Oxford German Studies

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Bertolt Brecht: The Path from the Hedonistic to

the Humanist Satirist

Stephen Parker

To cite this article: Stephen Parker (2017) Bertolt Brecht: The Path from the Hedonistic to the
Humanist Satirist, Oxford German Studies, 46:1, 5-24, DOI: 10.1080/00787191.2017.1282654

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 Oxford German Studies, 46. 1, 5–24, March 2017

BERTOLT BRECHT: THE PATH FROM THE

HEDONISTIC TO THE HUMANIST SATIRIST
STEPHEN PARKER
University of Manchester

Proceeding from the observation that Brecht’s sensibility, attuned to intellectual dis-
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tance conveyed through irony and parody, was made for satire, this article explores
four hypotheses concerning satire as they apply to Brecht, in particular the notion
that the satirist’s implied yardstick is the properly human, irrespective of its moral
value or its attainability. The paper argues for the full recognition of Brecht as a satir-
ist both in the classic tradition and as a great innovator manipulating the major
genres. The article analyses Brecht’s development from a hedonistic to a humanist
satirist, who imbued his characters with an excess of vitality in a mix of affirmation
and satire, and who in anti-Nazi exile conducted a struggle with his own established
artistic practice, in the process testing the limits of satire itself.
KEYWORDS: Hedonism, Humanism, Irony, Parody, Parable, Marxism, SED, Nazism/
anti-Nazism/anti-fascism, Nationalism, Cynicism, Logical empiricism, Wu
Wei, Epic Theatre

Bertolt Brecht is perhaps best-known as a satirist for anti-fascist works written in

exile such as the gangster drama Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui and his
confrontation with Nazism in his poetry such as the cycle “Deutsche Satiren”.
When in his manifesto for anti-fascist writers, “Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben
der Wahrheit”, Brecht identified the problems in conveying the truth about Nazi
Germany, among them issues relating to writerly cunning, he referred to the great
satirists of the Enlightenment, Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, and Voltaire.
Brecht’s work in exile will, then, be an important element in our examination of
his satire. However, a satirical tone informs much of Brecht’s work in all genres
throughout his writing life. The satirical qualities of Brecht’s prose writing, itself
less well known than his poetry and drama, have been the subject of quite extensive
study.1 While a satirical tone is widely acknowledged in many other works, that rec-
ognition has not, however, resulted in a dedicated appreciation taking into account
work from the range of genres.
Contrary, contentious, sceptical, critical, scathing, acerbic, provocative, sardonic,
and more besides, Brecht was a debunker of pretention and folly in the classic

1
For a summary of research into Brecht’s prose writing, see Jan Knopf, ‘Die Prosa. Einfüh-
rung,’ in Brecht-Handbuch, ed. by Jan Knopf and others, 5 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001–03),
III, 1–22 (p. 17).

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group DOI 10.1080/00787191.2017.1282654
 6 S. PARKER

satirical tradition. Indeed, his sensibility, attuned to the cultivation of intellectual dis-
tance through the use of irony and the parody of conventional forms was, as I have
argued elsewhere, as if made for satire.2 Brecht’s work, moreover, not only exhibits
the qualities of the satirist as traditionally understood but also endows them with
fresh life by embedding them within his highly innovative literary practice.
Brecht’s novel satirical tone attracted great fellow satirists like Karl Valentin and
Karl Kraus to his work. What is more, ever the contrarian, the born dialectician
Brecht conducted a quarrel with himself about his satire and, particularly during
anti-fascist exile, questioned the very artistic impulses that had established him as
a hugely gifted satirist in the first place. He modified his practice accordingly. The
present paper will argue for the full recognition of Brecht the satirist, laying the
greater emphasis upon his dramatic and lyrical works. The paper will explore the
following hypotheses concerning satire as they relate to his work:

• It is generally acknowledged that in modern literature satire, infrequently guided

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by a normative moral code distinguishing between good and evil, exists less as a
clearly constituted genre than as a flexible and potent mode of writing which may
be embedded in all genres, modifying them in the process.3 Brecht exploited the
flexibility and potency of satire in his re-conception of the genres throughout
his writing life.
• The human body is generally acknowledged as a principal site for the satirical
representation of the perennial human struggle between appetite and reason, typi-
cally through exaggeration and distortion of bodily characteristics to represent
uncomfortable truths about behaviour. Brecht was deeply attracted to the depic-
tion of “den prächtig ungeschlachten Leib” and endowed his notably corpulent
figures from Baal to Azdak with a dramatic vitality exhibiting an uneasy mix of
affirmation and satirical distance.4
• Satirical techniques such as irony, parody, litotes, and hyperbole typically operate
by means of allusive indirection, which privileges aesthetic pleasure over prop-
ositional clarity. After delighting in that pleasure as a hedonist of the word,
Brecht conducted a struggle between his established satirical practice and an intel-
lectual attitude that was “ganz ernst”, which demanded propositional clarity and
was informed by Marxism and logical empiricism.5

2
Stephen Parker, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
3
Adopting slightly different emphases, in The Literature of Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), p. 4, Charles A. Knight, for example, argues, ‘Satire is thus pre-generic.
It is not a genre in itself but an exploiter of other genres. Nor is it quite a mode in the usual
sense. […] As a pre-genre, satire is a mental position that needs to adopt a genre in order to
express its ideas as representation’.
4
Bertolt Brecht, Werke. Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. by
Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller, 30 vols (Berlin, Weimar
and Frankfurt a. M.: Aufbau Verlag and Suhrkamp, 1988–2000), XXVIII, 58. Subsequent references
to Brecht’s Werke will be included between brackets in the main body of the article under the
heading BFA.
5
For Brecht’s discussion of the matter with Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1934, see Walter
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols
(Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), VI, 525. Subsequent reference to Benjamin’s Gesammelte
Schriften will be included between brackets in the main body of the article under the heading BGS.
 BERTOLT BRECHT 7

• In the attack upon human follies, injustice, corruption, and other vices, the
satirist’s implied yardstick in modern literature is typically a notion of what is
properly human, irrespective of its moral value and of whether the satirist
deems the properly human to be attainable in practice or not.6 The young
Brecht, employing a modernist “shock” aesthetic, was determinedly amoral in
his satire and characteristically ambivalent on the attainability of the properly
human. However, the issue acquired an acute urgency in his anti-fascist work,
which assumed a recognizably humanist form from the late 1930s in the face of
the European dictatorships.

