BRECHT'S PERSONAL POLITICS by H. Pachter “You have asked me to tell you what I know of Bert Brecht's personal attitudes to the political questions of his time. Let me state in advance that I find it difficult to comply for two reasons — one external, the other intrinsic. Brecht was an ironical author who liked to conceal his meaning while provoking the reader to find his own answer. In personal conversation he also preferred asking questions to giving answers; moreover, he found many situations so complex that humor was the only appropriate approach, and since humor always starts out from the proposition that before the court of history what is right today may be wrong tomorrow, it was often difficult to predict on which side he would come down in practical, everyday politics. The second difficulty was that Brecht shared with other persons of his stature the habit of using people. This appears very clearly, though involuntarily, in the memoirs of Fritz Sternberg and others who boast that they had some influence on Brecht's intellectual development. Having been in the position of an apprentice, I am painfully aware that when Brecht asked me a question it was not to receive instruction from me, but either to educate me or to be challenged by my stupidity. Moreover, it was clear at all times that Brecht did not approve of my critical attitude to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. We avoided the subject whenever possible, and he compartmentalized his ambiances — keeping his party friends apart from Korsch and me. Because of these limitations, I shall speak as little as possible from personal experience, and as much as possible from public sources…
Moreover, like Korsch, Brecht was not happy with the Popular Front tactics which the Comintern adopted in 1934. In his view, it blurred the class fronts and raised illusions among the workers. At the great writers' congress in the Paris Mutuality, 1935, which was supposed to enlist democratic intellectuals in the common cause, he read an appeal to overthrow capitalism first, after which Nazism would disappear of itself. He needed to see the world in black and white: on one side decadent, corrupt capitalism with its two helpers, the Social Democrats and the Fascists; on the other side the Soviet Union, virtue and the workers of the world. This had been the Communist Party's view until 1934, and it had been responsible for the disastrous disunity of the left that facilitated Hitler's rise to power. When the Comintern, finally at its 7th World Congress, abandoned this pernicious theory and the Soviet Union sought an alliance with France, Brecht held on to the view that fascism was nothing but a running dog of capitalism. Comparing the Nazi system with traditional capitalism, he found the former only "relatively worse"15 and in certain respects he even admired its greater efficiency and its "radicalism" which pleases him better than social democratic reform policies: "The Hitler regime is self-reliant capitalism; its policies are radical. Hitler's criticism of the Social-Democrats and of the Frankfurt School is excellent." In the ridiculous play about "The Stoppable Rise of Arturo Ui" he tries to show that nothing distinguishes gangsters, capitalists and Nazis from each other…16… I went to see him about the Moscow trials. We were at a crisis point in the Popular Front and at the height of the Spanish Civil War, in which the Soviet Union was heavily engaged. The trials, in this situation, were extremely embarrassing to the Left, and I said to Brecht: "You are one of the few people who might be listened to in Moscow; could you not speak up?" His answer was amazing. He said: "In fifty years people will have forgotten Stalin; but I want Brecht's plays still to be performed then, and therefore I must stay with the Party." So that was it. At that time I did not know that Brecht had in his desk drawer the autobiographical stories of Herr Keuner, whom he describes as "without backbone. I of all people must outlive violence."19 He also, at about the same time, showed Korsch a poem in which Stalin was compared to an ox that does much useful work and therefore is given special food. 20 He liked to call Stalin "the useful one." (He also is mentioned in Benjamin's diary.) Brecht was convinced that communism would emerge as the heir of European culture, and he wanted to be there to share the future. He could not bear missing the bus of history. Therefore he had to be with Stalin when Stalin was in the driver's seat. He had learned the lesson of historical inevita- bility all too well, much beyond his mentors' intentions. When Korsch pointed out to him how Stalin discredited the cause of socialism, he answered that one must distinguish between government and society. Like Trotsky at the time, he felt that Stalin would disappear and socialism remain; therefore, the defense of the Soviet Union had priority. He defended Stalin's mock trials in public (MeTi, pp. 113-114)21 though in private he mourned the disappearance of his friends, the actress Carola Neher 22 and the poet Sergei Tretyakov, his translator.23 He continued to see some dissidents who had not made their peace with Western democracy. But in parables and arguments he keeps repeating to them his fundamental conviction that freedom is not an eternal value but a petit-bourgeois prejudice.24 Productivity is everything; Stalin's personality cult is explained as a deliberate device to increase productivity.25…” -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41006): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41006 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/118207681/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
