[From Reiner Steinweg, as for the ‘Note to the Audience’ above. The ensuing public discussion was reported in the Welt am Abend on the 22nd, when speakers objected that the Young Comrade could have been expelled from the Party rather than shot. According to the reporter, ‘Brecht replied that the play was so constructed that changes could be made at any time. Sections could be added or taken out as in a montage. There had been many amendments in response to the answers received.’
At the same time ‘Brecht’s and Eisler’s view that the whole work was intended to instruct producers rather than consumers met with sharp disagreement.’
‘Wittfogel [the Marxist China specialist who chaired the meeting] summed up the results, and clarified the issues debated, including the undialectical question of the relative weight to be given to reason and feeling [of the Young Comrade]. The conclusive point was that all were convinced by the necessity of the decision to shoot him on security grounds.’]
LETTER OF 21.4.1956 TO PAUL PATERA
Dear Mr Patera,
The Decision was not written for an audience but exclusively for the instruction of the performers. In my experience, public performances of it inspire nothing but moral qualms, usually of the cheapest sort. Accordingly, I have not let anyone perform the play for a long time. My short play The Exception and the Rule is better suited to performance by non-professional groups.
[Letter 865 from Brecht: Letters 1913–1956, Methuen, 1990. Patera’s allegedly anti-Communist production at the Uppsala Chamber Theatre in Sweden would open five days later. In the same way as in the United States and elsewhere, this prohibition was ignored, as was the importance of Eisler’s music. Nonetheless the letter was subsequently cited to other applicants for performance rights, together with a note by Brecht to say that ‘The playwright has always refused to let The Decision be performed to an audience, since only the Young Comrade can learn from this, and then only if he has also played one of the Agitators and sung in the Chorus’. We know of no record of this condition ever having been fulfilled in Brecht’s lifetime. In 1998, Brecht’s centenary year, his forty-year-old refusal is to be waived.]
Editorial Notes
From ‘He Said Yes’ to ‘The Decision’
The Decision followed so closely on He Said Yes that Brecht and his collaborators were sometimes working on both plays at once; and only the subsequent pairing of the second with the more perfunctory He Said No has come to obscure the importance of their relationship. By Eisler’s account (as reported by his friend Notowicz) he and others had been dismissing He Said Yes as ‘a feeble-witted feudal text’, when Brecht offered to write a ‘counter-play’ in which a man would agree to be ‘excluded from the collective’. Eisler, who had not previously worked with Brecht, came round to discuss its writing, which directly or indirectly relates both to the Meyerhold production of Tretiakov’s Roar China (which came to Berlin that spring) and to some of the experiences of the composer’s brother Gerhart, who worked as an undercover Comintern agent in Canton (the 1927 rising) and Shanghai (between 1929 and 1931). It is not clear when this collaboration on the text began, but the Brecht/Eisler letter to the Neue Musik board was written in mid-May 1930 – six weeks before the He Said Yes première – while Eisler’s main work on the music took from 7 July to 2 August. The actor Ernst Busch, who was to play the Young Comrade, told Reiner Steinweg forty years later that Eisler was then staying in Busch’s lodgings. Brecht was away in the south of France.
The first surviving sketches by Brecht have the Leader of the Party House as a separate role, under the name of Herr Keuner. The Young Comrade was ‘a boy’, ‘ein Knabe’ as in He Said Yes, and the (three) Agitators ask him why he is not at school. This follows from what appears to be the earliest title, thus –
he said yes
(rendered concrete)
1
at the party house three agitators visit herr keuner to collect the chinese ABC of communism. mr k. makes a speech asking if they are in agreement with the idea of supporting the revolution of the chinese proletariat by every means. they answer yes. a boy who is writing in the outer office says yes too. as the agitators leave with the documents the boy asks them to take him along, and shows them a radio set which he could bring and that might come in useful. mr keuner agrees, after asking a few questions and stipulating that the boy’s yes ‘applies only to those who bring knowledge’.
items:
i know chinese
the way the coolies speak it
i learnt this for the world revolution
and i have learnt
from the writings of karl marx
for the world revolution and
have built a radio set
for it too.
