by Merilyn Moos
If it’s possible to find many examples where the raising of the stage effect is achieved at the expense of political depth, we can find just as many where the political effect of a good political content is lost because of the defective quality of the stage methods.
In a spoken chorus words and movements must be as precise as possible, the tone, stress and tempo of the chorus must be well polished. If we want to give form to a political content, we have to seek the form that corresponds to the given relationships, the content and the purpose. Form and content are in contradiction if we sing about the 33 dead of May Day 1929 in the form of an Alpine folk song, or if we tell the story of the German workers’ movement since 1914 in a short sketch. Content and means are in contradiction, if we imitate the terror of war with children’s trumpets, if an important sentence is spoken by a bad speaker (too quiet, too lofty, too theatrical), if an important part is badly cast. Form and purpose are in contradiction if the purpose of our agitation is to win over Social Democratic workers and the form is the ridiculing and mockery of their leaders without investigating the basis for their betrayal of the workers and the overwhelming factual material against them, and indeed making this central.
The Social Democratic worker is bound to the treacherous leaders of his party by the trust which he has put in them, and he defends them, in order to justify this trust, and we can only win him over by taking this fact into account.
Furthermore the economic structure and the immediate political situation are essential for the form. Rising unemployment reduces the income of performances and troupes, and thereby the possibility of improving resources. Increasing long-term unemployment weakens the will to fight of many comrades both physically and mentally. Increased exploitation through the new wage system drains the last remaining energy out of those who are working. With the deterioration of our economic situation, the conditions of our work deteriorate too. On the other hand the political situation is getting ever more serious. The class struggle is getting sharper. The masses are looking for a way out. Increasingly those who have previously been apathetic or who have disagreed with us are coming to us to get an answer to the question: What is to be done? And we have to discuss with them honestly, and show them the way: the cause of their impoverishment, the connection between their everyday needs and the capitalist economy based on profit, between wage cuts, fascism and war, public opinion – press, radio, cinema – the trade-union bureaucracy, fascism of all shades. (The scope of fascism is broader than the storm troops of the Nazis. To the forces of fascism belong the millions who sympathise with fascism, whom we must win over to our side, all fascist and fascistic parties and associations, and fascist methods of government such as paragraph 48, emergency decrees, sequestrations and the stripping of immunity.) And finally we have to show the way: Soviet Russia.
In order to win over those who disagree, we have to enter their conceptual world. That means: “the strong man”, “the German people”, “colonies”, “Jews”, “the big and the small”, the “career” of white-collar workers, the “existence” of small business people, the fear of “expropriation” by the middle class which has already been expropriated, the “tradition” of bourgeois newspaper readers, the hatred of the “city” among peasants, “intellectual weapons” and “freedom of conscience” for the intellectuals, hope of putting his party back on the right road and confused ideas about the unity of the proletariat for the Social Democrat, “Moscow gold”, which is the standard argument of all counterrevolutionaries. We have to demonstrate the unviability of these ideas, so that they no longer find a home in any brain.
Our conditions of work are getting worse, but our tasks are growing. We have to be topical and we have to be fundamental. The more superficially we treat a problem, either politically or artistically, the more superficial is the effect both politically and artistically. Better two more rehearsals. Better to launch the play later, but well. Moreover, a good orator is better and a bad agitprop troupe damages the reputation of all the others and hence harms their ability to make an impact.
Our job? Work! Work! Work!
Arbeiterbühne und Film, No 3, March 1931.
THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE: EASTER 1931 IN BERLIN
Siegfried Moos
It was a working conference. All the delegates – 88 delegates representing 13 districts and 126 local groups – were inspired by one single wish: learn, learn, learn. And there can hardly have been a single delegate who did not return to their local group with new stimuli.
The conference heard greetings from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, from the national leadership of the IFA [Community for Workers’ Culture], from the actors’ RGO, [Revolutionary Trade-Union Opposition], from the editorial board of Die Rote Fahne, and the Struggle Community for Red Sports Unity. Two representatives of the Russian workers’ theatre were refused entry to the country. Written greetings were received: from the national committee of the RGO, from the presidium of the IATB [International Workers’ Theatre Federation], from the workers’ theatres in Czechoslovakia and Ukraine. The Polish workers’ theatre published greetings to the conference in German in its newspaper.
The essential feature of the conference and of the discussion was an enormous difference in level. On the one hand there were theatre groups who were still performing old-style dramatic works lasting an entire evening, on the other there were agitprop troupes of enormous political seriousness, bubbling with vitality, activity and initiative. In between there were agitprop troupes that were in process of development, whose scripts and acting style were still superficial and politically defective. This difference of levels was revealed in the discussion, and also in the practical performances of three agitprop groups which were placed in the middle of the conference and turned out to be especially useful. The most advanced agitprop troupes are no longer satisfied with acting and recruiting; but when they discover organisational weaknesses, they intervene helpfully, in order to get things going. Thus a troupe is due to play to the assembly of a factory which has taken over its management. The previous time it performed before an almost empty hall. This time it organises things for itself. It takes care of the production of leaflets, organises and helps with distributing them, helps with the factory newspaper. The hall is full for the performance. The troupe recruits new comrades from among the employees in order to do the revolutionary work required in the factory. The older comrades acquire a new enthusiasm. Another troupe goes into the countryside. No success. They organise agitation for the next performance. They come back, recruit thirty members and found the local group of a revolutionary organisation.
