The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2

by Peter Weiss

  We began in late November, as the Finnish-Soviet conflict was threatening to escalate into all-out acts of war. As each day passed, the pressure on our project intensified; it was as if every thought, every image, every word had to battle for its right to exist. Everything we wrote down was opposed by crushing dismissal. And though it was anxiety that drove Brecht to work, this time the difficulty of finding focus was compounded by the unwieldy nature of the subject matter. According to the history books, Engelbrekt had suddenly emerged from the darkness when the hour was ripe; and then, having shaped an entire epoch, vanished without a trace. The lack of a past; the brief duration of his activity, one year and ten months, from mid-summer of thirty-four to the twenty-seventh of April thirty-six; the impossibility of ascertaining the location where he was slain by axe and hastily buried; the various motivations for letting him vanish into obscurity—either to rob his actions of significance, to divest him of his exemplary quality, to make him seem like a failure rather than a figure to be emulated, or, by amping up his mystique, to idealize him, to declare him a saint—these were the negations we had to contest with. Such a man does not come out of nowhere, said Brecht. We had to investigate historical facts from which this ambivalent figure could be carved out, had to analyze mechanisms that set this still faceless man in motion, caused him to act, and brought about his downfall. A number of early sketches—which Brecht had produced as Matthis had told him about Engelbrekt for the first time and read to him from Grimberg’s work—had already been cast aside during the meetings in September as misinterpretations. Engelbrekt could not, as Brecht had assumed back then, be viewed as a popular leader of peasant origins. In the poem by Thomas Simonsson, the bishop of Strängnäs, he was described as then litzla man. This could be taken as a characterization of his short stature, as the Swedish historians of the fifteenth century Ericus Olai and Olaus Petri had read it, but could also, as is suggested in the rhymed Karlskrönikan, refer to a lowly heritage. Because in this text, however, the aim was to praise the truly great man, Karl Knutsson, Engelbrekt’s rival and successor from the Bonde dynasty, who had to share the title of commander of the realm with Engelbrekt before having himself elected king; and because Thomas, the owner of mines and smelting works in the region around Norberg, was familiar with Engelbrekt’s rank, we stuck with the idea of the diminutive, stocky miner. Brecht associated the expression then litzla man with the image of a kobold, a Rumpelstiltskin, a forest spirit; he liked the idea of connecting him with this gnome-like quality, which was at odds with Engelbrekt’s fabled strength and booming voice. Our work in September had provided us with a broad foundation. Looking back, the song about Margaret and her Union appeared easy enough to sing; the courts and kings had been clearly outlined. Now, however, it became almost impossible to knead the shadowy, earthy, loamy mass into this small figure who was said to have inspired the country to rise up against foreign domination. And yet here it was that we had to look for our sense of belonging and understanding. We were so disfigured by the events of our age, had been made so alien to ourselves by the disempowering developments, that every glimmer of revolt seemed to become shot through with doubt, that with every upswing we immediately saw those who had been betrayed. The unrest began in the iron mines among those who had nothing left to lose, the miners and farmworkers rose up against the plunder, and a popular militia began to form, but soon enough traders, merchants, large landowners, knights, and clerics joined them, the revolutionary struggle transformed into a national war—and after this collective effort, the nobles and the bourgeoisie made off with the victory. Realizing that it could never have turned out differently, once again defeated and outgunned right around the world, we turned to this period of history to analyze the interplay between past and present experience, in the hope of discovering something about the roots of the developments that continued to repeat themselves. But our goal was not so much to compare the betrayed movement of unity from back then with the fallen front of our own times, but to uncover their particularities and specificities. We needed to find another way to draw lessons from our current failures, which were still so hazy and unclear. Never before had dealing with an artistic problem presented itself to me under such relentless antagonism as during that winter; it had never been more clear to me how artistic activity was played out right where the forces of society clashed most