Pitiless, Stressed Brecht | Victoria Baena

In 1924, when he was in his mid-twenties, Bertolt Brecht and his frequent collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann began work on a play set in Chicago. Neither of them had but lived in America, however the metropolis, with its slick metal skyscrapers and historical past of strikes, fascinated Brecht as an emblem of the guarantees and pitfalls of capitalist modernity. The mission that will grow to be Fleischhacker centered on a speculator within the wheat futures market. In preparation, Brecht sought out businessmen and financial writers to clarify how the trade labored. He assumed that he would “acquire the necessary information quickly by making a few enquiries.” However he couldn’t get a straight reply:

I gained the impression that these processes had been merely inexplicable, i.e. to not be grasped by motive, i.e. unreasonable. The best way the world’s wheat was distributed was merely incomprehensible. From each viewpoint besides that of a handful of speculators this grain market was one huge swamp.

Ultimately he gave up on the interviews and began studying Marx. Capital gave him ammunition for the concept to understand the true nature of social relations you wanted to desert what Marx referred to as the “noisy sphere” of {the marketplace}, “where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone.” On the floor, Jae Fleischhacker, a hustling commodity dealer, could possibly be the protagonist of an upward mobility plot. Because it seems, he’s conspiring not simply to get wealthy however to nook the wheat market, oblivious of the laborers who truly develop the crop and the customers who’ve to fret concerning the value of bread. If you happen to descend into what Marx referred to as “the hidden abode of production,” Brecht thought, you may grasp simply how merciless it’s to guess on a supply of on a regular basis survival.

To do justice to how capitalism makes such gambles appear completely pure, Brecht got here to really feel he would want a brand new dramaturgy, one that will introduce a productive friction into classical drama’s narrative arcs. For Fleischhacker, nevertheless, he and Hauptmann struggled to reconcile this incipient Marxist aesthetic with the extra naturalistic supply materials. (The plot was drawn partly from Frank Norris’s sensationalist 1903 novel The Pit.) Ultimately they put the mission apart, and although the themes and strategies they tried out would discover their approach into lots of Brecht’s different tasks, at this time Fleischhacker exists solely in a whole lot of loose-leaf dialogue fragments, incomplete stage instructions, and contextual materials. brecht: fragments, a blinding current present about his visible output and archival manuscripts at London’s Raven Row, sampled a few of this analysis: handwritten notes on the Chicago inventory market, newspaper clippings, {a photograph} of John D. Rockefeller.

Brecht collected these sorts of extracts—images, quotations, newspaper headlines, photocopies—all through his life. He and his collaborators typically minimize and pasted them into notebooks, which reside within the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin together with annotated manuscripts, plot plans, and mass-media photos—200,000 sheets in complete. 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 variety from this daunting vary of fabric, a lot of it by no means meant for publication.

The present 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, nevertheless it put specific stress on the preparatory materials for Fleischhacker and three different unfinished performs from the second half of the Nineteen Twenties: Fatzer (1926–1930), Der Brotladen (The Breadshop, 1929–30), and The Flood (1926–27). This was a interval when Brecht was growing the methods of what he would come to name Epic Theatre or, later, “dialectical theatre,” amongst them third-person and past-tense narration, a desire for setting his performs in faraway locations or distant eras, and musical choruses that interrupt the motion. It was additionally on this time that he got here to public consideration with The Threepenny Opera (1928), an anticapitalist remodeling of John Homosexual’s 1728 ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera and a stunning hit.

By shifting the main focus from his extra well-known dramatic works to his unfinished performs and visible ephemera, the present delivered to life the artistic, haphazard, typically anarchic nature of Brecht’s composition course of—evident, for example, within the scattered dialogues he would write on free sheets of paper, which might grow to be modular, rearrangeable scenes. However the curators additionally argued that even his extra polished, completed productions commerce in a fragmentary aesthetic. Brecht’s plots typically haven’t any conventional climax or dénouement; abrupt, montage-like transitions break up the scenes. Von Held has urged elsewhere that even when Brecht and Hauptmann had completed Fleischhacker, they deliberate to form it into “a multitude of scenic splinters” with no “sense of narrative direction or coherence.” Brecht was a author and thinker for whom virtually each work was perpetually in progress, who was consistently returning to earlier concepts, revising his texts, modifying his theories. It was an method that suited his adherence to historic materialism—his conviction that capitalism, like every social configuration, was under no circumstances mandatory, timeless, or impervious to vary.

The fragment has a protracted and storied historical past in German aesthetics; the Romantics made a complete worldview out of it. Take their fascination with ruins: a mournful craving for a mythic wholeness one way or the other misplaced in modernity. However nostalgia had no place in Brecht’s aesthetics, nor in his politics. He favored fragmentary varieties much less as a result of they symbolized a previous in ruins than as a result of they had been methods to shock viewers out of their complacency, encouraging them to ask, as a personality in his movie Kuhle Wampe (1932) places it throughout a debate on the worldwide monetary disaster, “who will change the world.”

