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

  Wholly forgotten gangsters

  Taken as models by our youngsters.

  Ladies and gentlemen, the management knows

  There are ticklish subjects which some of those

  Who pay admission hardly love

  To be reminded of.

  Accordingly we’ve decided to put on

  A story in these parts little known

  That took place in another hemisphere –

  The kind of thing that’s never happened here.

  This way you’re safe; no chance you’ll see

  The senior members of your family

  In flesh and blood before your eyes

  Doing things that aren’t too nice.

  So just relax, young lady. Don’t run away.

  You’re sure to like our gangster play.

  [‘Prolog (2)’ from GW Stücks, pp. 1838–39. Written subsequently to the first version of the play, which includes the prologue given in our text.]

  Ladies and gentlemen, the management’s aware

  This is a controversial affair.

  Though some can still take history as they find it

  Most of you don’t care to be reminded.

  Now, ladies and gentlemen, surely what this shows is

  Excrescences need proper diagnosis

  Conveyed not in some polysyllabic word

  But in plain speech that calls a turd a turd.

  Never mind if you’re used to something more ethereal –

  The language of this play suits its material.

  Down from your gallows, then! Up from your graves!

  You murderous pack of filthy swindling knaves!

  Let’s see you in the flesh again tonight

  And hope that in our present sorry plight

  Seeing the men from whom that plight first came

  Moves us not just to anger but to shame.

  [BBA 174/131. Inserted at the end of the first version of the play, but evidently written for a German audience after the end of the Second World War.]

  NOTES

  1. Preface

  The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, written in Finland in 1941, represents an attempt to make Hitler’s rise intelligible to the capitalist world by transposing that rise into a sphere thoroughly familiar to it. The blank verse is an aid in appraising the characters’ heroism.

  2. Remarks

  Nowadays ridiculing the great political criminals, alive or dead, is generally said to be neither appropriate nor constructive. Even the common people are said to be sensitive on this point, not just because they too were implicated in the crimes in question but because it is not possible for those who survived among the ruins to laugh about such things. Nor is it much good hammering at open doors (as there are too many of these among the ruins anyway): the lesson has been learned, so why go on dinning it into the poor creatures? If on the other hand the lesson has not been learned it is risky to encourage a people to laugh at a potentate after once failing to take him seriously enough; and so on and so forth.

  It is relatively easy to dismiss the suggestion that art needs to treat brutality with kid gloves; that it should devote itself to watering the puny seedlings of awareness; that it ought to be explaining the garden hose to former wielders of the rubber truncheon, and so on. Likewise it is possible to object to the term ‘people,’ as used to signify something ‘higher’ than population, and to show how the term conjures up the notorious concept of Volksgemeinschaft, or a ‘sense of being one people,’ that links executioner and victim, employer and employed. But this does not mean that the suggestion that satire should not meddle in serious matters is an acceptable one. Serious things are its specific concern.

  The great political criminals must be completely stripped bare and exposed to ridicule. Because they are not great political criminals at all, but the perpetrators of great political crimes, which is something very different.

  There is no need to be afraid of truisms so long as they are true. If the collapse of Hitler’s enterprises is no evidence that he was a halfwit, neither is their scale any guarantee that he was a great man. In the main the classes that control the modern state use utterly average people for their enterprises. Not even in the highly important field of economic exploitation is any particular talent called for. A multimillion-Mark trust like I. G. Farben makes use of exceptional intelligence only when it can exploit it; the exploiters proper, a handful of people most of whom acquired their power by birth, have a certain cunning and brutality as a group but see no commercial drawbacks in lack of education, nor even in the presence among them of the odd amiable individual. They get their political affairs dealt with by people often markedly stupider than themselves. Thus Hitler was no doubt a lot more stupid than Brüning, and Brüning than Stresemann, while on the military plane Keitel and Hindenburg were much of a muchness. A military specialist like Ludendorff, who lost battles by his political immaturity, is no more to be thought of as an intellectual giant than is a lightning calculator from the music-hall. It is the scope of their enterprises that gives such people their aura of greatness. But this aura does not necessarily make them all that effective, since it only means that there is a vast mass of intelligent people available, with the result that wars and crises become displays of the intelligence of the entire population.