Particular elements of Brecht’s early socialization can be identified which helped to

shape the satirist he became: his body, family, religion, school, and the First World
War. Brecht’s troubled relationship with his body yielded an acute awareness of
death and a carpe diem determination to extract maximum enjoyment from life’s
pleasures, lending his work a distinctive, irreducibly biophysical and often deeply
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pessimistic quality.7 At the same time, his upbringing in the Brecht household,
where his businessman father installed his mistress to look after his ailing wife,
instilled in him an early sense of the hypocrisy surrounding conventional bourgeois
morality and the associated business ethic. At school and in church, the clergy linked
that morality inextricably to their religious teaching. Among other things, Brecht
and his fellow pupils were required to learn chunks of Luther’s Bible off by heart.
The Bible, catechisms, stories, and hymns stayed with Brecht, a vast resource that
gave structure to his imagination for uses that never ceased to challenge the dog-
matic certainty with which it had been inculcated. While Brecht applied his satirical
gifts to a wide range of themes, he returned again and again to the delusions of reli-
gion, intellectual sophistry, bourgeois hypocrisy, and acquisitiveness in the family
and business, and to the gross inhumanity of militarist nationalism, imperialism
and war.
In poems published in the early stages of the First World War the schoolboy Brecht
adopted an “official” voice, supporting the German cause in patriotic verse. By 1916
this voice was yielding to one in which the parodistic ending of “Mütter Vermisster”
reveals his talent for lethal mimicry of religious and political dogma. Unpublished at
the time, the poem depicts mothers whose sons do not come home from the front
and who spend their lives unable to free themselves of the thought that they will
return. “Mütter Vermisster” blends sympathy for the suffering mothers with a
parody of Christian dogma, playing first on Moses 1. 3 and then on Luke 22. 19,
in conjunction with faux naïf observations and rhymes:

Oh, einmal wird Licht; sonst kann Gott nicht sein —

Und sei’s, wenn sie stürben, in letzter Zeit:

6
My approach is informed by Henri Bergson’s classic study Le rire. Essai sur la signification
du comique (Paris: Éditions Alcan, 1924), in which Bergson argues that comic behaviour is any-
thing that suggests a rigidity, a merely mechanical, automatic response rather than a flexible,
vital, properly human attitude, that laughter punishes comic behaviour, and that laughter is an
intellectual response, suspending emotion and moral judgement.
7
Brecht’s troubled relationship with his body is discussed as a strand of Parker’s Bertolt
Brecht.
 8 S. PARKER

Die dunklen Zimmer werden weit.

Und hell im Licht steht einer breit.
Sein Stuhl ist frei. Sein Mahl bereit.
Und er bricht ihnen Brot und er reicht ihnen Wein
Und sie lächeln im Sterben verklärt und befreit
Und sie gehen sehr leicht in den Himmel ein. (BFA 13, 92–93)

The same parodistic impulse informs “Das Lied von der Eisenbahntruppe vom Fort
Donald”. The first version cites the Protestant hymn “Näher, mein Gott, zu Dir”, well
known to Brecht from his Protestant upbringing, which had recently been played on
the sinking Titanic:

Die Männer vom Fort Donald — hohe!

Näher, mein Gott, zu dir, sangen sie
Näher zu dir, sangen sie.
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Und der See wuchs drunten, und oben wuchs Regen und Wind. (BFA 11, 309)

The parallel between the men from the railroad gang and soldiers at the front was
not made explicit, nor indeed could it be in print, but there was no doubt that
both groups of men, like the passengers on the Titanic, were doomed.
Brecht read Spinoza and the Book of Job as he sought answers to the problem of
suffering, approaching the Bible increasingly not as a source of faith but an object of
rational enquiry and philosophical disputation, which he laced with Nietzschean
sarcasm. The sarcasm was of a piece with the parody in a growing arsenal of satirical
devices which Brecht adopted as much for self-protection as for criticism directed
aggressively outwards. During US exile in the Second World War, he would write
to his son Stefan about the “thema der UNEMPFINDLICHKEIT (unzerstörbarkeit,
unverwüstlichkeit), das, als ich jung war, uns sehr beschäftigte”.8 He explained that
he and his friends

behandelten das thema der unempfindlichkeit, kommend aus einem grossen

krieg, ganz persönlich. wie konnte man unempfindlich werden? die schwier-
igkeit, nicht sogleich sichtbar, bestand darin, dass die gesellschaft, den wunsch
in uns erweckend, unempfindlich zu werden, zugleich die produktivität (nicht
nur auf künstlerischem gebiet) abhängig machte von der empfindlichkeit, d.h.
der produktive hatte den preis der verletztbarkeit zu entrichten.

Only in a letter to a close relative did Brecht dispense with the irony with which he
habitually infused accounts of his life for public consumption. Instead, he described
the predicament which he shared with a generation damaged by war, which felt it
could no longer afford sensitivity because that opened one to a dangerous vulner-
ability. Yet, as Brecht explained to Stefan, any strategy for productivity depended
upon sensitivity. Brecht was aware not only of the dilemma but also of the price
that had to be paid. Available evidence indicates that in the First World War

8
Brecht’s undated letter to his son is in the Bertolt Brecht Archive, reference number 2869. Per-
mission to quote from the letter in Parker, Bertolt Brecht (p. 1) was granted by Barbara
Brecht-Schall, representing the Brecht Estate.
 BERTOLT BRECHT 9

Brecht was plunged into a profound crisis of faith, which, in the light of the evidence
of the propensity of humans to murder fellow humans on a mass scale, issued in a
deep cynicism about human motivations.9
Out of his predicament Brecht created extraordinary works notorious for their
aggressively satirical, amoral cynicism, works which have come to define our
image of the young Brecht, the carpe diem hedonist. Among his finest such compo-
sitions is “Luzifers Abendlied”, written during the final days of freedom before con-
scription. Collected in Hauspostille as “Gegen Verführung” and spoken by the
defiant Paul Ackermann in the first version of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Maha-
gonny, it is a resounding warning —, employing brilliant, ironic inversion — not
to be seduced by Christianity into abandoning life’s pleasures:

Laβt euch nicht verführen!

Es gibt keine Wiederkehr.
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Der Tag steht in den Türen;

Ihr könnt schon Nachtwind spüren:
Es kommt kein Morgen mehr. (BFA 11, 116)

In his letter to his son, Brecht suggested that Hauspostille and his three early plays,
Baal, Trommeln in der Nacht and Im Dickicht der Städte, were forerunners of the
cult of coldness in American literature. Trommeln in der Nacht epitomizes the cyni-
cism which Brecht took away from the war. It features, too, a scathing satire upon
the morality of the bourgeois family. Brecht’s protagonist Andreas Kragler is an ego-
tistical anti-hero, a vitalist outcast both sensitive and brutally amoral, who, like
other early Brechtian male outsiders, has acquired a thick, calloused skin,
masking sensitivity. Most shockingly for the later Marxist Brecht, who considered
suppressing this play, Kragler places his desire for his own well-being with his
bride Anna above all other things, most notably the revolution. What is more, his
choice is presented in a sympathetic light. Crucially, however, Kragler does not
join the German middle-class world represented by the Balickes. At the war’s end,
Balicke, Anna’s father, represents the conservative, monarchist position of those in
the world of business on the home front who made money from the war. With
the onset of peace, Balicke, embodying Brecht’s already thoroughly cynical view
of business, is shifting production from shell boxes to prams, anticipating a baby
boom. Balicke, moreover, echoes the unrepentantly nationalist press of 1918 in
his denunciation of the returning soldiers, brutalized by war, who in 1914 had
been sent on their way to victory with flowers:

Die Demobilisation schwemmt Unordnung, Gier, viehische Entmenschung in

die Oasen friedlicher Arbeit. […] Unsichere Existenzen mehren sich, dunkle
Ehrenmänner. Die Regierung bekämpft zu lau die Aasgeier des Umsturzes.
[…] Die aufgepeitschten Massen sind ohne Ideale. Das Schlimmste aber, ich
kann es hier sagen, die Frontsoldaten, verwilderte, verlotterte, der Arbeit
entwöhnte Abenteurer, denen nichts mehr heilig ist. (BFA 1, 182)

9
See Parker, Bertolt Brecht, pp. 69–70.
 10 S. PARKER

The heroes of 1914 are the outcasts of 1918, feared and hated by the good citizens at
home, who see them as dangerous fomenters of revolution. For Balicke, Kragler
must be a Spartacist. In classic satirical mode, Balicke exposes himself through
what he says. The play’s ridicule of the gross inhumanity of German militarism is
epitomized in Glubb’s singing of Brecht’s “Ballade vom toten Soldaten”:

