THE WIFE: It’s really an old one, cost eleven marks fifty. Ours was falling to pieces.
THE RELEASED MAN: Ha.
THE MAN: Anything doing in the street?
THE RELEASED MAN: They’re collecting.
THE WIFE: We could do with a suit for Willi.
THE MAN: Hey, I’m not out of work.
THE WIFE: That’s just why we could do with a suit for you.
THE MAN: Don’t talk such nonsense.
THE RELEASED MAN: Work or no work, anybody can do with something.
THE MAN: You found work yet?
THE RELEASED MAN: They say so.
THE MAN: At Seimens?
THE RELEASED MAN: There or some other place.
THE MAN: It’s not as hard as it was.
THE RELEASED MAN: No.
Pause.
THE MAN: How long you been inside?
THE RELEASED MAN: Six months.
THE MAN: Meet anyone in there?
THE RELEASED MAN: No one I knew. Pause. They’re sending them to different camps these days. You could land up in Bavaria.
THE MAN: Ha.
THE RELEASED MAN: Things haven’t changed much outside.
THE MAN: Not so as you’d notice.
THE WIFE: We live a very quiet life, you know. Willi hardly ever sees any of his old friends, do you, Willi?
THE MAN: Ay, we keep pretty much to ourselves.
THE RELEASED MAN: I don’t suppose you ever got them to shift those rubbish bins from the hallway?
THE WIFE: Goodness, you remember that? Ay, he says he can’t find anywhere else for them.
THE RELEASED MAN as the wife is pouring him a cup of coffee: Just give me a drop. I don’t want to stay long.
THE MAN: Got any plans?
THE RELEASED MAN: Selma told me you looked after her when she was laid up. Thanks very much.
THE WIFE: It was nothing. We’d have told her to come over in the evening more, only we’ve not even got the wireless.
THE MAN: Anything they tell you is in the paper anyway.
THE RELEASED MAN: Not that there’s much in the old rag.
THE WIFE: As much as there is in the Völkischer Beobachter, though.
THE RELEASED MAN: And in the Völkischer Beobachter there’s just as much as there is in the old rag, eh?
THE MAN: I don’t read that much in the evenings. Too tired.
THE WIFE: Here, what’s wrong with your hand? All screwed up like that and two fingers missing?
THE RELEASED MAN: Oh, I had a fall.
THE MAN: Good thing it was your left one.
THE RELEASED MAN: Ay, that was a bit of luck. I’d like a word with you. No offence meant, Mrs Mahn.
THE WIFE: None taken. I’ve just got to clean the stove.
She gets to work on the stove. The released man watches her, a thin smile on his lips.
THE MAN: We’ve got to go out right after dinner. Has Selma quite recovered?
THE RELEASED MAN: All but for her hip. Doing washing is bad for her. Tell me … He stops short and looks at them. They look at him. He says nothing further.
THE MAN hoarsely: What about a walk round the Alexanderplatz before dinner? See what’s doing with their collection?
THE WIFE: We could do that, couldn’t we?
THE RELEASED MAN: Sure.
Pause.
THE RELEASED MAN quietly: Hey, Willi, you know I’ve not changed.
THE MAN lightly: Course you haven’t. They might have a band playing there. Get yourself ready, Anna. We’ve finished our coffee. I’ll just run a comb through my hair.
They go into the next room. The released man remains seated. He has picked up his hat. He is aimlessly whistling. The couple return, dressed to go out.
THE MAN: Come on then, Max.
THE RELEASED MAN: Very well. But let me just say: I find it entirely right.
THE MAN: Good, then let’s go.
They go out together.
16
Charity begins at home
With banners and loud drumming
The Winter Aid come slumming
Into the humblest door.
They’ve marched round and collected
The crumbs the rich have rejected
And brought them to the poor.
Their hands, more used to beatings
Now offer gifts and greetings.
They conjure up a smile.
Their charity soon crashes
Their food all turns to ashes
And chokes the uttered ‘Heil!’
Karlsruhe 1937. An old woman’s flat. She is standing at a table with her daughter while the two SA men deliver a parcel from the Winter Aid Organisation.
