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About Bert Brecht

This month marks the 70 year since Bertolt Brecht was born, and Georg Johannesen paints a portrait of the Marxist, moralist and poet. 




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Orientering Februar 1968

It is difficult to write about the East German poet Bertolt Brecht. (I've read at least ten books about him, one more foolish than the other.) This year he would have turned 70 years, but I can't exactly see him behind me behind a white lady with 70 lights. Birthdays are suitable for Lady Bird and the like if one is to be famous first. Bertolt Brecht belongs more in a culture where you are not so sure of your age. He warned "townspeople" against leaving a tombstone that could "reveal where one lay", and with "inscriptions" that "indicated" one and with the stated "year of death" that one could not "deny". In short: Ohnesorg was not as old as Eichmann and Brecht was not as old as Adenauer. Or in Brecht's words: “The most well-fed people are
shared with the police. ”

Brecht was and is difficult to exploit propaganda – even for those he agreed with. Once upon a time, for example, East Berliners and West Berliners of the best intelligence were to meet officially in West Berlin and hypothesize a discussion about "democracy". Brecht would not be a drawstring. He told the East German cultural officials: "Should I talk about freedom of spirit? I thought you knew I was too dictated.
about Stalinalleen, he said: "Good that we live in a socialist state so we can tear it down again."
maybe the committee was moaning about language details so the committee had to submit new translations constantly. Brechts then said: “The world is moving forward. Now the police are translating my poems. "But about George Orwell, Brecht said," I think he should be killed. "Brecht liked to shock. He often managed to get his say. Shortly before his death, Brecht said, "I've been trying to be an unpleasant person." He could say, "I've been trying to be a Communist person." Brecht was Leninism's first and greatest poet to date.

When Brecht suddenly arrived at the new age at the end of the 50 years, there was no way of explaining away. By and large it was claimed: 1. Brecht was not a poet and / or 2. Brecht was not a communist. Actors and audiences took him seriously while literatures buzzed with turned faces as they usually do. (But in the long run, even literary history cannot prevent dictators from being understood.)

Brecht was when he died:

1. Famous for its theater theories.

2. Known as a playwright.

3. Almost unknown as a lyricist.

4. Politically and morally a questionable person.

I think we can now see a new Brecht with reverse status:

1. Brecht as one of the 20. century's greatest political moralists.

2. Brecht as one of the greatest lyricists of our time.

3. Brecht as a useful playwright with an urge to theorize away from his own poetry.

So we can learn more from the Communist than from the theater man Brecht, and his poetry lives more like poetry than drama. His two most famous plays, "The Twelve Opera" and "Mother Courage" are full of brilliant songs, and Brecht's best play is (in my opinion) "The Good Man from Sezuan," written with poetic despair as a bitter fable about the Soviet Union. Other of Brecht's pieces that will live are the dry and hard Marxist teachings from the 30 years – where a rigidly constructed class struggle-
form becomes the timeless day-to-day adventure. ("Precaution," "Mother," "Exception and Rule," "The Seven Sins of the Small Citizen.") These plays are cantatas. Here, Brecht is farthest from the bourgeois theater and almost his own opinions about society as a moral subject. In short: The annoying thing about Brecht is that he is best as a communist.

In this context, it is no longer particularly interesting that artists, poets, intellectuals, students and the like were pacifists, socialists or communists in the interwar period. It may also not be particularly interesting that intellectuals, students and artists are radical now in 1968. Who hadn't heard of Spain? And who doesn't hear about Vietnam? The 30 years had a German corporal, and the 60 years have a US president: gas chambers, h-bombs, pogroms, rockets! (The point is not to see Hitler and Johnson. The point is: to see Churchill and Kennedy!)

The interesting thing is: the collapse of Western radicalism around 1950 or before, when "the god" failed and Koestler became an Angloman. Why, for example, did Sigurd Hoel get embraced by pickpockets, that is, right-wingers? Why did Overland become so simple? It was at the end of the 50 years that CIA journals such as "Encounter" led long "discussions" about Bertolt Brecht following the recipe: He is not a Communist and he is not a poet, because he is not evil and he is not good. Or vice versa. Oh well. No, well. Brecht was a challenge. Brecht was an open crude in the Cold War's anti-communist deep freeze. Brecht will teach us something next time too.

