The plebeians rehearse the insurrection

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The "German tragedy " The plebeians rehearse the uprising was published by Günter Grass in 1966. The premiere took place on January 15, 1966 in the Berlin Schillertheater .

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1st act

On June 17, 1953 , rehearsals for an adaptation of William Shakespeare's drama Coriolanus take place in the Deutsches Theater Berlin , which are directed by the “boss” (obviously referring to Bertolt Brecht ). The focus of the discussion is the question of how the plebeians are to be represented in the first scene . The "boss" is particularly displeased with how easily the plebeians in the Shakespeare version allow themselves to be dissuaded from their plans for uprising by Menenius Agrippa . Erwin, the assistant director, sums up the discomfort: “Because parable rhymes with simplicity, the people are glued like a parable.” However, the “boss” does not like it if you think the people are simple at the beginning of the play.

A delegation of workers bursts into this meeting and expects the “boss” to write “a letter” for them, giving the insurgents a voice. The "boss" holds out the workers because it is not clear to him what they want to fight for. They cannot answer legitimate questions: “Have you already occupied the radio? / Called the general strike? / Are you safe from Western agents? / What is the Vopo doing? Is she looking away? / Did you give the Soviet Union a guarantee / that it would remain with socialism? / What if armored cars come? "

Because the workers are at a loss and because his samples are more important to him, the “boss” wants to send the workers home.

2nd act

The “boss” lets the workers play the previous course of the uprising for him and uses the corresponding scenes for the rehearsals for his Shakespeare adaptation. "Plebeians and proletarians / have entered into wild marriages," he observes with pleasure. “Volumnia”, his partner, who is watching the scene, comments on it with the words: “What a lousy esthete you are!” Finally, a bricklayer loses patience: He insults the “boss” with his opinion, meaningless words. According to the “boss”, the bricklayer did not even think of the word “traitor to workers”.

During this phase of the standstill, Kosanke, representative of the party , appears. He expects loyalty to the state from the “boss” and a corresponding written declaration; the “boss” does not want to fulfill Kosanke's wish either. “The West reads me with pleasure; / the East reads Kosanke's lies. ”, he provokes his“ colleague ”. A verbal argument develops between the workers and Kosanke, who eludes him through his departure.

The “boss” is happy about the rich “booty” because the tape was recording all the time. "Volumnia" comments on this with the words: "He plays."

3rd act

Wiebe and Damaschke from the strike leadership step up and ask the “boss” to write a strike call. Their demands are much more radical than those of the workers who had been present for a long time and who ultimately only wanted to withdraw the increase in standards. When the “boss” tries to hold off the workers, there is a “ stand trial ”: The “boss” and Erwin are to be hung up.

Erwin slips into the role of Menenius Agrippa and tells the fable of the belly and the limbs. Impressed by this, the workers give up their intention of executing the theater people.

The events come to a head: Outside the theater, the first injured people are. In the distance you can hear Kosanke speaking through a megaphone. Wiebe's call for freedom is drowned out by the sound of tanks rolling in. The uprising has obviously failed. The "boss" decides to write a letter to the party leadership. Too late he realizes: “The holy spirit breathed. / I thought it was a draft, / called: who is bothering you? ". He then listens to the tape recordings again.

4th act

Kosanke appears and intimidates the theater people. He urges the "boss" to put his signature on a letter in which he and other intellectuals express his solidarity with the SED. At first he is hesitant because he doesn't want to be a “chameleon”, but then he signs, urged by “Volumnia” to do so, but secretly keeps a paused version with which he wants to prove his differentiated attitude. He doesn't want to work on the “Coriolan” any further; because he now knows "that we [...] cannot change Shakespeare as long as we do not change." Ultimately, the only thing left for the "boss" is to retreat to an idyll in a "house, between poplars, by the lake".

The "Fable of the Belly and the Limbs"

An (alleged) episode from the class struggles in Rome during the republican era was taken up in ancient literature . The patrician senator Menenius Agrippa tried to calm the rebellious plebeians with a fable , namely the "Fable of the Belly and the Limbs". The best known is the version by Titus Livius (in: "ab urbe condita, 2, 32, 8-12"). The fable was taken up by William Shakespeare in his drama "Coriolanus". This in turn was edited by Bertolt Brecht in the 1950s.

