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) (2 page)

In Bavaria 1922 was a Brecht year. Soon after his return the Munich Residenztheater accepted
In the Jungle
, thanks to the recommendations of its artistic adviser Jacob Geis and of its new chief director Erich Engel, who had arrived a few months earlier from his native Hamburg.
Baal
was at last published (by Gustav Kiepenheuer of Potsdam), while 29 September saw the premiere of
Drums in the Night
. Clearly this was very different from later Brecht productions, for Otto Falckenberg, the head of the Kammerspiele, staged it in expressionist style with angular poses and sets to match by his own staff designer Otto Reigbert. But Ihering came from Berlin to review it, and in the
Berliner B
ö
rsen-Courier
of 5 October he wrote that ‘At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany’s literary complexion overnight. Bert Brecht has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision.’ Here too was ‘a physical sense of chaos and decay’:

Hence the unparallelled creative force of his language. It is a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column.

Ihering was known to be the judge for that year’s award of the Kleist Prize. This had been founded in 1911 by a group of Kleist enthusiasts to celebrate the centenary of the poet’s death, and was intended for writers who had yet to establish themselves. Up to its abolition in 1932 it was probably the most significant literary award in Germany, having previously been given to the playwrights Sorge, Unruh, Hasenclever and Jahnn, while in 1923-5 it went to Musil, Barlach and Zuckmayer. On 13 November the
Berliner B
ö
rsen-Courier
announced that it had gone to Brecht, and not for
Drums in the Night
only but for all three of his completed plays. ‘Brecht’s linguistic power,’ said Ihering’s citation,

is even more richly developed in
Baal
and
In the Jungle
. His language is vivid without being deliberately poetic, symbolical without being over literary. Brecht is a dramatist because his language is felt physically and in the round.

Because
Drums in the Night
was generally regarded as the prize-winning play it was widely performed all over Germany, notably in Berlin immediately before Christmas, when Falckenberg again directed it for the Deutsches Theater with a first-rate cast. Brecht always claimed that he had only written it to make money, and certainly it differs in several ways from his other works. Alone of those in this volume it seems to contain no anticipations of his later plays.

In Munich for two nights after the premiere it was followed by a midnight show called
The Red Grape (Die rote Zibebe
, a name at one time given to the tavern in Act 4, and also used of the moon which hangs so conspicuously over the action). This was described as an ‘improvisation in two scenes by Bert Brecht and Karl Valentin’, the latter being a famous Munich music-hall comedian. In the first scene Max Schreck, the actor who played Glubb, was the Freakshow Landlord who opened a series of curtained cabins, each containing a performer who stepped out to do a solo turn. The programme shows that these included the sailor-poet Joachim Ringelnatz, the reciter Ludwig Hardt, Brecht himself singing songs, and the dancer Valeska Gert, though for the second performance Brecht seems to have been replaced by his fellow-poet Klabund. The second scene was a sketch called ‘Christmas Evening’ by Valentin, whom a short programme note by Brecht compared with
Chaplin, among other things for his ‘virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology’. Valentin’s influence has sometimes been seen in Brecht’s farcical one-acters, though Brecht himself acknowledged it rather as affecting his work as a director, particularly his use of grouping.

That October Brecht was appointed to the Kammerspiele’s dramaturgical and directing staff, where his main task was the adaptation and production of Marlowe’s
Edward II
. The actual writing of this play, which is very largely an original work, must have taken place mainly in the winter of 1922-3, since the Berlin State Theatre started showing an interest in it early in the new year. It was done in collaboration with Feuchtwanger, whom Brecht saw frequently throughout 1923 and who is said to have inspired the speech characteristics of Shlink in
In the Jungle
. It was not however performed till the next year, and although there were two more Brecht premieres in 1923, neither was at the Kammerspiele itself. First
In the Jungle
was staged at the Residenztheater on 9 May by Engel, with settings by Brecht’s school-friend Caspar Neher: the beginning of a lifelong collaboration between the three men. Jessner of the State Theatre came from Berlin, as did Ihering, who again wrote enthusiastically, though not without observing that to anyone insensitive to its language the play must appear a muddle. This the local critics bore out; the three-hour performance was poorly received; it ran for only six evenings, and altogether was a disastrous enough flop to occasion the sacking of the theatre’s artistic adviser. Nor was
Baal
in Leipzig at the end of the year any more successful. Alvin Kronacher’s production at the Old Theatre on 8 December was taken off by order of the city council within a week, and the director reprimanded. It brought an interesting press controversy between Ihering and his rival Alfred Kerr as to the relative originality of Brecht and Toller, but Kerr was undoubtedly right when he wrote that ‘The only hope for a Baalade like this is as a posthumous fragment…’. For the text as we have it was not performed again for another forty years.