violently. Standing in the center of the contradictions, it faced the threat of being pulverized, but its driving force was the desire to assert itself in the face of these forces. For that reason, with everything seeking to annihilate us, we clung to our task, which was interrupted multiple times until, with us still waiting to resume the work despite its fragmentary state, it came to a halt. The jerking, uneven nature of our progression matched the kind of activity we had become familiar with in the autumn, and which reflected not just the shifting winds of external events but also the differences between us and Brecht. It was not possible for me to dabble in more than one project at the same time; Ljungdal was able, with all the literary sources at his disposal, to work on multiple things at once, was preparing a book about the Marxist worldview and writing reviews; Matthis was also writing articles on the side and planning a film; but Brecht was constantly exposed to a glut of ideas and yet remained capable of organizing the diverse themes, setting them on their tracks, treating them according to a set system. He rushed to and fro in his bustling factory, overseeing all departments, issuing brief instructions here and there, following the paths of the different products, inspecting the outcomes and always coming up with further applications. With the Engelbrekt piece, as I later came to understand, he was mainly interested in exercises of style, investigations of dramatic forms. Occasionally, hastily stroking her platinum blonde hair, he would have Steffin read him prose pieces, meditations that he had dictated during the night, or notes from conversations with refugees, theses for a wide-ranging essay on literary realism; sometimes he also spent time working on a novel about Caesar—for relaxation, as he used to say. He was using ideas brought to him by Greid for a composition that he called the Book of Changes, even though as soon as the actor left he would make snide remarks about his dilettantism. Goldschmidt, on the other hand, he was happy to listen to. The famous surgeon from Vienna—who, as usual, was not allowed to practice his profession in Sweden, allowed at most to help a resident at the Karolinska hospital analyze X-rays for a paltry sum—would tell him anecdotes about this work, which Brecht often inserted word-for-word into the dialogue of his figures Ziffel and Kalle. What attracted him about these reports was their tone. Though Goldschmidt had every reason to complain, they had nothing of the usual litanies delivered by other emigrants. Most of all, Brecht wanted to hear Goldschmidt’s recollections of his time in prison in Russia during the First World War. The reports were burlesque, of a half-Hasidic, half-Slavic flavor. He was talking about his aide, a Romanian gypsy named Juan, who had made Goldschmidt’s stay in the camp as a field medic more bearable through his farcical wit, his good-natured mischief. A kind of Švejk figure, said Brecht, already planning a new piece, which he wanted to work on with Goldschmidt. The search for a pseudonym for this character was like a scene from the play. Considering the practical difficulties of staging a play, the name couldn’t sound Jewish. Erzhauer was suggested, Steinklopfer, Schmied, Maurer, and finally Koch. Despite my apparent autonomy, Brecht’s air of authority—which never left a doubt that it was he who would reap the profits from everything that was produced in his workshop—made it clear that I remained a kind of employee, though without him ever asking how I actually made my living. My efforts to overcome this unsatisfactory situation were bolstered by the idea that I was participating in the construction of a work that was also my own. For myself, for my development, for my path to becoming a writer, I carried out studies that had to be carefully slotted into my timetable—though I couldn’t help but notice the levity with which Brecht attended to the material he received, in contrast to the harried way that I went about my rese
arch. What he found entertaining were the things we translated for him from magazines and books. Pushing his cap—made not of leather but of cloth, though it looked like leather due to its filthy, oily sheen—down even further, imitating the expression of a detective, he pulled the evidentiary exhibits out of our notes and set out to solve a case from the history of Sweden. He wasn’t worried at all by the press campaign against the Soviet Union, which, so they said, was merely looking to secure its remaining spheres of influence, which was also why it wanted to attack Finland. He didn’t believe that the Western powers would establish a front in northern Scandinavia to come to Finland’s aid or to cut off the shipments of Swedish ore to Germany. The only thing he feared was the creation of a Soviet-German military alliance, to which he felt Molotov was alluding