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) (50 page)

but that is what makes bad baal the antisocial man great

that the report of his enemy

describing him with my voice is

permeated by his

accusing me that i

a delighted onlooker

while he was exploiting the exploiters

and making use of the users

started treating him more harshly

as soon as he derided my own rules

but that is his offence

and why he is called antisocial

because in making trivial demands of him

the perfect state would appear like an exploiter.

[‘Baal’, from Dieter Schmidt (ed.):
Baal. Der b
ö
se Baal der asoziale
, Suhrkamp, 1968, p. 90. This poem, which is not included in GW, is part of the material relating to the Baal
Lehrstücke
project discussed on pp. 372-3 below.]

Baal
is a play which could present all kinds of difficulties to those who have not learnt to think dialectically. No doubt they will see it as a glorification of unrelieved egotism and nothing more. Yet here is an individual standing out against the demands and discouragements of a world whose form of production is designed for exploitation rather than usefulness.
We cannot tell how Baal would react to having his talents employed; what he is resisting is their misuse. Baal’s art of life is subject to the same fate as any other art under capitalism: it is attacked. He is anti-social, but in an antisocial society.

Twenty years after completing
Baal
I was preoccupied with an idea (for an opera) related to the same basic theme. There is a carved wooden Chinese figure, two or three inches high and sold in thousands, representing the fat little god of happiness, contentedly stretching himself. This god was to arrive from the East after a great war and enter the devastated cities, trying to persuade people to fight for their personal happiness and well-being. He acquires followers of various sorts, and becomes subject to persecution by the authorities when some of them start proclaiming that the peasants ought to be given land, the workers to take over the factories, and the workers’ and peasants’ children to seize the schools. He is arrested and condemned to death. And now the executioners practise their arts on the little god of happiness. But when they hand him poison he just smacks his lips; when they cut his head off he at once grows a new one; when they hang him from the gallows he starts an irresistibly lively dance, etc., etc.
Humanity’s urge for happiness can never be entirely killed
.

For the present edition of
Baal
the original version of the first and last scenes has been restored. Otherwise I have left the play as it was, not having the strength to alter it. I admit (and advise you): this play is lacking in wisdom.

[‘Bei Durchsicht meiner ersten Stücke. Foreword to
Stücke
I, all editions but the first. GW
Schriften zum Theater
, pp. 947-8. For a more accurate view of the revisions to the first and last scenes, see p. 372 below.]

For the following note and for the writings by Brecht quoted in it the editors have drawn gratefully and extensively on the two volumes of ‘materials’ edited by Dieter Schmidt,
Baal. Drei Fassungen
and
Baal. Der böse Baal der asoziale. Texten, Varianten und Materialien
, published by Suhrkamp-Verlag in 1966 and 1968 respectively (‘edition suhrkamp’ numbers 170 and 248).

Brecht’s first play was not written in four days and for a bet, as has been alleged, but developed from a paper which he read in the spring of 1918 to Professor Artur Kutscher’s theatre seminar at Munich University. His subject was Hanns Johst, the Expressionist novelist and playwright who later wrote the Nazi play
Schlageter
and at the end of 1933 became president of the (purged) Prussian Academy. Brecht undertook to write a ‘counter-play’ to Johst’s
Der Einsame
(The Lonely One), an emotionalized account of the life of the nineteenth-century dramatist Christoph Dietrich Grabbe, which the Munich Kammerspiele were presenting. A first draft was complete by mid-May, and a month later he could write to his lifelong friend Caspar Neher:

My play:

Baal eats! Baal dances!! Baal is transfigured!!!
What’s Baal up to?

24 scenes

is ready and typed – a substantial tome. I hope to get somewhere with it.

He revised the play in the spring of 1919, after his military service and the writing of the earliest draft of
Drums in the Night
. That was the version first submitted to publishers and theatre managements, but Brecht appears to have decided that it was too long – there were 29 scenes – and too wild, and before its publication he overhauled it yet a third time, jettisoning about one-third of the 1919 text. Publication should have taken place some time in the second half of 1920, but the original publishers were by then already in trouble with the censorship over other books, and only a few copies for Brecht’s own use were ever printed. The rights
were transferred to another firm (Kiepenheuer of Potsdam) who brought the book out two years later at the time of the première of
Drums in the Night
, virtually unchanged apart from the addition of the first woodcutters’ scene.

