Bertolt Brecht

by Bertolt Brecht

  This is how Eddy was talking as we crossed the Halensee bridge. In the Grunewald he went further. It was a gloomy night with a nasty fog and I would rather have been at home. But Eddy still had plenty to say.

  He clearly intended to let me have the benefit of his views on life. He told me what he thought of the world, in full. He told it straight from the shoulder, travelling at fifty on a road which didn’t exist except in his imagination. He was weak on philosophy and an excellent driver, but his driving was a lot more dangerous than his philosophy.

  He said people were poorly constructed, a bad job which had not been properly tested, the kind of thing put on the market by firms who don’t take enough time and then conceal their shoddy workmanship with nifty aluminium coachwork. But I was watching the pines flash by with the feeling that we were going much too fast.

  Eddy pressed the pedal to get up more speed, and told me what he thought of women. Eddy considered women, when he had touched sixty-five, to be such trash that he couldn’t really understand why they were always rated above other domestic animals which were far more reliable. They were far too flimsy, jerrybuilt. He really seized on this word ‘jerry-built’ as applied to women. He blurted it out repeatedly and added that they should be forbidden by the fire regulations as unsafe, and with that in mind he hit seventy.

  I couldn’t concentrate on Eddy’s anti-woman arguments in the rush (seventy miles an hour!) but the pines I could see flashing by seemed immensely solid and quite permanent.

  The strange thing was that Eddy’s Weltschmerz had one foot on the accelerator. There being no way of moving the foot I had to try to do something about the Weltschmerz.

  Consequently in the middle of the night on an unlit road between Wannsee and Potsdam, in the Grunewald forest, etc., I began to expound the merits of our planet to that raving ball of fat. I told him that in the circumstances I couldn’t go into detail, but that, in simple terms, everything was relative, although I couldn’t help observing that our speed was absolute. There was no way the speed at which we were racing towards our deaths could be termed ‘relatively’ fast. As I broached the theme of ‘the silver lining to every cloud’ we were careering down a wooded slope, and when we reached the bottom we bumped across a meadow, so my discourse on ‘women having their good sides too’ could scarcely have had much effect. Eddy spotted the road again and quickly got the car up to a speed commensurate with his despair.

  I was totally exhausted. I could see us lying by some hitherto unblemished milestone, in the grey light of dawn, us being the remains of a car, the remains of a lunatic, and the remains of the lunatic’s victim. I felt terribly bitter.

  We drove for a while, at least half an hour, in stony silence, but at unrelenting speed. Then Eddy drove down a gravel slope again and I said curtly and harshly, ‘you’re a lousy driver!’

  This statement, which I meant seriously, had a powerful impact on Eddy. He had the reputation of being an excellent driver. Driving was the one thing he could do.

  A muffled sound came from his shapeless body. It sounded like the wail of a mastodon that had been told it was too weak to pull up a blade of grass.

  Eddy accelerated to seventy-five.

  We had just reached a stretch with a lot of bends. Eddy went into every bend on full throttle. There wasn’t much light, only a few glimmers here and there in the villages, from cow-sheds, etc. In one of these I glimpsed Eddy’s phiz; he had a thin, scornful smile on his babyface, which was no longer of this world.

  But in the middle of a wood that was black as sin the engine coughed.

  Then Eddy pressed the accelerator.

  Then the car slowed down.

  Then Eddy declutched and stepped on the accelerator.

  Then the car stopped.

  It was out of petrol.

  Eddy climbed out and glared at the tank, looked into his spare can, shook it and sat down on the running board, broken. It was a wood with no beginning and no end, a wood that certainly was not on the map. It must have been quite a long way east, because it was as cold as a hole in the ice.

  And that to all intents and purposes is the end of my story. All that remains is to say that towards morning two men were seen in a remote village shoving a Chrysler along, and one of them, the thin one, was telling the other what he thought of him and a few other things to boot, while the other, a battered ball of fat, shoved and panted and occasionally laughed.

