Pitiless, Restless Brecht

In 1924, when he was in his mid-twenties, Bertolt Brecht and his frequent collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann started work on a play set in Chicago. Neither of them had yet lived in America, but the city, with its slick steel skyscrapers and history of strikes, fascinated Brecht as an emblem of the promises and pitfalls of capitalist modernity. The project that would become Fleischhacker centered on a speculator in the wheat futures market. In preparation, Brecht sought out businessmen and economic writers to explain how the exchange worked. He assumed that he would “acquire the necessary information quickly by making a few enquiries.” But he couldn’t get a straight answer:

I won the impression that these processes were simply inexplicable, i.e. not to be grasped by reason, i.e. unreasonable. The way the world’s wheat was distributed was simply incomprehensible. From every point of view except that of a handful of speculators this grain market was one big swamp.

Eventually he gave up on the interviews and started reading Marx. Capital gave him ammunition for the idea that to grasp the real nature of social relations you needed to abandon what Marx called the “noisy sphere” of the marketplace, “where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone.” On the surface, Jae Fleischhacker, a hustling commodity trader, could be the protagonist of an upward mobility plot. As it turns out, he is conspiring not just to get rich but to corner the wheat market, oblivious of the laborers who actually grow the crop and the consumers who have to worry about the price of bread. If you descend into what Marx called “the hidden abode of production,” Brecht thought, you might grasp just how cruel it is to bet on a source of everyday survival.

To do justice to how capitalism makes such gambles seem utterly natural, Brecht came to feel he would need a new dramaturgy, one that would introduce a productive friction into classical drama’s narrative arcs. For Fleischhacker, however, he and Hauptmann struggled to reconcile this incipient Marxist aesthetic with the more naturalistic source material. (The plot was drawn in part from Frank Norris’s sensationalist 1903 novel The Pit.) Eventually they put the project aside, and though the themes and methods they tried out would find their way into many of Brecht’s other projects, today Fleischhacker exists only in hundreds of loose-leaf dialogue fragments, incomplete stage directions, and contextual material. brecht: fragments, a dazzling recent show about his visual output and archival manuscripts at London’s Raven Row, sampled some of this research: handwritten notes on the Chicago stock market, newspaper clippings, a photograph of John D. Rockefeller.

Brecht collected these kinds of extracts—photographs, quotations, newspaper headlines, photocopies—throughout his life. He and his collaborators often cut and pasted them into notebooks, which reside in the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin along with annotated manuscripts, plot plans, and mass-media images—200,000 sheets in total. For brecht: fragments, the theater director Phoebe von Held collaborated with the scholar and translator Tom Kuhn, Raven Row’s curator Alex Sainsbury, and the archivist Iliane Thiemann to cull and translate a selection from this daunting range of material, much of it never intended for publication.

The show spanned the Weimar years, Brecht’s exiles in Scandinavia (1933–1941) and Los Angeles (1941–47), and his postwar return to state socialism in East Berlin, but it put particular stress on the preparatory material for Fleischhacker and three other unfinished plays from the second half of the 1920s: Fatzer (1926–1930), Der Brotladen (The Breadshop, 1929–30), and The Flood (1926–27). This was a period when Brecht was developing the techniques of what he would come to call Epic Theatre or, later, “dialectical theatre,” among them third-person and past-tense narration, a preference for setting his plays in faraway places or distant eras, and musical choruses that interrupt the action. It was also in this time that he came to public attention with The Threepenny Opera (1928), an anticapitalist reworking of John Gay’s 1728 ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera and a surprising hit.

By shifting the focus from his more famous dramatic works to his unfinished plays and visual ephemera, the show brought to life the creative, haphazard, sometimes anarchic nature of Brecht’s composition process—evident, for instance, in the scattered dialogues he would write on loose sheets of paper, which could become modular, rearrangeable scenes. But the curators also argued that even his more polished, finished productions trade in a fragmentary aesthetic. Brecht’s plots often have no traditional climax or dénouement; abrupt, montage-like transitions break up the scenes. Von Held has suggested elsewhere that even if Brecht and Hauptmann had finished Fleischhacker, they planned to shape it into “a multitude of scenic splinters” with no “sense of narrative direction or coherence.” Brecht was a writer and thinker for whom almost every work was forever in progress, who was constantly returning to earlier ideas, revising his texts, modifying his theories. It was an approach that suited his adherence to historical materialism—his conviction that capitalism, like any social configuration, was by no means necessary, timeless, or impervious to change.

The fragment has a long and storied history in German aesthetics; the Romantics made a whole worldview out of it. Take their fascination with ruins: a mournful yearning for a mythic wholeness somehow lost in modernity. But nostalgia had no place in Brecht’s aesthetics, nor in his politics. He favored fragmentary forms less because they symbolized a past in ruins than because they were ways to shock viewers out of their complacency, encouraging them to ask, as a character in his film Kuhle Wampe (1932) puts it during a debate on the global financial crisis, “who will change the world.”

