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 B
Author: Bertolt Brecht
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‘Expressionism was a fine, good, grand thing…’ he wrote. ‘But the result is, alas, and through no fault of the Expressionists, the German Republic of 1920.’ Dadaism likewise was breaking up by 1922; at the Bauhaus the semi-mystical Itten was about to be succeeded by the technologically minded Moholy-Nagy; while artists like Grosz, Dix, Beckmann and Schlichter were evolving the coolly representational, socially conscious style which in 1924 became known as
Neue Sachlichkeit
. Brecht was always much too conscious of his own aims to care to be labelled as part of a movement; none the less his works of these years very clearly reflect the decline of Expressionism and the rise of the new style. He defined his position admirably in a note of 27 June 1920:
I can compete with the ultra-modernists in hunting for new forms and experimenting with my feelings. But I keep realizing that the essence of art is simplicity, grandeur and sensitivity, and that the essence of its form is coolness.
Baal
was written as a kind of counter-play to the Expressionists’ invocations of Humanity with a capital H, yet the wandering poet remains a romantic-expressionist figure, while the influence of Georg Büchner is one that is also noticeable in a number of Expressionist plays.
Drums in the Night
too, with its symbolic use of the moon, its cinematic third act and its hero’s slightly mad rhetoric, can reasonably be termed an Expressionist play.
In the Jungle
, however, was written at the turning-point, the watershed between the two movements. The Rimbaud allusions, the colour references before each scene in the 1922 version, the attic-cum-undergrowth setting, the use of spotlights referred to in Brecht’s note of 1954: all this is expressionistic, whereas the American milieu, the preoccupation with the big cities and the very notion of the ‘fight’ were to become characteristic concerns of the mid-1920s. A furthernote of 10 February 1922 even suggests that Brecht was looking forward to his own 1930s doctrine of ‘alienation’:
I hope in
Baal
and
Jungle
I’ve avoided one common artistic bloomer, that of trying to carry people away. Instinctively, I’ve kept my distance and ensured that the realization of my (poetical and philosophical) effects remains within bounds. The spectator’s ‘splendid isolation’ is left intact; it is not
sua res quae agitur
; he is not fobbed off with an invitation to feel sympathetically, to fuse with the hero and seem significant and indestructible as he watches himself in two different versions. A higher type of interest can be got from making comparisons, from whatever is different, amazing, impossible to overlook.
Thus though
In the Jungle
is still wildly romantic it already foreshadows the detached impersonalities of the machine age. And those supporters who, like Ihering and Engel and Geis, thought that Brecht would help lead the theatre out of the Expressionist undergrowth can now be seen to have been absolutely right.
III
The final texts of these plays often make Brecht’s evolution difficult to follow. He was a restless amender and modifier of his own work, so that any one of them may consist of layer upon layer of elements from different periods. ‘He is more interested in the job than in the finished work,’ wrote Feuchtwanger in an article of 1928 called ‘Portrait of Brecht for the English’,
in the problem than in its solution, in the journey than in its goal. He rewrites his works an untold number of times, twenty or thirty times, with a new revision for every minor provincial production. He is not in the least interested in seeing a work completed….
Thus between 1922 and its publication in 1927
In the Jungle
became
In the Jungle of Cities
. The city allusions were strengthened, the boxing foreword was added and various boxing allusions worked into the text, the colour references at the start of each scene gave way to mock-precise (‘objective’) data of time and place, the
Neue Sachlichkeit
. Brecht was always much too conscious of his own aims to care to be labelled as part of a movement; none the less his works of these years very clearly reflect the decline of Expressionism and the rise of the new style. He defined his position admirably in a note of 27 June 1920:
I can compete with the ultra-modernists in hunting for new forms and experimenting with my feelings. But I keep realizing that the essence of art is simplicity, grandeur and sensitivity, and that the essence of its form is coolness.
Baal
was written as a kind of counter-play to the Expressionists’ invocations of Humanity with a capital H, yet the wandering poet remains a romantic-expressionist figure, while the influence of Georg Büchner is one that is also noticeable in a number of Expressionist plays.
Drums in the Night
too, with its symbolic use of the moon, its cinematic third act and its hero’s slightly mad rhetoric, can reasonably be termed an Expressionist play.
In the Jungle
, however, was written at the turning-point, the watershed between the two movements. The Rimbaud allusions, the colour references before each scene in the 1922 version, the attic-cum-undergrowth setting, the use of spotlights referred to in Brecht’s note of 1954: all this is expressionistic, whereas the American milieu, the preoccupation with the big cities and the very notion of the ‘fight’ were to become characteristic concerns of the mid-1920s. A furthernote of 10 February 1922 even suggests that Brecht was looking forward to his own 1930s doctrine of ‘alienation’:
I hope in
Baal
and
Jungle
I’ve avoided one common artistic bloomer, that of trying to carry people away. Instinctively, I’ve kept my distance and ensured that the realization of my (poetical and philosophical) effects remains within bounds. The spectator’s ‘splendid isolation’ is left intact; it is not
sua res quae agitur
; he is not fobbed off with an invitation to feel sympathetically, to fuse with the hero and seem significant and indestructible as he watches himself in two different versions. A higher type of interest can be got from making comparisons, from whatever is different, amazing, impossible to overlook.
Thus though
In the Jungle
is still wildly romantic it already foreshadows the detached impersonalities of the machine age. And those supporters who, like Ihering and Engel and Geis, thought that Brecht would help lead the theatre out of the Expressionist undergrowth can now be seen to have been absolutely right.
III
The final texts of these plays often make Brecht’s evolution difficult to follow. He was a restless amender and modifier of his own work, so that any one of them may consist of layer upon layer of elements from different periods. ‘He is more interested in the job than in the finished work,’ wrote Feuchtwanger in an article of 1928 called ‘Portrait of Brecht for the English’,
in the problem than in its solution, in the journey than in its goal. He rewrites his works an untold number of times, twenty or thirty times, with a new revision for every minor provincial production. He is not in the least interested in seeing a work completed….
Thus between 1922 and its publication in 1927
In the Jungle
became
In the Jungle of Cities
. The city allusions were strengthened, the boxing foreword was added and various boxing allusions worked into the text, the colour references at the start of each scene gave way to mock-precise (‘objective’) data of time and place, the
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