  But it was happy, childlike laughter.

  The Good Lord’s Package – A Christmas Tale

  Draw your chairs up to the fire, and don’t forget to lace your tea with rum. It is best to be nice and warm when you are telling a tale about the cold.

  Many people, especially a particular sort of man with a thing against sentimentality, find Christmas quite repugnant. But there is at least one Christmas in my life which I recall with genuine pleasure. It was Christmas Eve 1908 in Chicago.

  I had arrived in Chicago at the beginning of November, and when I enquired about the general situation there they told me straight away that it was going to be the hardest winter even that city – which was unpleasant enough at the best of times – could come up with. I asked what were the chances for a boilermaker and was told that a boilermaker had no chance at all, and when I went looking for a half-way decent place to lay my head, everything turned out to be too expensive. This was a lesson many were to learn in that winter of 1908 in Chicago, whatever their trade.

  And the wind howled horribly across Lake Michigan the whole of December, and towards the end of that month a whole succession of meat-packing firms closed down and threw a flood of unemployed men out on the freezing streets.

  All day long we trudged round various districts looking desperately for work, and we were happy if we could find a seat in the evening near the abattoirs in one of the little bars full of exhausted people. There at least it was warm and we could sit in peace. And we sat as long as we possibly could over a single glass of whisky, and we saved up all day for that glass of whisky which came complete with noise, warmth and comradeship, all that we could hope for by then.

  And that is where we were sitting on Christmas Eve that year. The bar was even more crowded than usual, and the whisky more watery, and the customers more desperate. Obviously neither customers nor landlord will be in festive mood when the customers’ main object is to get through the evening on a single glass and the landlord’s main object is to eject anybody sitting with an empty one.

  However, about ten o’clock three fellows rolled in who had, God knows how, a few dollars in their pockets. And since it was Christmas and sentimentality was in the air they asked for doubles to be put up for the entire company. Five minutes later the whole bar was unrecognisable.

  Everybody fetched himself a fresh whisky (and saw to it that he was given good measure), the tables were pushed together and a frozen-looking girl was asked to dance the cake-walk, during which the entire festive company clapped their hands. But what can I say – the Devil may have had a hand in it, but there was no way to break the ice.

  In fact things took a nasty turn from the outset. I think it was having to accept other people’s generosity that got on everyone’s nerves. The men who were footing the bill for all this Christmas spirit were not viewed with a friendly eye. Right after the first free whiskies it was decided to organise Christmas presents for everybody, no mean feat, you might say.

  Since there wasn’t much giftware to hand, the idea was that people would look less for articles of intrinsic value, and more for those that were appropriate for the recipient and might even have a deeper significance.

  So the landlord’s present was a bucket of dirty, melted snow from outside where there was plenty, to help him make his old whisky last into the new year. To the waiter we gave an old, opened tin can, to give him one decent utensil to serve from, and to a girl who worked in the bar, a pocket knife with a broken blade, to scrape off at least one layer of last year’s powder with.

  All these pre
sents were greeted with provocative applause by everybody present, with the possible exception of those who received them. Then came the biggest joke of the evening.

  You see, there was a man among us who clearly had something to hide. He sat there every evening and people who knew about these things stated categorically that, unconcerned though he might wish to appear, he must have an insurmountable fear of anything that had to do with the police. On the other hand anybody could see that he was ill at ease.

  For this man we thought out something special. With the landlord’s permission we tore three pages out of an old street directory which had nothing but addresses of police stations on them, wrapped them carefully in newspaper and handed the package to our man.

  When we handed it to him there was a long silence. The man took the thing hesitantly in his hand and looked up at us from under his eyebrows with a rather wan smile. I noticed that he felt the parcel with his fingers to find out what was inside even before opening it.

  And then something very remarkable happened. The man was fiddling with the string with which his ‘present’ was tied when his eye, quite idly it seemed, fell on the newspaper in which those interesting pages from the street directory were wrapped. From that moment there was nothing idle about his eyes. His whole thin body (he was very tall) curled round the newspaper and he bent his face deep down into it and read. Never, either before or since have I seen anybody read like that. He quite simply devoured what he read. And then he looked up. And again I have never, neither before nor since, seen a man look so radiant as that man then.