Der Sommer zog über die Gräber hin

Und der Soldat schlief schon
Da kam eines Nachts eine militär-
ische ärztliche Kommission.
Es zog die ärztliche Kommission
Zum Gottesacker hinaus
Und grub mit geweihtem Spaten den
Gefallnen Soldaten hinaus.
Und der Doktor besah den Soldaten genau
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Oder was von ihm noch da war

Und der Doktor fand, der Soldat wär k. v.
Und er drückte sich vor der Gefahr. (BFA 1, 230)

Again, Brecht employed a classic satirical technique, representing inhumane behav-

iour by foregrounding abuse of the human body. The song aroused the unremitting
hostility of German nationalists, its impact still evident when Nazi Germany
stripped Brecht of his citizenship in 1935.
Strikingly unfettered, the satirical tone in Brecht’s early work is the hallmark of a
writer determined to expose the mendacity informing social conventions. Amongst
the early poems is “Ballade vom Liebestod”, its pathological take on relations
between the sexes a grotesque parody of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The male
lover murders his “love”, whose corpse is presented with shocking, voyeuristic relish:

Ach, ihr zarter Kinderleib perlmuttern!

Holz und Liebe schlugen ihn so rauh
Schmilzt wie Holz salzflutzerschlagner Kutter
Unter Sturmflut! Gras in zuviel Tau! (BFA 11, 111)

The young Brecht, moreover, cultivated a sarcastic, anti-Romantic attitude in the

treatment of love as nothing more than casual sex for the hedonistic male seducer
that he himself became. The sarcasm remained concealed in the paratextual infor-
mation accompanying one of his best-known poems, “Erinnerung an die Marie
A.”, which ends:

Und auch den Kuβ, ich hätt ihn längst vergessen

Wenn nicht die Wolke da gewesen wär
Die weiβ ich noch und werd ich immer wissen
Sie war sehr weiβ und kam von oben her.
Die Pflaumenbäume blühn vielleicht noch immer
Und jene Frau hat jetzt vielleicht das siebte Kind
Doch jene Wolke blühte nur Minuten
Und als ich aufsah, schwand sie schon im Wind. (BFA 11, 92–93)
 BERTOLT BRECHT 11

The passing cloud signifies the transience of love in a matter-of-fact treatment which
plays on sentimental tropes. The poem’s original title was, however, “Sentimentales
Lied 1004”, an allusion to the claim of Don Juan’s 1003 conquests in Spain alone.
Brecht added a note to the manuscript: “Im Zustand der gefüllten Samenblase sieht
der Mann in jedem Weib Aphrodite” (BFA 11, 318). From this perspective, the poem
was simply a celebration of the male’s egotistical sexual pleasure, in which the
woman’s identity was incidental.10
Brecht mustered all his satirical powers in his first full-length drama, Baal, the
exemplary work of the hedonistic satirist. Baal is a typical Brechtian dramatic
blend of dialogue, poetry, and song arranged in a loose sequence of scenes. The
work captured the lyrical “Baalsche Weltgefühl” that so animated the Augsburg
Brecht Circle around the end of the First World War and heralded the enormous dra-
matic talent that would create Epic Theatre.11 Despite all his efforts over the years to
alter fundamentally its dramatic trajectory in order to provide an unambiguously
critical perspective upon the asocial, vitalist outsider, Brecht continued to defend
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his first play, writing in 1939:

Baal überflogen, der Gesamtausgabe wegen. Schade drum. Es war immer ein
Torso, er wurde dann noch mehrmals operiert, für die (zwei) Buchausgaben
und die Aufführung. Der Sinn ging dabei fast verloren. Baal, der Provokateur,
der Verehrer der Dinge, wie sie sind, der Sichausleber, der Andreausleber. Sein
“Mach, was dir Spaβ macht!” gäbe viel her, richtig behandelt. (BFA 26, 323)

Baal is, indeed, the provocateur, a monstrously corporeal pleasure-seeking

philosopher-poet-singer, sating his appetites by consuming those around him, the
embodiment of a modernist shock aesthetic indifferent to morality. “Der Choral
vom Großen Baal” announces Baal’s entrance:

Als im weißen Mutterschoße aufwuchs Baal

War der Himmel schon so groß und weit und fahl
Blau und nackt und ungeheuer wundersam
Wie ihn Baal dann liebte — als Baal kam.
Und der Himmel blieb in Lust und Kummer da
Auch wenn Baal schlief, selig war und ihn nicht sah:
Nachts er violett und trunken Baal.
Baal früh fromm — er aprikosenfahl.
Und durch Schnappsbudicke, Dom, Spital
Trottet lässig Baal und — und gewöhnt sich’s ab —
Mag Baal müd sein, Kinder, nie sinkt Baal:
Baal nimmt seinen Himmel mit hinab. (BFA 1, 19)

10
For a discussion of the young Brecht’s deployment of the name Marie, see Jürgen Hillesheim
and Stephen Parker, ‘“Ebenso hieß das Mädchen nicht andauernd Marie”. Vier (fast) unbekannte
Frauenbriefe an Bertolt Brecht aus den Jahren 1916 bis’ 1918’, German Life and Letters, 64
(2011), 536–51.
11
Hanns Otto Münsterer, Bert Brecht: Erinnerungen aus den Jahren, 1917–22 (Zurich: Verlag
der Arche, 1963), p. 109.
 12 S. PARKER

The song traces the trail of bodies which he leaves behind, seduced and spent, before
Baal, sated, goes to his death.
Like the precursors whom Brecht acknowledged, Wedekind, Villon, Rimbaud,
and Verlaine, Baal is a figure both ridiculed by the society surrounding him and at
the same time deeply serious in his exposure of its flaws. His vital presence is an
indictment of that society and as such cannot be tolerated. The sinful provocateur
Baal is, indeed, a classic satirical type, as described by Charles A. Knight, who
writes of a “dramatic pattern by which central characters, who may or may not
be sympathetic, become satirists themselves by undertaking or staging a perform-
ance designed to expose the hypocrisies that otherwise dominate the play”.12 In
that way, they become, if not necessarily directly a mouthpiece, then vehicles for
the satirist to expose social relations and conventions within the play. Much
satire, ancient and modern, is informed by the disturbing dynamic of the deviant
winning out for at least some of the time against a social norm that is anything
but a golden mean to which all citizens might aspire in their behaviour, and is
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instead typically saturated by vice, sloth, delusion, deceit, and hypocrisy. The devi-
ants have their place amidst conflicting social forces, some representing greater vital-
ity, others lethargy, whereby, as in Henri Bergson’s famous study Le rire and in much
literature, modern and ancient, vitality becomes an index of what is properly
human, even if the vitalist’s behaviour is disturbingly amoral.
Baal the vitalist outsider of gargantuan appetites was a seminal creation of youth-
ful precocity and, like the portrayal of Kragler, proved hugely problematic.
However, while Brecht could dismiss the formally more conventional Trommeln
in der Nacht as a work written merely to make money, with Baal fundamental dra-
matic principles were at stake. It is no exaggeration to say that all Brecht’s sub-
sequent dramas were all written in dialogue with his first full-length piece and
that such apparently very different characters as Fatzer, Mauler, Galileo, and
Azdak would retain a presence strikingly reminiscent of Baal, both vitally corporeal
and provocative to those surrounding them, even if the satirical dimension is at times
more subdued than it is accentuated. Strikingly, when Brecht created the reflective,
ascetic intellectual Herr Keuner as the counterpoint to the instinctual Baal and to the
asocial Fatzer, Keuner in his Socratic questioning and ironic observations would
retain characteristics of the provocateur, whose performative presence occasions
the satirical treatment of those surrounding him.
The dramatic form and satirical tone of Baal remained crucial points of reference
in Brecht’s subsequent dramatic development. His halting progress upon his next
plays betokens his difficulty in moving beyond his first creation. Im Dickicht der
Städte sees two Brechtian character types, the littérateur and the businessman,
pitted against each other in an existential struggle to the death. The littérateur is con-
fronted by the sophist temptation to sell his opinions, while the businessman seeks to
annihilate the littérateur and his family. The play went through much re-writing in
the years straddling the mid-1920s as Brecht reflected upon the misery of life in a
German society grossly impoverished by the reckless gamble of its elites to win
the First World War. In the process, Brecht shifted his position from the radical indi-
vidualism of Baal to a radical negation of individualism, demonstrated with cool

