J: I will take the following things of which Engels speaks in his ‘Origin of Family’, the question of ‘armed forces’. In primitive communism the armed forces were not a specialised group, they were the people. It was the people who fought the forces of nature and the people were armed. In the society of private property the property owners because they are in the minority have to have an armed army to protect their property from the disinherited majority, the disarmed people. This constellation: armed minority vs disarmed people is true of Slavery, Feudalism, Capitalism. Sometimes army is recruited, or mercenary like in China –
B: Levée en masse –
J: In the dictatorship of the proletariat you have in that transient phase towards scientific communism the Red Army representing the armed forces and the Red Army must be identified with the movement in the direction where the army is the people. They are not a force to protect the property but an army that has come into the possession of property. In the (future) state of communism when the need for international and civil wars will be abolished then the army will again be used against forces of nature as in primitive communism, Thesis – antithesis – synthesis on a higher plane. Now I want to know this. You have the Greek drama with the chorus from which later developed the chorusless drama. Now you bring back the chorus. What is the synthesis?
B: That is a very important question. But first: we must speak of the development of the antique drama into the bourgeois drama – we will call it this way – the drama with a hero – we must not make the distinction whether there is the drama with or without chorus. The first phase of the drama known to us shows only the chorus. Then there was the chorus leader. Aeschylos. Then two chorus leaders. I will not try right now to construct a scheme and will speak later about the manifoldedness what concerns the use of the chorus. But I will say that right now we see again that the choric element is brought to the foreground and that the individual is brought more into the background. We have perhaps the phase where the individual is on the way back into the collective. Where this leads to we cannot say yet. I would like to say something about the various kinds of choruses that I have used. You know the chorus in ‘The Mother’. There is a different kind of chorus in ‘Die Massnahme’. A third version you find in ‘Saint Joan of the Stockyards’. Here the chorus whenever it appears represents collectives, you have the chorus of the workers, but also of the capitalists, you have the chorus of the dealers and you have the chorus of the wholesale buyers – all groups with common interests. Each group has its own language. So that if you look at it this way you in the end have an exhibition (demonstration) of idioms. The big meat packers for instance use the Shakespearian blank verse as the language of the rich bourgeois individuals. It is the slang of this society as it has already fixed it in its literature in a classic way. As an example I read to you from the first scene of the play the first lines of dialogue between the great Pierpont Mauler, meat packer, and his partner Cridle.
CRIDLE: Why so sinister, my dear Pierpont?
MAULER: Remember, Cridle, ’twas some days ago –
We were walking through the slaughter-house, ’twas evening
And how we stood beside our brand-new cannery etc., etc.
That is how the great free (what’s on reason of exploitation) individuals speak. The ‘people’ on the contrary speak in verses like those of Aristophanes – somewhat hasty syncopated verses – and they speak only in verses when they are in groups, the single one speaks prose.
J: How do you recognise the different kinds of verse?
B: The great individuals speak in the iambic metre, irregular iambics –
J: Pentameter –
B: Yes – but modernised.
J: And what here?
B: Those are free verses, syncopated.
J: MacL also uses mixture of metres. Basic rhythm of American folk diction very different from British. British rhythm is iambic, American Folkrhythm trochaic.
B: With us the rhythm is determined by the class standpoint.
J: Is this to be interpreted that you want to give more dignity to the one group?
B: No. The function is only to be class-distinctive.
J: MacL does not use metric divisions, he uses so to say ‘quantity of division’. Units of syllables, units of accents instead of metric arrangements. (Examples: He’ll say / properly so / Never again will it come / everywhere I looked for him). ‘Panic’ is extremely interesting. MacL gives to the chorus 3 accents, to the bankers 5 accents. Because of the five accents the bankers of course get a fuller characterization whereas the chorus of the unemployed remain anonymous. The bankers are by far better drawn, individuals of flesh and blood – the unemployed which he treats sympathetically are shown in the twilight of becoming. Their leader is a blind man.
E: With Brecht the leader would have the best eyes.
J: It is his theory of the leader being a prophet, to see into the future he needs no physical eyesight. His lines are very beautiful. Example: that passage ‘Like pebbles into a pool’), beautiful cadence.
B: Eliot has that, too. There are beautiful things in Eliot’s works, for example in ‘Waste Land’.
J: But he uses not the same method.
B: Yes, this whole method is very strange. I would always prefer the historical method. I would give the various classes that diction that historically belongs to them.
J: I’ll ask you this, how would you meet this problem? Suppose you were writing in English – here in the United States – a play about negroes, a historic drama, not 1905, but 1800, and you were writing a heroic drama with an epic sweep, a drama of the revolutionary tradition of the Negroes – what would you do what regards language? What language would you use for characterization? First, would you write it in verse?
