July 6. Brecht, in the course of yesterday’s conversation: “I often think of a tribunal before which I am being questioned. ‘What was that? Do you really mean that seriously?’ I would then have to admit: Not quite seriously. After all I think too much about artistic matters, about what would go well on the stage, to be quite serious; but when I have answered this important question in the negative, I will add a still more important affirmation: that my conduct is legitimate.” This formulation, it is true, came later in the conversation. Brecht had begun with doubts not of the legitimacy but of the effectiveness of his procedure. With a sentence that arose from some remarks I had made on Gerhart Hauptmann: “I sometimes wonder whether they are not, after all, the only writers who really achieve anything: the writers of substance, I mean.” By this Brecht means writers who are entirely serious. And to explain this idea he starts from the fiction that Confucius had written a tragedy or Lenin a novel. One would think this inadmissible, he declares, conduct unworthy of them. “Let us suppose that you read an excellent political novel and afterward find out it is by Lenin; your opinion of both would be changed, and to the disadvantage of both. Nor would Confucius be allowed to write a play by Euripides; it would be thought undignified. Yet his parables are not.” In short, all this points to a distinction between two literary types: the visionary, who is serious, on the one hand, and the reflective man, who is not quite serious, on the other. Here I raise the question of Kafka. To which of the two groups does he belong? I know, the question cannot be decided. And this very thing is for Brecht a sign that Kafka, whom he considers a great writer, like Kleist, Grabbe, or Büchner, is a failure. His starting point is really the parable, which is responsible to reason and therefore, as far as its wording is concerned, cannot be entirely serious. But this parable is then subject to artistic elaboration. It grows into a novel. And, strictly speaking, it carried the germ of one from the start. It was never quite transparent. Moreover, Brecht is convinced that Kafka would not have found his own form without Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and the other parabolic passage in The Brothers Karamazov, where the corpse of the saintly Starets begins to stink. In Kafka, therefore, parable is in conflict with vision. But as a visionary, Brecht says, Kafka saw what was to come without seeing what is. He stresses—as he had done earlier in Le Lavandou, but, to me, more clearly—the prophetic side of his work. Kafka, he says, had only one problem, that of organization. What seized him was fear of the ant-colony state: how people become estranged from themselves by the forms of their communal life. And certain forms of this estrangement he foresaw—for example, the procedure of the G.P.U. He did not, however, find a solution, and did not wake from his nightmare. Of Kafka’s precision, Brecht says it is that of someone vague, a dreamer.
July 12. Yesterday, after a game of chess, Brecht said: “If Korsch comes we shall have to work out a new game with him. A game in which the positions do not always remain the same; where the function of the pieces changes if they have stood for a while on the same square: then they become either more effective or weaker. Like this, the game does not develop; it stays the same too long.”
July 23. Yesterday a visit from Karin Michaelis, who is just back from her Russian journey and full of enthusiasm. Brecht recalls his guide, Tretiakov, who showed him Moscow, proud of everything his guest saw, no matter what. “That is no bad thing,” says Brecht; “it shows that it belongs to him. No one is proud of other people’s property.” After a while he adds: “Well, in the end I did get a bit tired. I could not admire everything, nor did I want to. It’s like this: they are his soldiers, his trucks. But, unfortunately, not mine.”
July 24. On a beam supporting the ceiling of Brecht’s study are painted the words “Truth is concrete.” On a window sill stands a little wooden donkey that can nod its head. Brecht has hung a little notice around its neck saying, “I, too, must understand it.”
