Brecht’s New Age

Letters

Vol. 6 No. 6 · 5 April 1984

From Ronald Hayman

SlR: Among the extraordinary pronouncements about Brecht made by your reviewer, Margot Heinemann (LRB, Vol. 6, No 4) one is outstandingly perverse. Discussing his reactions to what she calls ‘the protests and violent demonstrations’ of June 1953, she concludes that ‘the whole record … increases one’s respect for Brecht’s political insight and for the stance he was taking towards both political and cultural authorities.’ The paragraph that precedes this verdict is extremely misleading. Brecht did not start to plan a play about Hans Garbe after the rising: he’d already begun to plan it in 1951. ‘The crisis,’ she writes disingenuously, ‘signalled not only danger but positive hope, if the Party was determined to correct its mistakes.’ She must know – and Brecht certainly knew – that the party was not determined to do any such thing, and Brecht was not telling the truth when he wrote in his letter of 23 June to Neues Deutschland: ‘It was obvious that the intervention of the Soviet troops was in no way directed against the workers’ demonstrations.’ He cannot have believed that the gunners in the Soviet tanks had aimed away from the workers in the Leipzigerstrasse who were throwing stones at the police. Sixteen people were killed. Genuine working-class grievances, writes Margot Heinemann, were recognised by Brecht as being ‘exploited by the old Nazi and Western capitalist forces and forcibly repressed by the Russian Army’. The implication is that the exploitation came before the repression. The rising was crushed on the day it started, so the old Nazis and capitalists would have had to work pretty quickly. And how could Brecht, who wasn’t there, be certain that the Russian gunners had fired only at Nazis and capitalists they recognised? And did Brecht really believe that ‘for several hours, until the intervention of the occupying forces, Berlin stood on the verge of a third world war’? Besides, if Margot Heinemann wants to defend Brecht’s stance, how does she explain his own subsequent guilt-feelings, evidenced, for instance, by the depressed entry he made in his diary on 20 August? ‘The 17 June has alienated the whole of existence.’

Ronald Hayman
London NW3

Margot Heinemann writes: Ronald Hayman describes as ‘extraordinary’ my statement that for Brecht the crisis of June 1953 in Berlin signalled not only danger but positive hope. If Brecht really believed what he said about the 17 June demonstrations, he asks, how do I ‘explain his own subsequent guilt-feelings, evidenced, for instance, by the depressed entry he made in his diary on 20 August?’ I ‘explain’ by referring to the whole diary entry for that date, not just the first sentence taken by Hayman in isolation (and misinterpreted at that, for, given the sense in which Brecht uses the term ‘alienation’, the sentence means that everything has to be looked at in a new light, nothing can be taken for granted). The entry as a whole shows that while shocked and distressed he was also hopeful, perhaps too hopeful. Here is what he wrote: since it is not my bona fides but Brecht’s that is mainly under attack I print it in full.

The 17 June has alienated the whole of existence. In all their lack of direction and pitiable helplessness, the workers’ demonstrations still show that here is the rising class. It is not the petty-bourgeois who act, but the workers. Their slogans are confused and feeble, fed in by the class enemy, and no sort of power to organise is shown, no councils are set up, no plan is formed. And yet here we had the class in front of us, in its most depraved state, but still the class. Everything depended on fully evaluating this first encounter. It was contact. It did not come as an embrace, but as a blow with the fist, but all the same it was contact. The party had to be scared, but it did not need to despair. After the whole historical development, it could not hope anyway for the spontaneous agreement of the working class. There were tasks which in some circumstances, in the actual circumstances, it had to carry through without agreement, indeed against the resistance of the working class. But now, in the form of trouble, came the great opportunity to win the workers. Therefore I did not feel the 17 June as purely negative [my italics]. At the moment when I saw the proletariat – nothing will induce me to alter that word in a sly or soothing way – once more handed over to the class enemy, the capitalism of the fascist era which is again growing stronger, I also saw the only force that could deal with it.

Like it or not, this is what Brecht thought; and, as I said, the analysis deserves respect, if not agreement. The grievances in his view came from the workers, the slogans from the old Nazi forces already active before 17 June. Anyone who fails to understand that events may sometimes contain contradictory elements – for instance, that a demonstration may be both a response to genuine grievances and a neo-fascist provocation – cannot understand much about recent political history. Once again Hayman is grounding an argument on a single sentence lifted out of context, which is the kind of thing that in my view makes his book unreliable. Contradictory situations give rise to contradictory feelings: often no outcome can be seen as wholly and simply good. For instance, Brecht certainly wanted the military defeat of Hitler and Nazi Germany: yet in face of the ruins of Berlin and Augsburg his poetry expresses shame, pain and an exile’s sense of guilt – as in the fine poem ‘Die Vaterstadt, me find’ ich sie doch?’. So too the end of the war, sealed by the bomb on Hiroshima, meant not only victory but foreboding. These complexities are not just personal to Brecht: he faced them and tried to do what he could to change the contradictory world in which ‘guilt feelings’ are inevitable.

When I said that the ‘whole record’ as stated by Willett increased one’s respect for Brecht’s insight and the political stand he was taking towards the authorities, I had in mind, not just his actions at the time of the demonstrations, but the more critical, exploratory tone of his subsequent writings and his campaign against the control of the arts by stuffy bureaucrats. He had meant for some time to write about the shock-worker Garbe, as Hayman says, but it was of course only after the June events that he planned to shape the material into a Lehrstück ‘with a whole Act about 17 June’ – so I don’t see what Hayman’s point is.