The fear and misery of the Third Reich

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Fear and Misery of the Third Reich is a play by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht , which he wrote in exile from 1935 to 1943.

Emergence

Margarete Steffin and Brecht began in 1934 to collect material on everyday events in National Socialist Germany. At the end of 1937, the first five scenes were available, which were summarized under the title Fear . Further scenes were written in quick succession; in May 1938 there were already 25, eight of which were shown in the Paris premiere on May 21, 1938. By June 1938, the number of scenes rose to 27. Brecht called the compilation "montage", which was testing an artistic method he had developed under new conditions. In 1942/43 a version was created for the American market, which received another scene and was given the title The Private Life of the Master Race (the translation was done by Eric Bentley). This American version was then in the first half of 1945 under the title The life of the master race basis for a performance by the German-language emigrant theater Kammerspiele in Quito .

A production by Henry Schnitzler on June 7, 1945 at the University of California and a production carried out by Berthold Viertel on June 12, 1945 at the Pauline Edwards Theater of the City College of New York no longer met with any particular interest from the audience one month after the end of the war . The immigrant actors' poor command of the English language also contributed to cold reviews. The New York critic George Jean Nathan attacked Brecht as a poet with little soul and stated that “the direction of Berthold Viertel and the playful achievements were of a kind that would have been booed even at the German traveling theater in the provinces.” The New York production had initially arranged by Erwin Piscator . Brecht continued it, but finally transferred it to Viertel. Shortly after the premiere, Piscator sent Brecht a detailed comparison of the staging approaches developed by Brecht and himself, in which he complained that Brecht had not adequately implemented the dramaturgical potential of his text.

In 1996, another scene of the fear and misery of the Third Reich was found in Caspar Neher's estate , written in November 1946. This means that a total of 30 scenes can be assigned to the piece. Whereby he wrote another 5 scenes shortly before his death, which also had National Socialist content. So there were 35 scenes in total.

content

Based on Heinrich Heine's Germany. Brecht originally wanted to call the play a winter fairy tale Germany - A horror fairy tale . In 1938, Brecht also brought up the title Die Deutsche Heerschau . The final title is based on Balzac's novel Glamor and Misery of the Courtesans .

In the scenes , each preceded by a short poem , German National Socialism is depicted in everyday life. The scenes have no direct connection, the protagonists only appear in one scene. Overall, they make clear how the National Socialist dictatorship penetrated all social classes and areas of life and spreads fear and distrust.

At the same time as the omnipresence of terror and fear, the scenes also address the small, often inconspicuous areas of resistance that people have in places where freedom of expression is banned from public and private life. Almost every scene explores the visible and invisible attitudes of the secret resistance and also shows the various types of adaptation, submission and delusion that made National Socialist rule possible in the first place. Brecht, to whom Georg Lukàcs' praise for the scene "The Spy" seemed too one-sidedly related to the realistic character of the play, wrote on August 15, 1938 in his work journal: "The montage of 27 scenes is overlooked, and that it is actually only is a gesture table, just the gestures of falling silent, looking around, frightening, etc. The gestures of dictatorship. The epic theater can thus show that both "interiors" and almost naturalistic elements are possible in it, but do not make the difference. " The theatrical effect of the scenes results both from their historical character as a document of everyday National Socialist life in the years before the start of the war and from the gestural intensification of the situations that Brecht was concerned with and which made the play a study of human behavior under the conditions of state terror power.

The 30 scenes in detail:

National community
Two drunken SS officers shoot around in a residential street.
The betrayal
A couple overhears a neighbor who they have betrayed is brutally arrested.
The chalk cross
An SA man reveals a trick to mark people who think differently for arrest.
The bog soldiers
The quarreling of the left parties continues in the concentration camp.
Service to the people
An SS man pretends to whip a prisoner, only when the group leader checks that he really hits him.
Legal finding
Despite the unambiguous facts, judicial proceedings turn into a farce, as the judge, for fear of reprisals, does not believe he can judge according to current law, but rather according to the expectations of the highest-ranking influence, which cannot be determined here in the field of tension between the SA and SS.
The occupational disease
A doctor who prides himself on being patient-friendly eschews a more thorough examination of an injured worker from Oranienburg concentration camp .
physicist
Physicists X and Y secretly talk about Einstein's scientific work.
The Jewish woman
A Jewish woman abandons her husband, who is ostracized by better society because he is married to her.
The informer
A paranoid couple fears that their young son will report them. This shows how distrust divides and divides families.
The black shoes
In conversation with her daughter, the financial misery of a widow becomes clear, whose daughter is encouraged in the Association of German Girls to go to the country as free labor and pay for it herself.
Labor service
A student and a worker are forced to do labor service, the class differences remain.
The hour of the worker
A radio announcer interviews factory workers for propaganda purposes. When a worker gives his honest opinion, he is pushed away from the microphone.
The box
A worker is brought to his family in a zinc coffin to cover up how he was murdered.
The international
Despite being flogged, two prisoners in the concentration camp sing Die Internationale together .
The discharged man
In a workers' kitchen, a couple speaks to a laid-off man whom they do not trust.
The vote
A war blind man and his old mother are taken to the polling station by the SA and, in heroic words, instructed in making the right choice.
The new dress
A young woman, whose dress is made of cheap material because the wool is reserved for uniforms, curses the regime, not knowing that SA men will hear her.
Winter aid
Two SA men bring donations from an old woman and arrest their daughter after the mother carelessly notices that the daughter is documenting the rising food prices in her household book.
Two bakers
Two meet in prison; one because he refused to mix bran in the bread, the other because he did it 2 years ago.
The farmer feeds the sow
A farmer illegally feeds his cattle and keeps his family as guards.
The old fighter
A butcher who was once loyal to the party does not get meat delivered at the state-set prices. In order not to send his customers away for nothing, he defies the orders of the party and secretly buys goods from a Jew. When his son is brought to the concentration camp, he hangs himself around his neck with a sign: "I voted Hitler!"
The Sermon on the Mount
A dying fisherman speaks to a pastor about the Christian faith, which no longer counts for his son who is loyal to the regime and who is also present, because Jesus was a Jew. The pastor is afraid that his words of comfort will get him into trouble.
The warning
Relevant propaganda poems and exercises prepare the Hitler Youth for war. A boy is harassed by the squad leader because his mother does not buy him a gas mask.
The bombardment of Almeria is known in the barracks
A boy who greets with good morning receives more food than the boy who shouts Heil Hitler after the soldiers realize that Hitler is actually going to war.
Job creation
A woman receives news that her brother's plane crashed in Szczecin, but the neighbor suspects that he perished on secret operations in the Spanish Civil War . It is said that German airmen who want to save themselves by parachute are shot in the air from their own side so that they cannot be presented as prisoners as proof of German involvement.
What helps against gas
A man quietly tells his sister that the only thing that would help them would be to overthrow the regime, but nobody dares to say it out loud.
Referendum
Resistance workers read the letter of an executed man and continue despite adverse circumstances.
The substitute for feeling
A man euphemistically justifies his decision to withhold a vital operation from his sister and let her starve to death, while the same government decision to feed the people is propagandistically reported on the radio.
Hamburg 1938
Three SA men read the same letter from an executed person to his son as in the scene “Referendum”, which hits one of the pregnant women on the stomach.