12
Knight, p. 8.
 BERTOLT BRECHT 13

detachment in his development of Epic Theatre. Work on what became Mann ist
Mann also exemplifies Brecht’s development. The protagonist Galy Gay, another
counterpoint to the vitalist Baal, begins as the hapless Galgei, who is put upon
and drastically abused by his fellows in a Brechtian theatre of cruelty. He is then
developed as a character whose behaviour is determined by the socio-economic
forces surrounding him. His transformation into a fighting machine of the British
Army in India has its place in the unpitying depiction of characters who function,
in a much reduced civilian society as in the military, not as flexible, autonomous
agents but as little more than automata, devoid of the essentially human in Bergso-
nian terms. Here as elsewhere, such as the depiction of the bourgeois Herr Schmitt in
Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis, who “bigs himself up” on stilts in a
hyperbolic show of self-delusion, sardonic satire reveals man as a creature
without insight into his situation, doomed to repeat his mistakes, tragedy giving
way, following Karl Marx’s observation, to farce.
The radical questioning of individualism in the dramas within a drastically impo-
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verished socio-economic context had its corollary in Brecht’s poetry, most notably in
the cycle “Aus dem Lesebuch für Städtebewohner”. In a matter-of-fact, neusachlich
tone there and elsewhere Brecht’s verse indicates that toughness and resilience are
required, but will probably not be enough, to ensure survival in the strange, fleeting
and hostile environment of modern urban life, which threatens the very identity of
the self:

Trenne dich von deinen Kameraden auf dem Bahnhof

Gehe am Morgen in die Stadt mit zugeknöpfter Jacke
Suche dir Quartier und wenn dein Kamerad anklopft:
Öffne, o öffne die Tür nicht
Sondern
Verwisch die Spuren! (BFA 11, 157)

Brecht also deployed the neusachlich tone in a sarcastic commentary upon the pre-
vailing inwardness in contemporary German poetry, quintessentially represented by
Rainer Maria Rilke. Brecht decried Rilke’s work as the epitome of an anachronistic
“bourgeois” literature, which he undertook to destroy just as he undertook to
destroy conventional theatre. When invited to judge a poetry competition for Die
Literarische Welt, Brecht delivered his most notorious attack on such writing in
“Kurzer Bericht über 400 (vierhundert) junge Lyriker” (BFA 21, 191–93). He pre-
faced his comments with lines about Mother Goddam’s whore house from his
“Song von Mandalay” before caricaturing contemporary German verse as consisting
of “hübschen Bildern und aromatischen Wörtern”. Brecht dismissed Germany’s
leading poets, whom the young poets had imitated, writing that he thought little
of the poetry of Stefan George, Franz Werfel, and Rilke, “eines sonst wirklich
guten Mannes”. As for the young poets themselves, Brecht wrote: “Ich habe hier
eine Sorte von Jugend kennengelernt, auf deren Bekanntschaft ich mit gröβerem
Gewinn verzichtet hätte”. Claiming, “ich habe mich […] niemals besonders für
Lyrik interessiert”, Brecht suggested that it “muβ zweifellos etwas sein, was man
ohne weiteres auf den Gebrauchswert untersuchen können muß”. Brecht’s deploy-
ment of the term use value was not merely polemical. Its status as, in effect, an aes-
thetic category had huge consequences for his output. If poetry had a future, Brecht
 14 S. PARKER

maintained, it was in conjunction with ideas drawn from economists’ theories of

value, including labour theory of value, and from sociology rather than traditional
aesthetics. Brecht’s own mastery of aesthetics, of course, freed him to incorporate
those further dimensions.
However, as a result of such attitudes Brecht was, and remained, for many readers
the cold, cynical observer of a drastically diminished, inhumane existence in an
impoverished urban world hostile to individual life, which, he provocatively
suggested, would be swept away along with the civilization that had sustained it.
Some saw little difference between Brecht and his friend from the early 1920s,
Arnolt Bronnen, who joined the nationalist right. Indeed, in discussion with
Walter Benjamin in exile in 1938–39 Heinrich Blücher went so far as to identify
in “Aus dem Lesebuch für Städtebewohner” moments which “nichts sind als eine
Formulierung der GPU-Praxis”, in the sadism of which “die schlechtesten Elemente
der KP mit den skrupellosesten des Nationalsozialismus kommunizierten” (BGS 5,
540).13 This judgement contrasted starkly with Benjamin’s own interpretation of
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the cycle in his recent “Kommentare zu Gedichten von Brecht”, in which Benjamin,
like Arnold Zweig, saw those poems as prefiguring the wretched experience of exile,
in particular for communists who had already experienced the Weimar Republic as a
form of emigration. Benjamin had, moreover, identified in Brecht’s poetry “die
besondere Rolle […], die die Freundlichkeit in der Vorstellungswelt des Dichters
spielt” (BGS 2, 570). However, this evaluation, articulated during the darkest
times of Brecht and Benjamin’s exile, puts an anachronistic, humanist gloss on
Brecht’s early work. At the same time, a work such as Das Badener Lehrstück
vom Einverständnis articulates more fully Brecht’s stance on human suffering in
the mid- to late 1920s than the lyrical “Aus dem Lesebuch für Städtebewohner”.
The question of whether man is prepared to help his fellow man is answered repeat-
edly with a resounding “No!”. Again and again, as in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt
Mahagonny and Die Dreigroschenoper, Brecht employs biting satire to demonstrate
man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man in a world devoid of binding values.
While the hedonist lived once more in the lumberjack Paul Ackermann and in the
gangster and sex addict Macheath, in Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis
and other works Brecht showed he was by no means blind to the urgent need to
address the predicament of urban humanity. He now coupled his modernist
“shock” aesthetic with a class-based analysis of injustice in a world conceived as a
constellation not only of socio-economic relations but also of knowledge. The
“gelernter Chor” issues the following challenge in the final scene of Das Badener
Lehrstück vom Einverständnis:

Euch
Fordern wir auf, mit uns zu marschieren und mit uns
Zu verändern nicht nur
Ein Gesetz der Erde, sondern
Das Grundgesetz.
Einverstanden, daβ alles verändert wird

13
See, too, Erdmut Wizisla, Benjamin und Brecht: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frank-
furt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 215–17. Wizisla shows that Benjamin was inclined to accept Blü-
cher’s argument and to modify his understanding of Brecht’s development.
 BERTOLT BRECHT 15

Die Welt und die Menschheit

Vor allem die Unordnung
Der Menschenklassen, weil es zweierlei Menschen gibt
Ausbeutung und Unkenntnis. (BFA 3, 45)

