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) (59 page)

Finally, in lieu of ‘Very drunken and infantile’ comes ‘You can all stuff it. I’m the lover.’

(1) The play is set in an unreal, chilly Chicago. Shlink wears a long dirty yellow costume down to his ankles, picturesquely blackened hair, and a black tuft on his chin.

George Garga is like A. Rimbaud in appearance. He is essentially a German translation into American from the French.

(2) Towards the end of
Jungle

Everything performed in front of a cyclorama. At the back all the actors not immediately involved sit in a dusty light, following the script. When Jane Garga dies she drops hers, and so on.

(3) A play

Chicago

The timber dealer Shlink, a Malay (Wegener’s type), fights a war of annihilation with the younger George Garga (Granach’s type), during the course of which both reveal their most extreme human characteristics. By means of an appearance of passivity the man Shlink slashes through the ties binding young George Garga to the world round him and makes him fight a desperate war of liberation against the steadily thickening jungle of Shlink’s intrigues against him. Shlink’s timber business and Garga’s family are among those annihilated. Increasingly isolated, more and more tightly entangled, the two go into the woods to fight it out. In the final conflict, which is fought with utter dedication, George Garga regains solid ground; he breaks off the fight (which was the man Shlink’s final sensation) and takes over his timber business in the great city of Chicago.

The events dealt with are concrete ones; the fight for the timber business, the family, a marriage, the fight for personal
freedom. There are not many characters, no walking-on parts.

[From Bertolt Brecht:
Im Dickicht der Städte
. Erstfassung und Materialien. Edited by Gisela E. Bahr. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1968, pp. 134, 136-7. Paul Wegener and Alexander Granach were prominent German actors of the time.]

The judicial proceedings to clarify the
Jane Garga murder mystery
led to the unmasking of one of those
sinister affairs in Chinatown
in Chicago which are so irresponsibly exploited by the press. A
Malayan timber merchant’s fishing expedition
in a lending library, the almost total
ruination
of an immigrant
family
of French descent, the
mysterious lynching of the Malay
.

The play before you provides a possibly somewhat rough piece of theatrical carpentry whose raw material would certainly interest a wider public. There are a fair number of gaps in it. It omits even points which the proceedings cleared up, such as the
Malayan murderer’s crimes
, thanks to which he regained possession of his
timber business donated to the Salvation Army
, and which characterized his flight into the yellow swamps with George Garga as an act of fear of the
lynch law of the respectable population
. Others remained obscure, and will no doubt always remain so. The
fate of Mae Garga
, her whereabouts, her motives for abandoning a family she had cared for for many years, have never been cleared up.

The present stage text is primarily intended to make theatrical material of
certain remarkable incidents
whose originals in real life appear to have taken place in the gloomy September of 1914 in
Chicago’s Chinatown
, and whose consequences will no doubt be recalled from the newspapers. Accordingly only extracts are given of the few conversations that concern us here (for this unusual and most horrific story reposes only on a small number of conversations, whose substance was difficult and expensive to get at). They consist, making allowance for some clarifications and
improbabilities
such as are
inevitable
to the drama and for a perhaps over-
romantic embroidery
of the events due to stage requirements, simply in the most important sentences uttered here at a specific point on the globe’s surface at specific moments in
the history of mankind
.

[Ibid., pp. 9-10. Brecht instructed that the italicized words should be shouted from behind the curtain before the start of the play, in imitation of newspaper sellers’ cries.]

i. A Malay called C. Shlink appears in the life of George Garga and for no known reason starts a fight. He tries Garga out to establish his fighting qualities, then starts by annihilating his economic existence.

ii. George Garga fights back.

iii. Shlink gives up his property so as to fight on equal terms. He thereby arouses the interest of Marie Garga, his enemy’s sister.

iv. Garga abandons his family so as not to be hampered in the fight. Shlink moves into the vacant space.

v. Garga has vanished. Shlink has summoned up his reserves.

vi. Garga reappears, determined to exploit Shlink’s fighting mood to further his own and his sister’s objectives.

vii. Shlink is ready to follow out Garga’s instructions.

viii. Garga tries to dig in behind his family. This results in the Garga family’s total liquidation. Garga himself disappears provisionally into prison, but not unprovided with weapons.

[Ibid., p. 137, with the suggested date 1923-4.]

At one or two points in my play
Jungle
a character quotes verses by Rimbaud and Verlaine. In the script these passages
are marked as quotations by means of inverted commas. Apparently the stage has no technique by which to express quotation marks. If it had, then a considerable number of other favourite works would become possibly more palatable for literary scholars but pretty intolerable for the audience. In view of the difficulty of their craft, those currently concerned with the manufacture of plays are unlikely, I fear, to have time either now or in the next ten years to sit back and think about such matters. Interested parties from the world of scholarship are accordingly invited to ring back in eleven years or so. (It can be divulged here and now that if the drama is to progress at all it will progress surely and serenely over the dead bodies of the scholars.)

[‘Eine Feststellung’, from GW
Schriften zum Theater
, p. 969. This appeared in the
Berliner Börsen-Courier
of 4 November 1924, after an article by Her warth Walden in
Die Republik
of 31 October complaining of Brecht’s borrowings. There were statements under the same heading by the Rimbaud translator Hans Jacob, siding with Walden, and by Herbert Ihering, pooh-poohing such revelations.]

What was new was a type of man who conducted a fight without enmity but with hitherto unheard of (i.e. undepicted) methods, together with his attitude to the family, to marriage, to his fellow-humans in general, and much else – probably too much. That wasn’t, however, what people regard as new. The sort of thing they regard as new is the machine, in other words something they can use without having made it or being able to understand it. In literature the last thing to strike them as new is the idea, say, that a husband ought not to treat his wife as a doll, or that marriage is dangerous, or that a cart-driver can be just as tragic as a more highly placed individual, indeed more so in that he doesn’t know his way around so well.