  On top of that it is a fact that crime itself frequently provokes admiration. I never heard the petty bourgeoisie of my home town speak with anything but respectful enthusiasm of a man called Kneisel who was a mass murderer, with the result that I have remembered his name to this day. It was not even thought necessary on his behalf to invent the usual acts of kindness towards poor old grannies: his murders were enough.

  In the main the petty bourgeois conception of history (and the proletariat’s too, so long as it has no other), is a romantic one. What fired these Germans’ poverty-stricken imagination in the case of Napoleon I was of course not his Code Napoléon but his millions of victims. Bloodstains embellish these conquerors’ faces like beauty spots. When a certain Dr. Pechel, writing in the aptly named Deutsche Rundschau in 1946, said of Genghis Khan that ‘the price of the Pax Mongolica was the death of several dozen million men and the destruction of twenty kingdoms,’ it made a great man of this ‘bloodstained conqueror, the demolisher of all values, though this must not cause us to forget the ruler who showed that his real nature was not destructive’ – on the mere grounds that he was never small in his dealings with people. It is this reverence for killers that has to be done away with. Plain everyday logic must never let itself be overawed once it goes strolling among the centuries; whatever applies to small situations must be made to apply to big ones too. The petty rogue whom the rulers permit to become a rogue on the grand scale can occupy a special position in roguery, but not in our attitude to history. Anyway there is truth in the principle that comedy is less likely than tragedy to omit to take human suffering seriously enough.

  5. Jottings

  Kusche: ‘… but at the very point where the projections unmistakably relate Ui to a specific phase of German history… the question arises: “Where is the People?’”

  ‘Brecht has written, apropos of Eisler’s Faustus, that “our starting point has to be the truth of the phrase ‘no conception can be valid that assumes German history to be unalloyed misère and fails to present the People as a creative force’.”’

  ‘What is lacking is something or other that would stand for this “creative force of the People” … Was it all a mere internal affray between gangsters and merchants? Was Dimitroff (as it is simpler to give that force an individual name) a merchant?’

  Ui is a parable play, written with the aim of destroying the dangerous respect commonly felt for great killers. The circle described has been deliberately restricted; it is confined to the plane of state, industrialists, Junkers and petty bourgeois. This is enough to achieve the desired objective. The play does not pretend to give a complete account of the historical situation in the 1930s. The proletariat
is not present, nor could it be taken into account more than it is, since anything extra in this complex would be too much;, it would distract from the tricky problem posed. (How could more attention be paid to the proletariat without considering unemployment, and how could that be done without dealing with the [Nazi] employment programme, likewise with the political parties and their abdication? One thing would entail another, and the result would be a gigantic work which would fail to do what was intended.)

  The projected texts—which K. takes as a reason for expecting the play to give a general account of what happened – seem to me, if anything, to stress the element of selectivity, of a peep-show.

  The industrialists all seem to have been hit by the crisis to the same extent, whereas the stronger ought to knock out the weaker. (But that may be another point which would involve us in too much detail and which a parable can legitimately skip.) The defence counsel in scene 9 [our scene 8], the warehouse fire trial, possibly needs another look. At present his protests seem designed merely to defend a kind of ‘honour of the profession’. The audience will of course want to see him as Dimitroff, whether it was meant to or not.

  As for the appearance of Röhm’s ghost, I think Kusche is right. (‘As the text now stands it makes a drunken Nazi slob look like a martyr.’) [ … ]

  The play was written in 1941 and conceived as a 1941 production. [ … ]

  [From GW Schriften zum Theater, pp. 1176–80. Written for a proposed volume of the Versuche whose preparation was interrupted by Brecht’s death in 1956. Since the play was first published in Sinn und Form only after that date, the characteristic East German criticisms voiced by Lothar Kusche (and originally made at a meeting between Brecht and younger writers in late 1953) must have been based on a reading of the script.]

