Reflections

by Walter Benjamin

  Old Acquaintances

  So these characters stepped once more before their creator. There is Peachum, who always keeps his hat on because there is no roof that he does not expect to crash on his head. He has neglected his instrument shop and, with his transport ships, taken a step nearer military commerce, in the course of which his army of beggars is put to use at critical moments as an “excited crowd.” The ships are to serve as troop carriers during the Boer War. As they are rotten, they go down with the troops not far from the Thames estuary. Peachum insists on attending the funeral for the drowned soldiers; along with many others, among whom is a certain Fewkoombey, he hears a sermon by the bishop on the biblical admonition to make one’s talent grow. At this time he had already secured himself against any dubious consequences of his arms-supply business by eliminating his partner, though he does not commit the murder himself. His daughter, too, “Peach,” has brushes with crime—but only such as befit a lady, an abortion and adultery. We meet the doctor who is constrained to perform the operation, and from him hear a speech that is a counterpart to that of the bishop.

  The hero, Macheath, was still very close to his apprenticeship in Threepenny Opera. The novel recapitulates this only briefly; with regard to “whole groups of years” it observes the silence “that makes many pages of the biographies of our big-business men so void of content,” and Brecht leaves open the question whether, at the outset of the transformation that leads from the lumber dealer Beckett to the wholesale merchant Macheath, there was the murderer Stanford Sills, called “The Knife.” It is clear only that the businessman remains loyal to certain earlier friends who have not found their way into legality. This is its own reward, for these friends obtain by robbery the goods that Macheath’s combine markets cheaply and without competitors.

  Macheath’s combine consists of the B shops, whose tenants—independent agents—are contracted only to buy his goods and to pay rent for the shops. In a number of newspaper interviews he has spoken of his “decisive discovery of the human instinct of independence.” Admittedly these independent agents are badly off, and one of them finishes in the Thames when Macheath, for business reasons, temporarily interrupts his supply of goods. Murder is suspected; a criminal affair arises. But this criminal affair merges into the satirical theme. The society seeking the murderer of the woman who has committed suicide will never be able to recognize him in Macheath, who has only exercised his contractual rights. “The murder of the small-business woman Mary Sawyer” not only is central to the plot but also contains its moral. The impoverished shopkeepers, the soldiers crammed into leaky ships, the burglars whose employer has the police president in his pay—this gray mass, which in the novel takes the place of the chorus in the opera, provides the rulers with their victims. On it they commit their crimes. To it belongs Mary Sawyer, who is forced to drown herself, and from its midst comes Fewkoombey, who to his astonishment is hanged for her murder.

  A New Face

  The soldier Fewkoombey, who in the prologue is given lodgings on Peachum’s suggestion, and to whom in the epilogue “the talent of the poor” is revealed in a dream, is a new face, or, rather, scarcely a face but “transparent and faceless,” like the millions who fill barracks and basement apartments. Hard against the frame, he is a lifesize figure pointing into the picture. He points to the bourgeois criminal society in the middle ground. In this society he has the first word, because without him it would make no profit; therefore Fewkoombey is in the prologue. And he is in the epilogue as a judge, because otherwise this society would have the last word. Between the two lies the short span of a half year that he dawdles through, but during which certain affairs of the ruling class have developed so far and so favorably that they end with his execution, which is interrupted by no “king’s messenger on horseback.”

  Shortly before this he has, as we have mentioned, a dream. It is a dream of a trial revolving around a “special crime.” “Because no one can keep a dreamer from triumphing, our friend became president of the greatest court of all time, of the only truly necessary, comprehensive, and just court. . . . After long reflection, itself lasting months, the Supreme Judge decided to begin with a man who, according to the statement of a bishop at a funeral for drowned soldiers, had invented a parable that had been used for two thousand years from every kind of pulpit and represented in the view of the Supreme Judge a special crime.” The judge proves his point of view by specifying the consequences of the parable and cross-examining the long series of witnesses who have to report on their talents.

  “‘Has your talent increased?’ the Supreme Judge asked sternly. Frightened, they answered, ‘No.’ ‘Did he’—referring to the accused—‘see that it did not increase?’ To this they did not know at first how to reply. After a period of deliberation, however, one of them stepped forward, a small boy . . . . ‘He must have seen it; for we froze when it was cold, and were hungry before and after our meals. See for yourself whether it shows or not.’ He put two fingers into his mouth and whistled and . . . out . . . stepped a female figure exactly resembling the small trader Mary Sawyer.” When the accused, in view of such compromising evidence, is conceded a defense counsel, Fewkoombey says, “But he must suit you”; and when Mr. Peachum presents himself in this capacity, the guilt of his client is specified. He must be charged with aiding and abetting, because, says the Supreme Judge, he put into the hands of his people this parable that is also a talent. He then condemns him to death. But the gallows receive only the dreamer, who has understood in a waking minute how far back go the traces of the crime to which he and his kind fall victim.

