Brecht Collected Plays: 1: Baal; Drums in the Night; In the Jungle of Cities; Life of Edward II of England; & 5 One Act Plays: "Baal", "Drums in the Night", "In the Jungle of Ci (World Classics) (55 page)

Today I realize that my contradictory spirit – I’m suppressing my wish to insert the word ‘youthful’ as I hope I still have it at my disposal in full strength – led me close to the limits of absurdity.

The ‘human predicament’ drama of those days, with its unrealistic pseudo-solutions, was uncongenial to the student of science. It set up a highly improbable and undoubtedly ineffectual collective of ‘good’ people who were supposed to put a final stop to war – that complicated phenomenon whose roots lie deep in the social fabric – chiefly by moral condemnation. I knew next to nothing definite about the Russian revolution, but my own modest experience as a medical orderly in the winter of 1918 was enough to make me think that a totally new and different permanent force had entered the arena: the revolutionary proletariat.

It seems that my knowledge was not enough to make me realize the full seriousness of the proletarian rising in the winter of 1918-19, only to show me how unseriously my obstreperous ‘hero’ took part in it. The initiative in this fight was taken by the proletarians; he cashed in. They didn’t have to lose property in order to make them rebel; he got restitution. They were prepared to look after his interests; he betrayed theirs. They were the tragic figures, he the comic. All this, I realized on reading the play, had been perfectly evident to me, but I could not manage to make the audience see the revolution any differently from my ‘hero’ Kragler, and he saw it as something romantic. The technique of alienation was not yet open to me.

Reading Acts 3, 4, and 5 of
Drums in the Night
I felt such dissatisfaction that I thought of suppressing the play. The only thing that stopped me erecting a small funeral pyre was
the feeling that literature is part of history, and that history ought not to be falsified, also a sense that my present opinions and capacities would be of less value without some knowledge of my previous ones – that is, presuming that there has been any improvement. Nor is suppression enough; what’s false must be set right.

Admittedly I could not do much. The character of Kragler, the soldier, the petit-bourgeois, I couldn’t touch. My comparative approval of his conduct had also to be preserved. Anyway, even the workers always find it easier to understand the petit-bourgeois who defends his own interests (however sordid these may be, and even if he is defending them against the workers) than the man who joins them for romantic reasons or out of a sense of guilt. However, I cautiously reinforced the other side. I gave the publican Glubb a nephew, a young worker who fell as a revolutionary during the November fighting. Though he could only be glimpsed in outline, somewhat filled in, however, thanks to the publican’s scruples, this worker provided a kind of counterpart to the soldier Kragler.

The reader or spectator has then to be relied on to change his attitude to the play’s hero, unassisted by appropriate alienations, from sympathy to a certain antipathy.

[From ‘Bei Durchsicht meiner ersten Stücke’ in GW
Schriften zum Theater
, pp. 945-7. Dated March 1954.]

The original version of this play was written in the spring of 1919 and entitled
Spartakus
; no script of it has so far been found. The Brecht Archive has only the typescript of the version used for the Deutsches Theater production of December 1922, three months after the Munich premiere. The earliest known text is that published by Drei-Masken Verlag in Munich in 1922, which was also reissued twice by Propyläen-Verlag (i.e. Ullstein) in Berlin during the second half of the 1920s. Brecht used it for the first volume of his collected
Stücke
in 1953, with the extensive revisions outlined in his own retrospective note. This revised text was printed, with minor amendments, in the
Gesammelte Werke
of 1967 and is the basis of the present translation.

Three main versions are thus accessible: the 1922 publication, the script of December 1922, and the final text of 1953. The first describes the play as a ‘Drama’, the other two simply as a ‘Play’. In the second the prostitute Augusta is for some reason called Carmen, though Augusta remains a nickname. At some earlier point the Bar in Act 4 seems to have been called ‘The Red Grape’ (or ‘Raisin’): hence the nickname given to one of the waiter brothers in the final version. The confusion in the timing of the action (which is said to take place in November, though the Spartacist revolt and the battle for the Berlin newspaper offices actually occurred in January) was not cleared up till 1967, when a note appeared in GW saying, ‘The action of the play now takes place in January 1919.’ The most serious divergences between the different versions however occur in Acts 3, 4, and 5, and they represent a seemingly permanent dissatisfaction on Brecht’s part with the second half of the play.

