Schweyk in World War II
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| Title: | Schweyk in World War II |
| Genus: | Epic theater |
| Original language: | German |
| Author: | Bertolt Brecht |
| Music: | Hanns Eisler |
| Publishing year: | 1957 |
| Premiere: | 17th January 1957 |
| Place of premiere: | Warsaw |
| Place and time of the action: | Prague in World War II |
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Schweyk in World War II is a drama by the playwright Bertolt Brecht . It was written in exile in the USA in 1943 , but was never completed. As late as 1946, Brecht refused the first performance at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, stating that Schweyk was not yet finished. A playable version of the piece was published by Elisabeth Hauptmann on the basis of several manuscripts by Brecht. It was finally premiered in January 1957, six months after Brecht's death, with Hanns Eisler's incidental music in Warsaw . Bertolt Brecht wrote the play Schweyk in World War II based on the novel Der brave Soldat Schwejk by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek . The foreign rule and the resistance of the Czech people against their masters are preserved as a historical context. In place of the rule of the Habsburgs which enters the Nazis and the place of the First of the Second World War .
The play was filmed in 1961 for Süddeutscher Rundfunk with Hanns Ernst Jäger in the title role.
The subject had occupied Brecht since he had worked on a stage version of the adventures of the good soldier Schwejk on the Berlin Piscator stage in early 1928 .
content
The Prague dog dealer Schweyk is the protagonist in the drama. Through his friend Baloun he got into trouble with the German occupation forces and after a short employment with the Gestapo he had to join the Wehrmacht as punishment for his offense. The offense consisted of slaughtering his Gestapo boss's favorite dog and serving it to his friend.
A framework plot shows how Hitler plans and carries out the attack on the Soviet Union . This framework story is merged with the story of Schweyk in the last picture, in which Schweyk comes to Stalingrad as one of the last German soldiers and meets Hitler there. Schweyk, however, is not impressed by him and he replies to Hitler:
- And I'll tell you quite frankly that I just don't know yet
- Whether I shoot you now or don't give a fuck about you
Hitler gets out of control and starts dancing around wildly.
The aftermath forms a grotesque contrast to the “prelude in the higher regions”. In the prelude , Brecht parodies the “Prologue in Heaven” in Goethe's tragedy Faust . With Brecht, Hitler appears like God, the Lord, who allows himself to be worshiped by the three " angels " Göring , Goebbels and Himmler ; at the same time, however, Hitler also takes on traits of Mephistus , the devil. With Brecht's arrangement, the framework story gets an extreme height of fall.
Drama technique
The play is written by Bertolt Brecht in the style of epic theater . This can be recognized by the multitude of alienation effects that prevent any form of catharsis . Rather, comedy arises, especially through parodies that alienate their original. So not only Goethe's Faust is parodied, but also the Horst Wessel song . Songs that interrupt the plot reflect and comment (as in many pieces by Bertolt Brecht) on the plot several times.
Songs
For use outside of his Schweyk piece during World War II , Brecht envisaged several songs embedded in the piece. It can be assumed that the calf march was also intended for anti-fascist radio broadcasts. The calf march is a parody of the Horst Wessel song . Outside the context of the Schweyk piece, the song of the Vltava , left only in fragments by Brecht, is often sung, the melody of which is based on Bedřich Smetana's symphonic poem Die Moldau .
Interpretations and reviews
Continuation or postponement of the novel?
After the world premiere of Schweyk in Warsaw, critics were unanimously negative about the “transplantation” of the novel into the era of National Socialism. The authors assume that Hašek's Schwejk is not 25 years older, but that Brecht has alienated the plot in Hašek's novel by replacing the foreign control on the part of Austro-Hungarian state organs with that of National Socialist Germany. Jan Kott called this procedure an “artistic mistake”, Andrzej Wirth put it: “Schweyk as an acting person” was only possible in the old Austrian army, “under the conditions of relative personal freedom, which is a necessary condition of every mode of action. This relative personal freedom was ruined by fascism ”. The newspaper “ Życie Warszawy ” (“Warschauer Leben”) came to a similar conclusion : “Hitler's Germany was not an operetta state.” The German-language premiere on March 1, 1958 at the Erfurt Theater also failed critics and audiences. It was not until its western premiere on May 22, 1959 at the Schauspiel Frankfurt in a production by Harry Buckwitz , for which Hanns Eisler added four interludes for orchestra, that a successful series of the play began on German and international stages.
The Berliner Ensemble, on the other hand, on the occasion of its Schweyk production, which was staged from April 2010 to September 2013, summarized the plot with the words: “The good soldier Schweyk, who survived the First World War, is still alive and shows our history his successful efforts to survive World War II […] ”. According to this, Schweyk, the landlady and the regulars of the Prague pub "Zum Kelch", who have all gotten 25 years older since the outbreak of the First World War, experience a lot for the second time. Based on this interpretation, Brecht wrote a continuation of the Hašek novel.
expenditure
- Bertolt Brecht: Pieces. Volume 10 - Pieces from Exile: Schweyk in World War II; The Caucasian Chalk Circle; The days of the Commune. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1957 (first edition). Also: Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin (GDR) 1958.
- Bertolt Brecht: Schweyk in the Second World War (= Edition Suhrkamp. 132). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1959 a. ö., ISBN 3-518-10132-3 .
literature
- Jürgen Eder: The subversive rogue: Bertolt Brecht's “Schwejk in the Second World War”. In: Aussiger Contributions, 2.2008, pp. 137–145, urn : nbn: de: hebis: 30: 3-294259 .
- Johannes Freund: "Obediently report, I shit as you wish." The comic dismantling of National Socialism in Brechts Schweyk. In: ECIBS Communications from the International Brecht Society. 36.1 (2008), online ( memento from June 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive ).
- Herbert Knust (Ed.): Materials on Bertolt Brechts Schweyk in the Second World War: templates (adaptations), variants, fragments, sketches, letters a. Diary notes (= edition suhrkamp. 604). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-518-00604-5 .
- Gerd Rienäcker: In the higher regions. A prelude and two interludes in Brecht / Eisler's “Schweyk in the Second World War”. In: ders .: Music theater in an experiment: twenty-five essays. Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936872-22-8 , pp. 193-205.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Herbert Knust (Ed.): Materials on Bertolt Brechts Schweyk in the Second World War. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-518-00604-5 , p. 155.
- ^ Jürgen Schebera: Eisler. a biography in texts and pictures. Schott publishing house, Mainz u. a. 1998, ISBN 3-7957-2383-3 , p. 270
- ↑ Schweyk in World War II (TV 1961) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ Volker Mall: [ Who actually shot whom? Lesson draft on the subject of "Horst Wessel Song and Calf March" ]. In: Neue Musikzeitung . Edition 11/1998
- ↑ a b Program booklet Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt / M. 1958/59, printed in: Herbert Knust (Ed.): Materials on Bertolt Brechts Schweyk in the Second World War. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-518-00604-5 , p. 299 f.
- ↑ Brave Schweyk . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 1957, pp. 50 ( online ).
- ↑ Herbert Knust (Ed.): Materials on Bertolt Brechts Schweyk in the Second World War. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-518-00604-5 , p. 156.
- ↑ live review: Schweyk in the Second World War