Brecht brought to bear a quite dispassionate understanding of what must be

changed, drawing increasingly upon the social-scientific claims of Marxism and
logical empiricism: exploitation would only end if ignorance was overcome.
People must achieve insight into their situation and, on that basis, change it
through an agreed course of action, however difficult such an agreement might be
to achieve. That was the scale of the challenge. Invoking humanist values missed
the point in a Germany ravaged by recurrent economic crisis following the disaster
of the First World War.
Exceptionally, satire is not a feature of Brecht’s austerely experimental Lehrstücke
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of the early 1930s, which prefigure his major quarrel with himself over satire during
the early period of exile. When Brecht sought to re-engage with mainstream theatre
before 1933 in Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe, a first piece of fully fledged
Marxist Epic Theatre, he resumed the satirical mode in the depiction not only of
the duplicitous meat king Pierpont Mauler and his cronies but also of the delusions
of Johanna and her fellow Salvation Army religionists, not to mention the reformist
delusions of the Social Democrats. Indeed, whilst he is satirized, the vital, flexible
Mauler succeeds amidst recurrent crisis in the struggle between capital and labour
because of the limitations of those around him, which are satirically exposed.
Like many others, Brecht was quite unprepared for the events which transformed
Germany from January 1933. After fleeing into exile he composed satirical anti-
fascist pieces such as “Außenpolitische Ballade”, written on the occasion of Alfred
Rosenberg’s visit to London:

Der konnte kein Englisch sprechen

Er hatte es nicht gelernt
Vier Tage verstand er die Engländer nicht
Und dann hat er sich wieder entfernt.
Und er sprach zu seinem Freund Hitler:
Was ist das für ein Stuβ
Daβ, um England in den Arsch zu kriechen
Man englisch sprechen muß? (BFA 14, 166)

However, Brecht was concerned that his response to events might not match the
gravity of the situation. Walter Benjamin’s diary from the summer of 1934 describes
Brecht’s predicament as an anti-fascist satirist. During the early period of exile, prose
writing for once eclipsed poetry and drama (although some prose drafts would be
transformed into dramatic works). Brecht mentioned to Benjamin two satirical
prose projects, the larger one the Tui-novel, which was “bestimmt, einen enzyklopä-
dischen Überblick über die Torheiten der Tellektuall-Ins zu geben” (BGS 6, 530), but
which remained incomplete and was later incorporated in the drama Turandot.14

14
Brecht coined the terms ‘Tui’ and ‘Tellektuall-In’ to satirize fellow intellectuals’ sophistry.
 16 S. PARKER

The smaller one was the story about the “fate” of Giacomo Ui, “Wenige wissen
heute”, which Brecht later developed into Arturo Ui. For “Wenige wissen heute”
Brecht borrowed Benjamin’s copy of Machiavelli’s Geschichte von Florenz, which
combines a sober, factual style with the narrator’s strongly subjective interventions.
As in the earlier prose work “Tod des Cesare Malatesta” and in his anti-fascist novels
Dreigroschenroman and Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar, Brecht employed a
narrative technique combining pellucid clarity and a provocative narrative voice in
his exposure of conventional accounts of historical events. This entailed a concerted
critique of the duplicitous use of language in the abuse of power.15 Similarly, through
satirical counterpointing of historical parallels in a parabolic form, Brecht sought to
provoke his readers into grasping fatal continuities which must be broken.
In these prose works as well as his poetry, Brecht established anti-fascist satire as a
strong suit. It was informed by his accustomed, vehement rejection of all forms of
obscurantism, metaphysics, and prophetic vision, since they were, in his view, ultimately
grist to the fascist mill. However, Brecht explained to Benjamin that he felt a “sonder-
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bare Unschlüssigkeit” about his literary plans and wondered how effective his satires
were in reaching the proletariat (BGS 6, 530). The sophisticated bourgeois writer
worried that his self-imposed, rationalist austerity was squeezing the life out of his art:

Einmal manifestieren sich so Bedenken, denen — je inniger Brechts Befassung

mit den Problemen und Methoden des proletarischen Klassenkampfs wurde
— die satirische und zumal die ironische Haltung als solche ausgesetzt
werden müβte. Man verstünde diese Bedenken – die eher praktischer
Natur sind – aber nicht, wenn man sie mit anderen, tieferliegenden identifi-
zieren würde. Diese Bedenken einer tieferen Schicht richten sich auf das artis-
tische und spielerische Element der Kunst, vor allem aber auf diejenigen
Momente, die sie teilweise und gelegentlich refraktär gegen den Verstand
machen. Diese chronischen Bemühungen Brechts, die Kunst dem Verstande
gegenüber zu legitimieren, haben ihn immer wieder auf die Parabel verwiesen,
in der sich die artistische Meisterschaft dadurch bewährt, daβ die Elemente
der Kunst am Ende sich in ihr wegheben. (BGS 6, 531)

Moreover, he told Benjamin:

Ich denke oft an ein Tribunal, vor dem ich vernommen werden würde. “Wie ist
das? Ist es Ihnen eigentlich ernst?” Ich müβte dann anerkennen: Ganz ernst ist es
mir nicht. Ich denke ja auch zu viel an Artistisches, an das, was dem Theater zu
gute kommt, als daβ es mir ganz ernst sein könnte. Aber wenn ich diese wich-
tige Frage verneint habe, so werde ich eine noch wichtigere Behauptung
anschlieβen: daβ mein Verhalten nämlich erlaubt ist. (BGS 6, 524–25)

Brecht wondered whether only “Substanz-Dichter” (BGS 6, 525), whom he viewed

as entirely serious, like Lenin and Confucius, really achieved anything. Brecht sum-
marized: “All dies läuft auf die Unterscheidung zweier literarischer Typen hinaus: des

15
For a recent discussion of Dreigroschenroman from the perspective of Brecht’s ‘Sprachkri-
tik’, see Ernest Schonfield, ‘The Rhetoric of Business in Brecht’s Dreigroschenroman’, German Life
and Letters, 69 (2016), 175–93.
 BERTOLT BRECHT 17

Visionärs, welchem es ernst ist, auf der einen und des Besonnenen, dem es nicht ganz
ernst ist, auf der anderen Seite” (BGS 6, 525). Whilst, as he acknowledged in “Fünf
Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit”, he deeply admired and had learnt
from Lenin and Confucius, Brecht had always placed himself in the latter category
and, as we have seen, identified with the great satirists of the Enlightenment, Thomas
More, Jonathan Swift, and Voltaire. However, he found himself by force of circum-
stances pushed more and more in the direction of the serious visionary, a position he
was reluctant to assume, even though he was aware that the price for not doing so
might be failure.
Brecht’s problems in completing the parabolic anti-fascist drama Die Rundköpfe
und die Spitzköpfe shed light on the issues he discussed with Benjamin. He had
developed the work as a full-length drama, satirizing the Nazis’ racial obsession
as a displaced expression of its economic exploitation. However, during a visit to
Moscow Brecht’s parabolic treatment of the subject was criticized as cumbersome
and opaque. Two members of the Comintern Executive offered him advice and
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encouragement: Béla Kun recommended he write short sketches about life in Nazi
Germany; and Vilis Knorin suggested he warn of the fascist threat of war. Mean-
while, at the Comintern Congress in 1935 the General Secretary Georgi Dimitrov
echoed Brecht’s “Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit”, proposing a
“Trojan Horse” approach to infiltrating Nazi Germany. Over the next two years,
in fulfilment of a Comintern brief to reach proletarian anti-fascists, Brecht aban-
doned the parable form in favour of a laconic satirical realism. Brecht composed
the cycle “Deutsche Satiren”, brilliantly innovative satirical verse, epigrammatic in
form and lapidary in style, its diction arranged in sharply ironic juxtapositions:

Der berühmte Ausspruch des Generals Göring

Kanonen sind wichtiger als Butter
Ist insofern richtig, als die Regierung
Desto mehr Kanonen braucht, je weniger sie Butter hat
Denn je weniger sie Butter hat
Desto mehr hat sie Feinde. (BFA 12, 70)

In these poems Brecht established his mastery of the anti-fascist poetic idiom with
which he refashioned German poetry. Brecht, moreover, followed Dimitrov’s
“Trojan Horse” strategy, having his satires broadcast into Nazi Germany through
the Comintern’s short-wave German Freedom Station. Brecht’s artistry contributed
to the “wahrhaft sensationell” impact of the German Freedom Station, winning over
listeners otherwise closed to modern verse (BFA 12, 377).
The equally brilliant, short, satirical scenes of Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reichs
demonstrate Brecht’s evolving practical and theoretical position. Combining theatri-
cally pleasurable and instructive elements, Brecht developed a satirical realism close
to mainstream theatre. As John and Ann White have shown, Furcht und Elend des
Dritten Reichs replaces the laboured deployment of the Verfremdungseffekt in
Rundköpfe with subtle refinement.16 In “Die jüdische Frau” Judith Keith resolves

16
John White and Ann White, Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches’ (Roche-
ster, NY: Camden House, 2010).
 18 S. PARKER

to leave her “Aryan” husband and go into exile, ostensibly in order not to affect his
career as a doctor but actually in the knowledge that he will disown her. A
matter-of-factly determined Judith Keith first makes phone calls to friends, explain-
ing, “ich verreise auf einige Zeit” (BFA 4, 385), then rehearses various versions of
what she might say to her husband, before their short, final exchange in which he
bluntly states that things have to be this way. It is springtime, but she is taking
her fur coat. The scene ends with his pathetic, hypocritical words: “Schlieβlich
sind es nur ein paar Wochen” (BFA 4, 390). As the Whites explain:

Almost everything that is said or done in the final minutes of this scene has in
some way been prepared — and estranged in one sense or another — by the
wife’s dummy runs. For this reason the audience is able to tap into the
complex subtext of the short, concluding dialogue with a heightened —
and extremely partisan — awareness.17
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The play was a triumph for Epic Theatre, subtly enriched by the Verfremdungseffekt
and more conventional “Aristotelian” elements, which encouraged the audience’s
enjoyment and analytical appreciation.
Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reichs is the first of Brecht’s great dramas of survi-
val in the dark times when the stateless Brecht’s relations with Moscow reached a
low point following the incarceration and murder of his friends during the Great
Terror and the attacks upon his work and that of surviving friends by the
Moscow “camarilla”, Georg Lukács, Walter Ulbricht, Alfred Kurella, and Fritz
Erpenbeck. Signalling his re-engagement with the parable in these doubly dangerous
times, Brecht produced a devastating, if covert critique of the USSR under Stalin’s
rule in “Ansprache des Bauern an seinen Ochsen”:

O groβer Ochse, göttlicher Pflugzieher

Geruhe, gerade zu pflügen! Bring die Furchen
Freundlichst nicht durcheinander! Du
Gehst voraus, Führender, hü!
Wir haben gebückt gestanden, dein Futter zu schneiden
Geruhe jetzt, es zu verspeisen, teurer Ernährer! Sorg dich nicht
Beim Fressen um die Furche, friβ!
Für deinen Stall, du Beschützer der Familie
Haben wir ächzend die Balken hergeschleppt, wir
Liegen im Nassen, du im Trockenen. Gestern
Hast du gehustet, geliebter Schriftmacher.
Wir waren auβer uns. Willst du etwa
Vor der Aussaat verrecken, du Hund? (BFA 12, 52)

Brecht informed Benjamin that Stalin was the ox (BGS 6, 536). Satirized as the
powerful, stolid beast in this Brechtian Animal Farm, Stalin is the object of the
resentful peasant’s excessive dependence as he treats him like a god. Written from
the — equally satirized — peasant’s perspective, the poem emphasizes his illusions,

17
Ibid., p. 208.
 BERTOLT BRECHT 19

therefore his role in the cult of Stalin. What is conspicuously absent from the poem
— and, we can infer, from the Soviet Union under Stalin — is the intelligence of the
thinker, whose wisdom in the practice of ancient Chinese philosophy Brecht cele-
brated around the same time in “Legende von der Entstehung des Buches Taoteking
auf dem Weg des Laotse in die Emigration”. Benjamin and Blücher distributed the
poem in French internment camps, where it had a remarkable, galvanizing effect
upon its anti-fascist readers — and their guards.18 Benjamin identified in the
poem the “Freundlichkeit” that was a key element in the humanist stance which
the chastened survivor Brecht henceforth adopted in conjunction with his Marxist
analysis at a time when an offensive Leninism had become untenable and the limit-
ations of logical empiricism had been exposed. Brecht acknowledged to Benjamin
that he had become, relatively speaking, “milde” (BGS 6, 535). The later wisdom
writer Brecht’s brand of Marxist humanism entailed an appeal to mankind’s
innate goodness, asserted in the face of deepening barbarism, which, in his view,
threatened the end of history. A vocabulary of social interaction, recognizably
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Chinese in origin, informs Brecht’s position, stressing, too, politeness and

composure.
Brecht’s Marxist humanism, however, retained a characteristic combativeness, his
art a satirical sharpness. Indeed, Brecht would capture the “Klaue” as well as the
“Grazie” of Chinese art in his late poem “Auf einen chinesischen Teewurzellöwen”
(BFA 15, 255). In his struggle for survival, the émigré challenged prevailing
ethical norms, sharply focused upon the non-negotiable category of individual
responsibility and the associated notion of heroic self-sacrifice. As early as 1920
Brecht had found in the Taoist doctrine of Wu Wei, the paradox of action and non-
action, a mode of behaviour which captured an unheroic, survivalist cunning in the
face of authoritarianism.19 He embedded the doctrine in a number of works in the
years 1938 to1943, beginning with the first version of Leben des Galilei. It contains
perhaps his most succinct expression of the doctrine in what was originally the
second part of the Keuner parable “Maßnahmen gegen die Gewalt”. Galileo
himself tells the story of the Cretan philosopher Keunos to illustrate his own predi-
cament. Much admired for his love of freedom, Keunos is visited one day during the
time of dictatorship (“Gewaltherrschaft”) by an agent, who shows him a certificate
issued by the city’s rulers. It states that any abode he sets foot in should become his
and he should be given everything he wants. He asks Keunos if he will serve him, and
Keunos does so for seven years without speaking a word:

Als nun die sieben Jahre um waren und der Agent dick geworden war vom
vielen Essen, Schlafen und Befehlen, starb der Agent. Da wickelte ihn
Keunos in die verdorbene Decke, schleppte ihn aus dem Haus, wusch das
Lager, tünchte die Wände, atmete auf und antwortete: nein. (BFA 5, 72–73)

A satirical tone informed by the doctrine of Wu Wei runs through Brecht’s plays of
survival, exposing the follies and illusions of the ruling as well as the ruled, from the
great characters in Mutter Courage, not least Anna Fierling, through the