The challenge for modern dramatists, Brecht thought, was preempting the audience’s desire to identify with the characters on stage, which allowed them to enjoy the spectacle and return home unaffected—other than (maybe) shedding a tear over the hero’s or heroine’s plight. Brecht abjured this kind of pity. In his poetry-scrapbook Kriegsfibel (War Primer), mostly produced around 1944, an image of a Russian woman who has just identified the corpse of her son bears the caption: “I say all pity, woman, is a fraud/Unless that pity turns into red rage.” Even when Brecht conceived of monomaniacal protagonists like the one in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941), a “parable play” that rewrites the rise of Hitler as a gangster on the Chicago cauliflower market, he looked for ways to keep the central character from becoming a tragic hero.

Among his tactics for short-circuiting empathy and catharsis were quick transitions between scenes, placards addressed directly to the crowd, and clashing stylistic registers to underscore the very staginess of the show. He famously called this the Verfremdungs effect, a way of “making strange.” The “V-Effect” often contributed to the plays’ humor (as in Arturo Ui’s versified hymn on cauliflower: “My dear vegetable dealers, things/Are not so simple. Only death is free”), but it also encouraged the audience to reflect on the stakes of the historical and social situation at large.

A small screen at the gallery’s entrance showed how Brecht adapted these techniques for his cinematic experiments. On it played an excerpt from a 1931 filmed stage production of the play Mann ist Mann (Man Equals Man, 1926), about an Irish porter trained to become an ideal British soldier. Brecht made the film as a study for the theatrical production and slackened the speed to a frame per second to draw even more attention to the stylized, almost jumpy quality of Peter Lorre’s gestures and bodily movements. The effect was to break them down into their component, replicable parts—just as, in the play, the officers find themselves nothing more than replaceable cogs in the colonial machine.

The film is in this sense also a showcase for what Brecht called gestus, which extended from physical gesture to language, posture, music, and rhythm. The point was less to capture a character’s idiosyncrasies than to probe the social and material conditions underlying human behavior in general. Walter Benjamin once described gestus as a way of “making gestures quotable” by having them interrupt and clash with other features of the scene, much as a “typesetter produces spaced type.” It required actors to deploy language and speech in a manner at once schematic and convincing. The gesture could be a stagy, ironic, Chaplinesque bow. Or it could be a silent scream: in a much-analyzed moment from the 1949 production of Mother Courage and her Children (1939), when the protagonist, a seventeenth-century war profiteer, realizes she has spent too long haggling with the regiment over the price of her son’s return and overhears the gunshots of his execution, the actress—and Brecht’s wife—Helene Weigel crumpled forward, tensed back, then wrenched her mouth wide open without releasing a sound.

Gestus was a concept for the theater, but the exhibition suggests that it also informed Brecht’s collages. His best-known work in that genre, War Primer, consists of what he called “photo-epigrams”—images of World War II, many from Life magazine and other mass-media sources, captioned with ironic rhyming quatrains about the machinery of war and the clichés of social documentary style. The Kriegsfibel is a “primer” in more than one sense, then: war is a skill that has to be learned, but also a repertoire of recurring poses and tropes.

Several of the initial page layouts, prepared by Brecht’s collaborator Ruth Berlau, were on display, including a Life photograph that shows a Thai woman taking shelter from American bombs. The original caption reads: “Woman of Thailand (Siam) Peers out of a Crude Bomb Shelter in Sichiengmai at American Bomber from French Indo-China Come to Bomb Border Hovels.” Brecht’s verses propose a caustic rejoinder:

So that they not be killed if they were found—
For in the skies their bosses were at war
Many crawled to shelter underground
And watched the fighting, fearful, from afar.

Alongside these manuscript documents were vitrines of loose-leaf albums that Brecht compiled with Hauptmann during his Los Angeles years. In one, a crowd of Italian peasants prepares to seize land from a Calabrian estate owner and turn it into a village cooperative; in another, a hungry child in China holds out an empty bowl. If the Life photographs invited their readers to pity the subject (and to be sure to buy the next issue), Brecht wanted to elaborate a visual grammar of class-based suffering and struggle, to oppose war rather than merely record it. Solidarity might arise more easily, he wagered, if oppressed people from different places and cultures could recognize this sort of shared iconography. In these years, during which images of war were circulating among a wider public than ever before, he saw a chance to make connections between far-flung conflicts and teach the eye to look more critically at what he called the “disorder of the world.”

Brecht was no less interested in the gestural language of power. In one album an image of New York mayor Jimmy Walker shaking a finger at his audience mirrors one of Hitler making the same gesture. (There is an echo here of Brecht’s Weimar contemporary Aby Warburg, whose Mnemosyne Atlas was another fragmentary, unfinished montage that catalogued recurring forms of human expression across time and space.) By making these sorts of provocative juxtapositions, Brecht hoped to denaturalize the poses world leaders struck for their followers and investigate why they had such entrancing effects. “What a wealth of material for the theatre there is in the fascist illustrated weeklies,” he wrote in his Journal. “These poseurs understand the art of Epic Theatre, giving banal events a touch of the historic.”