B: No, certainly not. The single one would always speak prose. In groups they would speak in that free, syncopated language, gestic rhythm – I would make no exception with the Negroes, not a difference between Negroes, Chinese or Irish.
J: But when the Negroes speak a dialect – the South, about 1800 – would you write the play in dialect?
B: No.
J: How would you meet the need for verisimilitude? Here verisimilitude requires dialect.
B: I would use a dialect when it plays a political part. For instance, there are plantation owners, they speak while doing business pure English. Those that intend to rob (fool, exploit) might speak dialect. If the spectator is supposed to learn that a dialect separates various classes, only then would I use dialect. Nowhere else.
J: Let’s take for example, well a drama about a slave insurrection. Only in the first scene you have the slaveowners who speak a cultivated English. They only appear in this first scene, later there are only slaves, practically illiterate. Only one of the slaves is cultured. How would you meet then the language problem?
B: If there is then this cultured negro, this kind of leader, I would use dialect in the first scene and later pure English. If there is this Negro leader I had to investigate first, whether the difference in the diction is important. Perhaps whether there is a ressentiment against the leader because of the difficulty to understand him, whether he is forced to learn their language or they are forced to learn his etc. In all these cases the language problem would be a central one, it would not be accidental.
J: Suppose they understand him, there is no language problem – how shall the slaves speak? Standard English?
B: Standard English, throughout.
J: Verse or prose?
B: Prose.
J: The leader, too?
B: All. In the first scene the owners perhaps speak in verse, but the whole then is in prose.
J: Verse for the slave owners, prose for the slaves, of course their vocablary limited according to their cultural standard. But here is the question: The American people are attuned to hear slaves speak dialect.
B: That’s excellent! Then the introduction of standard English is very important. That is revolutionary to
let the Negroes speak standard English.
J: You are considering how you would write it – according to your epic theory or as a natural drama?
B: I would not write it as a natural drama. A naturalistic writer could write it in dialect. Not I. You know the ‘Weavers’ [by Gerhard Hauptmann (1892)], they are written in a beautiful dialect. The play is based on facts. I always wanted to rewrite the play using the documents of the trial, in standard German.
J: As a naturalistic play, without abbreviations?
B: No. I don’t like naturalistic plays. A natural play with an idea (ideology) is a perversity. The naturalistic drama is like a piece of earth dug out, a material quantity exposed before your eyes and investigated – of course investigated from a certain standpoint.
J: According to your theory – would you have a chorus of slaves?
B: Perhaps a chorus of white workers.
J: There are no white workers.
B: Right now I see no chance a chorus there, without really missing the chorus I do not need it.
J: You would make the dialect-concession?
B: No, only as an expression of class-struggle.
E: What do the negroes think of dialect?
J: The emancipated Negro looks upon the dialect as a hangover of slavery.
[B: Do they use the Negro dialect in ‘Porgy and Bess’?
J: No, that is not the real Negro dialect.
E: In ‘Green Pastures’?
J: Not standard English.]
B: I think, the whole approach to the language problem must be the historic-political one.
J: Of course. But the modern bourgeoisie and blank verse?
E: The bourgeois class with Brecht speaks in blank verse as a means to deride them.
B: (points to the last scenes of ‘Saint Joan of the Stockyards’ where the verses are written in the manner of ‘Faust’ as the adequate language form for the capitalists that show the same dualism as Faust: Strive upwards, kick downwards.)
E: To use Goethean verses here has a mean and aggressive effect.
B: The position in the whole process of production determines the language of a person.
E: (shortly tells the story of ‘Saint Joan’: Like Indra’s daughter a Salvation Army girl sets out to help arbitrate in a strike with goodness – she only helps the capitalists.)
J: Religion as enabling Capitalism.
[Über Dramatik vom Typ Mutter’, 1935, published in Werner Hecht (ed.): Brecht im Gespäch, Suhrkamp, 1975, pp. 44–52. That text was translated from ours in the Brecht Archive. The original was taken down in New York in 1935 by Elisabeth Hauptmann, and includes handwritten amendments or additions to his own remarks by Brecht. We have barely edited it apart from restoring the four bracketed lines, 12–15 lines from the end, and have left her punctuation and US spellings as she typed them. V.J. Jerome was the American Communist Party’s intermediary between Brecht and Eisler on the one side and Theatre Union on the other.]
LETTER TO THE NEW YORK WORKERS’ COMPANY ‘THEATRE UNION’ ABOUT THE PLAY ‘THE MOTHER’
1
When I wrote the play The Mother
On the basis of the book by comrade Gorky and of many
Proletarian comrades’ stories about their
Daily struggle, I wrote it
With no frills, in austere language
Placing the words cleanly, carefully selecting
My character’s every gesture, as is done
When reporting the words and deeds of the great.