in his statement about a friendship cemented in blood between the two peoples. He was in favor of regularizing the borders to protect the Soviet Union but condemned the statements about the need to liberate the Finnish proletariat. And yet, said Ljungdal, soon everything would revolve around the iron ore that Germany needed for its armament. If the English didn’t come to Sweden via Narvik and Tromsø, the German armies would come to secure the raw materials they needed. Ore was also a key issue when unrest first broke out in Dalarna in the fall of fourteen thirty-two. The second part of the play had to begin in the mining districts, for it was here that Engelbrekt’s ancestors had resided since the thirteenth century. In twelve ninety-six, under Birger Magnusson’s regency, the name of a citizen of German extraction, Ingilbertus, had been recorded in the registry list of the city of Uppsala. In thirteen twenty-one, records allude to an Engilbertus, who bore a triangle of halved fleurs-de-lis on his coat of arms. Originally tradespeople, soon residing in the fiefdoms around Västerås, and then in Dalarna, the family became landowners involved in ore mining. In the title registers at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the names Englika, Englike, and Engliko could be found. One Engliko settled not far from Norberg, the site of the largest iron discovery, founded the Englikohof estate, bought into a mine lot, and set up a smelting works. The registers of thirteen sixty-seven revealed that the son of Engliko, in addition to being awarded tax-exempt status by Albert, had been made a nobleman. The coat of arms of this Engelbrekt Englikosson bore a downward-facing wing on the left side and a halved fleur-de-lis on the right. He died in thirteen ninety-nine and left behind two sons, of which the elder, Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, was mentioned for the first time in the year fourteen thirty-two when he stamped an official document with his seal, consisting of a triangle formed of halved fleurs-de-lis. Referred to as a mountain man, montanus, he must have been well over forty years old even then. He owned shares in mines and smelting works in Norberg and, together with his brother, was heir to four estates: in addition to Englikohof, ones in Tjurbo, Snäfringe, and Siende. His noble rank was a lowly one; perhaps he stood in the service of a nobleman as a squire. It was already quite something, said Brecht, to have this family tree, for this succession of names not only produced a biblical, incantatory tone but also allowed the figures to be woven into the sequence of historical facts we had explored earlier. Though we knew nothing about his childhood or the background of the mature Engelbrekt, it was possible to draw conclusions about his personal characteristics and behavior from the information recorded about his ancestors and from the accounts of the manner of his appearance on the stage of history. The fact that they were awarded a noble rank confirmed that the Engelbrekt family had grown wealthy and gained influence. Spelling their name according to Swedish pronunciation rather than the German announced where the bearers felt their loyalties lay. Given that they worked in one of the most important sectors of production and were dependent upon international commerce, however, they would have maintained close ties with the major traders of the Hanseatic League, probably also sharing with them the capital invested in the pits. Since Englikosson was among those who had received his privileges from King Albert, it could be assumed that, for his part, he had been an advocate of the Mecklenburgers. He must have been able to maintain Albert’s patronage through loyalty, or through lending him money, for he was also able to maintain control of his estates, mines, and smelting works while Jonsson Grip was expanding his power across Dalarna. His business acumen was apparent in the fact that he was harmed neither by the expulsion of Albert nor by the arrival of the Danish governors. It wasn’t until thirteen ninety-six, shortly before his death, as Margaret began to bring large swaths of the mining regions under her personal control, that his previous privileges were curtailed. He no longer had unfettered access to trade with the Hanseatic League, having instead to defer to the agents who had been sent out by the regent to take over the export business. If they wanted to retain possession of their transport posts and smelting works, the mine owners now had to put down—depending on their production volume—up to twenty-six ship-pounds of iron for a share in a mining company. In fourteen hundred two, at war with Holstein, the Dane was already circumventing these agreements in many locations and she ordered some of the most productive mines to be occupied. The young Engelbrekt was one of the miners whose rights were threatened, who had to