  The Party of Macheath

  In handbooks on criminality, lawbreakers are described as asocial elements. This may be accurate for the majority. For some, however, it is refuted by recent history. By making many into criminals they made them social models. So it is with Macheath. He is of the new school, while his father-in-law, his equal and long his enemy, is still of the old. Peachum does not know how to put himself across. He hides his greed behind concern for his family, his impotence behind asceticism, his blackmail behind care for the poor. Best of all, he likes to disappear into his office. This cannot be said of Macheath. He is a born leader. His words have a statesmanlike timbre, his deeds a businesslike stamp. The tasks he has to perform are manifold. For a leader they were never harder than they are today. It is not enough to exercise force in preserving property relationships. It is not enough to coerce the dispossessed themselves into exercising it. These practicalities must be dealt with. But just as a ballet dancer is expected not only to be able to dance but also to be pretty, fascism requires not only that there be a savior for capital, but also that he be a noble human being. That is the reason why a type like Macheath is in these times invaluable.

  He knows how to parade what the stunted petit bourgeois imagines a personality to be. Ruled by hundreds of authorities, tossed on the waves of price increases, the victim of crises, this habitué of statistics seeks an individual to whom he can hold on. No one will give him an answer, someone must. For this is the dialectic of the matter: if someone is willing to take responsibility, the petit bourgeois thank him with the promise not to take him to account. They decline to make demands, “because that would show Mr. Mac-heath that we have lost our trust in him.” His nature, that of a leader, is the reverse side of their contentment. The latter tirelessly gratifies Macheath. He misses no opportunity to show himself. And he is a different man before bank directors, before the tenants of the B shops, before the court, and before the members of his gang. He proves “that you can say anything if only you have an unshakable will”; for example, the following:

  “In my opinion, and it is the opinion of a serious, hard-working businessman, we do not have the right people at the head of the state. They all belong to some party or other, and parties are egoistical. Their point of view is one-sided. We need men who stand above the parties, as we businessmen do. We sell our goods to rich and poor alike. We sell everyo
ne, without regard for persons, a hundredweight of potatoes, install his electrical wiring, paint his house. The government of the state is a moral task. We have to reach a point where the employers are good employers, the employees good employees, in brief: where the rich are good rich and the poor good poor. I am convinced that the day of such a regime will come. It will find me among its supporters.”

  Coarse Thinking

  Brecht had Macheath’s program and numerous other reflections printed in italics, so that they stand out from the narrative text. In this way he has produced a collection of speeches and maxims, confessions and pleas that may be called unique. It alone would assure the work’s permanence. What these passages say no one has yet uttered, and yet everyone talks like this. These passages interrupt the text; they are—comparable in this to illustrations—an invitation to the reader now and again to dispense with illusion. Nothing is more appropriate to a satirical novel. Some of these passages lastingly illuminate the assumptions to which Brecht owes his persuasive power. For example: “The main thing is to learn coarse thinking, that is, the thinking of the great.”

  There are many who believe the dialectician an amateur of subtleties. So it is uncommonly useful that Brecht puts his finger on the “coarse thinking” that dialectics produces as its antithesis, includes within itself, and needs. Coarse thoughts have a special place in dialectical thinking because their sole function is to direct theory toward practice. They are directives toward practice, not for it: action can, of course, be as subtle as thought. But a thought must be coarse to find its way into action.

  The forms of coarse thinking change slowly, for they are created by the masses. Even from defunct forms we can still learn. One of these is the proverb, and the proverb is a school of coarse thinking. “Does Mr. Macheath have Mary Sawyer on his conscience?” people ask. Brecht rubs their noses in the answer and gives this section the heading “Wherever a foal is drowned there must be water.” He might have entitled another, “Wherever wood is planed there must be shavings.” It is the section in which Peachum, “the first authority in the field of destitution,” reviews the foundations of the begging industry.

  “I well know,” he says to himself, “why people do not check the infirmities of beggars more carefully before giving. They are convinced there must be wounds where they have aimed blows! Shall none be ruined where they have done business? If they care for their families, must not families end up under the bridges? Everyone is convinced in advance that in face of his own mode of life, mortally wounded and unspeakably helpless people must everywhere creep about. Why take the trouble to check. For the few pence they are prepared to give!”

  Criminal Society

  Peachum has grown since Threepenny Opera. Before his infallible gaze the conditions of his successful speculations lie exposed to view like the errors of those that failed. No veil, not the slightest illusion hides from him the laws of exploitation. Thereby this old-fashioned, unrealistic little man proves himself a highly modern thinker. He need not fear comparison with Spengler, who showed how useless the humanitarian and philanthropic ideologies from the early days of the bourgeoisie have become for present-day entrepreneurs. But the feats of technology benefit in the first place the ruling classes. That is true of advanced forms of thinking as much as of modern forms of locomotion. The gentlemen in Threepenny Novel have no cars, but they are all dialectical thinkers. Peachum, for example, reflects that murder is punishable. “But not to murder,” he thinks, “is also and more dreadfully punishable . . . to sink into the slums, as I and my whole family threatened to do, is nothing less than imprisonment. The slums are prison for life!”