The Chinese City of this first conception was Urga (in Outer Mongolia), later changed to Mukden (Manchuria, taken over by Japan in 1932). The ABC of Communism was the title of Nikolai Bukharin’s book of Marxist theory, which is presumably what Brecht meant by his references in the play. Bukharin had been expelled from the Soviet Politburo in 1929, and thereafter slowly slid into disgrace until his death following the last of Stalin’s great show trials in March 1938. Neither in Brecht’s theoretical writings in vols. 16–20 of the 1967 Gesammelte Werke nor in the play itself is his name mentioned.
The order of events
In May 1929 Brecht was strongly influenced towards the KPD (i.e. Communist Party) by police violence during the Berlin May Day demonstrations. The Berlin police were then under Socialist control. The theatre holidays followed, as did the Baden-Baden Festival (with the original lehrstück). At the beginning of the new theatre year in Berlin there were two notable failures: the one by Brecht, Weill and Elisabeth Hauptmann (Happy End); the other by Piscator, Walter Mehring and Eisler (The Merchant of Berlin). The Wall Street crash occurred in October, with disastrous consequences for Germany, and Weill completed Lindbergh’s Flight, re-setting the Hindemith numbers.
Weill took up the commission to write a piece for radio (and/or schools) for the next Festival on a Hauptmann/Brecht version of the Waley Taniko. Work started in January 1930, involving a new focus on ‘Einverständnis’. Brecht and Eisler agreed to write a companion play which would be a ‘concretisation’ of the same theme; they set it in China. With their letter of 13 May they withdrew it from the Festival before Eisler began on the music; and Weill with his piece followed suit. He Said Yes was then performed separately in late June by the Berlin schools under the auspices of a Prussian State institute, after which Eisler set The Decision for three left-wing workers’ choral societies to rehearse that autumn and perform in the Philharmonie (concert hall) on 13 December, then again in the Grosses Schauspielhaus on 18 January 1931. Both pieces were conceived to be worked on for the benefit of the (non-professional) participants, performing to an unorthodox audience. The first performances were followed by public discussions, after which amendments were made to the texts and the composers made adjustments accordingly.
Universal-Edition, who published both composers, brought out Weill’s piece in 1930, without waiting for the changed text of Brecht’s Versuche and Weill’s consequent adjustments. Eisler’s however appeared in mid-1931 with a text corresponding to the revised Versuche 4 (also of that year). Meantime Brecht had tacked He Said No on to the former, seemingly without consulting the composer. As a result it is necessarily the first He Said Yes that gets performed if the music is to play its part. Both Weill’s and Eisler’s are music-theatre works of the highest quality.
THE MOTHER
Texts by Brecht and Eisler
‘THE MOTHER’
The Mother, with music by Eisler, is the fifteenth of the ‘Versuche’, a dramatisation of the novel by Maxim Gorky. It also made use of a dramatisation by G. Stark and G. Weisenborn. It was performed on the anniversary of the death of Rosa Luxemburg, the great revolutionary.
The Notes to The Mother are part of the ninth ‘Versuch’, ‘Concerning a non-aristotelian dramaturgy’.
[F
rom Versuche 7, Kiepenheuer, Berlin, 1933. Stark was then a director at the Berlin Volksbühne, Weisenborn a playwright, later associated with the Harnack-Boysen resistance group, which was linked to the Red Orchestra.]
SONG OF THE MOTHER ON THE HEROIC DEATH OF THE COWARD VESSOVCHIKOV
So what was he like?
Whatever it was
When he went to the wall
He could die.
Nor did he compare it with others
Or himself with other people, but
Set about changing himself, under threat, into
Indestructible dust. And whatever
Still occurred, he performed
Like an agreement, as though fulfilling
A contract. Extinguished too
Were the wishes within him. Strictly he denied himself
The slightest movement. His inside
Caved in and vanished. Like an empty page
He escaped all
But description.