THE FIRST SA MAN: Here you are, Ma, a present from the Führer.
THE SECOND SA MAN: So you can’t say he’s not looking after you properly.
THE OLD WOMAN: Thanks very much, thanks very much. Look, Erna, potatoes. And a woollen sweater. And apples.
THE FIRST SA MAN: And a letter from the Führer with something in it. Go on, open it.
THE OLD WOMAN opening the letter: Five marks! What d’you say to that, Erna?
THE SECOND SA MAN: Winter Aid.
THE OLD WOMAN: You must take an apple, young man, and you too, for bringing these things to me, and up all those stairs too. It’s all I got to offer you. And I’ll take one myself.
She takes a bite at an apple. All eat apples with the exception of the young woman.
THE OLD WOMAN: Go on, Erna, you take one too, don’t just stand there. That shows you things aren’t like your husband says.
THE FIRST SA MAN: What does he say, then?
THE YOUNG WOMAN: He doesn’t say anything. The old lady’s wandering.
THE OLD WOMAN: Of course it’s just his way of talking, you know, it don’t mean any harm, just the way they all talk. How prices have gone up a bit much lately. Pointing at her daughter with the apple: And she got her account book and actually reckoned food had cost her 123 marks more this year than last. Didn’t you, Erna? She notices that the SA man seems to have taken this amiss. But of course it’s just because we’re rearming, isn’t it? What’s the matter, I said something wrong?
THE FIRST SA MAN: Where do you keep your account book, young woman?
THE SECOND SA MAN: And who are you in the habit of showing it to?
THE YOUNG WOMAN: It’s at home. I don’t show it to no one.
THE OLD WOMAN: You can’t object if she keeps accounts, how could you?
THE FIRST SA MAN: And if she goes about spreading alarm and despondency, are we allowed to object then?
THE SECOND SA MAN: What’s more I don’t remember her saying ‘Heil Hitler’ all that loudly when we came in. Do you?
THE OLD WOMAN: But she did say ‘Heil Hitler’ and I say the same. ‘Heil Hitler’!
THE SECOND SA MAN: Nice nest of Marxists we’ve stumbled on here, Albert. We’d better have a good look at those accounts. Just you come along and show us where you live. He seizes the young woman by the arm.
THE OLD WOMAN: But she’s in her third month. You can’t… that’s no way for you to behave. After bringing the parcel and taking the apples. Erna! But she did say ‘Heil Hitler’, what am I do do, Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!
She vomits up the apple. The SA lead her daughter off.
THE OLD WOMAN continuing to vomit: Heil Hitler!
17
Two bakers
Now come the master bakers
Compelled to act as fakers
And made to use their art
On substitute ingredients –
Spuds, bran and blind obedience.
It lands them in the cart.
Landsberg, 1936. Prison yard. Prisoners are walking in a circle. Now and again two of them talk quietly to each other downstage.
THE ONE: So you’re a baker too, new boy?
THE OTHER: Yes. Are you?
THE ONE: Yes. What did they get you for?
THE OTHER: Look out!
They again walk round the circle.
THE OTHER: Refusing to mix potatoes and bran in my bread. And you? How long’ve you been in?
THE ONE: Two years.
THE OTHER: And what did they get you for? Look out!
They again walk round the circle.
THE ONE: Mixing bran in my bread. Two years ago they still called that adulteration.
THE OTHER: Look out!
18
The farmer feeds his sow
You’ll notice in our procession
The farmer’s sour expression:
They’ve underpriced his crop.
But what his pigs require
Is milk, whose price has gone higher.
It makes him blow his top.
Aichach, 1937. A farmyard. It is night. The farmer is standing by the pigsty giving instructions to his wife and two children.
THE FARMER: I wasn’t having you mixed up in this, but you found out and now you’ll just have to shut your trap. Or else your dad’ll go off to Landsberg gaol for the rest of his born days. There’s nowt wrong in our feeding our cattle when they’re hungry. God doesn’t want any beast to starve. And soon as she’s hungry she squeals and I’m not having a sow squealing with hunger on my farm. But they won’t let me feed her. Cause the State says so. But I’m feeding her just the same, I am. Cause if I don’t feed her she’ll die on me, and I shan’t get any compensation for that.
