A Last Interview with Brecht

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This interview with Bertolt Brecht originally appeared in the November 1956 edition of The London Magazine.

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There was no name by the door-bell, just the two letters B. B. The house was at the back of a courtyard off Chausseestrasse, which is a continuation of Friedrichstrasse, one of the busiest streets in East Berlin. Brecht occupied only half of the house, and I was led upstairs to his work-room at the back of it, where I found him with his secretary looking through photographs of Berliner Ensemble productions and picking out the ones to be sent to Moscow.

He hadn’t either the Hemingway physique or the commanding voice which some of the stories about him suggest. He was a small man and he spoke in a soft, rather high-pitched voice which was insistent without having to be emphatic. I’m not sure whether it was his withdrawn, quietly doctrinaire way of talking that first made me think of a monk, but once the idea was there, everything encouraged it – the thin hair brushed forward at the front, the thin grey workman’s jacket hanging loose and low, and even the room, which was large and bright but monastic in the sparseness and simplicity of its furniture. There were chairs around the desk and around the table, there were books and pictures and a huge filing-cabinet, but altogether so little for such a large room that the dominant impression was of bare floorboards and bare whitewashed wall.

He spoke, too, rather like an abbot very patiently explaining points of doctrine; but in conversation, the doctrines didn’t seem as rigid as they do in print, and the faith seemed more like a personal faith. He attacked bourgeois playwrights, as he had often attacked them before, for paying too little attention to the pressure of society on the individual character, but it was surprising when s comparison of Shakespeare with modern playwrights led to a pious expression of faith in the future:

‘In Shakespeare, if there is a cook he always behaves like a cook and you know he is a cook. Shakespeare is the greatest bourgeois writer. He could see things for what they were, and he wasn’t troubled by a bad conscience. Society was different then. Today though, unfortunately – and it is really unfortunate – a cook is only free to behave in a certain way. Not all the time, of course. When he is talking to someone equal to himself, then he has freedom. You could have a scene between a cook and a cigar merchant, for instance. But when he is with his superiors, no. – In fifty years’ time, things will be different. We shall have reached a state where personality will be free. A man will cook because he has genius, or has good taste. Like the composer. What is his name? Rossellini? Rossini. But today a cook is only a cook. – And the bourgeois playwright fails to show that.’

The prophecy is only an orthodox echo of what Marx said about the way the revolution would free the individual consciousness from the enslavement of capitalist society, and put like this, it sounded oddly naïve. But he spoke of this Utopian future with a warmth that was quite missing from anything he said about the unsatisfactory present.

If writers, like cooks, were all slaves of society, I wondered whether he believed them all to be equal, or some to be less enslaved than others.

What about playwrights living in the West but hostile to the societies they are living in, like Sartre and Arthur Miller?

‘Gut aber nicht ganz gut. They are good plays. They help to alter society now, but in fifty years’ time when society is changed, no one will read them. They can’t help this. It is the angle they write from. – If I look at your face from here, or from here,’ he got up and moved to my right, ‘or from here,’ moving to my left, ‘it is a different face.’

But a good portrait can be painted from any angle.

‘Yes, but then you are free to choose the angle you paint from.’

But what is it that deprives them of freedom to choose the angle? Is it because of what you said about bad consciences? That they feel guilty on account of the societies they are living in and feel themselves to be part of?

‘No. Sartre hasn’t got a bad conscience. Why should he? He pulls himself away from the things he sees are wrong. But if he frees himself here,’ he touched his elbow, ‘then he gets caught here,’ pointing to his knee, ‘and by the time that he frees himself there, he gets caught up again here.’

But can’t he see where he isn’t free and show that in his plays?

‘No, it’s impossible for him to be objective.’

I still don’t see why. Because he belongs to a bourgeois society?

‘No, so does Einstein, but relativity isn’t a bourgeois idea.’

Well, take a play like Les Mains Sales—

‘That is the play about the Communist Party? I should have to read it again before I could judge. You see, I haven’t read it since Khrushchev’s last speech. That changes things a great deal, and it’s impossible to predict things like that. Who could have said that was going to happen?’

Odd though this sounded, it wasn’t at all illogical from his point of view. If a play can only be good if it is useful and if usefulness means usefulness to the Communist cause, then it follows that a political speech can make a good play into a bad play overnight.

Discussing politics, Brecht was quite open about making usefulness his criterion. We talked of a Communist whose ‘deviation’ had cost him his life.

‘I was in Denmark when he made the speech, and I could see that it was dangerous, but I wouldn’t have condemned him to death. At least, that is what I say, speaking from outside. I don’t know. It may have been necessary. I am not a politician, and I am not in the Party. I am a Marxist but I have never been a Party Member.’

But in principle you still hold to what you wrote in Die Massnahme?

(Die Massnahme is a didactic playlet* to prove that four Communist agitators are justified in killing a fifth who is so full of sympathy for the oppressed coolies that instead of obeying orders and inciting them to rebel, he tries to help them. This brings him into the foreground, which exposes his comrades to danger.)

‘To every word. But that is not a moral question whether the death of the young comrade is necessary. It is a matter of usefulness.’

Surely it’s a moral question, too. If it were only a matter of showing that the death is useful, then the play wouldn’t be necessary.

‘It could be considered as a moral question, but not until you have taken part in the play and acted the part of the young comrade and one of the four agitators and a member of the Control Chorus. Then you have seen it from every angle and only then may you judge.’

It seems to me that this leaves the word ‘moral’ without any meaning.