pay bribes and make continual concessions in order to be allowed to retain a portion of their lots. Gradually a sense of indignation began to build up within him that would later lead to revolt. Yet with his coat of arms, he still belonged to the privileged. He could attain an education. His friendships with aristocrats suggested he had been educated on noble estates, perhaps at Rossvik, the estate of the knight Nils Gustafsson Båt, whose son Puke, the same age as Engelbrekt, would become his most intimate confidant during the battles for freedom. As the owner of a mine, he had to oversee the transportation of the iron downriver to Västerås, and from there to Stockholm via Lake Mälaren. In Stockholm, at the transshipment point just on the other side of the sluice, at the Iron Canal, the cargo destined for the Hanseatic cities was weighed and loaded onto the big cogs. He might have traveled on these vessels to visit his trading partners in Lübeck, Wismar, or Rostock, where he could have learned about the sprawling social struggles in central Europe, particularly the revolts of the Bohemian peasants, the effects of which were spreading all the way to the coastal cities. Engelbrekt had supported the Union so long as it served to maintain the free exchange of commodities and provided protection from foreign attack, but it would seem that, when Eric assumed office, he entered a period of doubt, of restlessness, which continued until the outbreak of the revolts. At the outset he had perhaps hoped that he could attain a favorable position in the realm united under Margaret’s successor. There were indications that he, as a member of the cavalry, had taken part in Eric’s campaigns against the Holsteiners and the Hanseatic League, at a time when the Teutonic Order was weakened by its war against the Polish-Lithuanian Union. But this must have placed him in an ambivalent position, for the advantages that were secured in terms of Denmark’s position as a naval power were offset by his losses in valuable trading partners. As a man whose later life would be shaped by his sense of justice, he was thrust into a moral dilemma by breaching the trust of the Hanseatic traders; at the same time, though, it was here that he gained the military experience that would serve him in organizing and leading his people’s army. It was only when Eric broke his promise to guarantee Swedish independence, filling all crucial posts with his own vassals, sending his governors, bailiffs, and bands of mercenaries into Dalarna, doubling taxes, driving down the price of iron, sowing terror among the populace with his slashing and burning, that Engelbrekt began to resist the Danish regent. Slowly, a transformation took place, from the stance of a businessman and financier rooted in a particular class, from his outrage over personal injuries, to a broad, altruistic vision. Based on the high-level functions assigned to him with apparent popular support and on the assertiveness and confidence with which he immediately and without opposition assumed his duties, we could conclude that he had long ago demonstrated his abilities and won the respect of the miners. The sudden
ness of his appearance was simply due to the fact that the close circle in which he had previously been active had broken open, expanding its reach. It wasn’t that he had suddenly transformed from an insignificant individual into a key historical figure, but that from one moment to the next, history threw light on the field in which he had long served as an elected leader. It was impossible to determine the extent to which his first steps into the public sphere were motivated more by personal interests than by those of the greater good; likewise, the question of whether he had progressed to armed resistance through his own convictions or due to pressure on the part of the people would also have to remain unanswered. Even though he might have initially been concerned only with getting his business up and running again, with normalizing trade, he nevertheless became known as the spokesperson for the peasants and miners, who had designated him to present their complaints to the king regarding the injustices in the country. The time was not yet ripe for a military campaign. But the tactician recognized the prerevolutionary situation. He needed the people to achieve his own goals, but he might have also been swept up in the force issuing from the people. Previously, in a covert ritual, the supreme councillors had been responsible for all decisions; now, a public power was emerging from the populace. The revolutionary force could be glimpsed in the altered posture of the workers, the way they began to grasp their tools as if they were weapons. In the first part of the play, the lords had dominated. Now the action would issue from the lowly. Yet as we planned the scenes, the rulers imposed themselves upon us once more, for they occupied