  Later Texts

  NOTES BY MANFRED WEKWERTH

  1. Lessons of a pilot production at another theatre

  Scene I [Ia]

  The members of the trust display the same gangsters’ attitudes and costumes as we know from American films; two-tone suits, a variety of hats, scarves, and so on. This misses the point, essential to the story, that here we have old-established businessmen who have been in the trade ‘since Noah’s ark.’ These trust members are too much like parvenus, profiteers, so that the element of solid respectability – the bourgeois element – is lost. As a result their subsequent alliance with Ui, far from being worthy of remark, seems natural. Gangsters seeking out their own kind: not the bourgeois state turning to something it had expressly branded as its own mortal enemy – organized crime.

  For the same reasons the crisis too is ill-founded, since people who make such an impression are used to running into money troubles, because their business (profiteering) involves risks.

  Scene 2 [Ib]

  Ui, Roma, and Ragg emerge on to the apron from below stage and hurry past Clark one by one. In this way they formally announce themselves as gangsters emerging from a sewer manhole and not, as the story demands, as gangsters offering their services to the trust in a particularly offhand and gentleman-like manner.

  Scene 3 [2]. Dogsborough’s Restaurant

  Unless Dogsborough appears above all as an immovable, unchangeable, impregnable, rocklike fortress (i.e., solidly or immovably set in an attitude which, to judge from the text, Brecht took from Hindenburg), the great turning point where he crumbles will not be properly brought out, Instead of a ‘great personality’ succumbing to an economic force we get an average personality doing what is only to be expected. The actor gave us a lively, forceful, decisive, far too young Dogsborough, with an agile mind and agile gestures. When he looked out of the window and succumbed to the house by the lake, he turned round at least two times in order to express his reservations, and in so doing destroyed the great instant of succumbing.

  Similarly with Dogsborough’s treatment by the trust people. They should not address him as if he were one of their own sort – i.e., in business jargon – but ought to deploy considerable human resources in order to get him to listen to them at all. They should all the time be confirming his reputation as honest old Dogsborough.

  As to the identification of the characters with the Nazi leaders: Dogsborough bore no kind of resemblance to Hindenburg, neither of attitude, gesture, tone of voice, nor mask. The necessary degree of likeness to Hindenburg could only be achieved once one had taken in the inscriptions, and after the play had ended. The highly amusing way in which the course of the action instantly and directly alienates the gangsters into top Nazis was missed, or at any rate seemed vague and inexact.

  The play was written against Hitler and the big shots of those times. No general conclusions can be drawn until this story, transposed into terms of the gang world, can be concretely recognized so as to allow people in subsequent times to generalize from concrete knowledge and detect fascist trends. To start off by generalizing – i.e., by making the characters identifiable not merely with Hitler and Hindenburg – makes the events less concrete and prevents any true historical generalization. This is particularly true of our own time, where the historical events are barely remembered and the top Nazis virtually unknown except from photographs. Brecht himself rejects such a discreet approach inasmuch as he uses allusive names (Dogsborough, Giri, Roma, etc.), and calls for prescribed similarities of voice, gesture, and masks. Without this, the work degenerates into a roman à clef.

  Scene 4 [3]. Bookmaker’s office

  In the bookmaker’s office the group of leaders – Ui, Ragg, and Roma – associated with the other gangsters, with the result that their discussions degenerated into everyday conversation instead of being a crucial conversation between leading personalities; for the crisis would hardly be discussed before all and sundry. This was accentuated by the unrelievedly pliable, deflated, rubbery, unassertive attitude of Arturo Ui, who was in no way shown as a boss, but more as a passive plaything among strong men. Presented in such a wretched niggling light, his plans did not emerge as dangerous; what was shown was not so much the large-scale planning of lunacy as the actual lunacy itself. This meant that the Nazis’ logical approach – which admittedly developed on a basis of lunacy and lack of logic – was never established, so that every subsequent action seemed more or less accidental and not thought up with a vast expenditure of effort. Hence Nazism emerged as haphazard and individualistic instead of being a system: a system based on lunacy and lack of system.

