Brecht Collected Plays: 1: Baal; Drums in the Night; In the Jungle of Cities; Life of Edward II of England; & 5 One Act Plays: "Baal", "Drums in the Night", "In the Jungle of Ci (World Classics) Read Free

Looking back two years later he saw it as something more: a major turning-point in the German theatre’s understanding of the classics. For here had been an attempt at demonumentalization, an appeal for ‘not so much plaster…’ (the title of one of Brecht’s subsequent essays), in which
    He did not analyse the characters; he set them at a distance … He called for a report on the events.
    Viewed from 1926 it seemed like an early example of the‘epic’ style.
    Brecht’s Munich period came to an end with the 1923-4 theatrical season, for once established in Berlin he remained based there until he went into exile in 1933. Only the one-acters had not been performed by the time of his move.
Baal, Drums in the Night
and
Edward
were all in print, while the
Hauspostille
, his first book of poems, was enjoying something of an underground reputation, having been announced as early as 1922, five years before its actual publication. That first winter in Berlin he was to have the rare distinction (for a young author) of two productions in the major theatres:
Edward II
directed by Jürgen Fehling (this gifted director’s only Brecht production) at the State Theatre, with Werner Krauss as Mortimer and Faber once more as Edward, and
Jungle
at the Deutsches Theater directed by Engel, who had been lured to Berlin by Max Reinhardt a few months before Brecht. The outstanding young actor Fritz Kortner turned down a part in Reinhardt’s
St Joan
in order to play Shlink: another indication of the interest already stimulated by Brecht’s early work.
    II
    If the Bavarian years made Brecht’s name they also established the main lines of argument for and against his work, with Kerr and Ihering respectively as counsel for the prosecution and the defence. Already the point at issue was his literary borrowings, and a number of later attacks on him (including that dealt with in the notes to
In the Jungle of Cities)
were foreshadowed in Kerr’s
Baal
critique, with its dismissal of the play as second-hand Büchner and Grabbe. ‘Thegifted Brecht,’ he wrote, ‘is a frothing plagiarist.’ To which Ihering countered:
    A writer’s productivity can be seen in his relationship with old themes. In
Schweiger
Werfel invented a ‘hitherto unheard of story’ and was none the less imitative in every respect. Brecht was fired by Marlowe’s
Edward II
and was creative through and through.
    At the same time Brecht had been able to build the nucleus of his subsequent team of supporters and collaborators: first and foremost Neher, then Engel, the rather older Feuchtwanger, Kortner, Homolka, Klabund’s actress wife Carola Neher and the playwright Marieluise Fleisser, all of them people who have left their individual marks on the German theatre. Here Brecht’s personal magnetism clearly played a part: something to which there have been many tributes, starting with Feuchtwanger’s fictional picture of him as the engineer Pröckl in his novel
Success
(1931). The first three plays all bore dedications: to his school-friend George Pfanzelt (the ‘Orge’ of the poems), to Bie Banholzer who bore his illegitimate son Frank (killed in the war) and to Marianne his first wife, whom he married in 1922. With
Edward II
this practice came to an end.
    These were Brecht’s pre-collectivist, indeed in a sense his prepolitical years. He undoubtedly had opinions, many of them progressive and even revolutionary, but they were far from systematic, and politics and economics were wholly absent from what we know of his reading. On the other hand it was an extraordinarily tense and eventful time for Germany in general and Bavaria in particular, and Brecht was much too sensitive a writer not to reflect this in his work. A good deal has been made of his supposed pacifism in the First World War – though his schoolboy writings show that in fact he set out from a conventionally patriotic attitude and hardly developed beyond concern at the casualties – and of the impact made