Menenius Agrippa claims in all versions of the fable that the citizens of Rome form one body and that it is therefore nonsensical for the plebeians to fight against the patricians. Because a fight of the limbs against the empty stomach (as the Menenius represents the Senate led by patricians) makes no sense. In all versions before Brecht's adaptation, this assertion has a resounding success: the plebeians give up their fight. In the print version of Brecht's "Coriolan", however, the plebeians are not convinced of the fable, but react to the "language of violence" (Marcius 'soldiers appear at the end of Menenius' speech). Brecht lets the "beautiful speaker" Menenius sum up the situation in a one-to-one conversation with Marcius with the following words: "It was not my voice ore, it was / the voice of your ore that knocked it over."

Grass, on the other hand, shows that the fable continues to develop the effect attributed to it by Livy and Shakespeare in the present. Erwin says: “Nonsense has a tradition here / and keeps as fresh as formalin corpses. / That is why progress must not cancel it. ”Simple (simple-minded?) People are therefore not up to the rhetoric of the“ fair talkers ”.

The fable is an early example of political manipulation : By translating a situation onto a pictorial level and then using “coherent” argumentation on this level, Menenius “proves” that there is a community of fate between the plebeians and “their” state. In fact, there are also societies without a noble upper class, as Ernst Bloch rates the “fable of the stomach and limbs” as “one of the oldest social lies”.

Poetry and Truth - Brecht and June 17, 1953

When asked whether you couldn't look at the “boss” without thinking about Brecht, Marcel Reich-Ranicki replied in 1966: “No, you can't. Because if we are interested in this figure at all, it is mainly thanks to Brecht, thanks to the allusions to his situation in the GDR, to his plays and poems, to his theater and his life. "

Günter Grass already knew in 1964 that Bertolt Brecht was working on Erwin Strittmatter's "Katzgraben" on June 17, 1953 and not rehearsing for his adaptation of Shakespeare's "Coriolanus". There is also no evidence that Brecht was asked for support by insurgents and received an unannounced visit to the “Deutsches Theater Berlin” for this purpose.

According to Günter Kunert , Brecht did not stay in the theater until the uprising was suppressed, but met with him and Kurt Barthel (the role model for the character Kosanke) at Stephan Hermlin's in order to reach a joint reaction from leading cultural politicians and intellectuals to the uprising to advise.

However, there are minutes (?) Of a director's interview about the work on Shakespeare's "Coriolan", dated 1953, which contains the catchphrase: "We can change Shakespeare if we can change him." With that, Brecht obviously means that he was able to remove the undemocratic, anti-popular tendency from the play "Coriolanus" by Shakespeare. A performance of “Coriolan” did not take place during Brecht's lifetime ( because of the events of June 17, 1953?).

Work editions

  • Günter Grass: The plebeians are rehearsing the uprising. A German tragedy . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1966.
  • Günter Grass: The plebeians are rehearsing the uprising. A German tragedy . Luchterhand, Darmstadt / Neuwied 1977
  • Günter Grass: The plebeians are rehearsing the uprising. A German tragedy . Steidl, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-88243-934-3 .

literature

  • Günter Grass: Pre- and post-history of the tragedy of Coriolanus by Livy and Plutarch about Shakespeare and Brecht to me . Speech given on April 24, 1964 in front of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin. In: Günter Grass: The plebeians rehearse the uprising. A German tragedy . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1966, pp. 101-124.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Ernst Bloch: Political measurements, time of plague, Vormärz . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1970, pp. 172–176 (written in 1936)
  2. Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Tragedy from a German tragedy . In: The time. January 21, 1966.
  3. ^ Günter Grass: Before and after the tragedy of Coriolanus by Livius and Plutarch about Shakespeare and Brecht to me . Speech given on April 24, 1964 in front of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin. In: Günter Grass: The plebeians rehearse the uprising. A German tragedy . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1966, p. 123.
  4. Günter Kunert: No day like any other. Memories of the workers' uprising on June 17, 1953. ( Memento from January 16, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. June 17, 2003.
  5. Bertolt Brecht: Study of the first appearance in Shakespeare's "Coriolan". In: Collected works in 20 volumes. Suhrkamp. Frankfurt am Main 1967. Volume 16 ( Schriften zum Theater 2 ), pp. 869-887.