In literature too, usefulness was the criterion, and it is obvious that his basic objection to Ibsen was that his social criticism was no longer relevant. But his actual interpretation of The Doll’s House was very odd indeed:

‘Ibsen had great intelligence and he was a sound playwright, but in a play like The Doll’s House, what does he do? The husband is a banker, and he wants to see whether the wife has an equal right to be a banker. That is what she wants – to deal with accounts and financial affairs like her husband. But I don’t think Ibsen knew very much about banking. And the play has no meaning for society today. To be a banker! Just the question of whether it’s right for a woman to do the work of her husband. Isn’t that what it is?’

I think it’s more negative. More the question of whether it’s wrong for the husband to possess her and suppress her.

‘That’s what you say. That doesn’t interest me. Ha, we’re all suppressed. You’re suppressed. I’m suppressed. The real question is what Nora would do with her freedom if she had it.’

But I don’t think Ibsen was interested in that.

‘No, exactly.’

And that was that. Ibsen had been found guilty. I went back to Shakespeare. If Shakespeare was the greatest bourgeois dramatist, I was curious to know how much respect Brecht would have for the text if ever he put on Coriolanus, as he had been planning to. A play is never ‘translated’ for the Berliner Ensemble, always ‘adapted’ and ‘adaptation’ can cover anything from the introduction of new characters (like the rustic lovers in The Recruiting Officer) to a complete reversal of the writer’s meaning (as in what they call The Hero of the Western Word).

You’d treat Shakespeare quite differently from Synge or Farquhar?

‘Oh yes, completely. In Shakespeare, the original is worth keeping, as in a museum. Of course, you can’t play him word for word. This is 1956, and his experience was different – he couldn’t do things we can. He never flew in the air. But if I were putting him on today, it is only small changes I would have to make in the production, changes of emphasis.’

You see no point in trying, within limits, to give an idea of what the original production was like?

‘Oh, that is ridiculous. Absolutely childish. How can you? And if you could, do you know what would happen? The audience would laugh. Everything was so different. People moved differently. It would be like an old film. You know what it is like to see a film of fifty years ago. Think how the banquet scene in Macbeth would be, with the people all eating with their hands.’

And he made grotesque gestures of chewing and throwing bones over his shoulders. And at that moment, while he was making his parody movements and while we both laughing, he seemed to have come alive for the first time in the whole conversation.

Soon after that it came to an end. He had been ill. He was living in the country and coming to Berlin only for a few hours each day. I went away feeling disappointed. He had shown nothing of himself – but I don’t think he had hidden anything of himself either. It would have been more pleasant to think that he had, that the old Brecht was still alive behind the dead mask of faith. But could it have been a mask? He had been lively enough in touching on technical questions of production, but almost everything else he’d said led back either to his own theories of Epic Theatre or to Marx. The pious profession of faith in ‘fifty years from now’ is hard to reconcile with the mockery and the bawdy of his earlier plays and lyrics, but it is quite at one with the tone of the liturgical Hymn to Communism in Die Mutter, an adaptation of Gorki’s novel as a play. The Brecht of the Dreigroschenoper and Mahagonny was dead long before Brecht died on August 14.

But that is no reason for accepting Dr Herbert Luthy’s explanation of the change: that attracted not so much by the creed as by the discipline of Communism, he made a conscious effort to extinguish his own personality. In Leben des Galilei, Brecht makes Galileo quote the line ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out’, but only to add ambiguously: ‘Whoever wrote that knows more about comfort than I do.’ It may be that asceticism is the most comfortable state of all for the connoisseur, and Brecht had been very offended for a very long time by what he saw of society, but he was far too concerned about seeing it to indulge in a discipline that would lead to blindness. Say rather that he lost the power to focus on what was immediately around him and suffered at the end from a political hypermetropia, which allowed him to believe in the future that Communism promised. It was a leap to faith, but it didn’t involve a change of direction: the things the Party promised to change were the things he had always attacked, without ever having the effect he wanted. His whole theory of Epic Theatre is designed to aim productions at the intellect of the audiences for the sake of influencing them, and the attraction of the Party was not its discipline, but its appearance of having the power to effect change.

Nor is there any such complete break as Dr Luthy sees between his first plays and his last. In spite of all the differences, Mutter Courage has its roots in the preoccupations of Trommeln in der Nacht and the Dreigroschenoper – with war and with trading. And there is the same breadth of sympathy and the same humane anger against every kind of victimization. These are present even in Die Massnahme. The sweating coolies are brought in only to prove a point, but the sympathy for them is not perfunctory. If Brecht accepted the discipline of Communism, it was only because he saw no other way of helping to change the world, and if the irony which was the strength of his early plays had grown weaker by the time he came to write Mutter Courage – which has other strengths – and faded out altogether before the end, it didn’t collapse until after he had begun to doubt the value of doubt. So it may not be irrelevant to end this account of the man of faith that Brecht had grown into by quoting from the ironical ending to his Hymn to Doubt:

There are uncritical people, who never doubt
And there are scrupulous people, who never take action.
They doubt, not to make their minds up, but
To avoid having to decide. Their heads
They use only to shake. Apprehensively
They warn passengers on sinking ships about water.
With the murderer’s axe raised above their heads,
They ask themselves whether he isn’t human too.
And with the mumbled observation
That the question is still open, they climb into bed.
Vacillation is their profession.
Their motto is: judgement suspended.

Be careful when you praise doubt
Not to praise
The doubt which is despair.

What use is the capacity to doubt
To the man who can’t decide?
You can make mistakes
By acting with too little thought
But the mistake in time of danger
Is to go on thinking too long.

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*Lehrstuck. He compared his Lehrstücke with the Japanese No Plays and with didactic plays of Bacon’s. No audience is required. They are widely used, he said, in East German schools, with children playing first one part and then another.

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Bertolt Brecht was a German playwright and poet.

Ronald Hayman was a British critic, dramatist and biographer.

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