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 Page A

on him by his military service, which in fact was done on his own doorstep and in a hospital for venereal diseases, and started only a month or two before the end of the war. Several of the
Hauspostille
poems which are held to express his post-war sense of release had in fact already been written by then. Nor is there any evidence that he was more than a spectator of the revolutionary movements of November 1918, when the monarchy fell, and the first months of 1919, when Munich and Augsburg were governed by Soviets following Kurt Eisner’s murder and the short-lived Spartacist revolt in Berlin.
    Yet the ‘Legend of the Dead Soldier’ which he wrote in 1918 and took into
Drums in the Night
(see pp. 101 and 391) is always supposed to have earned him a place on the Munich Nazis’ black list, while the play itself, though their paper the
V
ö
lkischer Beobachter
thought that it ‘at any rate showed something of the idiocy of the November Revolution’, struck none of the liberal critics as an unfair picture. It was certainly a very confused one, as the muddle over the dating of the action will confirm, and Brecht himself came to judge it in the severest terms, very nearly suppressing the play altogether. The revolutionary setting, however, was only a background to the real drama, and it had an instinctive poetic power which was not to be found in Brecht’s later amendments.
    The element of revolt in his writing of this time was largely directed against his own middle-class background: the satirical first scene of
Baal
, for instance, and the first two acts of
Drums in the Night
. Much of his reading, too, was exotic-escapist, as can be seen from the allusions in this volume to Gauguin and
Treasure Island
and Rudyard Kipling, and certainly this partly explains Brecht’s interest in Rimbaud, whose elevated prose underlies Garga’s ‘psalmodizing’ in
In the Jungle
(cf. Brecht’s own semi-prose ‘Psalms’) and whose relationship with Verlaine was surely the model for that of Baal and Ekart. ‘How boring Germany is!’ says a note of 18 June 1920. ‘It’s a good average country, its pale colours and its surfaces are beautiful, but what inhabitants!’ ‘What’s left?’ he concluded: ‘America!’ That year he read two novels about Chicago, J. V. Jensen’s
The Wheel
(which has never appeared in English) and Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
, and when he began work on his own
In the Jungle
it was under their influence, intensified no doubt by his first experience of ‘the crushing impact of cities’ (about which he wrote an early poem) in the hard winter of 1921-2.
    By the time of its first performance the French occupation of the Ruhr had given a great stimulus to nationalism throughout Germany, and not least to the Nazis in Bavaria. The
V
ö
lkischer Beobachter
particularly detested this play, claiming that the audience was full of Jews and that the Chinese characters spoke Yiddish. A month later Brecht and Bronnen heard Adolf Hitler addressing a meeting in a Munich circus, and were inspired (according to Bronnen) to work out what sort of a political show they could put on in a circus themselves. In November the Beer-Cellar Putsch interrupted the rehearsals of
Edward II
for a day. Brecht, with his colleague Bernhard Reich, went to call on Feuchtwanger, who sawthis as the sign that they must leave Bavaria (and did in fact leave in 1924). But Reich recalls no particular concern with the Nazis on Brecht’s part, and indeed not only was the putsch quite firmly suppressed – and Hitler jailed – but the stabilization of the currency by the central government set the Nazi movement back for a number of years.
    The period covered by this volume saw not only a certain element of political restoration throughout central and eastern Europe but also the end of Expressionism in the arts. To the poet-playwright Iwan Goll, who in 1921 published an essay called ‘Expressionism is Dying’, the two phenomena were connected.