This is already on record in his diaries of 1920, even before our earliest version. ‘I have rewritten the beginning of Act 3 of
Drums,’
he noted on 3 August, ‘and the second (optional) ending to Act 4…. I’ve done four versions of Act 4 and three of Act 5. I’ve now got two endings, one comic, one tragic.’ A little later he is ‘dictating
Drums in the Night
. The third act is in the main good; the fourth a bastard, an abortion….’ Twenty-five diary pages later he is still at it:

nagging away at
Drums in the Night
. I’m drilling rock, and the drills are breaking. It’s terribly hard to make this fourth act follow grandly and simply after the first three, at the same time carrying on the external tension of the third, which works pretty well, and bringing the internal transformation (in 15 minutes) forcefully home. What’s more, the play’s strong, healthy, untragic ending, which it had from the outset and for the sake of which it was written, is the only possible ending; anything else is too easy a way out, a weakly synthetic concession to romanticism. Here is a man apparently at an emotional climax, making a complete volteface; he tosses all pathos aside, tells his followers and admirers to stuff it, then goes home with the woman for whose sake he got involved in this extremely dangerous mess. Bed as final curtain. To hell with ideas, to hell with duty!

The contrast between this view of the play and the author’s verdicts of 1928 and 1954 needs no stressing. Moreover, even by 1922 he had become less certain of the effectiveness of the third act, which seems to have gone badly at the première.

The detailed notes that follow show what passages Brecht cut or changed when he reviewed the 1922 text in the early 1950s. One or two minor amendments apart, the whole of the 1922 edition can be reconstructed from it. The script used by the Deutsches Theater is different yet again, particularly where Acts 4 and 5 are concerned. This would be too complicated to analyse in full, but an account of the more substantial changes follows the extracts from the 1922 edition. It will be found to shed light on one or two obscurities, notably the characters of Glubb and Laar.

The figures correspond to the annotations marked in the play. A figure in the play shows where a passage or phrase has been
cut
from the 1922 text. Figures with small arrows show the beginning and end of a passage or phrase which Brecht
rewrote
in the 1950s. In each case the original is given below. There were also a very few entirely new
additions
, which are marked by arrows without figures.

Where the 1922 text ends with a different punctuation mark from that shown in the play the next word should be correspondingly amended to start with a capital or lower-case letter, whichever is required.

A few very minor amendments have been overlooked for the sake of simplicity.

ACT
1

1 It looks as if the revolutionaries are confining their action to the suburbs.

ACT
2

2
Then an ever-louder sound of stamping feet outside. Shouting. Whistling. Singing. Drumming. The stamping and shouting are prolonged
.

3 and whistling into the cafés.

4 And got drums out in the street?

ACT
3

5 Street Leading to the Slums

6 wife …

7 Oh god, there’s sleep. There’s schnaps. There’s tobacco.

8 tobacco

9 down.

MARIE
: They’ll be swimming in schnaps down there tonight.

10
THE ONE
: They’re drumming pretty hard.

THE OTHER
: Hell! In our district!

11
THE ONE
: Feeling dizzy?

THE OTHER
: Haven’t you got a slow puncture?

THE ONE
: You’re getting smelly already.

12 slums

13 Now it’s drunk, but once it had buttoned boots and could do what it wanted with a tart on the dance-floor. Still, it’s cold now, I’d say, and has no very clear idea what to do. And shouldn’t be left lying about.

14 Is it that sack of booze?

15 and that will be him who is frightened out of his wits. I’ve known him since he was a boy.

