The Collected Short Stories of Bertolt Brecht

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The Collected Short Stories of Bertolt Brecht Edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim Translated by Yvonne Kapp, Hugh Rorrison and Antony Tatlow With a New Introduction by Marc Silberman Brecht General Editor Tom Kuhn Methuen Drama India Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Original work entitled Geschichten, being Volume II of Gesammelte Werkeof Bertolt Brecht, published by Suhrkamp Verlag. English-language translation first published in the UK in 1983 by Methuen London, first published in Bloomsbury Methuen Drama theAnUSA in 1998 by Arcade Publishing imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 BedfordFirst Squarepublished in India 2018 1385 Broadway London New York This edition first published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama in 2015 WC1B 3DP NY 10018 Reprinted by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama 2015 UK

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Contents

Introduction 1

The Bavarian Stories (1920–1924)

7

Bargan Gives Up 7 Story on a Ship 25 The Revelation 28 The Foolish Wife 30 The Blind Man 33 A Helping Hand 38 Java Meier 44 The Lance-Sergeant 56 Message in a Bottle 62 A Mean Bastard 64 The Death of Cesare Malatesta 72

The Berlin Stories (1924–1933)

79

The Answer 79 Before the Flood 83 Conversation about the South Seas 85 Letter about a Mastiff 87

vi

Contents

Hook to the Chin 95 Müller’s Natural Attitude 100 North Sea Shrimps 107 Bad Water 118 A Little Tale of Insurance 125 Four Men and a Poker Game 131 Barbara 140 The Good Lord’s Package 145 The Monster 149 The Job 156

Stories Written in Exile (1933–1948)

163

Safety First 163 The Soldier of La Ciotat 178 A Mistake 181 Gaumer and Irk 187 Socrates Wounded 191 The Experiment 211 The Heretic’s Coat 225 Lucullus’s Trophies 236 The Unseemly Old Lady 247 A Question of Taste 254 The Augsburg Chalk Circle 261 Two Sons 279

Appendix

283

Life Story of the Boxer Samson-Körner 283

Contents

Editorial Notes

309

The Principal Collections of Brecht’s Short Stories 309 Notes on Individual Stories 315

Index

331

Index of Titles in German 331

The Translators Yvonne Kapp, pages 178–180, 191–235, 247–254, 261–282 Hugh Rorrison, pages 79–178, 180–191 Antony Tatlow, pages 7–77, 254–261 John Willett, pages 236–247, 283–308.

vii

Introduction

While best known as a dramatist and poet, Bertolt Brecht was first and foremost a prose writer, more specifically a storyteller. Indeed, the first volume he published on his return to Germany in 1949 was an anthology of short stories, prose anecdotes and narrative poems, Tales from the Calendar, as he called them. After a bitter exile of sixteen years, Brecht chose, in other words, to reintroduce himself to the German audience with these realistic stories fashioned in the tradition of popular narratives that aim to instruct and entertain. Their unpretentious tone and reporting style are typical of Brecht’s art of storytelling. Although his reputation in the English-speaking world is that of a dramatist and theatre innovator, it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of his narrative prose writings. This republication of the anthology of short stories in translation offers an opportunity to reconsider from a different perspective this internationally regarded writer. Those who already know Brecht’s plays and/or poetry will perceive the echoes and resonances; those who do not will discover a master storyteller concerned with the way

2

Collected Short Stories of Bertolt Brecht

the process of history manifests itself in everyday events. At the same time, this is part of a major series of Brechtian volumes that includes Brecht on Film and Radio (2000), Brecht on Art and Politics (2004), Brecht on Theatre (2014), Brecht on Performance (2014), and his novel The Business Deals of Mr Julius Caesar (forthcoming in 2016). Brecht was a writer who always sought to structure events in a clear, linear direction with a beginning and an end. His theatre works as well as his poetry bear witness to this constant in his writing style. The best-known plays draw their strength from the centrality of a tale or report, from Baal’s ballads, to the commentator in The Threepenny Opera who sings of Mac the Knife’s crimes, to the theatrical conceit of The Caucasian Chalk Circle’s framing device for the central parable. The notes to many of the plays include the dramatist’s attempts to summarize the narration – in the form of a newspaper article, a schematic listing of events or a series of headings for the scenes. Even Brecht’s abundant poetry, echoing in the famous songs and lyrical passages of the plays, is less striking for strong images than for the clarity of language and narrative coherence. First came the story, then came the rest. Unlike in Germany, where his stories and parables are anthologized in school readers and an acknowledged part of the canon, Brecht’s prose is not well known to Anglophone readers. The short stories assembled, translated and republished in this volume are only a small selection of his prose writing, which encompasses anecdotes, aphorisms, dialogues, novels, screenplays, journals and diaries, prose poems, essays and theoretical treatises. In fact, the number of genuine short stories Brecht wrote is quite limited when compared to the plays and

Introduction

3

poetry (the many film scripts and ideas he sketched out as stories are excluded here; see Brecht on Film and Radio), and unlike his work on the plays and the poetry, which was continual and developed over his entire lifetime, the composition of the stories falls into three distinct periods. The Bavarian stories are among the first texts Brecht wrote in his hometown of Augsburg and during his student and bohemian years in Munich. As early as 1913 he was contributing anecdotes to his school newspaper, and between 1914 and 1918 he penned three stories about the war. Those collected here – written between 1920 and 1924 – treat mainly autobiographical problems such as existential helplessness and isolation, male comradeship and marriage, and the yearning for a better world, even where they are dressed up as adventuresome or exotic parables. In this respect they correspond to the screenplays Brecht was turning out at this time too, genre pieces that – like the prose stories – provided a strong form to guide his lively imagination. The first story in this section, ‘Bargan Gives Up’, was also the first of Brecht’s published texts (1921) that brought him recognition beyond Bavaria, and book publishers as well as newspapers and journals were initially more interested in these early stories and his poems than in the plays. The Berlin stories, written after Brecht moved to the city permanently in 1924 and before he fled Germany in 1933, mark the most intense period of his short-story writing, possibly motivated more by financial considerations than a commitment to the prose form as such. Their sober style and documentary realism reflect the influence of Weimar Germany’s ‘new objectivity’ (Neue Sachlichkeit) on Brecht. The emphasis on