[‘Lied der Mutter über den Heldentod des Feiglings Vessovchikov’, from p. 127 of Gedichte 4 (vol. 14) of the Berlin and Frankfurt edition, 1993. The editors’ note dates the typescript 1931 and says that Brecht passed it to Eisler, but it was never set. Neither of the two Vessovchikov brothers is shown by him as dying or as a coward, so it must have been written before the play took shape.]
NOTES
I
Written in the style of the didactic pieces, but requiring actors, The Mother is a piece of anti-metaphysical, materialistic, non-aristotelian drama. This makes nothing like such a free use as does the aristotelian of the passive empathy of the spectator; it also relates differently to certain psychological effects, such as catharsis. Just as it refrains from handing its hero over to the world as if it were his inescapable fate, so it would not dream of handing the spectator over to an inspiring theatrical experience. Anxious to teach the spectator a quite definite practical attitude, directed towards changing the world, it must begin by making him adopt in the theatre a quite different attitude from what he is used to. The following are a few of the means employed in the first production of The Mother in Berlin.
II Indirect impact of the epic stage
In the first production of The Mother the stage (Caspar Neher) was not supposed to represent any real locality: it as it were took up an attitude itself towards the incidents shown; it quoted, narrated, prepared and recalled. Its sparse indication of furniture, doors, etc. was limited to objects that had a part in the play, i.e. those without which the action would have been altered or halted. A firm arrangement of iron piping slightly higher than a man was erected at varying intervals perpendicularly to the stage; other moveable horizontal pipes carrying canvasses could be slotted into it, and this allowed of quick changes. There were doors in frames hanging inside this, which could be opened and shut. In New York the set (by Max Gorelik) was similar but more solid. A big canvas at the back of the stage was used for the projection of texts and pictorial documents which remained throughout the scene, so that this screen was also virtually part of the setting. Thus the stage not only used allusions to show actual rooms but also texts and pictures to show the great movement of ideas in which the events were taking place. The projections are in no way pure mechanical aids in the sense of being extras, they are no pons asinorum; they do not set out to help the spectator but to block him; they prevent his complete empathy, interrupt his being automatically carried away. They turn the impact into an indirect one. Thus they are organic parts of the work of art.
III Projections
See below (page 363).
IV Epic method of portrayal
The epic theatre uses the simplest possible groupings, such as express the event’s overall sense. No more ‘casual’, ‘life-like’, ‘unforced’ grouping; the stage no longer reflects the ‘natural’ disorder of things. The opposite of natural disorder is aimed at: natural order. This order is determined from a social-historical point of view. The point of view to be adopted by the production can be made more generally intelligible, though not properly characterised, if we call it that of the genre painter and the historian. Scene 2 of The Mother includes the following incidents which have to be brought out by the production and kept separate from one another.
1. The young worker Pavel Vlassov is visited by revolutionary comrades who want to do an illegal piece of work in his quarters.
2. The Mother is disturbed to see him in the company of revolutionary workers. She tries to chase them away.
3. During this illegal work the worker Masha Khalatova explains in a little song how, in order to gain bread and jobs, workers need to ‘turn the whole State upside down for ever’.
4. A police search makes the Mother realise the danger of her son’s new activities.
5. Though horrified by the brutality of the police, the Mother declares that she finds her son, not the State, to be guilty of violence. She blames him for this, and his leaders even more so.
6. The Mother sees her son being chosen for a dangerous operation, distributing pamphlets, and offers her own services in order to save him from being involved.
7. After a moment’s discussion the revolutionaries hand the pamphlets over to her. She cannot read them.
These seven incidents must be portrayed as emphatically and significantly as any well-known historical episodes, though without sentimentalising them. In this epic theatre serving a non-aristotelian type of drama, the actor will at the same time do all he can to make himself observed standing between the spectator and the event. This making-oneself-observed also contributes to the desired indirect impact.