MANKE
: To the dogs and to Glubb’s schnaps parlour, that’s where he’ll go. If he’s lucky he’ll be put up against a wall.

BABUSCH
: He’ll choose the schnaps parlour. Or else he’ll whistle them all up and when you hear a din towards dawn at the newspapers and there’s something drumming in the night: there he goes!

16
MURK
: Don’t you see me?

ANNA
: Yes.

17
MURK
sobering up
: The linen has been bought and the flat is rented. And where do you want to go?

MANKE
: Hear the rabble singing? Where does she want to go? We say: to the little filthy houses, that’s where. You know, where one slithers on all the sick on the staircase. To the tumbledown black attics the wind whistles through.

ANNA
: That’s where I want to go.

MANKE
: We’re not beaten. The old beds with the rain coming in on them, and how’s anyone to keep warm, the wind whistles through. Perhaps it’s worse there. You go there! One disappears there. Those are the houses they are drumming in now. Stuffed full of sacks like this one, with no shirt on, and everything takes twenty or thirty years, the last years on this earth, they’ve never counted and yet your soul feels more at home there than anywhere else.

MURK
: Father and Mother are fixing the wedding.

18 waited four years.

MURK
: Who has no clean shirt on his body …

MANKE
: And his skin is like a crocodile-hide!

MURK
: Whom you failed to recognize, the way he looked.

MANKE
: But the lily was still in her hand when he came.

ANNA
: He is come who has

19 slums.

20 To the slums, the darkness, the nothingness?

ANNA
: Yes. Into nothingness.

MURK
: Nothing but a drunk man’s dreams. Nothing but a woman’s magazine story. Nothing but a snow of yesteryear.

ANNA
: Nothing else …

MANKE
: That’s it: nothing else! She knows now: it’s for nothing!

MURK:

21 What about the ‘lily’? What about when no breath of wind
gets to you and you’re frightened out of your wits?

22
MURK
: We packed him off. Bag and baggage.

ANNA
: And they

23 was, packed off good and proper.

ANNA
: And he was finished.

24 He’s drunk.

25 Into the wind and I’m so drunk. Can’t see my own hands, and she leaves me!

BABUSCH
: Now I begin to get it, man. So that’s the fish we’re frying. That’s the end of the Ride of the Valkyries now, my
boy. The whole fishy ghost story’s starting to turn horribly serious.

26 to the slums.

27 Take it home, do something for your immortal soul.

28
MANKE
drags Murk to his feet, spreads both his arms widely once more, says grandly
: The slums are

ACT
4

29
THE SCHNAPS DANCE

30
BABUSCH
at the window
: Has a man in artillery uniform been here?

GLUBB
pouring schnaps
: No, not here.

BABUSCH
over his shoulder
: He hasn’t been here.

GLUBB
: Is one supposed to be coming?

Babusch shrugs his shoulders
.

GLUBB
: Shall I tell him anything?

BABUSCH
looks at Anna, who shakes her head
: No, we’ll come back.

Exeunt both
.

MANKE
: When they grab something it’s schnaps, when they share something it’s a bed, and when they produce something it’s babies. My god, my god. When they had some schnaps in them, dear man, with those pale faces and trembling knees –
he imitates it
– and their nose in the air where it was raining, raining bullets, dear man. And a gun in the hand and a sticky feeling at the tips of the fingers, my boy!

BULLTROTTER
: Freedom! Space! Air!

31 Marseillaise

32, you bourgeois!

BULLTROTTER
throws a newspaper at him
: Where there’s a horse there’s horseshit.
They throw papers at one another
. Freedom!

MANKE:

33 So that’s the sort you are?

34
BULLTROTTER
: Riots! Strike! Revolution!

35
BULLTROTTER
: But what’s that wind?

36
BULLTROTTER
: That’s fine. He’s got an artillery tunic on.

MANKE
: A funny sort of casing. Are you laying an egg, then?

37, turning up with the guns like that?