Bertolt Brecht

Journals 1934 - 1955

Bertolt Brecht, Bertolt Brecht, Bertolt Brecht

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000143317
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Thema: Arti performative

This book contains selected poems, plays, and prose by Bertolt Brecht taken from various points throughout his career. It includes translations of two prose works and provides some background information on Brecht's life and career.

Denmark
1934 to 15 March 1939

1934

i am a playwright.

i would actually like to have been a cabinetmaker, but or course you don't earn enough doing that, i would have enjoyed working with wood, you don't get really fine stained and polished wood much any more, the beautiful panelling and balustrades of the old days, those pale, maple-wood tabletops as thick as the span of your hand that we found in our grandparents' rooms, worn smooth by the hands of whole generations, and the wardrobes i've seen! the way the edges were bevelled, the doors inlaid, the internal compartments offset, and such beautiful proportions, seeing a piece of furniture like that made you think better thoughts, the things they could do with a wooden fork-handle, these craftsmen who have all gone now. even in these times of ours there are good things to be seen, in bond street in london in a shop window i saw a big cigar-box, six plain maple boards and an iron catch, but it looked marvellous, the cigars were a guinea apiece, at a casual glance the unadorned box would have made one think, 'this tobacco is so costly that they can't even lay out a shilling for the packaging, a guinea is the bottom price they can take, and at that the planters are starving', but on further inspection one could see that the firm had seen fit to provide a case too that would satisfy the expectations of their connoisseurs of fine tobacco.

i am now 36 years old and i have not wasted these years; 1 am entitled to say this, the more so if i think of the efforts i have made rather than of my achievements, and if i plead in extenuation that i live in times where it is not only easy to waste time, but one is also robbed of it. i haven't lived for myself, but in the public arena, for from the age of 21 i have been known for my literary works and for many enterprises connected with them. 1 have moreover already attracted followers, and i have advised and given a lead to others, i merely mention this to lend some weight to my statement that 1 don't know everything about life', not that i am unpractical or live in the clouds; i don't avoid the nuts and bolts of everyday life, i am hardly an 'innocent soul', i have arranged advantageous contracts that made possible a life that is in accord with my desires, 1 own houses, a motor car, i maintain a family, employ secretaries, all of this in spite of the fact that no one could call my works marketable, but even if i am unpractical, in the sense that life, as i have said, puzzles me, there are more practical people than me who are equally puzzled.

when i weigh up where abandoning myself to my enthusiasms has got me, and what benefit repeated scrutiny has been, i recommend the latter, if i had adopted the former approach, i would still be living in my fatherland, but by not adopting the latter, i would no longer be an honest person.

1935

years after i had made my name as a writer i still knew nothing of politics and had not set eyes on a book by or about marx. i had written four dramas and an opera which had been performed in many theatres, i had received literary prizes, and in surveys which invited contributions from progressive minds, my opinions could frequently be read, but i didn't yet understand the abc of politics, and i had no more idea of the way public affairs in my country were regulated than any peasant in his isolated cottage, before i turned to literature, ihad in thewar year of iiji/written an anti-war poem, the 'ballad of the dead soldier', [. . .]. by 1918 i was a soldiers' council delegate and had been in the uspd. but on getting into literature i. never progressed beyond rather nihilistic criticism of bourgeois society, not even eisenstein's great films, which had a colossal effect on me, nor the first productions of the piscator theatre, which i admired no less, moved me to study marxism, perhaps this was due to my scientific education (i had studied medicine for several years), which strongly immunised me against influence from the emotional side, then a sort of technical hitch helped me to move forward, for a certain play i needed the chicago wheat exchange as background, i imagined i would be able to get the necessary information quickly by consulting specialists and practitioners in the field, things turned out differently, nobody, neither a number of well-known economic journalists nor any of the businessmen - i followed one dealer with long experience of the chicago wheat exchange from berlin to vienna - could adequately explain what went on at the grain exchange, i gained the impression that the dealings were downright inexplicable, that is, not accessible to rational understanding, in other words plainly irrational, the manner in which the world's wheat was distributed was utterly incomprehensible, from any angle, apart from that of a handful of speculators, the market in wheat was one huge swamp, the projected drama was never written, instead i began to read marx, and it was then, and only then that i did read marx. and for the first time, my own scattered practical experiences and impressions really came to life.