August 5. Three weeks ago I gave B. my essay on Kafka. He certainly read it, but never spoke about it of his own accord, and both times I brought the conversation around to it, he replied evasively. Finally I took back the manuscript without a word. Yesterday evening he suddenly came back to this essay. The transition to it, somewhat abrupt and breakneck, was effected by the comment that I, too, could not be entirely absolved from the reproach of a diarist’s style of writing, in the manner of Nietzsche. My Kafka essay, for example—he was concerned with Kafka merely from the phenomenal point of view—took the work as something that had grown by itself—the man, too—severed all its connections, even that with its author. It was always the question of essence that finally interested me. Whereas such a matter ought to be approached by asking the question of Kafka: what does he do? how does he behave? And by looking in the first place more at the general than at the particular. It then emerges that he lived in Prague in a bad milieu of journalists and self-important literati; in this world literature was the main, if not the only, reality. With this attitude Kafka’s strengths and weaknesses are connected; his artistic value, but also his manifold futility. He is a Jewboy—as one might also coin the term Aryanboy—a skinny, unlikable creature, a bubble on the iridescent morass of Prague culture, nothing more. Nevertheless, he also had certain very interesting sides. These could be brought out; one would have to imagine a conversation between Lao-tse and his disciple Kafka. Lao-tse says: “Well now, disciple Kafka, the organizations, the leaseholds and other economic forms in which you live make you uneasy?” “Yes.” “You can’t cope with them any more?” “No.” “A stock certificate worries you?” “Yes.” “And now you are looking for a leader to hold on to, disciple Kafka.” That is of course despicable, says Brecht. I reject Kafka. And he goes on to talk about a parable of a Chinese philosopher on “the pains of usefulness.” In the forest there are various kinds of tree trunks. From the thickest, beams for ships are cut; from less thick but still respectable trunks, box lids and coffin sides are made; the very thin ones are used for rods; but nothing comes of the stunted ones—they escape the pains of usefulness. “In what Kafka wrote you have to look around as in such a forest. You will then find a number of very useful things. The images are good. But the rest is obscurantism. It is sheer mischief. You have to ignore it. Depth takes you no further. Depth is a dimension of its own, just depth—which is why nothing comes to light in it.” I explain to B. in conclusion that plumbing the depths is my way of going to the antipodes. In my essay on Kraus I did indeed come out there. I know that the one on Kafka was not so successful: I could not rebut the charge that it consisted of diarylike notes. Discussion within the frontier zone designated by Kraus, and in another way by Kafka, did indeed interest me. I had not yet, I said, explored this area in Kafka’s case. That it contained a good deal of rubbish and detritus, much real obscurantism, I fully realized. Nevertheless, other aspects were more decisive, and I had touched on a number of them in my essay. B.’s critical approach must, after all, prove itself in the interpretation of the particular. I open “The Next Village.” At once I was able to observe the conflict produced in B. by this suggestion. Eisler’s remark that this story was “worthless” he rejected emphatically. On the other hand, he was equally unable to explain its value. “It would need close study,” he thought. Then the conversation broke off; it was ten o’clock, and the radio news was on the air from Vienna.
August 31. The day before yesterday we had a long and heated debate on my Kafka. Its basis: the charge that it advanced Jewish fascism. It increased and propagated the obscurity surrounding this author instead of dispersing it. Whereas it was of crucial importance to clarify Kafka, that is, to formulate practicable proposals that can be derived from his stories. That proposals were derivable from them could be supposed, if only from the serene calm of their viewpoint. However, these suggestions would have to be sought in the direction of the great general abuses afflicting present-day humanity. Brecht tries to show their imprint in Kafka’s work. He confines himself chiefly to The Trial. There above all, he thinks, we find the fea
r of the unending and irresistible growth of cities. He claims to know from personal experience the crushing weight of this phenomenon on human beings. The inexplicable mediations, dependencies, entanglements besetting men as a result of their present form of existence, find expression in these cities. They find expression in another way in the desire for a “Leader,” who for the petit bourgeois represents the man whom—in a world where blame can be passed from one person to the next so that everyone escapes it—he can hold accountable for all his misfortunes. Brecht calls The Trial a prophetic book. “What can become of the Cheka you can see from the Gestapo.” Kafka’s perspective: that of the man who has gone to the dogs. Odradek is characteristic of this: Brecht interprets the janitor as representing the cares of the father of a family. Things must go wrong for the petit bourgeois. His situation is Kafka’s. But whereas the type of petit bourgeois current today—that is, the fascist—decides in face of this situation to exert his iron, indomitable will, Kafka hardly resists; he is wise. Where the fascist imposes heroism, he poses questions. He asks for guarantees of his situation. But the latter is so constituted that the guarantees would have to exceed all reasonable measure. It is a Kafkaesque irony that the man who seemed convinced of nothing more than of the invalidity of all guarantees was an insurance official. Moreover, his unrestricted pessimism is free of any tragic sense of fate. For not only has his expectation of misfortune a solely empirical foundation—albeit a perfect one; he also places the criterion of final success with incorrigible naïveté in the most trivial and banal of enterprises: the visit of a commercial traveler or an application to an authority. The conversation concentrated at times on the story “The Next Village.” Brecht declares it a counterpart to the story of Achilles and the tortoise. Someone who composes the ride from its smallest particles—leaving aside all incidents—will never reach the next village. Life itself is too short for such a ride. But the error lies in the “someone.” For just as the ride is deceptive, so, too, is the rider. And just as the unity of life is now done away with, so, too, is its brevity. No matter how brief it may be. This makes no difference, because a different person from him who started the ride arrives at the village. For my part, I give the following interpretation: the true measure of life is remembrance. Retrospectively, it traverses life with the speed of lightning. As quickly as one turns back a few pages, it has gone back from the next village to the point where the rider decided to set off. He whose life has turned into writing, like old people’s, likes to read this writing only backward. Only so does he meet himself, and only so—in flight from the present—can his life be understood.