I read Brecht as a young man. Why? Brecht helped me to understand why one cannot take moral indignation seriously if it comes from the right wing. For no one has doubted that ordinary petty citizens find it "awful" when they read "Aftenposten": writers imprisoned in the Soviet, monks shot in Tibet, throats cut on Algerian co-workers, Russian tanks observed in Budapest, new refugee shot by East German People's Police, new priest imprisoned in Poland. So what? I also thought it was "awful". Or to express myself more clearly with several quotes: "I" – "It seems" – "It" – "Is" – "Terrible"! What is it"? What is “is” in an endangered and random world like ours? Who "thinks" in a nuclear age? Who has a proper "I" under late capitalism? Not "I", and hardly Brecht. Truths are so simple that they are rarely said: Who can imagine a civil society in that 21. century – or a humanity consisting of two generations to unchanged real estate? Not me. No.

The question then becomes: Why wasn't Brecht "disappointed" with Stalin and Ulbricht? Why didn't he jump off his Austrian citizenship? Why wasn't Brecht "free" like us? In a poem from his time in the United States, Brecht says that when he was stolen by a comrade, he had to hide it from "shame" – he did not want it to be known in the "animal kingdom". Why this disgust with the United States? Why could he prefer Stalin when he had the opportunity to live under a human of Harry Truman's dimensions? Answer: Harry Truman was an "animal", not a human, while Stalin was a bad person, a beast at worst.

In Brecht's humanity, there is no room for anyone but socialists. Brecht was against nature and posed "our" nature as a contradiction to "his" nature. (At this point, Brecht is a true grandson of Hegel.) In Brecht's world, capitalism and communism are juxtaposed as nature and culture. Capitalism is nature. Communism is culture.

Brecht's starting point was here many other end points. From his earliest youth, Brecht was a master of cynicism: he practiced hopelessly. In his youth books "Huspostill" and "City Book Reading" he made a clean table before putting Marx on the table. Before becoming a revolutionary, Brecht was devoid of any belief in bourgeois beliefs of anything. This is the first thing we can learn from Brecht: There must be no "radicals" who stand under their opponents and who have before them a maturation process that will make them small citizens. With such people you do not revolutionize. They fail when the "god" fails. And the "god" always fails.

For Brecht, on the other hand, it was necessary to find medicine for a humanity that everything in 1920 seemed to be on death row. Brecht finished early on what is called youth. It is original in our culture where Jesus becomes Hamlet and youth are rebellious before the old home calls the years of its lime. The next thing we can learn from Brecht is that cynics have good taste. Goodness had been tried and practiced for a long time even when Brecht was young. Thus, Brecht quickly learned to disregard terms such as "willingness to sacrifice", "willingness to sacrifice", "courage", "hope", "faith" and "next-
love". Brecht was not a member of the scouting movement. He did not believe in scouting even where it disguises itself as a laboring movement. For Brecht, the "good" was something of course to humans. They had to be forced into "evil", while "good" acts appeared as dangerous temptations. Against good and evil, Brecht lined up dead and alive, capital and labor.

For Brecht, abandoning communism was then the last thing a human being could do to himself. It was to go over into nature, that is, death or the unconscious animal and plant life: Capitalism is dead, the bourgeoisie is unconscious. What frightened Brecht the most was not the evil of capitalism, but its lack of reason: "… for without equal is the system they have created, animalistic and thus incomprehensible…" Brecht did not distinguish between life and thought.

Where Albert Schweitzer calls for "awe of life," Brecht expresses contempt for nature and awe for reason. Here Brecht is reminiscent of the 1700 people who thought nature was "ugly".

Unlike, for example, Øverland and Orwell who remained within Western idealism, Brecht broke out into other, older cultures with a more mature feel than ours. That would be too far-fetched to justify this claim, which ends: Bertolt Brecht ceased to be European. Bertolt Brecht became Chinese. Some claim the same about Karl Marx.

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