This first published version was the play as we now have it, apart from the first and last scenes. It was republished in 1953 as the first volume of Brecht’s collected
Stücke
; then in 1955 scene I was given its present form (including the two poems quoted from the Munich Expressionist periodical R
evolution
, which are in fact Georg Heym’s ‘Der Baum’ and ‘Vorbereitung’ by the then East German Minister of Culture, Johannes R. Becher), while Brecht restored the final scene which he deleted from the proofs in 1920. What Brecht says in his own note of 1954 is not precisely right, since neither of these scenes is in its original form. But clearly he was content to leave it as an early work.

In the later 1920s he felt otherwise. The version which he himself staged at the Deutsches Theater in February 1926 (a single afternoon performance by the ‘Junge Bühne’ – and
Baal’s
only performance in Berlin to this day) was a largely new, much shorter play called
Life Story of the Man Baal
. As will be seen below, it retained only eleven of the published scenes, which were altered so as to set Baal in the emergent technological society of the first decade of the century. They were stripped of much of their original lyricism and given an ‘epic’ framework by means of titles to each scene. Brecht wanted this version to appear as an appendix to the
Stücke
edition of the 1950s, but it remained unpublished till 1966. Its only other known performances were in Vienna in 1926 (with a prologue by Hofmannsthal) and in Kassel the year after.

Around 1930 – the dates and also the intended arrangement of the fragmentary typescript are uncertain – he planned a number of linked
Lehrstücke
(or didactic playlets) about the character he now called
Bad Baal the Antisocial Man
. Here he thought of making Baal appear in various guises –

guest/whore/judge/dealer (bulls)/engineer (only concerned with experiment)/suppliant – in need of help (exploiting other people’s wish to be exploited)/nature-lover/demagogue/worker (strikebreaker)/mother/historian/soldier/lover (baker’s apprentice scene from ‘breadshop’)/as parson/as civil servant/the 2 coats

– but apart from a reception where Baal is guest and the Baal Hymn is sung this plan has very little to do with the play. The
writing is deadpan, with strange word order and virtually no punctuation apart from full stops. Brecht’s aphoristic
alter ego
Herr Keuner appears, and the only
Baal
character apart from Baal himself is Lupu. Some idea of the style can be got from the beginning of ‘Bad Baal the Antisocial Man and the Two Coats’, which is one of the few complete episodes:

BAAL
: all night i have been going in increasing cold through the forests towards where they get darker. the evening was icy. the night was icier and a crowd of stars crept into a whiteish fog towards morning. today the bushes occupy the least space of the entire year. whatever is soft freezes. whatever is hard breaks.

THE LEFT-HAND CHORUS
the best thing is
         the cold comes before the warmth
         everything makes itself as small
         as it can. everything is
         so sparingly silent only
         thinking becomes
         impracticable and then
         comes the warmth

THE POOR MAN
it is cold. i have no coat. i’m freezing. perhaps that grand gentleman can tell me what i can do against the cold. good day sir …

In 1938 Brecht again looked at the play with a view to the Malik-Verlag collected edition of his work (which was never completed). ‘A pity,’ he then noted: ‘it was always a torso, and on top of that it underwent a number of operations … Its meaning almost disappeared. Baal the provocateur, the admirer of things as they are, who believes in living life to the full, other people’s lives as well as his own. His “do what amuses you” could be very rewarding if properly handled. Wonder if I could find the time’. That is, aside from the
Lehrstücke
plan, which was still on the agenda. A few months later he seems to have written that off, to judge from a diary note of 4 March 1939:

Today I finally realized why I never managed to turn out those little
Lehrstücke
about the adventures of ‘Bad Baal the Antisocial Man’. Antisocial people aren’t important. The really antisocial people are the owners of the means of production and other sources of life, and they are only antisocial as such. There are also their helpers and their helpers’ helpers, of course, but again
only as such. It is
the
gospel of humanity’s enemies that there are such things as antisocial instincts, antisocial personalities and so on.