18
See Wizisla, pp. 219–21.
19
Antony Tatlow, The Mask of Evil (Berne: Peter Lang, 1977) and Heinrich Detering, Bertolt
Brecht und Laotse (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008).
 20 S. PARKER

protagonists in Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti, and on to the gods in Der gute
Mensch von Sezuan.
However, in Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui, Brecht’s exposure of Hitler’s
road to power, he drew upon his tale of Giacomo Ui. Oscillating between indolence
and brutal anger, Ui/Hitler is one of Brecht’s great satirical creations, a delight for
any actor equipped to exploit the great parodist Brecht’s dramatic gift. There are
echoes of Shakespeare’s Richard III and Julius Caesar, and of Goethe’s Faust, as
well as of Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator. Brecht’s use of roughly hewn blank
verse in the grand style of the verse drama brilliantly counterpoints the sordid
content of the dialogue. This made for a second element of parodistic Verfremdung.
The play exploits the analogy between fascists and hoodlums, which remains com-
pellingly relevant today, and demonstrates graphically how the fascists — Ui like
Hitler rises from a modest background — use violent intimidation through “protec-
tion” to take advantage of the climate of weakness and insecurity in all social classes
— not least traditional land-owning and business elites — engendered by a crisis in
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the capitalist cycle. Using the threat of their bodyguards and machine-gun-toting
cronies, they bribe and blackmail individuals, infiltrate and corrupt civic and
business institutions, and destroy organized labour, reducing workers to consumers
with values no different from the hopelessly corrupted lower middle classes. All this,
Brecht’s title points out, can be prevented. The play’s final line “Der Schoβ ist frucht-
bar noch, aus dem das kroch!” (BFA 7, 112), offers a chilling reminder of what may
still be in store.
Brecht wrote Arturo Ui for the American theatre. However, when he arrived in
Los Angeles no theatre would touch a work which exposed the country’s social
and economic life as latently fascist, susceptible to the same collapse into lawlessness
as much of Europe. The USA had, of course, long had a special place in Brecht’s
mind, initially as a source of fresh vitality in contrast to a Europe exhausted and
impoverished by war, later as the epitome of the rampant growth and inevitable self-
destruction of high capitalism. Hollywood was that in spades, a magnet for foo-
tloose finance in a popular entertainment industry on an unprecedented scale. His
contempt for the film industry pours out as he responds to movie men’s taunts in
the poem “Liefere die Ware!”: “Wenn ich ihre verfaulenden Gesichter sehe/
Vergeht mir der Hunger” (BFA 15, 78). His journal contains some extraordinary
satirical aperçus:

Bemerkenswert, wie hier eine alles depravierende billige Hübschheit einen

hindert, halbwegs kultiviert, d.h. würdig zu leben. […] Hier kommt man
sich vor wie Franz von Assisi im Aquarium, Lenin im Prater (oder Oktoberf-
est), eine Chrysantheme im Bergwerk oder eine Wurst im Treibhaus. […] Der
Merkantilismus erzeugt alles, nur eben in Warenform, und hier schämt sich
der Gebrauchswert, nicht der Tauschwert in der Kunst. (BFA 27, 70–71)

Landing in this ultimate realization of culinary art, whose exchange value bore on its
capacity to foster illusions, was for Brecht a truly grotesque irony. He recorded his
life as a jobbing scriptwriter in the cycle, “Hollywoodelegien”, a typically ironic take
on a genre normally associated with rueful responses to loss. The most famous piece
in the cycle is the laconic “Hollywood”: “Jeden Morgen, mein Brot zu verdienen/
Gehe ich auf den Markt, wo Lügen gekauft werden./ Hoffnungsvoll/ Reihe ich
 BERTOLT BRECHT 21

mich ein zwischen die Verkäufer” (BFA 12, 122). For Brecht, everything in Califor-
nia had been commodified, any sense of history and culture lost in a society where
only the market, lubricated by credit, counted. Brecht reflected upon Shelley’s words
about the City of London: “Ich/ Der ich nicht in London lebe, sondern in Los
Angeles/ Finde, nachdenkend über die Hölle, sie muβ/ Noch mehr Los Angeles glei-
chen” (BFA 15, 46).
Following the decisive turn in the war on the Eastern Front, as survival began to
give way to thoughts of a post-fascist Europe, Brecht presented two great comic
figures, Schweyk and Azdak, whose satirical performance exposes the characters
surrounding them. In Schweyk, the unassuming, eponymous picaro does not experi-
ence his plight as the division of his own nature, unlike Galileo and Fierling with
their egotistical and material needs. Even though he will never lead the way, the
quick-witted Schweyk, is able to pass through the crucible separating the dark
times from those beyond. His survival instinct enables him to evade traps, his
manner contrasting with the viciously acquisitive, if militarily and ideologically blin-
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kered attitudes, of the SS and Gestapo surrounding him. While this survivor’s nature
is uncomplicated, his picaresque behaviour can acquire intricacy: he evades the sol-
diers’ grasp with a brand of truth-telling in which the naive and the cunning are vir-
tually indistinguishable within a behavioural pattern again informed by Wu Wei. He
sees the chasm which divides those in the “Höheren Regionen” (BFA 7, 183), with
their aspirations to accumulate power, from the interests and appetites of the
Little Man, whom the powerful would deploy as their instruments: “Einem
groβen Mann is das gewöhnliche Volk eine Kugel am Bein, das is, wie wenn Sie
dem Baloun mit sein Appetit zum Abendessen ein Debrecziner Würstel vorsetzen,
das is für nix” (BFA 7, 192). The plans of the “great” cannot be implemented by
the likes of Baloun, never mind by the “great” themselves. Brecht puts Hitler
centre stage in a satirical unmasking of the Führer, of his economic motives in
war, and of his dependence upon the support of the “little man”, be he German, Aus-
trian, or Czech. In the epilogue, Schweyk and Hitler meet on the never-ending road
to Stalingrad. Schweyk sings to Hitler as the Führer attempts to escape in a wild
dance:

Und der Ostwind is dir kalt und der Bodn is dir heiβ
Und ich sags dir ganz offen, daβ ich nur noch nicht weiβ
Ob ich auf dich jetzt schieβ oder fort auf dich scheiβ. (BFA 7, 251)

Brecht turned to post-Nazi reconstruction in Der Kaukasischer Kreidekreis. The

Georgian setting for the prologue was surely not without design, given Brecht’s
reflections upon the Georgian Stalin. In the play, the end of the war heralds the
arrival of the extraordinary Azdak, formerly a village clerk and now a judge, a
last Brechtian hedonistic vitalist, “certainly Brecht’s most scurrilous and original
figure”.20 The unrelentingly subversive attitudes of the disappointed revolutionary
still serve the interests of the poor against the rich. Like Schweyk, Azdak is a disar-
mingly frank truth-teller: “Krieg verloren, aber nicht für Fürsten. Fürsten haben
ihren Krieg gewonnen, haben sich 3,863,000 Piaster für Pferde bezahlen lassen,

20
Tatlow, p. 293.
 22 S. PARKER

die nicht geliefert” (BFA 8, 69). Azdak proclaims: “Die Zeit der Verwirrung und
Unordnung ist vorüber, die ich in dem Lied vom Chaos beschrieben finde, das wir
jetzt singen werden”:

Schwester, verhülle dein Haupt, Bruder, hol dein Messer, die Zeit ist aus den
Fugen.
Die Vornehmen sind voll Klagen und die Geringen voll Freude. Die Stadt sagt:
Laβt uns die Starken aus unserer Mitte vertreiben.
In den Ämtern wird eingebrochen, die Listen der Leibeigenen werden zerstört
Die Herren hat man an die Mühlsteine gesetzt. (BFA 8, 77)