The national conference showed the correctness of the line of the ATBD [German Workers’ Theatre Federation]: training, helping the weaker to keep up, links with big factories.
The troupes which had the best political training were also the most effective agitationally and the most advanced in their political work. For the further development of the troupes, and especially also of theatre companies, which are lagging behind, helping them keep up is (see No 4 of Arbeiterbühne) urgently required. Since this work can be carried out fruitfully only on the district level, our next task is the rigorous and thorough organisation of individual districts. Links with large factories are still extremely inadequate. We can see that it is difficult to establish contact. In order to overcome a certain degree of estrangement between the comrades in the factory and the agitprop troupe, it is necessary for the agitprop troupe to make itself available for donkey work in the factory, helping with the production and distribution of leaflets, and with the factory newspaper. Such assistance must always remain only a means to the preparation and utilisation of our theatrical agitation. This, now as always, remains the centre of our work.
Questions took up a lot of time: methods of work and the crisis of the programme. The report “Methods of Work”, on a high theoretical level, showed the situation at the present moment and the perspective for the workers’ movement. Discu
ssions and the use of performances by the troupes were also fruitful. The essence of the workers’ theatre is the unity between actors and audience. Increasingly the boundary between the stage and the audience is breaking down. Our aim is that the audience should be pulled into the play by questions, interjections and discussions. The auditorium becomes the stage and the spectators become actors. The actors are lost among the spectators. The actors and spectators become a unity. The raised stage loses its significance. This development, of which the first signs are already present, will lead to further progress. One speaker giving a report states that the bourgeoisie, of course unintentionally, is correcting our methods of working. Something we’ve been fighting against for a long time, the crude ridiculing of representatives of the church and the government, is now being punished by imprisonment as a result of the emergency decree. The emergency decree has raised the possibilities of our effectiveness to an extent that we could not have dared to dream of. We can no longer put the pope, members of the national and regional governments, police chiefs and other important “public figures” on the stage, as we otherwise could have dealt with them, so that ….. we can no longer express, but we can suggest. And it is an old rule of effectiveness, that a much greater effect can be achieved through suggestion than by direct statement. (Though this must never happen at the expense of ideological clarity.)The audience understands, and has the pleasure of having thought through what was suggested.
In Berlin now performances are only permitted on the condition that agitprop troupes do not appear. At Easter alongside the national conference of the ATBD was held the national troupe conference of the Communist Party and of the KJVD [German Communist Youth League]. The Berliner Börsenzeitung [Stock Exchange Newspaper] devoted its front page to this conference and openly urged the public prosecutor to “intervene immediately”. We have to say that this fear of agitprop troupes does us almost too much honour. But now we must publicly attack every harassment. The bourgeoisie wants to block our work. Now they can ban our troupes’ songs, strip our troupes of their costumes, confiscate our properties. But they can’t forbid us to show the facts with our means and with new methods, to show the concrete things of everyday life as every reporter does. Our programme and our methods of work must be adapted to the new conditions. The main thing is to connect to the way the masses think about the concrete facts of everyday life, to show how things are connected and their backgrounds! The connection between collective reporting and theatrical representation (for which of course we shall also use satire), working with the most primitive properties, the greatest possible topicality and flexibility of our plays, the most rigorous discipline of the troupe collective, that is the necessary form of our future work.
Resolution unanimously agreed at the National Conference:
Since the last federal conference in Dortmund in 1930 the contradictions between capital and labour have become very much sharper. The progressive intensification of the industrial and agrarian crisis on a national scale is forcing the bourgeoisie to take ever more brutal measures against all working people.
Because Germany lost the war the crisis is particularly acute here. The German bourgeoisie is making desperate efforts to overcome the crisis at the expense of the working masses.
As a result, it finds itself obliged to completely abandon the ground of the pseudo-democracy which has existed hitherto, and to entrust the Brüning government with the establishment of fascist dictatorship. It is actively supported in the carrying through of these measures by the stance of the SPD, whose leaders are publicly mobilised for the fascist course of Brüning, and by the Nazis, who are increasingly exposed as agents of the terrorist suppression of the working class.
The fighting working class is faced with the enormous task of organising a popular revolution against fascism.
In relation to this overall strategic solution the ATBD must make more concrete the tasks it set itself at the Dortmund conference. The local groups of the ATBD must increasingly prove themselves capable of developing themselves as cadres and specialists in their special field of agitation and propaganda, i.e. as struggle units with a responsible function.