The problem for contemporary dramatists, Brecht thought, was preempting the viewers’s need to establish with the characters on stage, which allowed them to benefit from the spectacle and return dwelling unaffected—apart from (perhaps) shedding a tear over the hero’s or heroine’s plight. Brecht abjured this sort of pity. In his poetry-scrapbook Kriegsfibel (Struggle Primer), principally produced round 1944, a picture of a Russian lady who has simply recognized 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 just 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 regarded for methods to maintain the central character from turning into a tragic hero.

Amongst his ways for short-circuiting empathy and catharsis had been fast transitions between scenes, placards addressed on to the gang, and clashing stylistic registers to underscore the very staginess of the present. He famously referred to as this the Verfremdungs impact, a approach of “making strange.” The “V-Effect” typically contributed to the performs’ humor (as in Arturo Ui’s versified hymn on cauliflower: “My dear vegetable dealers, things/Are not so simple. Only death is free”), nevertheless it additionally inspired the viewers to mirror on the stakes of the historic and social state of affairs at massive.

A small display screen on the gallery’s entrance confirmed how Brecht tailored these methods for his cinematic experiments. On it performed an excerpt from a 1931 filmed stage manufacturing of the play Mann ist Mann (Man Equals Man, 1926), about an Irish porter skilled to grow to be a super British soldier. Brecht made the movie as a examine for the theatrical manufacturing and slackened the velocity to a body per second to attract much more consideration to the stylized, virtually jumpy high quality of Peter Lorre’s gestures and bodily actions. The impact was to interrupt them down into their element, replicable elements—simply as, within the play, the officers discover themselves nothing greater than replaceable cogs within the colonial machine.

The movie is on this sense additionally a showcase for what Brecht referred to as gestus, which prolonged from bodily gesture to language, posture, music, and rhythm. The purpose was much less to seize a personality’s idiosyncrasies than to probe the social and materials circumstances underlying human habits on the whole. Walter Benjamin as soon as described gestus as a approach of “making gestures quotable” by having them interrupt and conflict with different options of the scene, a lot as a “typesetter produces spaced type.” It required actors to deploy language and speech in a fashion without delay schematic and convincing. The gesture could possibly be a stagy, ironic, Chaplinesque bow. Or it could possibly be a silent scream: in a much-analyzed second from the 1949 manufacturing of Mom Braveness and her Kids (1939), when the protagonist, a seventeenth-century conflict profiteer, realizes she has spent too lengthy haggling with the regiment over the worth of her son’s return and overhears the gunshots of his execution, the actress—and Brecht’s spouse—Helene Weigel crumpled ahead, tensed again, then wrenched her mouth large open with out releasing a sound.

Gestus was an idea for the theater, however the exhibition means that it additionally knowledgeable Brecht’s collages. His best-known work in that style, Struggle Primer, consists of what he referred to as “photo-epigrams”—photos of World Struggle II, many from Life journal and different mass-media sources, captioned with ironic rhyming quatrains concerning the equipment of conflict and the clichés of social documentary fashion. The Kriegsfibel is a “primer” in a couple of sense, then: conflict is a talent that must be discovered, but additionally a repertoire of recurring poses and tropes.

A number of of the preliminary web page layouts, ready by Brecht’s collaborator Ruth Berlau, had been on show, together with a Life {photograph} that exhibits a Thai lady taking shelter from American bombs. The unique 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 suggest a caustic rejoinder:

In order that they not be killed in the event that they had been discovered—
For within the skies their bosses had been at conflict
Many crawled to shelter underground
And watched the combating, fearful, from afar.

Alongside these manuscript paperwork had been vitrines of loose-leaf albums that Brecht compiled with Hauptmann throughout his Los Angeles years. In a single, a crowd of Italian peasants prepares to grab land from a Calabrian property proprietor and switch it right into a village cooperative; in one other, a hungry little one in China holds out an empty bowl. If the Life images invited their readers to pity the topic (and to you’ll want to purchase the subsequent challenge), Brecht needed to elaborate a visible grammar of class-based struggling and battle, to oppose conflict somewhat than merely document it. Solidarity may come up extra simply, he wagered, if oppressed folks from completely different locations and cultures might acknowledge this type of shared iconography. In these years, throughout which photos of conflict had been circulating amongst a wider public than ever earlier than, he noticed an opportunity to make connections between far-flung conflicts and educate the attention to look extra critically at what he referred to as the “disorder of the world.”