THE FARMER’S WIFE: Too right. Our grain’s our grain. And those buggers have no business telling us what to do. They got the Jews out but the State’s the worst Jew of them all. And the Reverend Father saying ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.’ That’s his way of telling us go ahead and feed our cattle. It weren’t us as made their four-year plan, and we weren’t asked.
THE FARMER: That’s right. They don’t favour the farmers and the farmers don’t favour them. I’m supposed to deliver over my grain and pay through the nose for my cattle feed. So that that spiv can buy guns.
THE FARMER’S WIFE: You stand by the gate, Toni, and you, Marie, run into the pasture and soon as you see anyone coming give us a call.
The children take up their positions. The farmer mixes his pig-swill and carries it to the sty, looking cautiously around him. His wife looks cautiously too.
THE FARMER pouring the swill into the sow’s trough: Go on, have a good feed, love. Heil Hitler! When a beast’s hungry there ain’t no State.
19
The old militant
Behold several million electors.
One hundred per cent in all sectors
Have asked to be led by the nose.
They didn’t get real bread and butter
They didn’t get warm coats or fodder
They did get the leader they chose.
Calw (Württemberg), 1938. A square with small shops. In the background a butcher’s, in the foreground a dairy. It is a dark winter’s morning. The butcher’s is not open yet. But the dairy’s lights are on and there are a few customers waiting.
A PETIT-BOURGEOIS: No butter again today, what?
THE WOMAN: It’ll be all I can afford on my old man’s pay, anyway.
A YOUNG FELLOW: Stop grumbling, will you? Germany needs guns, not butter, no question about that. He spelled it out.
THE WOMAN backing down: Quite right too.
Silence.
THE YOUNG FELLOW: D’you think we could have reoccupied the Rhineland with butter? Everyone was for doing it the way we did, but catch them making any sacrifices.
A SECOND WOMAN: Keep your hair on. All of us are making some.
THE YOUNG FELLOW mistrustfully: What d’you mean?
THE SECOND WOMAN to the first: Don’t you give something when they come round collecting?
The first woman nods.
THE SECOND WOMAN: There you are. She’s giving. And so are we. Voluntary-like.
THE YOUNG FELLOW: That’s an old story. Not a penny to spare when the Führer needs a bit of backing, as it were, for his mighty tasks. It’s just rags, what they give the Winter Aid. They’d give ’em the moths if they could get away with it. We know the kind we got to deal with. That factory owner in number twelve went and gave us a pair of worn-out riding boots.
THE PETIT-BOURGEOIS: No foresight, that’s the trouble.
The dairywoman comes out of her shop in a white apron.
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Won’t be long now. To the second woman: Morning, Mrs Ruhl. Did you hear they came for young Lettner last night?
THE SECOND WOMAN: What, the butcher?
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Right, his son.
THE SECOND WOMAN: But he was in the SA.
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Used to be. The old fellow’s been in the party since 1929. He was away at a livestock sale yesterday or they’d have taken him off too.
THE SECOND WOMAN: What’re they supposed to have done?
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Been overcharging for meat. He was hardly getting nothing on his quota and had to turn customers away. Then they say he started buying on the black market. From the Jews even.
THE YOUNG FELLOW: Bound to come for him, weren’t they?
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Used to be one of the keenest of the lot, he did. He shopped old Zeisler at number seventeen for not taking the Völkischer Beobachter. An old militant, that’s him.
THE SECOND WOMAN: He’ll get a surprise when he comes back.
THE DAIRYWOMAN: If he comes back.
THE PETIT-BOURGEOIS: No foresight, that’s the trouble.
THE SECOND WOMAN: Looks as if they won’t open at all today.
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Best thing they can do. The police only have to look round a place like that and they’re bound to find something, aren’t they? With stock so hard to get. We get ours from the cooperative, no worries so far. Calling out: There’ll be no cream today. General murmur of disappointment. They say Lettner’s raised a mortgage on the house. They counted on its being cancelled or something.
