Man is man
| Data | |
|---|---|
| Original title: | Man is man |
| Genus: | Comedy |
| Original language: | German |
| Author: | Bertolt Brecht , Elisabeth Hauptmann |
| Literary source: | Poems and fragments by Brecht; Texts by Rudyard Kipling and Alfred Döblin |
| Music: | Bertolt Brecht; Josef Vorsmann ; 1927 Edmund Meisel ; New setting in 1958 Paul Dessau |
| Publishing year: | 1927 |
| Premiere: | September 25, 1926 |
| Place of premiere: | Darmstadt and Düsseldorf |
| Place and time of the action: | 1925 |
| people | |
|
Uria Shelley, Jesse Mahoney, Polly Baker, Jeriah Jip - four soldiers from a machine gun division of the British Army in India; Charles Fairchild, called Blody Five, sergeant; Galy Gay, an Irish packer; Galy Gay's wife; Mr. Wang, fat cat from a Tibetan pagoda; Mah Sing, his mesmer ; Leokadja Begbick, canteen attendant; Hiobja, Bessie, Ann - their daughters, mixed race, who form a jazz band; Three Tibetans; soldiers |
|
Mann ist Mann is a comedy by Bertolt Brecht , which premiered in 1926 in Darmstadt and Düsseldorf in parallel with the subtitle "The transformation of the packer Galy Gay in the military barracks of Kilkoa in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-five" . There are different versions and settings.
The parabolic piece depicts the transformation of the main character of the piece, the packer Galy Gay, into a soldier. The topic is the interchangeability of human identities. In a long chain of entanglements it becomes clear that human identity can only be defined through the social context in relation to other people. Sergeant Charles Fairchild, known as Bloody Fiver, also lets himself into a change of identity for erotic reasons, but is so appalled that he secretly castrates himself so as not to jeopardize his identity as a tough sergeant again. Except for the widow Begbick, all the characters in the play go through a change of identity. The piece shows the loss of individuality broken ironically. The first elements of the theater concept later developed by Brecht become visible when the actors address the audience, songs interrupt the plot or the half-height curtain only partially hides the conversions.
Emergence
In addition to the various versions of the piece, there is also extensive preparatory work in the form of sketches, text variants and drafts, so that “man is man is one of the most extensive traditions in the estate”. As early as the end of the First World War, Brecht began considering the subject of "Galgei" to write a play that shows the interchangeability of human individuality.
- “That was Citizen Galgei
- With a heavy head and fat
- Villains once said that he was
- The butter dealer Pick. "
In 1920/21 he designed the first scenes that still play "Plärrer" at the Augsburg fair . After a long break, Brecht continued work in 1924. Deeply impressed by Rudyard Kipling's reading , he moves the story to colonial India . The title changes from "Galgei" to "Mann ist Mann" and the protagonist is now called "Galy Gay". Together with Elisabeth Hauptmann he works out the text and scenes. At Christmas 1925, Elisabeth Hauptmann received the piece she had worked on up to then as a 170-page manuscript as a gift with a humorous personal dedication under the heading “main manuscripts”. At this point in time, the piece is still a draft; the manuscript contains completed passages, notes and comments. In 1926, Hauptmann and Brecht completed the first version.
An original version of Mann is Mann , which differs significantly from the piece versions of 1926 and 1938, was only known in 2016. In contrast to the later versions of the text, in which the military milieu is explicitly made into a battleground, the battlefield in the original version of the play focuses “on suppressed and sublimated sexuality”. The original version, made around 1925, of which only one copy is available, was in the estate of the Austrian theater director and theater and film director Max Reinhardt (Jürgen Stein collection).
Literary sources
The literary sources are well researched. Kipling's story "Soldiers Three" was the model for the three soldiers Uria, Jesse and Jip. The story “Krishna Mulvaney”, German in the “Soldiers' Stories” collection, also tells of a group of three soldiers and is the model for the motif of imprisonment in a palankin. The ballad "Loot" from the Barrack Room Ballads tells of a temple burglary. Kipling's work provides a number of other motifs. Other ideas come from Alfred Döblin's novel The Three Jumps of Wang-lun . According to the Brecht Complete Edition, the title of the play “Man is Man” comes from the poem “The Panama Canal” by Ivan Goll (1924). Brecht's title “Mann ist Mann” appears frequently in literary tradition. Ferdinand Freiligrath's poem In spite of all this and its template, A Man's a Man for A 'That , written by Robert Burns in 1795, Goll and Brecht must have known:
- “And you also sit at the meager meal
- In Zwilch and Lein and all that,
- Treat villains with velvet and gold cup -
- A man is a man despite everything! "
Freiligrath translated Robert Burns' hymn in 1843 and adapted it again in the revolutionary year of 1848. The title became a motto of the labor movement.
