich. But what does live on is the mindless violence of the hoodlum, which has now spread a great deal further within those very societies, to haunt the football terraces, the film and television screens and the imaginations of the elderly, sometimes gratuitously, sometimes under the guise of legitimate social or political grievance.

  So the alienating devices can change their function, as Brecht’s big plays come to convey a very different message from the one they were planned to carry. Galileo becomes a defence of sceptical human reason against imposed systems of thought; Ui a blasting attack on the banal irrationality which can lead in certain circumstances to psychopath
ic government. Such works in other words are continually shifting in relation to our times; they are still in motion. In that sense they do indeed seem like the dispersed fragments of some great explosion which took place about fifty years ago. But at the moment they may still be tending to come together again.

  THE EDITORS

  Chronology

  1898

  10 February: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht born in Augsburg.

  1917

  Autumn: Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Brecht to Munich university.

  1918

  Work on his first play, Baal. In Augsburg Brecht is called up as medical orderly till end of year. Elected to Soldiers’ Council as Independent Socialist (USPD) following Armistice.

  1919

  Brecht writing second play Drums in the Night. In January Spartacist Rising in Berlin. Rosa Luxemburg murdered. April-May: Bavarian Soviet. Summer: Weimer Republic constituted. Birth of Brecht’s illegitimate son Frank Banholzer.

  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’.