THE PETIT-BOURGEOIS: They can’t start cancelling mortgages. That’d be going a bit too far.
THE SECOND WOMAN: Young Lettner was quite a nice fellow.
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Old Lettner was always the crazy one. Went and shoved the boy in the SA, just like that. When he’d sooner have been going out with a girl, if you ask me.
THE YOUNG FELLOW: What d’you mean, crazy?
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Crazy, did I say? Oh, he always went crazy if anyone said anything against the Idea, in the old days. He was always speaking about the Idea, and down with the selfishness of the individual.
THE PETIT-BOURGEOIS: They’re opening up, after all.
THE SECOND WOMAN: Got to live, haven’t they?
A stout woman comes out of the butcher’s shop, which is now half-lit. She stops on the pavement and looks down the street for something. Then she turns to the dairywoman.
THE BUTCHER’S WIFE: Good morning, Mrs Schlichter. Have you seen our Richard? He should have been here with the meat well before now.
The dairywoman doesn’t reply. All of them just stare at her. She understands, and goes quickly back into the shop.
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Act as though nothing’s happened. It all blew up day before yesterday when the old man made such a stink you could hear him shouting right across the square. They counted that against him.
THE SECOND WOMAN: I never heard a word about that, Mrs Schlichter.
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Really? Didn’t you know how he refused to hang that plaster ham they brought him in his shop window? He’d gone and ordered it cause they insisted, what with him hanging nothing in his window all week but the slate with the prices. He said: I’ve got nothing left for the window. When they brought that dummy ham, along with a side of veal, what’s more, so natural you’d think it was real, he shouted he wasn’t hanging any make-believe stuff in his window as well as a lot more I wouldn’t care to repeat. Against the government, all of it, after which he threw the stuff into the road. They had to pick it up out of the dirt.
THE SECOND WOMAN: T
s, ts, ts, ts.
THE PETIT-BOURGEOIS: No foresight, that’s the trouble.
THE SECOND WOMAN: How can people lose control like that?
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Particularly such a smooth operator.
At this moment someone turns on a second light in the butcher’s shop.
THE DAIRYWOMAN: Look at that!
She points excitedly at the half-lit shop window.
THE SECOND WOMAN: There’s something in the window.
THE DAIRYWOMAN: It’s old Lettner. In his coat too. But what’s he standing on? Suddenly calls out: Mrs Lettner!
THE BUTCHER’S WIFE: What is it?
The dairywoman points speechlessly at the shop window. The butcher’s wife glances at it, screams and falls down in a faint. The second woman and the dairywoman hurry over to her.
THE SECOND WOMAN back over her shoulder: He’s hung himself in his shop window.
THE PETIT-BOURGEOIS: There’s a sign round his neck.
THE FIRST WOMAN: It’s the slate. There’s something written on it.
THE SECOND WOMAN: It says ‘I voted for Hitler’.
20
The Sermon on the Mount
The Church’s Ten Commandments
Are subject to amendments
By order of the police.
Her broken head is bleeding
For new gods are succeeding
Her Jewish god of peace.
Lübeck 1937. A fisherman’s kitchen. The fisherman is dying. By his bed stand his wife and, in SA uniform, his son. The pastor is there.
THE DYING MAN: Tell me: is there really anything afterwards?
THE PASTOR: Are you then troubled by doubts?
THE WIFE: He’s kept on saying these last four days that there’s so much talking and promising you don’t know what to believe. You mustn’t think badly of him, your Reverence.
THE PASTOR: Afterwards cometh eternal life.
THE DYING MAN: And that’ll be better?
THE PASTOR: Yes.
THE DYING MAN: It’s got to be.
THE WIFE: He’s taken it out of himself, you know.
THE PASTOR: Believe me, God knows it.
THE DYING MAN: You think so? After a pause: Up there, I suppose a man’ll be able to open his mouth for once now and again?
THE PASTOR slightly confused: It is written that faith moveth mountains. You must believe. You will find it easier then.
Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 4 Page 23