In terms of the piece's imagery, the proverb tradition is also interesting. Galy Gay, on the way to buy fish on behalf of his wife, becomes a man by giving up this job. “Half fish, half man, fish is still man; / Even fish is fish, even man is man ”, wrote Reinmar von Zweter in the 13th century . The phrase that has become a proverb is available in numerous variants:
- 1. It is not all holy that have white, black, or gray tails.
- 2. Court monks and monastery knights are unsuitable; half fish half man, is neither fish nor man.
- 3. Even fish is fish, even man is man; to the monastery with the priest!
Contents of the first version
In 11 scenes, the first version develops the story of the Irish packer Galy Gay, who sets out to buy a fish (scene 1). At this time the four soldiers Uria Shelley, Jesse Mahoney, Polly Baker and Jeriah Jip ambushed the Old Yellow Lord's Pagoda. The pagoda is trapped, however, and Jeriah Jip loses his hair when he gets stuck in a window coated with glue. They hide it in a palanquin (2nd scene). On the way to go shopping, Galy Gay, who cannot say no, allowed himself to be persuaded to carry a woman's bag home. He meets the three soldiers who need a replacement for the fourth man at roll call (3rd scene). They persuade Galy Gay to take them to the canteen of the widow Leokadja Begbick and her three daughters. There they learn of the severity of the sergeant "Bloody Fiver", the "Tiger of Kilkoa". They dress Galy Gay in army clothes and he represents the hidden Jeraiha Jip at roll call (4th scene). Meanwhile, Wang, the lord of the Yellow Lord's Pagoda, wants to market the drunken Jeraiha Jip as god. He threatens his comrades who want to free him with charges, so that they leave without having achieved anything (5th scene). The short sixth scene shows Galy Gay who fell asleep in the canteen. In the pagoda, Wang manages to make Jip's stay attractive with good food (7th scene). Wang goes to the canteen and buys seven bottles of the best whiskey. When Jip's friends see this, they know he won't be back. You decide to turn Galy Gay into a soldier. To persuade him, they threatened that the sergeant would have his head crushed by an elephant because he said the wrong name during a roll call. Galy Gay then claims to his wife that he is Jeraiha Jip. The motto “man is man” is interpreted to mean that all men are equal and interchangeable. (8th scene)
In an "interlude", the actress explains the intention of the play to Leokadja Begbick "next to the portrait of Mr. Bertolt Brecht":
- “But then Mr. Bertolt Brecht also proves
- That you can do as much as you want with a person.
- A person is being remounted here tonight like a car
- Without losing anything "
With the metaphorical appeal to the audience to “let their private fish swim”, Leokadja calls on Begbick to adapt to the dangerous world.
The army sets out for Tibet. The soldiers embroil Galy Gay in an opaque deal with an elephant who is just a dummy. So they have an excuse to tie him up and take him away. Bloody Fiver tells how he got his name: He "tried" his revolver on five captured Sikhs. In the end, the desperate Galy Gay takes on the role of Jip. He himself believed in his new identity when he was led to believe that Galy Gay was shot. (9th scene)
Galy Gay watches as Bloody Fiver emasculates himself because he cannot cope with his weakness towards women. Galy Gay is now one of the 100,000 soldiers on the way to Tibet, a de-individualized mass of equals (10th scene). The eleventh scene takes place at the mountain fortress Sir el Dchowr in Tibet, which the English want to conquer. Jeraiha Jip returns, but is turned away and given Galy Gay's passport. He is now a soldier and recognizes the weak point of the mountain fortress and destroys it with 5 cannon shots. He has become a human fighting machine.
Performance and impact
On September 25, 1926 , the play was premiered simultaneously in Darmstadt and Düsseldorf . Jacob Geis ' production in Darmstadt with the set by Caspar Neher is considered to be the first performance with "Brecht curtains", the half-height curtain that does not cover the alterations between the scenes. Ernst Legal played the Galy Gay. The reactions were mixed. Director Geis missed “the tempo of the irresistible process” in the Brecht play, he felt the interruptions partly as “training”. Brecht's new concept also irritated the audience. The press praises the actors, sets and directors, but opinions on the play are divided. Elisabeth Langgässer speaks of the piece's “historical significance” and praises its consistency and poetic quality. Praise remarked Herbert Ihering , the piece with Chaplin's Gold Rush compared, unfavorably Alfred Kerr . While the Darmstadt-based company performed the man-is-man song set by Brecht, in Düsseldorf Josef Vorsmann set the songs to music in jazz style. Directed by Joseph Münch , Galy Gay played by Ewald Balser . The reviews were worse here, both in terms of the staging and the play.
Radio lesson Berlin
After the mixed reaction to the premiere, Brecht worked out a version for the radio that was broadcast on March 18, 1927 in the Berlin radio hour . Alfred Braun directed, Ernst Legal spoke Galy Gay, Helene Weigel the Leokadja Begbick, the composition came from Edmund Meisel .
