>
>Brecht's wierd. I think he would have been a far less
>interesting artist (judging by his pre-marxist works)
>without marxism. The need to communicate his political
>ideas gave his plays structure.
>
>On the other hand when he let the politics dominate
>the result was awful. That Lehrstucke where they kill
>a guy for the good of the party (can't remember the
>name. Its set in China) for example. Lovely stuff.
Au contraire. Die Massnehme (The Measures Taken) is actually a great little play, very moving in a Noh drama sort of way, raises all sorts of hard questions about the choice between discipline and inchoate impulses to do good that also quite apposite today, with the antiglobalization movement. Ohe language is pure and beautiful, better German has never been written, it's crystalline. One needn't agree with Brecht's "solution," but it's not a simple justification for the purges. The Young Comrade isn't shot because he disagrees with the line. but because he's blown the other comrades' cover and they're fleeing in hostile territory. Moreover, the play is cast in the form of an inquiry into his death; he wasn't "disappeared" or treated as a nonperson or indeed as an enemy of the people, and his killing is presented as something that has to be looked into and justified to a reviewing authority. You could in fact takethe play as a criticism of the Stalin terror. Brecht has some poems from around that time that suggest that he was very uncomfortable with the terror.
Brecht's politics were very complicated. He was a pacificist when it was not safe or easy to be one (Mother Courage, The Trial of Lucullus--that got him in trouble with the DDR). He was very UNcomplacent about "lying down in the more" and "sleeping with butchers" (lines from the great poem, To Those Born Later). He's almost never starry-eyed about the side he chose. Apart from a few inferor poems, he never simply glorifies the USSR. He's cold-eyed about the limittaions of the common people whose cause he upholds. His depictions even of the the other side are anything but cartoonish--Peachum and Tiger Brown in The Threepenny and the meatpacking bosses in St Joan are fully realized, complex and not altogether unsympathtic individuals, not crude negative stereotypes. Nor are his protagonists simple socialist realist heroes. Galileo, for example, is a coward, although his choices are justified. He's utterly merciless to military types,though. that's part of his pacifism. And his art is utterly and totally animated by his political choices--but never never by a party line. In fact he never joined the Party.
>
>Several artists were ruined by politics. Godard being
>a good example. From "My Live to Live" to those 70s
>experimental films he did with that commune.
>Frightening.
But Weekend, a highly political film with very silly politics ("The horror of the bourgeoisie must be combatted with even more horror!"), is also a very great movie.
jks
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