On 7/28/06, Carrol Cox <<a href="mailto:cbcox@ilstu.edu">cbcox@ilstu.edu</a>> wrote: > > How did Brecht's suggestion go. The people have lost the confidence of > their leaders & should be dissolved? > > Carrol The poem Carrol refers to is called "The Solution"  - in translation - After the uprising or the 17th June The Secretary of the Writer's union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts.  Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another? The poem was written in 1953 after the Berlin Uprising.  The uprising actually began outside of Berlin in East Germany and, in the beginning was a very elemental protest against speed-up and heavy production quotas.  This was really one of the first widespread worker's centered uprising in Eastern Europe after the war and it took the leadership in the GDR and in the Soviet Union by surprise.  It also took the U.S. Cold Warriors by surprise and as the National Security Archives has revealed the U.S. leaders did not know what attitude to take toward this uprising.  Does any one know if there has been good historical research on this uprising?  Uprisings such as this are often described as spontaneous, but the sections of East Germany that participated in the uprising had deep roots in grass roots radical union movements, usually organized around a strong shop steward leadership.   An interesting literary side light to the Brecht poem is Gunter Grass's play _The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising: A German Tragedy_.  The play takes place with Brecht rehearsing a play about a revolution (his revolutionary rewrite of Coriolanus perhaps?) while outside the workers themselves are marching, rebelling, rioting.  The play focuses on Brecht as an intellectual who supports the revolution on stage but ignores it when it is happening outside the stage door.  Grass tries to write a Brechtian play about Brecht and in my mind he only creates a piece of bad propaganda.  Bertolt Brecht would make a good stage character, but I think he would have be portrayed as some kind of combination of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, the Good Woman of Szechuan, and a character out of "What Makes Sammy Run."