Brecht commented on the radio version several times. In the Rundfunk-Rundschau he spoke confidently for his generation who are interested in radio because the theaters have become “old and lacking in ideas”. “Man is man” he described as a piece of a new genre in which the problems “of successful bourgeois plays 〈…〉 do not occur”. It is no longer about the "individual psychological state", but about the "confrontation of the masses with the individual" in a time when "the superficial varnish of individualism is decomposing".
analysis
The title of the piece, “Mann ist Mann”, sounds like a thesis: As if all men are the same. The viewer learns little about the identity and the associated life story of the main character Galy Gay: He is married, works as a packer and is on the way to buy fish for his wife. Nonetheless, his behavior and expressions reveal the characteristics of other characters: he is soft, cannot say no, can be manipulated by others.
“On the other hand, this man without a past is“ a peculiar man ”. This is what his wife and widow Begbick call him. Its peculiarity, however, seems to be primarily a lack of properties. In particular, the characteristic vagueness of his behavior makes him an example of Brecht's thesis. "
List of symbols
- GBA = Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, Klaus-Detlef Müller (eds.): Bertolt Brecht, works, large annotated Berlin and Frankfurt edition, Berlin and Weimar (construction publishing house), Frankfurt am Main (Suhrkamp publishing house) 1988 ff .
Text output
- Bertolt Brecht: Man is man. The transformation of the packer Galy Gay in the military barracks at Kilkoa in the year nineteen twenty-five. With an appendix: The elephant calf or the ability to prove any claim, Berlin [Propylaen-Verlag] 1927
- Bertolt Brecht: Man is man. The transformation of the packer Galy Gay in the military barracks at Kilkoa in the year nineteen twenty-five. Version from 1938, Collected Works, Volume 1, London (Malik-Verlag) 1938, pp. 161–224
- Bertolt Brecht: Man is man. Version from 1953. in: Pieces, Vol. 2, Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1955
- Bertolt Brecht: Man is man. The transformation of the packer Galy Gay in the military barracks at Kilkoa in the year nineteen twenty-five. Version from 1926, GBA Vol. 2, Pieces 2, pp. 93-168
- Bertolt Brecht: Man is man. The transformation of the packer Galy Gay in the military barracks at Kilkoa in the year nineteen twenty-five. Version from 1938, GBA Vol. 2, Pieces 2, pp. 169-227
Secondary literature
- Jan Knopf: Brecht-Handbuch, Theater, Stuttgart (Metzler) 1986, unabridged special edition, ISBN 3-476-00587-9
- Jan Knopf (Ed.), Brigitte Bergheim (Red.), Joachim Lucchesi (Red.): Brecht manual in five volumes. Volume 1. Pieces. ISBN 3-476-01829-6 , Stuttgart (Metzler) 2001
- Ana Kugli: Man is man. In: Brecht manual in five volumes. Volume 1. Pieces. ISBN 3-476-01829-6 , pp. 152-166
- Frank Thomsen, Hans-Harald Müller, Tom Kindt: Ungeheuer Brecht. A biography of his work. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2006, ISBN 978-3-525-20846-5
Individual evidence
- ↑ The cast list, including the misspelling “Blody Five”, comes from the Great Berlin and Frankfurt Edition (GBA): Bertolt Brecht: Man is man. The transformation of the packer Galy Gay in the military barracks at Kilkoa in the year nineteen twenty-five. Version from 1938, GBA vol. 2, pieces 2, p. 94
- ↑ GBA vol. 2, notes p. 406
- ↑ GBA Vol. 2, p. 407
- ↑ Sabine Kebir: I did not ask for my share, p. 29
- ↑ cf. GBA Vol. 2, p. 408
- ↑ Jan Knopf: Because no man is no man, in: Die Presse, February 13, 2016
- ↑ cf. GBA Vol. 2, pp. 408f.
- ↑ "Everyone in the harbor at the dock in the bars / talks and smiles at each other / whether in a braid in a hat in a cap / whether blond or black hair / man is man."; GBA Vol. 2, p. 409
- ↑ Quoted from Julius Schwering [Hrsg.]: Freiligrath's works in six parts. Volume 2. Berlin / Leipzig / Vienna / Stuttgart 1909. pp. 129-131
- ↑ “even” here means “whole”, cf. the Grimm dictionary ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Klosterspiegel in proverbs, pointed speeches, anecdotes and pulpit pieces. Bern: Jenni, 1841.
- ↑ a b c GBA vol. 2, p. 123
- ↑ GBA Vol. 2, p. 415
- ^ Rhein-Mainische Volkszeitung, Frankfurt am Mainn, September 29, 1926; quoted from GBA Vol. 2, p. 416
- ↑ cf. GBA Vol. 2, p. 415
- ↑ Rundfunk-Rundschau, Berlin, March 13, 1927, p. 186; quoted from: GBA Volume 24, p. 36
- ↑ Rundfunk-Rundschau, Berlin, March 13, 1927, p. 186; quoted from: GBA Volume 24, p. 37
- ↑ Rundfunk-Rundschau, Berlin, March 13, 1927, p. 186; quoted from: GBA Volume 24, p. 37
