Brecht Collected Plays: 1: Baal; Drums in the Night; In the Jungle of Cities; Life of Edward II of England; & 5 One Act Plays: "Baal", "Drums in the Night", "In the Jungle of Ci (World Classics) (3 page)

The period covered by this volume saw not only a certain element of political restoration throughout central and eastern Europe but also the end of Expressionism in the arts. To the poet-playwright Iwan Goll, who in 1921 published an essay called ‘Expressionism is Dying’, the two phenomena were connected. ‘Expressionism was a fine, good, grand thing…’ he wrote. ‘But the result is, alas, and through no fault of the Expressionists, the German Republic of 1920.’ Dadaism likewise was breaking up by 1922; at the Bauhaus the semi-mystical Itten was about to be succeeded by the technologically minded Moholy-Nagy; while artists like Grosz, Dix, Beckmann and Schlichter were evolving the coolly representational, socially conscious style which in 1924 became known as
Neue Sachlichkeit
. Brecht was always much too conscious of his own aims to care to be labelled as part of a movement; none the less his works of these years very clearly reflect the decline of Expressionism and the rise of the new style. He defined his position admirably in a note of 27 June 1920:

I can compete with the ultra-modernists in hunting for new forms and experimenting with my feelings. But I keep realizing that the essence of art is simplicity, grandeur and sensitivity, and that the essence of its form is coolness.

Baal
was written as a kind of counter-play to the Expressionists’ invocations of Humanity with a capital H, yet the wandering poet remains a romantic-expressionist figure, while the influence of Georg Büchner is one that is also noticeable in a number of Expressionist plays.
Drums in the Night
too, with its symbolic use of the moon, its cinematic third act and its hero’s slightly mad rhetoric, can reasonably be termed an Expressionist play.
In the Jungle
, however, was written at the turning-point, the watershed between the two movements. The Rimbaud allusions, the colour references before each scene in the 1922 version, the attic-cum-undergrowth setting, the use of spotlights referred to in Brecht’s note of 1954: all this is expressionistic, whereas the American milieu, the preoccupation with the big cities and the very notion of the ‘fight’ were to become characteristic concerns of the mid-1920s. A further
note of 10 February 1922 even suggests that Brecht was looking forward to his own 1930s doctrine of ‘alienation’:

I hope in
Baal
and
Jungle
I’ve avoided one common artistic bloomer, that of trying to carry people away. Instinctively, I’ve kept my distance and ensured that the realization of my (poetical and philosophical) effects remains within bounds. The spectator’s ‘splendid isolation’ is left intact; it is not
sua res quae agitur
; he is not fobbed off with an invitation to feel sympathetically, to fuse with the hero and seem significant and indestructible as he watches himself in two different versions. A higher type of interest can be got from making comparisons, from whatever is different, amazing, impossible to overlook.

Thus though
In the Jungle
is still wildly romantic it already foreshadows the detached impersonalities of the machine age. And those supporters who, like Ihering and Engel and Geis, thought that Brecht would help lead the theatre out of the Expressionist undergrowth can now be seen to have been absolutely right.

III

The final texts of these plays often make Brecht’s evolution difficult to follow. He was a restless amender and modifier of his own work, so that any one of them may consist of layer upon layer of elements from different periods. ‘He is more interested in the job than in the finished work,’ wrote Feuchtwanger in an article of 1928 called ‘Portrait of Brecht for the English’,

in the problem than in its solution, in the journey than in its goal. He rewrites his works an untold number of times, twenty or thirty times, with a new revision for every minor provincial production. He is not in the least interested in seeing a work completed….

Thus between 1922 and its publication in 1927
In the Jungle
became
In the Jungle of Cities
. The city allusions were strengthened, the boxing foreword was added and various boxing allusions worked into the text, the colour references at the start of each scene gave way to mock-precise (‘objective’) data of time and place, the whole flavour of the play was changed. The same was done still more drastically with
Baal
in 1926, though in this case Brecht later decided to scrap the more ‘objective’, technologically flavoured version and go back (more or less) to the 1922-3 text.
Drums in the Night
he seems to have left alone after 1922, perhaps because it was
not performed again after the first, largely topical wave of interest had subsided – though the discussion on p. 401 ff. suggests that Piscator was considering it. Then for his Collected Plays in the 1950s he largely rewrote the last two acts.