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Collected Short Stories of Bertolt Brecht

authenticity, the explicit naming of places and dates, and the almost naturalistic interest in details balance the stories’ more complex formal structures and layered narrative perspectives. Thematically the stories from this middle period are dominated as well by topical issues of the 1920s: Americanism as an alternative to German philistinism (although not necessarily portrayed as a positive one), sports, business and engineering technology. Boxing in particular fascinated Brecht at this time because it allowed him to articulate in a popular domain the issues of fame and the problems of maintaining it that also concerned him as an artist. For example, the fragmentary ‘Life Story of the Boxer Samson-Körner’ (see the appendix) focuses on the way a reputation is gained through economic and social factors, not necessarily through talent. Like the plays of the Berlin period, Brecht’s short stories aim to reveal the social behaviour of individuals – either right or wrong – through their actions, which are made visible for the reader’s examination. The majority of the stories in the final group were written during the years in Scandinavian exile, mostly between 1937 and 1940, while Brecht was living in Denmark and Sweden. Seven of them were later included in the post-war collection Tales from the Calendar. His first prose pieces from the exile period used operative forms, satires and pamphlets meant as ammunition in the struggle against fascism. As the prospects for a speedy defeat of National Socialism diminished, so too did his short prose change in function and style. The material and the main characters became historical and generalizable, with a strong socially critical orientation (e.g. Socrates, Francis Bacon in ‘The

Introduction

5

Experiment’, Giordano Bruno in ‘The Heretic’s Coat’, Lucullus). In contrast to the stories of the 1920s, those of the final period are more accessible, but also more didactic. The protagonists tend to be simple, sometimes even naive people misused or misled by those in power (e.g. a soldier from the First World War, a servant girl in ‘The Augsburg Chalk Circle’, an ‘unseemly’ grandmother or a rural mother in ‘Two Sons’) instead of flamboyant or clever outsiders as in the earlier stories. All of the stories rely on a precise, lean narrative logic and economical use of language that strive to inform the reader quickly but dependably. The dominant tradition of psychological interiority in German literature offered Brecht few models for his kind of prose writing. The first, unrealized plan in 1920 for a collection of short prose works based on biblical motifs (to be called Gesichte or visions) was inspired formally by the French poet Rimbaud’s prose poems. Traces can still be recognized in the ‘Rimbaudesque’ story ‘The Revelation’. After the war, the boom in newspaper and magazine publication opened up new publication opportunities, and Brecht welcomed the challenge from the popular media to produce short prose pieces with strong plots and external conflicts. Among English-language writers (e.g. Jack London, G. K. Chesterton, Upton Sinclair, Rudyard Kipling, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis) he found more congenial models that corresponded to his own objectifying, distanced manner of formulating prosaic events, actions and behaviour. Later, in exile, when he did turn to the German tradition of pious calendar tales, he cunningly revised it by converting the didacticism to his own ends of interventionist thinking (‘eingreifendes Denken’). In this

6

Collected Short Stories of Bertolt Brecht

respect, it is remarkable that Brecht’s short stories are consistently the least explicitly political part of his writing, although this should not suggest that they are secondary products of his poetic imagination. The stories written after 1927, for instance, when he was moving closer and closer to Marxism, do not directly document the transition to more ideologically marked forms and themes that characterize the plays, poems and essays of the period. The prize-winning story ‘The Monster’ (1928) or ‘The Job’ and ‘Safety First’ (both 1933) do reflect, however, his growing insight into relationships of power and class domination. The thirty-seven selections gathered here are divided into three groups corresponding to the major divisions in Brecht’s life, presented as far as can be determined in chronological order according to the time of writing. In addition, one unique and unfinished story about the boxer Paul Samson-Körner (mentioned above) is included in the appendix. The translations in this form were first published in 1983 and appear here unchanged. The editorial notes at the back, written by John Willett and Ralph Manheim for that earlier edition, have been updated, based on the new German edition of Brecht’s complete works (Werke), the ‘Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe’ in thirty volumes (1988–2000), published by Aufbau Verlag (Berlin and Weimar) and Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt am Main). These notes include a brief overview of the prose collections planned and completed by Brecht, as well as those that appeared after his death, followed by comments on the individual stories. Marc Silberman Madison, Wisconsin (2014)

The Bavarian Stories (1920–1924)

Bargan Gives Up At midnight we made the ship fast in a bay which was sleeping under thick, fat-leaved trees, put biscuits and dried dates in our pockets and, treading carefully as if on eggs, pushed on westwards through the bush. Bargan who led us like a swarm of kids – not that we buccaneers were exactly babes-in-arms – Bargan had a flair for the stars and when it came to getting his bearings he was as good as God Almighty. We found our way through the monstrous forest, which was more tangled than a ball of twine, to the clearing, and ahead of us in the mild light lay the town, which we had been looking for like our own home before daybreak. Silently we began our terrible business; at first none of them bothered us but then, awakened from their sleep by destroying angels, they turned nasty and a dirty battle was fought in the