  The crime novel, which, in its early days, in the hands of Dostoyevsky, did much for psychology, has at the height of its development put itself at the disposal of social criticism. If Brecht’s book makes more exhaustive use of the genre than did Dostoyevsky, one of the reasons is that—as in reality—the criminal has his livelihood in society, and society—as in reality—has its share in his theft. Dostoyevsky was concerned with psychology; he made visible the criminal element hidden in each person. Brecht is concerned with politics; he makes visible the element of crime hidden in all business.

  Bourgeois legality and crime—these are, by the rules of the crime novel, opposites. Brecht’s procedure consists in retaining the highly developed technique of the crime novel but discarding its rules. In this crime novel the actual relation between bourgeois legality and crime is presented. The latter is shown to be a special case of exploitation sanctioned by the former. Occasionally natural transitions between the two occur. The thoughtful Peachum observes “how complex deals often turn into very simple actions, customary from time immemorial! . . . It began with contracts and government stamps and by the end murder was needed! How strongly I, of all people, am opposed to murder! . . . And to think that we were only doing business with each other!”

  It is natural that this borderline case of the crime novel has no room for the detective. The role of preserver of the legal order allotted to him by the rules is here taken over by competition. What takes place between Macheath and Peachum is a struggle between two gangs, and the happy end a gentlemen’s agreement that gives legal sanction to the distribution of the spoils.

  Satire and Marx

  Brecht strips the conditions in which we live, removing the drapings of legal concepts. Naked as it will be when it reaches posterity, their human content emerges. Unfortunately it looks dehumanized, but that is not the satirist’s fault. His task is to undress his fellow citizen. If he then gives him a new outfit, as Cervantes does in the dog Berganza, Swift in the horse figure of the Houyhnhnms, Hoffmann in a tomcat, his real concern is nevertheless only with the posture in which his subject stands naked between his costumes. The satirist confines himself to the nakedness that confronts him in the mirror. Beyond this his duty does not go.

  So Brecht contents himself with a small rearrangement of the costumes of his contemporaries. It just suffices, incidentally, to establish continuity with the nineteenth century, which produced not only imperialism but also the Marxism that has such useful questions for it. “When the German Kaiser telegraphed President Krüger, which stock prices were rising there and which falling?” “Of course, only Communists ask that.” But Marx, who was the first to undertake to bring back the relations between people from their debasement and obfuscation in capitalist economics into the light of criticism, became in so doing a teacher of satire who was not far from being a master of it. Brecht was his pupil. Satire, which was always a materialistic art, has in him now become a dialectical one, too. Marx stands in the background of his novel—roughly as Confucius and Zoroaster stand behind the mandarins and shahs who, in the satires of the Enlightenment, survey the Frenchmen around them. It is Marx who here determines the distance that every great writer, but particularly the great satirist, maintains between himself and his object. It was always this distance that posterity made its own when it declared a writer a classic. We may assume that it will find ample accommodation in Threepenny Novel.

  Conversations with Brecht

  Svendborg Notes

  July 4, 1934. A long conversation in Brecht’s sickroom at Svendborg yesterday revolved around my essay “The Author as Producer.” The theory it develops—that a decisive criterion for judging the revolutionary function of literary works lies in the degree of technical progress in literature that leads to a revised function of art forms and thus also of the intellectual means of production—Brecht would only accept with regard to a single type, the upper-middle-class writer, among whom he counts himself. “Such a writer,” he says, “does indeed enjoy solidarity with the interests of the proletariat at one point: where the development of his own means of production is concerned. But in feeling solidarity at this one point, he is at this point, as producer, proletarianized, and utterly so. This complete proletarianization at one point, however, brings about solidarity with the proletariat on the entire front.” My criticism of p
roletarian writers of Becher’s type Brecht found too abstract. He tried to improve it with an analysis of the Becher poem printed in one of the latest numbers of one of the official proletarian literary journals under the title “I Say in All Frankness . . .” Brecht compared it, on the one hand, with his didactic poem on the art of acting written for Carola Neher, and, on the other, with “Bateau ivre.” “I taught Carola Neher a number of things,” he said; “she learned not only how to act, but also how to wash, for example. For she used to wash in order not to be dirty. There was no question of that. I taught her how to wash her face. She then brought this to such perfection that I wanted to film her doing it. But this came to nothing because at that time I was unwilling to film, and she unwilling to be filmed by anyone else. This didactic poem was a model. Every pupil was intended to put himself in the place of the ‘I.’ When Becher says ‘I,’ he believes himself—as president of the Union of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers in Germany—to be exemplary. Only no one wants to follow the example. One gathers simply that he is pleased with himself.” Brecht said on this occasion that he had long intended to write a series of such model poems for different professions—engineer, writer. On the other hand, Brecht compares Becher’s poem to Rimbaud’s. In the latter, he thought, Marx and Lenin, too—had they read it—would have detected the great historical movement of which it is an expression. They would have recognized very clearly that it does not describe the perambulations of an eccentric stroller, but the vagabond flight of a person who can no longer endure the limits of his class, which—with the Crimean War, the Mexican adventure—was beginning to open up exotic parts of the world to its mercantile interests. To assimilate the gesture of the unfettered vagabond, putting his affairs in the hands of chance and turning his back on society, was patently impossible for the stereotype of the proletarian fighter.