the bulk of all the chronicles; their intrigues overshadowed everything that occurred below, down among the earth and the rocks, events that were seldom deemed worth mentioning. We discussed how we could express the shift in power as an epoch dawned in which, once again, peace was being replaced by wars and Sweden was succumbing to a regime of violence that exceeded everything from which they had secured their liberation through effort and sacrifice. And since events were dictated from above, and mistreatment was always foisted upon the people from above, these heights also exuded an awful attraction, which also seduced the historians into turning their dazzled gazes toward the heavens. The decrees could not be evaded, just as decrees determined our daily lives, today, in nineteen thirty-nine. We have to try, said Brecht, to transfer our current anxiety to our treatment of the circumstances from back then, such that the depiction incorporates our defeat, our limited perspective, our continual guessing. Fateful decisions are being made above our heads, sometimes from quite a distance, with their effects then revealing themselves right before our faces. We refuse to allow ourselves to be assaulted, we are drawn into decisions that arouse utter confusion and force us to sketch out our own image of the situation as best we can. The explanations we come up with may well be mistaken—and as such they correspond to much of what was thought up, resolved, and revoked in Engelbrekt’s time. The most important thing was to place the workers, the exploited, in the foreground, to overlay our own plane, and to search for allies there, while the enemies were sent to the back disdainfully and faced off against only from a distance. It was significant that we were dealing with rebelliousness, that the beginning of this part would not be shrouded in a powerlessness in which the rage would dwindle miserably. The elites had to be portrayed in the piece in the same way that the newsreels and the photos in our newspapers conveyed gray impressions of the meetings of the famous leaders, of their supercilious smiles or grim facial features, in the same way that we read their declarations, so abstract and yet so dangerous, aimed as they were at our extinction. Before anything was conveyed about Eric, who eroded Margaret’s Union and destroyed everything she had striven for during the final years of her life, the context of Norberg was to be put on the stage. Brecht’s desire for exact details had Ljungdal, Matthis, and me in the libraries, collecting excerpts from obscure works, sketching devices, constructions, machines. On the tall table Brecht erected a model made of cardboard, bits of wood, and modeling clay that gave an impression of what had been documented in writing and drawings. Pieces of wood were piled up before the stones and set alight, the heated strips of ore were doused in water and made to split, the clumps were hewn out of the mountain and broken down with picks and sledgehammers, the fully laden baskets then hauled up by the winches of the huge treadmill. Buckets full of groundwater were hoisted up, wooden beams lowered down on ropes and fixed together to form supports: each motion of those involved in the operation, the surveyors, the diggers, the carriers and helpers—the latter including women and children—the barrow-pushers and wagoners who carted the raw pieces to the smelting ovens, was intertwined in a deliberate and stable order. The activities around the conical, charcoal-heated smelting hut proceeded in a similar fashion, where the water wheel powered the bellows, the smelted metal ran its course to be cleaned and refined and ultimately worked by the blacksmiths. In contrast to the simple verses that Brecht wanted to use as linguistic material, in his discussion and visualization of the mine structure he seemed to have a universal theater in mind. Perhaps this was in defiance of the fact that even the smallest stage was beyond his reach. He answered our questions in a range of ways. To begin with, he said that we needed to be familiar with the entire, complicated mechanism before we could proceed to restrictions. Then that he felt it was not impossible that such scenes from working life could be set on the stage in the future; that is, in a future dominated by productive forces. The centrality and physicality of the people involved in the production, the power and conviction in their actions, their cooperation, the impression that it was they who bore the burden of building the world, this was all to be decisive for the continued progression of the plot. The crackling of the fire, the beating of the hammers, the rattling of the cogs and the creaking of the wooden frameworks, the climbing and dragging, the blackened faces, sooty caps, filthy boots, and leather aprons, these were component parts of an entirety that was impinged upon by foreign, disruptive