Performances

  • Eight scenes from the play were premiered on May 21, 1938 in Paris under the title 99% (subtitle: Pictures from the Third Reich) . The director was Slatan Dudow .
  • The first performance of the American adaptation took place on June 7, 1945 in Berkeley . (A rehearsal of Henry Schnitzler with 17 scenes was shown in the program of the founding congress of the UN .). 9 scenes from the play were also performed on Broadway in 1945 . This performance, directed by Erwin Piscator , was a disaster for Brecht, as Winfried Roesner writes. Brecht had a falling out with Piscator and directed it himself, the actors “look like 'school children' to him, and the famous Albert Bassermann , 78 years old, speaks English that he doesn't understand himself. Brecht, directs as if he wanted to ruin his own play. The reviews are devastating and find everything to be 'incredibly boring'. For a long time, Brecht couldn't get over the diarrhea on Broadway and no longer allowed performances there. "
  • The Swiss premiere was in November 1946.
  • The Turkish premiere was in the 1971/72 season. The director was Yılmaz Onay . After five performances the piece was banned.

Publications

The work was first published in 1938 by the Malik publishing house in Prague , but the print-ready set was probably destroyed in connection with the political events at the end of 1938. The American version was published in the USA in September 1944, the first German-language edition, it contained 24 scenes, was also published in the USA in New York in 1945 . In Germany, the piece was published by Aufbau-Verlag in 1948.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Digitized edition of the structure published in New York from 1934–2004 online , edition of July 13, 1945, p. 8.
  2. ^ Bertolt Brecht Broadway - the hard way . Frankfurt / Main 1994 (Edition Suhrkamp)., ISBN 3-518-11835-8
  3. ↑ George Jean Nathan: Theater Book of the Year (1945-46): a Record and an Interpretation . New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1947. p. 28. Quoted from Peter Bauland: The hooded eagle: modern German drama on the New York stage . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1968. p. 155.
  4. ^ Letter from Erwin Piscator to Bertolt Brecht, June 15, 1945, in: Erwin Piscator: Briefe. Volume 2.2: New York 1939-1945 . Edited by Peter Diezel. Berlin: B&S Siebenhaar 2009 (Erwin Piscator. Berlin edition). Pp. 17-19.
  5. ↑ Bertolt Brecht: Fear and misery of the Third Reich . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M., 1998, p. 138.
  6. ↑ Hans Lösener: Countervotes. A drama didactic. With reading exercises for scenes from Brecht's "Fear and Misery of the Third Reich" . Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Hohengehren 2017, p. 3 fu 74 f.
  7. ^ Bertolt Brecht: Works. Large annotated Berlin and Frankfurt edition. Edited by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, Klaus-Detlef Müller. Volume 26: Journals I (1913-1941) . Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Aufbau-Verlag and Suhrkamp 1994, p. 318 f.
  8. ↑ Eberhard Spreng: Theatrical Resistance. 70 years ago Bertolt Brecht's “Fear and Misery of the Third Reich” premiered in Paris. , Deutschlandfunk , May 21, 2008.
  9. ^ Bertolt Brecht: Selected works in six volumes. Suhrkamp 1997, Volume 1, p. 685 ff.
  10. ↑ Winfried Roesner: May 21, 1938: Brecht's 'Furcht und Elend des Third Reichs' is premiered. swr.de , SWR2 Zeitwort, broadcast on May 21, 2016.
  11. ↑ Ankara Art Theater - Ankara Sanat Tiyatrosu Hitler Rejimi'nin Korku ve Sefaleti ( Memento of the original from May 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ast.com.tr