I did my best to
Portray those seemingly ordinary
Countless incidents in contemptible dwellings
Among the far too many-headed as historical incidents
In no way less significant than the renowned
Acts of generals and statesmen in the school books.
The task I gave myself was to tell of a great historic figure
The unknown early champion of humanity
To constitute an example.
2
So you will see the proletarian mother take the road
The long and winding road of her class, see how at the start
She feels the loss of a penny on her son’s wages: she cannot
Make him a soup worth eating. So she engages
In a struggle with him, fears she may lose him. Then
Reluctantly she aids him in his struggle for that penny
Ever fearful now of losing him to the struggle. Slowly
She follows her son into the jungle of wage claims. Thereby
She learns to read. Quits her hut, cares for others
Beside her son, in the same situation as he, those with whom she
Earlier struggled over her son; now she struggles alongside them.
Thus the walls around her stove start to tumble. Her table welcomes
Many another mother’s son. Once too small for two
Her hut becomes a meeting place. Her son, though
She seldom sees. The struggle takes him from her.
And she herself is among the throng of those struggling. The talk
Between son and mother grows into a rallying-cry
During the battle. In the end the son falls. No longer was it
Possible for her to provide him with his soup by the one
Available means. But now she is standing
In the thickest turmoil of the vast and
Unceasing battle of the classes. Still a mother
Now even more a mother, mother of many now fallen
Mother of fighters, mother of unborn generations, she embarks
On a spring-clean of the State. Gives the rulers stones
In their extorted feast. Cleans weapons. Teaches
Her sons and daughters the ABC of struggle
Against war and exploitation, member of a standing army
Covering the entire planet, harried and harrying
Untolerated and intolerant. Defeated and relentless.
3
So too we staged the play like a report from a great epoch
No less golden in the light of many lamps than the
Royal plays staged in earlier times
No less cheerful and funny, discreet
In its sad moments. Before a clean canvas
The players entered simply with the characteristic
Gests of their scenes, delivering their phrases
Precisely, authentic words. Each phrase’s effect
Was awaited and exposed. And also we waited
Till the crowd had laid those phrases in the balance – for we had noticed
How the man who owns little and is often deceived will bite
A coin with his teeth to see if it is genuine. Just like coins then
Must the actors’ phrases be tested by our spectators
Who own little and are often deceived. Small hints
Suggested the scene of the action. The odd table and chair:
Bare essentials were enough. But photographs
Of the great opponents were projected on the screens at the back
And the sayings of the socialist classics
Painted on banners or projected on screens, surrounded the
Scrupulous actors. Their bearing was natural
Yet whatever said nothing was left out in the
Carefully considered abridgement. The musical numbers
Were lightly presented, with charm. Much laughter
Filled the house. The unconquerable
Good humour of the resourceful Vlassova, grounded in the assurance of
Her youthful class, provoked
Happy laughs from the workers’ benches.
Keenly they took advantage of this rare chance
To experience the usual incidents without urgent danger, thus
Getting the leisure to study them and so prepare
Their own conduct.
4
Comrades, I see you
Reading the short play with embarrassmen
t.
The spare language
Seems like poverty. This report, you reckon
Is not how people express themselves. I have read
Your adaptation. Here you insert a ‘Good morning’
There a ‘Hullo, my boy’. The vast field of action
Gets cluttered with furniture. Cabbage reeks
From the stove. What’s bold becomes gallant, what’s historical normal
Instead of wonder
You strive for sympathy with the mother when she loses her son.
The son’s death
You slyly put at the end. That, you think, is how to make the spectator
Keep up his interest till the curtain falls. Like a business man
Investing money in a concern, you suppose, the spectator invests
Feeling in the hero: he wants to get it back
If possible doubled. But the proletarian audience
At the first performance never missed the son at the end.
They maintained their interest. Not out of crudeness either.
And then too we were sometimes asked:
Will the workers understand you? Will they renounce
The familiar opiate: the spiritual participation
In other people’s anger, in the rise of others, the whole deception
That whips one up for two hours, to leave one still more exhausted
Filled with hazy memories and yet vaguer expectations?
Will you truly, offering
Knowledge and experience, get an audience of statesmen?
Comrades, the form of the new plays
Is new. But why be
Frightened of what’s new? Is it hard to bring off?
But why be frightened of what’s new and hard to bring off?
To the man who’s exploited, continually deceived
Life itself is a perpetual experiment
The earning of a few pennies
An uncertain business which is nowhere taught.
Why should he fear the new rather than the old? And even if
Your audience, the workers, hesitated you should still
Not lag behind it but show it the way
Swiftly show it the way with long strides, its final power inspiring you
With unbounded confidence.