For part of the show’s run, the gallery not only showed ephemera from the four early dramatic fragments but brought them to life. Actors filled Raven Row’s eighteenth-century townhouse twice a day to perform translated excerpts selected and arranged by the curators. Before each performance the audience was split in two. At one point during a Saturday performance late last month, a cast member opened a door to the gallery where his colleagues were performing to admonish them: “Guys, can we get a bit of quiet? This is my best scene.”

That Saturday, half the audience was led into the lower gallery for Der Brotladen. The play centers on the eviction of a single mother of five children, Mrs. Queck (Efé Agwele), dressed as a Victorian dairymaid in tatters and shreds (one of the designer lambdog1066’s inventive, drag-inspired costumes). Landlords and real estate agents swapped roles in rapid succession with missionaries from the Salvation Army, who for Brecht embodied the dead end of liberal philanthropy. A manuscript page of notes hanging on the opposing wall, reproduced on cardboard and underlined in red ink, pressed the point. The play’s statesman character “wants to abolish the external misery” and “the army wants to abolish the internal misery,” Brecht wrote, but they “both want to leave the State as it is.”

Later the actors ushered the audience into the hallway and up the stairs for a staging of The Flood, which Brecht envisioned as a radio play based on the Biblical story. In the excerpt, a prophet (played by the musician and actor Elaine Hua Jones) encountered refugees fleeing the plains for the mountains and chastised humanity for its sins. Brecht’s research for the project included Sodom, Nineveh, the fall of Pompeii, and the 1926 Miami hurricane. “The Fall of the Paradise City Miami,” one of his typewritten notes declares; the curators displayed it alongside a headline he cut out—“SEA GIVES UP FLORIDA DEAD”—and notes about the infrastructural exploits that had been required to build Miami out of a swamp.

Part of the pleasure of the performances was how they echoed and rhymed: in the fragment from Fatzer, about a tank crew that deserts the army in World War I, shellshocked men emerged from a tank that recalled Noah’s ark. If, in Fleischhacker, “a bit of late rain was the reason” for Fleischhacker’s “instructive downfall,” here too weather put a damper on the characters’ political debates—or, as Brecht wrote, “rain drowns out the revolution.”

In Der Brotladen, as the actors careened up and down a ramp, crawling in and out of the gallery’s open windows, the show briefly became a public spectacle; it drew the attention of a couple and an elderly man strolling along the quiet back street in London’s Spitalfields neighborhood, who stopped and peeked in. This was perhaps a less Brechtian part of the performance. Even in the Lehrstücke, or learning plays, which he was composing around the same time as these dramatic fragments, the idea was never to collapse the borders between art and life but rather for participants to emerge from a time-bound experiment and return to reality, hopefully changed.

Anne Tetzlaff

A scene from a performance staged at Raven Row as part of brecht: fragments, 2024

Anne Tetzlaff

A scene from a performance staged at Raven Row as part of brecht: fragments, 2024

Anne Tetzlaff

A scene from a performance staged at Raven Row as part of brecht: fragments, 2024

On the other hand, the delivery drivers zooming on electric bikes past the performance of a play about Weimar-era inequality did recall Brecht’s interest in the analogies and discrepancies between his era and earlier moments of economic crisis and conflict. This was one reason he so often set his plays in a time or place other than his own, from interwar China (The Good Person of Szechwan, 1941) to seventeenth-century Italy (Life of Galileo, 1938). What he called “historicism” was another way of startling viewers into recognizing the specific conditions that shaped their present. A note to Fatzer observes that the play was to be set “at the time of the first world war         a time bereft of all morality.” It was to end “with the total destruction of all four [men] but which in midst of murder false witness and debauchery also bore the bloody traces of a new kind of morality.”

Today Brecht might himself be in need of historicizing. Techniques like breaking the fourth wall and privileging disjunctive, nonlinear frames have become part of an all-too-familiar toolkit across contemporary film, television, and performance; “Brecht,” as the critic Fredric Jameson has written, “is also ‘Brecht.’” One welcome aspect of this exhibition, then, was that it restored Brechtian formalism to the particular conjuncture of these Weimar years. And yet the curators also seemed to imply that theirs needn’t be the only path through Brecht’s archive. The show’s focus on his restlessly unfinished aesthetic suggested that his work still has the potential to be put to new uses, to speak persuasively to times and places distant from his own. Brecht himself had expressed a similar hope in a 1929 poem that Kuhn translates as “On the making of longlasting works”: “So too the plays [Spiele] that we invent/Are unfinished, or so we hope.”