Confounding his own rules by awarding the child to Grusche, Azdak also claims the
governor’s estates for the city. The play ends with a dance during which Azdak is lost
in the throng, never to be seen again, while the Singer comments:
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Das Volk Grusiniens vergaβ ihn nicht und gedachte noch

Lange seiner Richterzeit als einer kurzen
Goldenen Zeit beinah der Gerechtigkeit. (BFA 8, 91)

The Singer invites the audience to reflect upon solutions to social conflicts which
might enable society finally to move into a new age, beyond the crass inequality
and injustice that marked the dark times. The glimpse of a new age of justice in
the final scene is that and only that. The task of constructing a just society
remains to be undertaken and, in Brecht’s understanding conveyed through
Grusche and Azdak, requires a human solidarity and co-operation latently present
in humans, which the maternal instinct quintessentially represents.
Following his return to Berlin Brecht rapidly grasped that the state builders would
rather not see the enactment of potentially tragic conflict affecting the new society,
nor dark satire. Comedy that could reconcile the sharp ends of conflict was the safer
choice, to which Brecht had recourse in the attempt to sidestep controversies sur-
rounding his depiction of “negative” characters, as in the furore surrounding the
production of Mutter Courage. Alongside his own great works from exile, the Ber-
liner Ensemble performed Kleist’s Der zerbrochene Krug, Lenz’s Der Hofmeister,
and Strittmatter’s Katzgraben.
However, Brecht responded to his severely attritional conflicts with the SED over
cultural policy by giving rein to his satirical gifts, particularly following 17 June
1953 when he successfully defended his own interests and those of fellow artists
in the Academy of Arts. Brecht went on the offensive with the poem “Nicht feststell-
bare Fehler der Kunstkommission”, publicly mocking the appearance of the func-
tionary Helmut Holtzhauer before academicians:

Geladen zu einer Sitzung der Akademie der Künste

Zollten die höchsten Beamten der Kunstkommission
Dem schönen Brauch, sich einiger Fehler zu zeihen
Ihrem Tribut und murmelten, auch sie
Zeihten sich einiger Fehler. Befragt
Welcher Fehler, freilich konnten sie sich
An bestimmte Fehler durchaus nicht erinnern. (BFA 15, 268)
 BERTOLT BRECHT 23

Unthinkable before 17 June 1953, this poem appeared in Berliner Zeitung, followed
by “Das Amt für Literatur”, in which bureaucrats and Party hacks were again the
butt of Brecht’s satire. He employed trademark ironic inversion in scathing criticism
of the SED leadership and its administrative practices in other poems, most famously
“Die Lösung”, which ends, “Wäre es da/ Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung/ Löste
das Volk auf und/ Wählte ein anderes?” (BFA 12, 310).
A major theme of the “Buckower Elegien”, which Brecht wrote that summer,
picking up on his ironic use of the term elegy in the “Hollywoodelegien”, is the recur-
rence of fascism in the everyday life of the GDR, which the SED’s propagation of
German cultural nationalism had done little to challenge. The elegies contain min-
iature aperçus upon life in the GDR, often informed by his trademark laconic, sati-
rical tone. Some like “Gewohnheiten, noch immer” and “Heiβer Tag” comment upon
the persistence of reaction, the latter containing the lines
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[…] Im Heck
Eine dicke alte Nonne, dick gekleidet. Vor ihr
Ein ältlicher Mensch im Schwimmanzug, wahrscheinlich ein Priester.
An der Ruderbank, aus vollen Kräften rudernd
Ein Kind. (BFA 12, 308)

Another elegy “Groβe Zeit, vertan” reflects upon opportunities for change squan-
dered by damaging administrative fiat: “Was sind schon Städte, gebaut/ Ohne die
Weisheit des Volkes?” (BFA 12, 311). At times, the late humanist Brecht ran the
risk of a sentimentalism which he had earlier excoriated.
In the traumatic summer of 1953 Brecht turned to satire for the composition of his
final drama Turandot oder Der Kongreβ der Weiβwäscher, for which he drew upon
Carlo Gozzi’s sarcastic, tragi-comic operatic treatment of the Turandot legend. Con-
ceiving his Turandot as burlesque, Brecht lampooned German intellectuals’ fateful
choices through the ages, highlighting their sleight-of-hand sophistry, most
notably their willingness to sell their suitably doctored thoughts to the powerful.
Turandot abounds with Brecht’s sardonic jokes born of his encounters with fellow
intellectuals: the Bund Proletarisch-Revolutionärer Schriftsteller and the KPD;
Goebbels and Rosenberg; Lukács and Kurella; the Paris congresses for the defence
of culture; the Moscow show trials; Adorno, Horkheimer, and the Frankfurt
School; the House Un-American Activities Committee; and, finally, the SED’s Cam-
paign against Formalism. Ever probing ironic dissonances between form and
content in order to bring out serious underlying issues, Brecht exposes intellectual
prostitution as a grimly repetitive spectacle. He recognized that the SED’s cultural
nationalism exhibited fateful continuities with that of the Nazis. Bitter experience
had taught him that the SED was drawing directly upon a reactionary Stalinist cul-
tural nationalism which had strong affinities with the Nazis’ own. Although his cri-
tique was not confined to the failings of the new socialist state within a divided
Germany, it was apparent that the German socialist project in the GDR remained
mired in the “dark times” of the 1930s. Brecht’s Turandot is, indeed, a critique of
the type of society he had known all his life, which had produced intellectuals as,
in his view, an unremittingly parasitic presence, propagandists either masquerading
as academics and professionals or in plain sight as PR people and lobbyists.
 24 S. PARKER

Throughout the momentous world-historical events that dominated Brecht’s life

little happened to allay his pessimism about the course of human affairs. From
Baal and Im Dickicht der Städte to Turandot, the satire upon intellectuals’ sale of
opinions is a recurrent theme, as is Brecht’s satire upon business and acquisitiveness
more generally, upon the hypocrisy surrounding the family and sexuality, upon the
delusions of religion, and upon the gross inhumanity of militarist nationalism,
imperialism and war. Throughout, the human body is foregrounded in the perennial
human struggle between appetite and reason. Brechtian satire, moreover, entails the
exposure not only of perpetrators of injustice and corruption but also of people’s
unthinking, lethargic acceptance of such vice. Brecht employed an unfettered, sardo-
nic tone in his early amoral, hedonistic work, delighting in the allusive indirection of
satire. However, this manner clashed with his aspiration to achieve a
social-scientifically informed analysis of impoverished German society, deriving
propositional clarity from Marxist categories and logical empiricism. This resulted
in a more restrained satirical tone, drawing out contradictions through sharply
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ironic juxtapositions in writing which assumed its most consummate form in his
laconic anti-fascist poetry. In the face of Nazi barbarism and the gross criminality
of the Soviet Union under Stalin, a chastened Brecht adopted a satirical voice incor-
porating a Marxist humanism, an expression of faith in human solidarity and
co-operation, informed by Chinese social philosophy. In his assumption of this suc-
cession of contrasting positions as he responded to the social and political upheavals
of his age, the restlessly innovative dialectician Brecht exploited the huge potential of
satire in modern literature and, in doing so, tested its limits.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Stephen Parker is Henry Simon Professor of German at the University of Manchester. His
latest book, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), will shortly be
appearing in German with Suhrkamp.