He also came to feel that he had made a mistake in seeing socialism as a matter of social order rather than of productivity, which may have been another reason underlying his more sympathetic judgement of Baal at the end of his life.

Numbers in square brackets refer to the scene order of the final text. Other numbers to that of the particular script under discussion

Though
Baal
at first appears to have little structure, so that Brecht could change scenes around, or add or delete them, without greatly affecting the play’s character, there are nine basic scenes which recur in the same order in every version, together with four others* which are in all except the 1926 text. They are: [1] (the opening party scene), [2] (Baal and Johannes), [3] (the first tavern scene), [4 i] (Baal and Johanna, after the seduction), [4 iii] (first scene with Sophie), [6]* (second ditto), [7] (cabaret scene), [8]* (Baal and Ekart), [15] (Baal reading a poem to Ekart, who speaks of his girl), [17]* (Baal reads ‘Death in the Forest’). [18] (last tavern scene, with the murder of Ekart), [20]* (the two gendarmes), and [21] (the death scene in the forest hut). Accordingly, we shall start by describing the more significant changes in these scenes, from one version to another up to 1922.

[1] In the first two versions it is a grand party: full evening dress. The host and other guests are not named; the host’s wife is not mentioned. Unspecified poems by Stramm and Novotny (whoever
he
was) are read; Baal, who is a clerk in the host’s office, calls them drivel. The servants try to throw him out, but he fights them off, saying, ‘I’ll show you who’s master.’

The 1922 version is virtually the same as the final text, less the character of Pschierer and all between the first remark of the Young Man and the last remark of the Young Woman. The scene ends, after Piller’s last jibe, with Johannes asking Baal if he may visit him and Emilie saying, ‘I’m sorry for him.’

[2] Baal’s speeches are longer than in the final version, but the scene is not essentially changed.

[3] In 1918 it is a bourgeois bar. Baal reads the ‘Ballad of Evelyn Roe’ (now in Brecht’s collected poems), is applauded and introduces Johannes and ‘Mr Ekart, a brilliant composer who is passing through’. He insults the bourgeois, who fail to pay for his drinks; he refuses to join Ekart on his wanderings because Marie the waitress, who is in love with him, cannot come too. Johannes leads him away.

In 1919 this becomes the Inn with an audience of drivers to whom he sings ‘Orge’s song’. Johannes brings Johanna; Emmi arrives, identified by Baal as ‘wife of my office boss’ and described as
well-dressed, nervous, rather domineering
. It is virtually the final version.

[4 i] Essentially the final version, though in 1918 Johanna is called Anna. Instead of asking Baal if he still loves her, she asks, ‘Do you love me?’
in a small voice, breathlessly
.

[4 iii] Sophie Dechant in 1918 appears dressed in white. She is an actress, on her way to play (presumably Hebbel’s) Judith. Much of the final version is there – Baal calling her a white cloud, her reference to Baal’s ugliness, her virginity, her declaration that she loves him – till Baal’s mother comes in, accusing him of having whores in his room. He says Sophie is to be his wife, and asks her if she will. A piano is playing all the time, off.

In 1919 the scene has been largely rewritten. Sophie ceases to be an actress and takes her eventual form. Baal still says she is to be his wife, but no longer asks her.

By 1922 the mother is cut out of the play. Baal’s long opening speech, which originally introduced another scene with his mother (see below) is added to this one. Johannes makes his brief appearance. Sophie’s name is changed to Barger, and there is no mention of her becoming Baal’s wife. Instead of the piano there is intermittently the beggar’s hurdy-gurdy playing
Tristan
.

[6] In 1918 it is ‘Night’, with no place given. Sophie says they are penniless, and wants to go back to the stage. Baal says he will go on the stage: in a cabaret. He sings the verse which later introduces 4 (ii).