elements. If earlier it had been mercenaries from Mecklenburg who had descended upon the peasants, a black bull’s head on their standard, to wrest from them grain and livestock, now heavily armed soldiers stepped forward whose banner of arms bore the Pomeranian red griffin against a silver background or the blue, elongated Danish leopard. They had a few bound women with them, one of the men had a dead child on his leg, which he swung back and forth, and skulking behind them was the country bailiff’s emissary. The men in armor moved cautiously, so as not to sully their polished leg pieces. Even the officer popping his head out was careful not to step in a puddle with his spurred shoes. Hay for the horses was requested; a farmhand brought the bundles over from the stalls. The activity in the mines had not yet drawn to a close. A number of peasants were brought over from the side. The lord had come to collect the taxes, and his bookkeeper read out the names of those who had not made their payments. One of them, stepping forward with his fists pressed on his hips, explained that he had needed to buy back his ox from the bailiff—who had taken it from him during the previous tax collection, valuing it at twelve öre, and then sold it back to him at the going rate of four marks—which had left him broke, and that he was therefore requesting an extension. Hand over the ox, said the collector. The peasant countered that, without the ox, he would be unable to cultivate his land, but two soldiers immediately seized hold of him and led him away. He was tasked, said the officer, with collecting the legally stipulated sums and, in the event of refusal, was authorized to confiscate farms and livestock as security. It was no longer possible, he was told, to provide him with minted money to the value of everything that had previously been handed over in grain, crops, poultry, and skins, as they also had to bear the costs of the board and lodging of the troops and make annual contributions to the costs of fort building. Now all the surrounding ears pricked up. The baskets ceased to stir, the wheelbarrows were set down. The emissary called for the owner of the mine, announcing that the bailiff, Jösse Eriksson, was awaiting the delivery of the iron ingot
s. In the ensuing silence, one of the peasants dared to say that for a year he had been asking for payment of his wages for services rendered to the bailiff, and that now he was going to be made to do forced labor simply because he had demanded what he was owed. With a wave of the officer’s hand, he was beaten and hauled off. Now the miners emerged from the pits. Marksmen sprang to the front and loaded their crossbows with their feet. The workers stood across from the menacing gang, holding their tools. A stocky figure climbed up over the rampart in a thick doublet and soft, pointed cap. What’s going on, he asked. I demand to see the owner of the mine, said the bailiff. You’re looking at him, replied the figure exiting the mine as he patted the dust from his clothes. The officer was unsure how to behave; the man who had just appeared more closely resembled a day laborer than the proprietor of a mine and a landowner, but he considered it appropriate to bow, for the king of the Union, the so-called Eric of Farther Pomerania, progeny of Duke Wartislaw and of a granddaughter of the great Valdemar, this foster son of the distinguished Margaret, governing the three realms from her seat in Denmark, was, it was said, well disposed toward Engelbrekt, so the tax collector of the Danish bailiff installed by Eric ought to show him respect as well. He ordered the soldiers to lower their weapons. Twenty ship-pounds of forging-grade iron, said Engelbrekt, so all together four hundred Livonian pounds, a tenth of our yield, have been loaded as stipulated by the court. It could be more, if we were allowed to work in peace and all this harassment wasn’t driving off our workforce. And why, asked the bailiff, has the iron not yet arrived in Västerås. The loads are on their way, said Engelbrekt, but the roads are in such a sorry state that they are not making any progress. And why don’t you repair them, asked the officer. Because the people we would need to do that, said Engelbrekt, were slain in the military campaigns. Though Lord Eriksson might not have personally felt the pangs of hunger plaguing the people, said Engelbrekt, he might have been miffed by the under-salted meat on his table; that could be remedied if an end were finally put to this war and the cargo in Lübeck harbor were allowed to enter. But the peasants, cried the emissary, have not met their obligations. Yes, the peasants, said Engelbrekt, I would also like to lure them out of the forests into which they fled from the thieves; my own fields are going to ruin because I have no cottagers left. I will report everything to my lord, said the messenger, and then I shall return.