The rehearsals for
Edward II
began that autumn under Brecht’s own direction. Brecht also supplied the music; the sets were again by Neher, and as in the two previous Munich Brecht productions the actor Erwin Faber played the lead. The premiere on 19 March 1924 was somewhat thrown out by the drunkenness of one of the principal actors, but the local critics appreciated Brecht’s success in conveying his ballad-like conception of the story (he apparently had the scene titles and dates announced before each episode),
while Ihering was impressed by his handling of the ensemble scenes and the careful dissection of the long speeches. Knowing something of Brecht’s as yet unformulated theoretical ideas, he realized that the audience with which he most sympathized was that for boxing matches, sporting events and incidents in the street, and attributed to this novel orientation part of the success of the production. Looking back two years later he saw it as something more: a major turning-point in the German theatre’s understanding of the classics. For here had been an attempt at demonumentalization, an appeal for ‘not so much plaster…’ (the title of one of Brecht’s subsequent essays), in which

He did not analyse the characters; he set them at a distance … He called for a report on the events.

Viewed from 1926 it seemed like an early example of the‘epic’ style.

Brecht’s Munich period came to an end with the 1923-4 theatrical season, for once established in Berlin he remained based there until he went into exile in 1933. Only the one-acters had not been performed by the time of his move.
Baal, Drums in the Night
and
Edward
were all in print, while the
Hauspostille
, his first book of poems, was enjoying something of an underground reputation, having been announced as early as 1922, five years before its actual publication. That first winter in Berlin he was to have the rare distinction (for a young author) of two productions in the major theatres:
Edward II
directed by Jürgen Fehling (this gifted director’s only Brecht production) at the State Theatre, with Werner Krauss as Mortimer and Faber once more as Edward, and
Jungle
at the Deutsches Theater directed by Engel, who had been lured to Berlin by Max Reinhardt a few months before Brecht. The outstanding young actor Fritz Kortner turned down a part in Reinhardt’s
St Joan
in order to play Shlink: another indication of the interest already stimulated by Brecht’s early work.

II

If the Bavarian years made Brecht’s name they also established the main lines of argument for and against his work, with Kerr and Ihering respectively as counsel for the prosecution and the defence. Already the point at issue was his literary borrowings, and a number of later attacks on him (including that dealt with in the notes to
In the Jungle of Cities)
were foreshadowed in Kerr’s
Baal
critique, with its dismissal of the play as second-hand Büchner and Grabbe. ‘The
gifted Brecht,’ he wrote, ‘is a frothing plagiarist.’ To which Ihering countered:

A writer’s productivity can be seen in his relationship with old themes. In
Schweiger
Werfel invented a ‘hitherto unheard of story’ and was none the less imitative in every respect. Brecht was fired by Marlowe’s
Edward II
and was creative through and through.

At the same time Brecht had been able to build the nucleus of his subsequent team of supporters and collaborators: first and foremost Neher, then Engel, the rather older Feuchtwanger, Kortner, Homolka, Klabund’s actress wife Carola Neher and the playwright Marieluise Fleisser, all of them people who have left their individual marks on the German theatre. Here Brecht’s personal magnetism clearly played a part: something to which there have been many tributes, starting with Feuchtwanger’s fictional picture of him as the engineer Pröckl in his novel
Success
(1931). The first three plays all bore dedications: to his school-friend George Pfanzelt (the ‘Orge’ of the poems), to Bie Banholzer who bore his illegitimate son Frank (killed in the war) and to Marianne his first wife, whom he married in 1922. With
Edward II
this practice came to an end.