September 27, Dragør. In a conversation one evening a few days ago, Brecht explained the curious indecision that at present prevents his making definite plans. The first reason for this indecision is—as he emphasizes himself—the advantages distinguishing his personal situation from that of most emigrants. If in this he scarcely acknowledges emigration in general as the basis for undertakings and plans, any such conception of it in his particular case is all the more irrevocably abolished. His plans have a wider compass. This presents him with a choice. On the one hand, prose projects are waiting. The smaller one on Ui—a satire on Hitler in the style of the historiographers of the Renaissance—and the big project of the Tui-novel. The Tui-novel is intended to give an encyclopedic survey of the follies of the Tellectual-Ins (intellectuals); it will, it seems, take place at least in part in China. A small model for this work is ready. But besides these prose plans he is claimed by projects that go back to very old studies and reflections. And while it was just possible to include the reflections that originated in connection with epic theater in the notes and introductions to the Versuche, ideas that arose from the same interests but were later combined with the study of Leninism, on the one hand, and with the scientific tendencies of the empiricists, on the other, have outgrown so restricted a framework. For years they have been grouped, now under this, now under that heading, so that in turn non-Aristotelian logic, behavior theory, the new encyclopedia, the critique of ideas, moved to the center of Brecht’s endeavors. These different activities are converging at present in the idea of a philosophical, didactic poem. Brecht’s scruples originate in the question whether—in view of all his previous work, but especially its satirical part and above all Threepenny Novel—he would find acceptance with the public for this work. In this doubt two different trains of thought come together. On the one hand, there are the misgivings to which—the more intense Brecht’s concern with the problems and methods of the proletarian class struggle became—the satirical and even more the ironic standpoint must as such be exposed. These misgivings—of a primarily practical nature—would, however, be misunderstood if they were identified with other, more fundamental considerations. This deeper layer of scruples concerns the artistic and playful element in literature, but above all those moments that sometimes, in part, make themselves refractory to reason. These heroic efforts of Brecht’s to legitimize art in relation to reason have thrown him back time and again on the parable, in which artistic mastery is proved by the final abolition in it of all elements of art. And it is just this concern with parable that is now prominent in more radical form in the considerations surrounding the didactic poem. In the course of the conversation itself I tried to explain to Brecht that such a didactic poem would have to justify itself less to the bourgeois public than to the proletarian, which would presumably take its criteria less from Brecht’s earlier, partly bourgeois-orientated work than from the dogmatic and theoretical content of the didactic poetry itself. “If this didactic poem is able to mobilize for itself the authority of Marxism”—I told him—“the fact of your earlier work will hardly shake it.”
October 4. Yesterday Brecht left for London. Whether he is now and then particularly tempted by me, or whether he has recently become generally more prone to it than earlier, what he himself called the baiting stance of his thought is now far more noticeable in conversation than earlier. Indeed, I am struck by a particular term that stems from this attitude. He is especially fond of using the concept of “nobodies” with such intent. In Dragør I read Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. First of all, he blamed this for being the chief cause of my illness. And to back up his argument he told me how when he was in his youth a protracted illness, the germ of which he had probably carried for a long time, had broken out when, one afternoon, already too weak to protest, he had listened to a schoolfellow playing Chopin on the piano. Brecht attributes to Chopin and Dostoyevsky an especially detrimental influence on health. But he took up every other possible position against my reading as well, and as he was himself at the same time reading Schweik, he did not miss the opportunity to compare the value of the two authors. At all events, Dostoyevsky could not hold a candle to Hasek, but was, rather, consigned unceremoniously to the “nobodies,” and he was doubtless close to extending to his work the term that he holds ready of late for all writings that lack, or to which he denies, an enlightening character. He calls them “clods.”
June 28, 1938. I found myself in a labyrinth of staircases. This labyrinth was not everywhere roofed. I climbed up; other stairways led downward. On one landing I found myself standing on a summit. A wide prospect opened across the country. I saw others standing on other peaks. One of these people was suddenly gripped by vertigo and plunged down. The giddiness spread; other people now fell from other summits into the depths. When I, too, was seized by this feeling, I woke up.
On June 22 I arrived at Brecht’s.
Brecht points to a nonchalant elegance in the posture of Virgil and Dante, describing it as the background against which Virgil’s grand gesture stands out. He called them both promeneurs. He stresses the classical status of the Inferno: “You can read it in the country.”
Brecht speaks of his inveterate hatred of clergymen, inherited from his grandmother. He insinuates that those who have adopted the theoretical doctrines of Marx in a form that is doctored to suit themselves will always form
a clerical camarilla. Marxism lends itself far too easily to “interpretation.” It is a hundred years old and has been shown . . . (At this point we are interrupted.) “‘The state must be abolished.’ Who says that? The state.” (Here he can only mean the Soviet Union.) Brecht comes and stands in an artful, crushed posture in front of the armchair in which I am sitting—he is imitating ‘the state’—and says, with a sidelong squint at imaginary clients; “‘I know, I ought to be abolished.’”
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