In order to enable the national organisation and each local group to accomplish these tasks, the national conference of the ATBD resolves to carry out the following plan of work:
1. Politicisation of the members by systematic training within the troupes as well as on a district level. – Deeper study of the daily press and periodicals; the hostile press must also be included.
2. Activising of the troupes by links with a large industrial or agricultural enterprise. Practical participation in the work of the RGO and ideological support with the aim of taking over responsible agitprop work in the RGO apparatus. - Close cooperation with other proletarian mass organisations, especially with cultural organisations allied in the IFA, with the aim of involving them in the work of the RGO. – Becoming more competent and polished in our methods in relation to the rural population and the petty-bourgeois intermediate strata. – Activity towards hostile organisations with the aim of reducing their influence on the masses and winning over their members.
In face of the sharpening persecution of the revolutionary workers’ organisations, which has already made itself felt also in the ATBD, we have a duty to make up for time lost in the past as rapidly as possible and to work with the greatest energy for the carrying out of this plan.
On the offensive against fascist reaction is our response.
Mobilisation and Counteroffensive!
Arbeiterbühne und Film, No 5, May 1931.
REVOLUTIONARY THEATRE
Siegfried Moos
Some very confused ideas about revolutionary theatre are still around. Some people regard left-wing partisan contemporary theatre, which critically confronts immediate situations, as revolutionary theatre. Others consider revolutionary theatre merely as frivolity, while yet others see it as one-sided party theatre.
I
A play is not necessarily revolutionary theatre because it shows the misery of the proletariat and criticises the present-day organisation of society, and when one of the characters says correct things from a revolutionary standpoint on the stage. It only becomes revolutionary theatre when it shows how circumstances are conditioned by class and presents a revolutionary alternative, when the proletariat appears on stage as the decisive revolutionary element, as a class, as an oppressed, struggling, rising class, which will overthrow the existing social order and will be the bearer of the new social order. It is only revolutionary art when the people on the stage (or in the film) are genuine representatives of their class. For example to put public prosecutors, doctors, judges, factory managers with humane feelings on the stage is only legitimate if it is also shown that they are hypocrites or insignificant exceptions. Exceptions, who are much more dangerous than their fellow class members. For they cover up the laws of class; those characters with “humane feelings” conceal them with the veil of their “humanity”. Even to show a doctor, judge etc. with revolutionary inclinations only makes sense if we want to demonstrate to intellectuals how their interests are linked to those of the entire proletariat. In other cases for us the appropriate representative of the proletariat is not a doctor, a judge, etc., but the worker, the working woman, the young worker. Theatre is only revolutionary when its effect is unequivocal, so unequivocal that it clearly expresses the statement: For us there is only one way out, only one way, that of revolutionary class struggle.
And then the spectator. Our spectator is primarily the proletariat. Only where the spectator and audience form a united totality, only there can something healthy and united come into existence: revolutionary theatre. In the framework of bourgeois commercial theatre all these fundamental conditions for revolutionary theatre cannot be fulfilled.
Revolutionary theatre is and remains the task of the workers’ theatre.
II
Revolutionary theatre as frivolity. In the history of bourgeois t
heatre there are a series of examples of how theatre can have a revolutionising impact. The impact of The Marriage of Figaro in the revolutionary days of 1789. The Dumb Girl of Portici in the days of August 1830. The impact was so strong that the audience, in the spirit of the performance, demonstrated through the streets, destroyed a hostile print shop, and burned down the houses of the Minister of Justice, the Chief of Police and hated journalists. In these pages already enough has been written about the importance of the workers’ theatre and worker actors for the class struggle. The free time of the worker actor is filled up with rehearsals, acting, meetings, political education. He is a true agent of the working class. For workers’ theatre is not frivolity, but the most vital, effective agitation for the class struggle.
III
Revolutionary theatre as party theatre. – In our ranks there is a place for everyone who stands on the ground of class struggle. We want to put forward the teachings of Marx, Engels and Bebel on the stage, applying them to today’s conditions. For instance, when Bebel says: “If I, as a Social Democrat, enter into an alliance with the bourgeois parties, then I will wager a thousand to one that not the Social Democrats but the bourgeois parties will be the winners, and we shall be the losers…. Party comrades must take care that the party leaders do not do any harm to the party.” Or “Either monarchy or bourgeois republic, both are class states, both are a form of state for the preservation of the class rule of the bourgeoisie”; or when Engels says: “So a unitary republic, but not in the sense of today’s French republic, which is nothing but the Empire without the Emperor”; or when Marx says: “Between capitalist and communist society there is the period of the transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this there is also a political transition period, whose state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” And in the Communist Manifesto: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.” So it follows that we have the duty, in the shaping of our plays, to apply these teachings. What Marx and Engels, and in the continuation of their thinking Lenin, have said, must be the foundation of our plays.