These were Brecht’s pre-collectivist, indeed in a sense his prepolitical years. He undoubtedly had opinions, many of them progressive and even revolutionary, but they were far from systematic, and politics and economics were wholly absent from what we know of his reading. On the other hand it was an extraordinarily tense and eventful time for Germany in general and Bavaria in particular, and Brecht was much too sensitive a writer not to reflect this in his work. A good deal has been made of his supposed pacifism in the First World War – though his schoolboy writings show that in fact he set out from a conventionally patriotic attitude and hardly developed beyond concern at the casualties – and of the impact made on him by his military service, which in fact was done on his own doorstep and in a hospital for venereal diseases, and started only a month or two before the end of the war. Several of the
Hauspostille
poems which are held to express his post-war sense of release had in fact already been written by then. Nor is there any evidence that he was more than a spectator of the revolutionary movements of November 1918, when the monarchy fell, and the first months of 1919, when Munich and Augsburg were governed by Soviets following Kurt Eisner’s murder and the short-lived Spartacist revolt in Berlin.

Yet the ‘Legend of the Dead Soldier’ which he wrote in 1918 and took into
Drums in the Night
(see pp. 101 and 391) is always supposed to have earned him a place on the Munich Nazis’ black list, while the play itself, though their paper the
V
ö
lkischer Beobachter
thought that it ‘at any rate showed something of the idiocy of the November Revolution’, struck none of the liberal critics as an unfair picture. It was certainly a very confused one, as the muddle over the dating of the action will confirm, and Brecht himself came to judge it in the severest terms, very nearly suppressing the play altogether. The revolutionary setting, however, was only a background to the real drama, and it had an instinctive poetic power which was not to be found in Brecht’s later amendments.

The element of revolt in his writing of this time was largely directed against his own middle-class background: the satirical first scene of
Baal
, for instance, and the first two acts of
Drums in the Night
. Much of his reading, too, was exotic-escapist, as can be seen from the allusions in this volume to Gauguin and
Treasure Island
and Rudyard Kipling, and certainly this partly explains Brecht’s interest in Rimbaud, whose elevated prose underlies Garga’s ‘psalmodizing’ in
In the Jungle
(cf. Brecht’s own semi-prose ‘Psalms’) and whose relationship with Verlaine was surely the model for that of Baal and Ekart. ‘How boring Germany is!’ says a note of 18 June 1920. ‘It’s a good average country, its pale colours and its surfaces are beautiful, but what inhabitants!’ ‘What’s left?’ he concluded: ‘America!’ That year he read two novels about Chicago, J. V. Jensen’s
The Wheel
(which has never appeared in English) and Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
, and when he began work on his own
In the Jungle
it was under their influence, intensified no doubt by his first experience of ‘the crushing impact of cities’ (about which he wrote an early poem) in the hard winter of 1921-2.

By the time of its first performance the French occupation of the Ruhr had given a great stimulus to nationalism throughout Germany, and not least to the Nazis in Bavaria. The
V
ö
lkischer Beobachter
particularly detested this play, claiming that the audience was full of Jews and that the Chinese characters spoke Yiddish. A month later Brecht and Bronnen heard Adolf Hitler addressing a meeting in a Munich circus, and were inspired (according to Bronnen) to work out what sort of a political show they could put on in a circus themselves. In November the Beer-Cellar Putsch interrupted the rehearsals of
Edward II
for a day. Brecht, with his colleague Bernhard Reich, went to call on Feuchtwanger, who saw
this as the sign that they must leave Bavaria (and did in fact leave in 1924). But Reich recalls no particular concern with the Nazis on Brecht’s part, and indeed not only was the putsch quite firmly suppressed – and Hitler jailed – but the stabilization of the currency by the central government set the Nazi movement back for a number of years.