V For example: a description of the first portrayal of the Mother
Here are a few examples of what epic acting brought out, as shown by the actress who created the part (Helene Weigel):
Scene 1: In the first scene the actress stood in a particular characteristic attitude in the centre of the stage, and spoke the sentences as if they were in the third person; and so she not only refrained from pretending in fact to be or to claim to be Vlassova (the Mother), and in fact to be speaking those sentences, but actually prevented the spectator from transferring himself to a particular room, as habit and indifference might demand, and imagining himself to be the invisible eye-witness and eavesdropper of a unique intimate occasion. Instead what she did was openly to introduce the spectator to the person whom he would be watching acting and being acted upon for some hours.
Scene 2: Vlassova’s attempts to scare off the revolutionaries were shown in such a way that, if one paid attention, it was not difficult to glimpse her own enjoyment of the situation. Her way of reproaching the revolutionaries was shocked rather than angry; her offer to distribute the pamphlets was full of reproach.
Scene 3: By muscling into the factory yard she showed what an asset it was for the revolutionaries to gain such a fighter.
Scene 4: She received her first lesson in Communism with the attitude of a great realist. She showed a certain amicable energy in her argument with her partners, treating them as idealists who were loth to recognise reality. A proof for her had to be not only true but also probable.
Scene 5: The May Day demonstration was spoken as if the participants were before a police-court, but at the end the actor playing Smilgin indicated his collapse by going down on his knees; the actress playing the Mother then stooped during her final words and picked up the flag that had slipped from his hands.
Scene 6: From this point on, the Mother was played so as to be much friendlier and more in command of the situation, apart from the very beginning of the scene, where she showed fright. ‘Praise of Communism’ was sung softly and calmly. The scene where the Mother and other workers learn to read and write is one of the most difficult for the actor. The audience’s laughter at one or two sentences must not prevent him from showing how difficult learning is for the old and unadaptable, thus achieving the stature of the real historical event, the fact that a proletariat which had been exploited and restricted to physi
cal work was able to socialise knowledge and expropriate the bourgeois intellectually. This event is not to be read ‘between the lines’; it is directly stated. A lot of our actors, when something has to be stated directly in a scene, get restless, and at once look there for something less direct which they can represent. They fall on whatever is ‘inexpressible’, between the lines, because it calls for their gifts. Such an approach makes what they can and do express seem banal, and is therefore harmful.
In the short scene ‘Ivan Vessovchikov can no longer recognise his brother’, the actress managed to convey how, without believing the teacher’s nature to be unalterable, the Mother was at the same time not going to point a finger at the changes that had taken place.
Scene 7: The Mother has to discuss her revolutionary work with her son under the enemy’s nose: she deceives the prison warder by displaying what seems to him the moving, harmless attitude of the average mother. She encourages his own harmless sympathy. So this example of a quite new and active kind of mother-love is herself exploiting her knowledge of the old familiar out-of-date kind. The actress showed that the Mother is quite aware of the humour of the situation.
Scene 8: This is another scene where the actress showed that not only she herself but Vlassova too could appreciate the slightly comic aspect of her make-believe. She made clear her conviction that a quite passive, if flexible attitude (that of a justifiable injury) should be enough to make the butcher aware of his class origins. She acted as the modest little drop that causes the bucket to overflow. ‘Praise of the Vlassovas’ (an instance of limited praise) was recited in front of the half-curtain and in her presence, standing to one side at a little distance.
Scene 11: The Mother’s mourning for her son can be shown by her hair having turned white. It is strong, but is merely sketched. And of course it does not destroy the humour. This must permeate the description of the denunciation of God.
Brecht Collected Plays: 3: Lindbergh's Flight; The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent; He Said Yes/He Said No; The Decision; The Mother; The Exception & the ... St Joan of the Stockyards (World Classics) Page 35