All this means that each play as we now have it reflects the views and to some extent the spirit of a number of different periods. The performances which have gone into theatrical history were not based on these particular texts. Even Brecht’s own notes are difficult to understand without knowing to which version each of them relates.

It is an impossible problem editorially, and our policy has been to print the final text but to provide all the variant material from other versions published in Brecht’s lifetime, together with extensive notes on the main unpublished scripts. This is so that the reader should not get false ideas of Brecht’s evolution and of his ideas and achievements at any given time. Brecht was a profound believer in change, whom it would be wrong to present statically in a final ‘authoritative’ mould. Indeed opinions might well differ as to whether any such mould is the right one: not only are there fine things in many of the rejected versions, which it would be cruel not to publish, but informed judgement often disagrees with Brecht’s last choices. Thus the chief German expert on
Baal
and the author of much the best book on Brecht’s early years both prefer the 1919 script of
Baal
; an outstanding West German theatre critic wants the 1922
Drums in the Night
; while Ihering wrote of the (final) published version of
In the Jungle of Cities
in 1927:

I love the fullness and colour of the old
Jungle
. There seemed to be no better evidence of Brecht’s richness and gifts than those crackling, exotically pulsating scenes as they shot to and fro…. The new
Jungle
, the
Jungle of Cities
, has lost in colour and atmosphere. It has gained in clarity and concentration.

Not that there is much chance that Brecht himself would have accepted his own choices as final if he had lived longer, or seen them staged, or looked again at some of the earlier texts which for one reason or another he did not have before him when preparing the collected plays. It is characteristic that he already wanted the 1926 version of
Baal
printed as an appendix. For he was always a man in motion, who progressed best by disagreeing with what had already been said. Often it had been said by himself.

As for the translations, they are as good as translators and editors can make them, but they make no claim to be definitive.
Better translations may well appear with time – quite apart from the obvious fact that each time must make its own translations. In all the poetry Brecht’s rules of punctuation are followed; that is to say there are no commas at the ends of lines, the line break being considered sufficient pause for anything short of a colon. Our aim is that the poetry should so far as possible fit any settings by the main composers with whom Brecht collaborated. A note will normally indicate where this is not the case, though there may be some tunes, particularly of Brecht’s own, which we have failed to track down.

All translation in the notes is by the responsible editor, as is the selection of material printed. The aim here has been to include anything of relevance to the understanding or production of the play in question, leaving those notes which comprise more general statements of Brecht’s theatrical ideas to be published in the volumes devoted to his theoretical writings. The essay ‘On Looking Through my First Plays’, which he wrote as a foreword to the first two volumes of his collected
Stücke
in 1954 (too late for the first printing), has been split into its component sections, of which that on
Man equals Man
will follow in the next volume. It can be reconstituted by reading it in the order indicated, starting with (i), the section on
Drums in the Night
.

The German text used throughout, unless otherwise stated, is that of the
Gesammelte Werke
(or Collected Works) edited by Elisabeth Hauptmann and a team comprising Werner Hecht, Rosemarie Hill, Herta Ramthun and Klaus Völker, and published by Suhrkamp-Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main, in 1967. This is referred to as GW, plus the appropriate subdivision:
Stücke
(plays),
Schriften zum Theater
(writings on the theatre), and so on. When the same terms (
Stücke
, for instance, as above) are used without the prefix GW they refer to the earlier collected edition issued by the same publisher from 1953 on. Particulars of other sources are given in full where reference is made to them. We would like to thank the editors and publisher for the help which they have given with various queries. The Brecht Archive in East Berlin has been generous in supplying material, and we are grateful for the support given us from the outset by Stefan S. Brecht.

THE EDITORS