Brecht was no much less within the gestural language of energy. In a single album a picture of New York mayor Jimmy Walker shaking a finger at his viewers mirrors considered one of Hitler making the identical gesture. (There’s an echo right here of Brecht’s Weimar modern Aby Warburg, whose Mnemosyne Atlas was one other fragmentary, unfinished montage that catalogued recurring types of human expression throughout time and area.) By making these kinds of provocative juxtapositions, Brecht hoped to denaturalize the poses world leaders struck for his or her followers and examine why they’d such entrancing results. “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 a part of the present’s run, the gallery not solely confirmed ephemera from the 4 early dramatic fragments however introduced them to life. Actors stuffed Raven Row’s eighteenth-century townhouse twice a day to carry out translated excerpts chosen and organized by the curators. Earlier than every efficiency the viewers was cut up in two. At one level throughout a Saturday efficiency late final month, a forged member opened a door to the gallery the place his colleagues had been performing to admonish them: “Guys, can we get a bit of quiet? This is my best scene.”

That Saturday, half the viewers was led into the decrease gallery for Der Brotladen. The play facilities on the eviction of a single mom of 5 kids, Mrs. Queck (Efé Agwele), dressed as a Victorian dairymaid in tatters and shreds (one of many designer lambdog1066’s ingenious, drag-inspired costumes). Landlords and actual property brokers swapped roles in speedy succession with missionaries from the Salvation Military, who for Brecht embodied the useless finish of liberal philanthropy. A manuscript web page of notes hanging on the opposing wall, reproduced on cardboard and underlined in purple ink, pressed the purpose. The play’s statesman character “wants to abolish the external misery” and “the army wants to abolish the internal misery,” Brecht wrote, however they “both want to leave the State as it is.”

Later the actors ushered the viewers into the hallway and up the steps for a staging of The Flood, which Brecht envisioned as a radio play based mostly on the Biblical story. Within the excerpt, a prophet (performed by the musician and actor Elaine Hua Jones) encountered refugees fleeing the plains for the mountains and chastised humanity for its sins. Brecht’s analysis for the mission included Sodom, Nineveh, the autumn of Pompeii, and the 1926 Miami hurricane. “The Fall of the Paradise City Miami,” considered one of his typewritten notes declares; the curators displayed it alongside a headline he minimize out—“SEA GIVES UP FLORIDA DEAD”—and notes concerning the infrastructural exploits that had been required to construct Miami out of a swamp.

A part of the pleasure of the performances was how they echoed and rhymed: within the fragment from Fatzer, a few tank crew that deserts the military in World Struggle I, shellshocked males 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,” right here too climate put a damper on the characters’ political debates—or, as Brecht wrote, “rain drowns out the revolution.”

In Der Brotladen, because the actors careened up and down a ramp, crawling out and in of the gallery’s open home windows, the present briefly turned a public spectacle; it drew the eye of a pair and an aged man strolling alongside the quiet again avenue in London’s Spitalfields neighborhood, who stopped and peeked in. This was maybe a much less Brechtian a part of the efficiency. Even within the Lehrstücke, or studying performs, which he was composing across the similar time as these dramatic fragments, the thought was by no means to break down the borders between artwork and life however somewhat for members to emerge from a time-bound experiment and return to actuality, hopefully modified.

Anne Tetzlaff

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

Anne Tetzlaff

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

Anne Tetzlaff

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

However, the supply drivers zooming on electrical bikes previous the efficiency of a play about Weimar-era inequality did recall Brecht’s curiosity within the analogies and discrepancies between his period and earlier moments of financial disaster and battle. This was one motive he so typically set his performs in a time or place apart from his personal, from interwar China (The Good Particular person of Szechwan, 1941) to seventeenth-century Italy (Lifetime of Galileo, 1938). What he referred to as “historicism” was one other approach of startling viewers into recognizing the precise circumstances that formed their current. A word 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 finish “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.”

Right this moment Brecht may himself be in want of historicizing. Methods like breaking the fourth wall and privileging disjunctive, nonlinear frames have grow to be a part of an all-too-familiar toolkit throughout modern movie, tv, and efficiency; “Brecht,” because the critic Fredric Jameson has written, “is also ‘Brecht.’” One welcome facet of this exhibition, then, was that it restored Brechtian formalism to the actual conjuncture of those Weimar years. And but the curators additionally appeared to suggest that theirs needn’t be the one path by Brecht’s archive. The present’s deal with his restlessly unfinished aesthetic urged that his work nonetheless has the potential to be put to new makes use of, to talk persuasively to instances and locations distant from his personal. Brecht himself had expressed the same hope in a 1929 poem that Kuhn interprets as “On the making of longlasting works”: “So too the plays [Spiele] that we invent/Are unfinished, or so we hope.”