To those with this culinary outlook, formal novelty lies
exclusively in the packaging. Since we were served up in the oldest possible packaging we were not new enough. ‘Valencia’ with jazz is new. It’s not particularly new without. Jazz itself is of course new.

[‘Neu und alt’ from GW
Schriften
zum Theater
, p. 67.? About 1926.]

Visiting the play
In the Jungle of Cities
has turned out to be such a difficult proposition that only the most courageous theatres have been prepared to tackle it. Indeed nobody should be surprised if the audience rejects the play entirely. The play rests on certain assumptions, which is always troublesome, which is why the general run of the drama avoids it. The following notes about these assumptions will be of little or no help.

2

The behaviour of our contemporaries, as frequently though by no means fully expressed in the newspapers, is no longer to be explained by old motives (largely borrowed from literature). An increasing number of police reports attribute no ‘motive’ to the criminal. That being so, it ought not to surprise you if the newer plays show certain types of person in certain situations behaving differently from what you expected, or if your guesses as to the motives for a particular piece of behaviour turn out to be wrong.
This is a world, and a kind of drama, where the philosopher can pick his way better than the psychologist
.

3

In the theatre as elsewhere, the bourgeoisie, having wasted a hundred years staging fights between men merely over women, is not going to have much time left for fights over more serious matters before it finds itself forced, in the
theatre as elsewhere, to concentrate on the most serious of all contemporary fights, the class struggle. An idealized fight such as can be seen in the play
In the Jungle of Cities
is at present only to be found in the theatre. For the real thing you will have to wait fifty years.

4

In the meantime I am sure you see that I still need to defend the simple basic conception of the play
In the Jungle of Cities
. This is that pure sport might involve two men in a fight which transforms them and their economic circumstances to the point of unrecognizability. The passion for sport is here being classed with all the other passions already at the theatre’s disposal. No doubt it will take at least five decades of continuous practice in at least two continents before this passion is put on an emotional par with those great and tragic passions liable to produce triumphs and catastrophes on the grand scale. What I mean is: there are catastrophes today whose motive is sport even though it cannot be recognized as such. Besides this continuous practice there will have to be an end to those other, less pure motives for fighting which still preponderate, such as the urge to own women or means of production or objects of exploitation: motives, in short, that
can
come to an end since they can simply be organized away.

5

The territory used for fighting in this play is probably unfamiliar. For the territory so used consists in certain complexes of ideas such as a young man like George Garga holds about the family, about marriage or about his own honour. His opponent uses these complexes of ideas in order to damage him. Moreover, each combatant stimulates such thoughts in the other as must destroy him; he shoots burning arrows into his head. I can’t explain this way of fighting more clearly than that.

6

My choice of an American setting is not, as has frequently been suggested, the result of a romantic disposition. I could just as well have picked Berlin, except that then the audience, instead of saying, ‘That character’s acting strangely, strikingly, peculiarly,’ would simply have said ‘It’s a very exceptional Berliner who behaves like that.’ Using a background (American) which naturally suited my characters, covering them rather than showing them up, seemed the easiest way of drawing attention to the odd behaviour of widely representative contemporary human types. In a German setting these same types would have been romantic; they would have contrasted with their setting, not with a romantic audience. In practical terms I would be satisfied if theatres projected America photographically on the backcloth and were content to imply Shlink’s Asiatic origin by means of a plain yellow make-up, generally allowing him to behave like an Asiatic, in other words like a European. That would keep at least
one
major mystery out of the play.

[‘Für das Programmheft der Heidelberger Auffiihrung’,
24 July 1928, from GW
Schriften zum Theater
, p. 969.]

My memories of writing the play
In the Jungle of Cities
are far from clear, but at least I remember the desires and ideas with which I was seized. One factor was my having seen a production of Schiller’s
The Robbers
: one of those bad performances whose very poverty emphasizes the outlines of a good play, so that the writer’s high aims are brought out by the failure to fulfil them. In
The Robbers
there is a most furious, destructive and desperate fight over a bourgeois inheritance, using partly non-bourgeois means. What interested me about this fight was its fury, and because it was a time (the early 1920s) when I appreciated sport, and boxing in particular, as one of the ‘great mythical diversions of the giant cities on the other side
of the herring pond’ I wanted my new play to show the conclusion of a ‘fight for fighting’s sake’, a fight with no origin other than the pleasure of fighting and no object except to decide who is ‘the best man’. I ought to add that at that time I had in mind a strange historical conception, a history of mankind seen through incidents on the mass scale and of specific historical significance, a history of continually new and different modes of behaviour, observable here and there on our planet.

My play was meant to deal with this pure enjoyment of fighting. Even while working on the first draft I noticed how singularly difficult it was to bring about a meaningful fight – which meant, according to the views which I then held, a fight that proved something – and keep it going. Gradually it turned into a play about the difficulty of bringing such a fight about. The main characters had recourse to one measure after another in their effort to come to grips. As their battleground they chose the family of one of the fighters, his place of work, and so on and so forth. The other fighter’s property was likewise ‘thrown in’ – and with that I was unconsciously moving very close to the real struggle which was then taking place, though only idealized by me: the class struggle. In the end it dawned on the fighters that their fight was mere shadow-boxing; even as enemies they could not make contact. A vague realization emerged: that under advanced capitalism fighting for fighting’s sake is only a wild distortion of competition for competition’s sake. The play’s dialectic is of a purely idealistic kind.