1936

the experiences i am having at the moment are not without value, i thought i could learn to write for films, but i see that it would take more than just a morning's work; the technique is at a quite primitive stage, however i am learning something different, although kortner treats me as an absolute equal, the nature of the work means that i am beginning to feel like an employee, i have not chosen the subject i am working on for myself, i can't relate to it and i don't know what will happen to my work when it comes on the market, i only have my labour to sell, and what is done with it afterwards has nothing to do with me. my interests are quite opposed to those of my employer, since i am on a weekly wage, it is not good for me if the work progresses quickly, quite the contrary, already i even catch myself taking out my watch as evening approaches; i want to get away, it's time for real life to begin, real life is quite separate, and incidentally quite unappealing, but in 'my own time' i don't waste a single thought on my daily work, i leave with the little englishman who works alongside me as translator and we strictly avoid touching anything that might remind us of work, i feel a sense of total solidarity with him when he refuses to work on Sundays, kortner seems to have noticed this incipient class consciousness, for he often says on the phone, when he is cancelling an appointment, that with his job he has work to do - just as any boss might, whenever he can, he makes mock of his employers, points out their inferiority and laziness, whereupon we are both silent.

at lunch - 1 eat at his place and hanna kortner is very nice - it all stops and i am the great poet once more, i have the privilege of being able to take a nap, but then, after coffee, the situation changes once more, the paper i am using to write this is from work: i pinched it.

1938

On Progress

it pleased me to think of the progress i have made as having been a rearguard action, every retreat, or almost every retreat, had been preceded by an advance, for example i began with the simplest, most ordinary sorts of poetry, the ballad, the street-ballad, forms which the better sort of poet had not been using for a long time, i retreated to free verse when rhyme proved inadequate for what i had to say. in the drama i began with a five act play with a central figure, a plot of the most venerable sort (the enoch arden motif) and a contemporary setting, after a while i had moved on far enough to give up empathy, in which even the most progressive spirits believed implicitly, with all my love of the new, i did not give up the old without clinging doggedly to it until it finally ceased to function, when i could no longer make any headway in the theatre with empathy, try as i might, i devised the lehrstiick for empathy, it seemed to me that if people stopped merely empathising intellectually, then that was enough, and something fruitful could be extracted from the old kind of empathy, incidentally i have never had any respect for revolutionaries who put off the revolution because things were too hot for them.

an error?

i have always needed the spur of contradiction.

Love of Clarity

my love of clarity comes from the unclear way i think, i became a little doctrinaire because i was in pressing need of instruction, my thoughts readily become confused, and i don't at all mind saying so. it's the confusion 1 mind, when i discover something, i immediately contradict it passionately and to my dismay call everything into question again, when a moment before i had been happy as a sandboy, because at least something had, in some measure, been established for my, as i told myself, modest requirements, such statements as that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or life is a protein condition, console me uncommonly, until i run into further inconveniences, and scenes that take place between people i write down simply because i can't imagine them clearly unless i do.

Belief

i greatly like the proletariat's belief in its final victory, but the proletariat's closely connected belief in various other things it has been told, i find disturbing.

july 38

reading lukacs's marx and the problem of ideological decline. how 'mankind' moves in wherever the proletariat abandons a position, the talk is once again of realism which they have blithely debased, just as the nazis have debased socialism, the realistic writer in an 'age of decline' (our epoch that is; at the outset a few murmurings of 'age of bourgeois decline', then simply 'age of decline' - the whole thing is coming unstuck, not just the bourgeoisie) is relieved of the need to be a dialectical materialist, all he has to do 'is give properly perceived and experienced reality priority over accepted world-views and received prejudices in shaping his material', since balzac and tolstoy did just this, they reflect reality! all the sholokhovs and thomas manns are thus vindicated, they reflect the world . . . there is no contradiction between the bourgeois realists and the proletarian realists (a glance at sholokhov seems in fact to corroborate this), nor, presumably between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat itself; how could there be, under the banner of the popular front? up with pastor niemoller! realist of the purest water! once again no knowledge is necessary to shape your material (for th[omas] mann indeed shapes his material, and it is a fact that he knows nothing), in shaping their material these half-wits give reality priority over prejudice without even knowing they are doing it. it is a process of direct experience: you get a kick, say: ow! he gets a kick, let him say: ow. the simplicity of it! the bold lukacs is magically attracted to the problem of ideological decline, it has become his thing, with him it is a case of a kantian develop...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Brecht Between Two World Systems
• Note on the Editing
• Journals
• Editorial Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Chronology
• Index