  ‘I have just read in this paper,’ he said with a rusty voice which he was having difficulty keeping calm, and which contrasted ludicrously with his beaming face, ‘that the whole affair was cleared up long ago. Everybody in Ohio knows I had nothing to do with it.’ And then he laughed.

  And all of us, who had been standing by astonished, expecting something quite different, and could only guess that the man had been under some kind of suspicion but had in the meantime, as he had just discovered from this newspaper, been rehabilitated, suddenly started to laugh in sympathy with almost as much heart as belly, and that broke the ice at last, our bitterness was quite forgotten, and it turned out to be an excellent Christmas that lasted into the morning and left everybody happy.

  And amid the general satisfaction it was of course quite irrelevant that it was not we who had sought out that sheet of newsprint but God.

  The Monster

  Just how many constructions can be put on a man’s behaviour was shown recently by an incident at the Russian Mezhrabpom film studios. It may have been insignificant and it had no consequence, but there was something horrible about it. While The White Eagle – a film about the pre-war pogroms in south Russia, which pilloried the attitude of the police at the time – was being shot in the studio, an old man turned up and asked for a job. He forced his way into the porter’s box at the street entrance and told the porter he would like to take the liberty of drawing the company’s attention to his extraordinary resemblance to the notorious governor Muratov. (Muratov had instigated the bloodbath at the time. His was the leading role in the aforesaid film.)

  The porter laughed in his face, but since he was an old man he did not eject him straight away, and that is how the long, thin fellow came to be standing, hat in hand, with a faraway look amid the hubbub of extras and studio technicians, seemingly still nursing a faint hope of earning bread and shelter for a couple of days on the strength of his resemblance to the notorious killer.

  For almost an hour he stood there, constantly stepping aside to let people go by until he ended up hemmed in behind a desk, and there he was at last suddenly noticed. There was a break in the shooting and the actors headed for the canteen or stood around chatting. Kochalov, the famous Moscow actor playing Muratov, went into the porter’s box to make a phone call. As he stood by the phone he was nudged by the grinning gatekeeper and when he turned he saw the man behind the desk, whereupon peals of laughter rang out all around him. Kochalov’s make-up was based on historical photographs, and the extraordinary resemblance that the old man behind the desk had been telling them about was obvious to everybody.

  Half an hour later the old man was sitting with the directors and cameramen like the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, discussing his contract with them. The negotiations were greatly facilitated by the fact that Kochalov had from the outset not been very keen to risk his popularity by playing an out and out monster. He was all for giving the ‘double’ a screen test.

  It was not unusual for the studios to cast historical figures with suitable types rather than actors. The directors have special methods for handling these people: they simply outlined to the new Muratov the bald historical facts of the incident being enacted and asked him to play the said Muratov for the tests just as he imagined him. It was hoped that his manner would match his physical resemblance to the real Muratov.

  They chose the scene in which Muratov receives a deputation of Jews who implore him to call a halt to the murders. (Page 17 of the script: ‘Deputation waits. Enter Muratov. Hangs cap and sabre on a peg on the wall. Goes to his desk. Glances through the morning paper’, etc.) Lightly made up, wearing the uniform of an Imperial Governor, the ‘double’ stepped on to the set, part of which was an authentic historical mock-up of the office in the governor’s palace, where he proceeded to play Muratov ‘as he imagined him’ to the entire production team. He played him as follows:

  (‘Deputation waits. Enter Muratov.’) The ‘double’ came in quickly at the door. Hands forward in his pockets, bad, drooping posture. (‘Hangs cap and sabre on a peg on the wall.’) The ‘double’ had apparently forgotten this stage direction. He sat down at the desk straight away without taking off his cap or sabre. (‘Glances through the morning paper.’) The ‘double’ did this quite absent-mindedly. (‘Opens the hearing.’) He did not even look at the bowing Jews. He put the paper aside hesitantly, seemingly unsure just how to switch his attention to the business with the Jews. Simply froze and cast an agonized look at the team of directors.

