Bertolt Brecht—The Early Years (1898 - 1926)

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YOUTH

Born into bourgeois (middle class family), but from young age dressed like a proletariat—before he had political leanings of any sort—just a bohemian by nature. 

Sickly child. Possibly has rheumatic fever—later has heart attack. 

FIRST WRITING

First poems published age 14: regular column in local newspaper, including theater reviews.  He also wrote for the school newspaper. Heroes include playwrights Buchner and Wedekind’ – the latter especially (his line “Morality is the best business in the world”) and poets Rimbaud, Verlaine and Villon.

WWI breaks out when he’s 16, too young to go to war. Wrote patriotic, pro-war poetry first, then almost kicked out of school at 16 for questioning in a poem why people would want to die for their country instead of live for it. Many friends, including Neher, fight in the war—BB finally drafted 1918 but doesn’t have to fight. Works in medical ward and sees the soldiers coming home with all their injuries and VD (STDs).

…there was almost no literary form at which Brecht did not try his hand. There were wonderful ballads… rude moralities, short and mainy very erotic novels, brilliant aphorisms, magnificent diary entries…

Not only did Brecht create ceaselessly; we, his friends, were encouraged to artistic activity… For his part, Brecht willingly accepted from us ideas and suggestions for changes in his own work…  Even at this early stage there were the first signs of co-operative work, in which of course Brecht took the undisputed lead.”

—Hanns Otto Münsterer

“He shies away neither from crudity nor from extreme realism. He is an odd mixture of tenderness and ruthlessness; of clumsiness and elegance; of crankiness and logic; of wild cries and sensitive musicality. He repels many people, but anyone who has once understood his tones finds it hard to drop him. He is disagreeable and charming, a very bad writer and a great poet, and amongst the younger Germans undoubtedly the one showing the clearest signs of genius.”

—Lion Feuchtwanger

Ballad of the Dead Soldier—early Brecht poem shows up later in Drums in the Night.

Young bard playing guitar in bars:

“Bert sings his songs, which never fail to make you feel better. Power, power, incredible power. Without any of that romantic nonsense, but tremendously evocative.” Caspar Neher

‘He loved the way that popular songs tacked cursorily from one subject to another or reduced a major natural disaster to a rhythmic couplet…discontinuity appealed to Brecht more than the idea of a single form which is ‘right’… Interruptions served as a reminder that there was no such thing as inevitability. The course of history could have run quite differently if events had been interrupted in different ways’. (Ronald Heyman)

FIRST PLAYS

Baal

Written from 1918 to 1919. 

Based on The Lonely One (Hanns Johst, who later wrote plays for the Nazis), about self-sacrificing artist. Brecht's first draft is a scene-by-scene rebuttal to Lonely One.

He based the main character Baal after François Villon.

“I’m working on a comedy:  ‘Baal eats! Baal dances!! Baal is transfigured!!!” There’s a bandit in it, a monstrous hedonist, a dumpling, a May-crazed man with immoral bowels!” Letter to Neher, May 1918

“Brecht loads his lines with the bestial imagery of feeding, sex and evacuating, and his poet without a conscience meets a fitting end in a dirty world.” —he is the real lonely one

JL Styan Modern Drama in Theory and Practice: Expressionism and Epic Theatre - Page 144 P

Episodic scenes as with Johst, and poetic, expressionistic language but utterly earthy, visceral, vital, unlike most expressionist work. “Love rips the clothes from the body like a whirlpool and then, after a glimpse of heaven, one is buried naked under dead leaves.”

Ended up taking out almost all of the Lonely One references and even sent it to Johst, who apparently was kind about it. Johst later became a Nazi.

Instead of expressionistic “telegraphic” utterances—"Brecht wrote in a realistic mixture of dialect and slang, with every line composed with its delivery in mind, capturing in tone and rhythm the exact quality of vitality intended in the speaker. Brecht’s sense of the stage emerged particularly in his growing ability to write gestiche Sprache, ‘gestic language,’ which made the lines physically actable and conveyed the basic posture and attitude of the speaker as well."

Here's the full video of David Bowie as Baal in a BBC movie. It's a little silly, but... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhMQtbA9R0k&feature=related

Drums in the Night

Written in response to Spartacists Uprising

Appears to be an expressionist play—working in the expressionist idiom, but with different outcome

Placards, moon turns out to be a Japanese lantern—anti-illusionistic

 Much more prosaic, both in language and in plot

The audience "…was totally unprepared for the downbeat ending. Expressionist plays usually end with ecstatic defiance, and it looked as though Brecht’s sympathies were with the rebels: no one was expecting Kragler to lose interest in them and reach out shamelessly for the pleasures his pregnant girlfriend could provide." (Ronald Hayman)

1919 Meets Lion Feuchtwanger, who helps him get his first two plays produced and later collaborates

Several of Brecht's works were written in close collaboration with me, from his early times until his latest. Brecht believed in collective effort, and working with him was one of my happiest experiences. This does not mean that it was easy to work with him. On the contrary, he demanded lots of patience. But he gave more than he asked for.

Brecht was passionately fond of debating. He especially like to debate about which method and approach would be the most fertile one for creating good literature. In the course of our intimate collaboration, I realized more and more clearly that the origin of his creations were the gestures and the word. Story, plot, continuity did not matter to him: what mattered to him, was the right situation, the right gesture, the right word. He visualized the gesture, out from the gesture grew the word, and out of the word grew the character.

