Drumming in the night

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First print from 1922

Drumming in the Night is a drama by Bertolt Brecht . Written in 1919, as Brecht's second piece after Baal , Drummeln in der Nacht was the first Brecht piece to be staged when it premiered in September 1922. In the same year, Brecht was honored with the Kleist Prize for this .

action

The play takes place in 1919 against the backdrop of the Spartacus uprising . Anna Balicke's fiancé Andreas Kragler was an artilleryman in World War I and has been missing for four years. After much hesitation, Anna agrees, as her parents wished, to be engaged to the war profiteer Murk. On the day of the engagement, Kragler suddenly appears who claims to have been a prisoner of war in Africa. Anna's parents and Murk treat the have-nothing as troublemakers; Anna, who is already pregnant by Murk, asks Kragler to go first. While he briefly joins the rebels, Anna finally leaves Murk and confesses to Kragler that she is pregnant. Kragler ultimately decides for Anna and against to participate in the fighting. He justifies his rejection with the words: My flesh should rot in the gutter so that your idea goes to heaven? Are you drunk?

History of origin, first performances

The piece was written in February 1919 in a first, no longer preserved version under the title Spartacus . Thematically it is closely linked to the revolutionary struggles in Germany in 1918/1919 . Detailed passages as well as headline-style dialogues suggest that Brecht processed direct personal impressions here and was also inspired by newspaper articles. Lion Feuchtwanger was enthusiastic in March 1919; he particularly praised the "wild, powerful, colorful language, not read from books [...]" . Brecht followed Marta Feuchtwanger's advice and renamed the piece to Drums in the Night . It was initially not listed; Brecht tried several times to revise it, without success.

On September 29, 1922, the premiere took place at the Münchner Kammerspiele under the direction of Otto Falckenberg , making Drummeln der Nacht the first performed piece by Brecht. At the premiere, there were posters in the auditorium with inscriptions such as “Glotzt nicht so romantisch”. Actors included Maria Koppenhöfer , Erwin Faber , Hans Leibelt and Kurt Horwitz . Karl Valentin was one of the premiere guests . The next day, Hermann Sinsheimer wrote an almost anthemic review in the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten (September 30) and was the real discoverer of Brecht: "A playwright arrived on the stage at the Kammerspiele yesterday evening."

The theater critic Herbert Ihering , who traveled from Berlin, wrote on October 5, 1922 in the Berlin Börsen-Courier : "The twenty-four year old poet Bert Brecht changed the poetic face of Germany overnight" . It was also Ihering who made Brecht the winner of the Kleist Prize , which Brecht was awarded on November 21, 1922.

On December 20, 1922, the play also premiered at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. It was a failure here and was discontinued after a few weeks. During rehearsals before the premiere, Brecht met Helene Weigel .

Revisions

Brecht made several corrections to the piece, for example in 1922 when he deleted extensive parts of the text in Acts 4 and 5. This version was published by the Munich publishing house Drei Masken at the end of 1922 . At the beginning of the 1950s there was another revision when an edition of his early pieces was to be published by Suhrkamp Verlag . The plot was now clearly placed in the context of the Berlin January fights (Spartacus uprising) and numerous Berlin details were added. Brecht now called the play a comedy .
In the GDR, 'Drumming in the Night' was massively falsified.

In 1922, Brecht parodied the piece together with Karl Valentin in the Münchner Kammerspiele . Brecht was close friends with Karl Valentin, whom he also held in high regard as an artist.

literature

Text output

  • Drumming in the night . Comedy, 19th edition Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2010 (German first edition: Drei Masken, Munich 1923), ISBN 978-3-518-10490-3 (= "edition suhrkamp", volume 490).

Secondary literature

  • Wolfgang M. Schwiedrzik (Ed.): Brecht's “Drumming in the Night” . Suhrkamp TB 2101 materials, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-518-38601-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Quoted from Elisabeth Tworek's entry in the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns zu Brecht, Bertolt: Drumming in the night, 1919
  2. Jürgen Hillesheim : The slacker is a humanist , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , April 16, 2019, p. 14.