  The team of directors laughed. One of the assistants stood up with a grin, sauntered on to the set with his hands in his pockets, sat down beside the ‘double’ at the desk and tried to help him along.

  ‘Now comes eating the apple’, he said encouragingly. ‘Muratov’s apple-eating was famous. His governorship, apart from his bloodthirsty decrees, consisted mainly of eating apples. He kept his apples in this drawer. Look, here are the apples.’ He opened the drawer to the left of the ‘double’. ‘The deputation now approaches and as soon as the first man opens his mouth you eat your apple, my lad.’

  The ‘double’ had listened to the young man with the keenest attention. The apples seemed to have made a big impression on him.

  When shooting resumed Muratov did in fact slowly take an apple out of the drawer with his left hand, and as he began to scrawl characters on some paper with his right he ate the apple, not with any great zest, but more out of habit as it were. By the time the deputation came to the point he was wholly engrossed in the apple. After a short time, during which he had not listened to a word, he made a casual gesture with his right hand to a Jew in mid-sentence and brought the matter to an instant end.

  Then the ‘double’ turned enquiringly to the directors and muttered, ‘Who is going to see them out?’

  The head director stayed in his seat. ‘Have you finished, then?’

  ‘Yes, I thought they would be taken away now.’

  The head director looked around with a grin and said: ‘With monsters it’s not that simple. You’ll have to try a little harder.’ At that he stood up and began to run through the scene again.

  ‘No monster ever behaves like that,’ he said, ‘That is how a little clerk behaves. You see, you have to think about it. You can’t do it without giving it some thought. You have to try to imagine this killer for yourself. You have to get right into his skin. Now come back on.’

 
He began to construct the scene anew on dramatic principles. He built up details and developed the characterisation. The ‘double’s’ efforts were not without skill. He did all that they told him, and not at all badly either. He seemed just as capable of acting the monster as anybody else. All he lacked, it seemed, was a little imagination of his own. After they had worked on it for half an hour the scene looked like this:

  (‘Enter Muratov.’) Shoulders back, chest out, jerky movements of the head. As he came in at the door he cast a hawk-like look at the deeply bowing Jews. (‘Hangs his cap and sabre on the peg on the wall.’) His coat fell as he did this and he left it lying. (‘Goes to the desk. Glances through the morning paper.’) He looked for the theatre notices on the arts page. He tapped the rhythm of a hit song with his hand. (‘Opens the hearing.’) Meanwhile he moved the Jews back three metres with an unceremonious gesture with the back of his hand.

  ‘You won’t understand, but what you are doing there won’t do’, said the head director. ‘It’s just ham acting. A villain of the old school, my dear chap, is not how we picture a monster in this day and age. That’s not Muratov.’

  The team of directors stood up and addressed themselves to Kochalov who had been watching it all. They were all talking at the same time. They broke up into groups, exploring the nature of the monster.

  On General Muratov’s authentic chair the ‘double’ sat clumsily slumped forward, staring into space but listening nonetheless. He followed each conversation closely. He made great efforts to grasp the situation. The actors playing the Jewish deputation also took part in the discussion. At one point everybody listened to two extras, both Old Jews from the city who had been members of that deputation at the time. These old men had been taken on to give the film character and authenticity. Curiously enough they found the way the ‘double’ had played the part at the outset had not been bad at all. They could not say how it affected others, people who had not been involved, but at the time it was precisely the routine, bureaucratic way in which everything was done that made the experience so terrifying. The ‘double’ had got this side of it pretty accurately. And the way he ate the apple during the first take, quite mechanically – during their interview, by the way, Muratov had not eaten an apple. The assistant director could not accept this. ‘Muratov always ate apples,’ he said sharply, ‘Are you sure you were really there?’