  Puny swindles ought to be mightily pondered underhand actions conceived on a vast scale; instances of thoughtlessness realized by enormous thought.

  Ui as a character

  Ui was presented as a passive plaything in the hands of strong men (Goebbels, Göring, Papen). He has pathological features which ran unchanged right through the play. All through he gave evidence of exhaustion and lack of enterprise, needing to be prompted and jogged by Givola even during his big speeches. In this way the character was emasculated and the main weight of responsibility shifted to the strong men, but without any explanation why they in particular should be strong.

  One of the dangerous things about Hitler was his immensely stubborn logic, a logic based on absence of logic, lack of understanding, and half-baked ideas. (Even the concentration camps were no accidental creation, having been planned as early as 1923.) Precisely Hitler’s languidness, his indecision, emptiness, feebleness, and freedom from ideas were the source of his usefulness and strength.

  The impression given in this production was that Hitler’s feebleness and malleability were a liability to the movement, and that given greater energy and intelligence fascism would have proved much easier to put up with, since its shortcomings were here attributed to human weakness. [ … ]

  […]

  The investigation [Scene 5]

  The legal process failed to come across. It was impossible to tell who has convened the inquiry, who is being accused, what part is being played by Dogsborough, how far an appearance of justice still matters, what official standing Ui has there. This scene
accordingly came across as a muddle, not as a bourgeois legal ritual that gangsters can use unchanged. Rituals and arrangements should therefore be portrayed with especial precision and care. Only the dignity of the traditional procedures can show the indignity of what is taking place.

  The Warehouse Fire Trial [Scene 8]

  This scene was not helped by the symbolic grouping which had the populace represented by Nazis who stood a few inches behind the centrally placed judges (pointing a pistol at their heads!).

  The fact that the Nazis needed the seal of approval of the bourgeois court, along with its dignity and its traditions, was thereby made incomprehensible. Instead it became an unceremonious gang tribunal, and accordingly without any meaning as a court.

  If all that is to appear is how the court’s bourgeois traditions are flouted, then it becomes impossible to show how the bourgeois court, by the mere fact of its existence, flouts justice; how crime is an integral part of its traditional procedures; and how it is unnecessary for this tradition to be broken to make it criminal.

  [From Manfred Wekwerth: Schriften, Arbeit mit Brecht, East Berlin, Henschel-Verlag, 1973, pp. 144–7. The production in question was that of the world première at Stuttgart under Peter Palitzsch’s direction in November 1958, a pilot for the subsequent Berliner Ensemble production directed by Palitzsch and Wekwerth together.]

  2. Two notes on the Berliner Ensemble production

  (a) The historical references

  After the third rehearsal we gave up trying to base the principal parts on their correspondences with the Nazi originals. The mistake became particularly evident in the case of Schall, who gave an extremely well-observed imitation of Hitler’s vocal characteristics and gestures, such as we had seen a day or two before on film. The faithfulness of this imitation wholly swamped the story of the gangster play. What resulted was a highly amusing detailed parody, but of details from a play about Nazis. The more profoundly amusing point – the parallel between Nazis and gangsters – was lost, since it can only be made if the gangster story is sufficiently complete and independent to match the Nazi story. It is the distancing of the one story from the other that allows them to be connected up on a historical-philosophical, not a merely mechanical plane. We asked the actors to be guided by a strong sense of fun, free from all historical ideas, in exploiting their extensive knowledge of American gangster movies, then carefully on top of that to put recognizable quotations from the vocal characteristics and gestures of the Nazi originals, rather as one puts on a mask.