He search frantically for the right word to fit the gesture. Not only had the meaning of the word to be to the point; beyond that, its sound had to fit the situation and the character, and beyond that, the word had to be light and elegant. "Elegant" was a favorite adjective of his. Sometimes it happened that, after weeks of hard work, he concluded from our failure in finding a particular word that the whole work was a failure, and he insisted that we should tear it up, and start from scratch.

He spared not effort to find the right word. 'le mot juste,' our word, his word. Once, in Munich, while we were working on the Life of Edward the Second and, all day long, had looked in vain for a certain right word, he came running to my house in the middle of the night, whistled under my window, and shouted triumphantly: "I found it."

He was unhappy that the German language had become so cheap and threadbare in the course of the two World Wars and the Hitler time. The pre-war German language had become obsolete, the contemporary language was intolerably vulgar. Occasionally, he would lament: "When Horace expresses the most commonplace thought and the most trivial feeling, it sounds magnificent. This is because he worked with marble. We German writers of today have to work with mud." Brecht used a much coarser term.

1920 or so working with Karl Valentin’s cabaret act

In 1922 while still living in Munich, Brecht came to the attention of an influential Berlin critic, Herbert Jhering: "At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany's literary complexion overnight...[he] has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision. [...] It is a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column.^"

In the Jungle (of Cities)

Brecht read Sinclair's The Jungle and liked the image of a city as a jungle, so wrote a play exploring that notion. Brecht realized no one had previously compared a city to a jungle and began to wonder who is who on the food chain in the Jungle that is a city. Didn’t use The Jungle’s plot at all, but pitted two men against each other, inspired by Verlaine and Rimbaud, former lovers whose relationship ended when the former shot at the latter. Employed two main distancing methods: note to audience to ignore “motives” (he deliberately included none) and watch the stakes, bc to be human is to fight, on some level, and we often don’t even know the motives we have to fight. Second distancing method: 11 scene play is 10 rounds of a boxing match + the “winner’s” speech. is important that the "outcome" in this Chicago fight ring really has no winners. One combatant is vanquished, but we learn that his ultimate desire is to be defeated. The victor, a younger man whose sacrifices of family and freedom allow him to win, survives but realizes he misses the emotional high of the duel. Though Brecht later tried to talk about the play in terms of classes, this one is really about the fear that men, in particular have that they can not express deep emotion with each other except through anger and competition, as well as an underlying fear that life is meaningless. They fight  in order to give their lives meaning.

Talking of In the Jungle and Baal

“I’ve kept my distance and ensured that the realization of my (poetical and philosophical) effects remains within bounds. The spectator’s “splendid isolation” is kept intact; it is not sua res quae agitur; he is not fobbed off with an invitation to feel sympathetically, to fuse with the hero and seem significant and indestructible as he watches himself in two different versions. A higher type of interest can be got from making comparisons, from whatever is different, amazing, impossible to overlook.” (BB, 2/10/22)

Edward II with Lion Feuchtwanger—first collaborative writing, adaptation of Marlowe's Edward II, then takes Asst dramaturg position at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin.

When Valentin observed soldiers should be afraid before a battle, “as white as cheese”, "…they were given white make-up to wear, which made them indistinguishable from each other…it was one of Brecht’s first alienation effects." (Heyman) Additionally, Asja Lacis, the assistant director who’d studied with Meyerhold, picking up the idea of making ‘actors puppet-like’: “I tried to choreograph the extras to a strong rhythm. Their faces should be immobile and expressionless. They knew neither why they were shooting nor where they were going.” (Brecht)

Reckoning with Marlowe’s verse and what to emphasize. Deemphasize tragedy, which is personal. Also adds narrator/ballad singer (like the Moritaten-sänger) to pre-figure what will happen in scene. Ending in Marlowe sends Edward into sewers, and Brecht takes us there to see him become self-sufficient there.

“Upon me here, for seven hours, the dung

Of London drips. But now this filth is hardening

My limbs. Now they are hard

As cedar wood. The stink of filth is making

My greatness measureless.

1923 Nazi Putsch

1924 G.F. Hartlaub "Die Neue Sachlichkeit"—The New Objectivity, which is about

Man is Man

Anti-war play

Stars Peter Lorre & Helene Weigel

Frankly didactic

Circus, cabaret, music hall styles

Premise that personality/individualism is unimportant—but

The “NEW HUMAN TYPE” who is mendacious, optimistic, adaptable—life is short, so don’t waste time suffering. Nothing matters more than staying alive. Also—people’s personalities change depending on the clothes/costumes/uniforms they are wearing (we’ll see this again in Galileo near end of career)

Elements of Chinese drama in way characters present selves to audience.

Charlie Chaplin films—slapstick and poetry work together

There’s a farce of a trial in the play, which was written during Hitler’s trail for Beer Hall Putsch (he should have been deported and after 5 yr sentence, got out in 9 months, this was typical of right wing crime)

“I was aware of huge inconsistencies in people’s social life, and I didn’t think it my task formerly to iron out all the discordances and interferences of which I was strongly conscious. I caught them up in the incidents of my plays and in the verses of my poems; and did so long before I had recognized their real character and causes. As can be seen from the texts it was a matter not just of a formal ‘kicking against the pricks’—of a protest against the smoothness and harmony of conventional poetry—but already of an attempt to show human dealings as contradictory, fiercely fought over, full of violence.”

—Brecht, “Of Rhymeless Verse with Irregular Rhymes”