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with himself." Brecht said on this occasion that he had long intended
to write a series of such model poems for different professions–
engineer, writer. On the other hand Brecht compares Becher's poem to
Rimbaud's. In the latter, he thought, Marx, and Lenin, too, had they
read it, would have detected the great historical movement of which it
is an expression. They would have recognized very clearly that it does
not describe the perambulations of an eccentric stroller, but the
vagabond flight of a person who can no longer endure the limits of his
class, which, with the Crimean War, the Mexican adventure, was
beginning to open up exotic parts of the world to its mercantile
interests. To assimilate the gesture of the unfettered vagabond, putting
his affairs in the hands of chance and turning his back on society, to the
stereotype of the proletarian fighter, was patently impossible.
6th July.
Brecht, in the course of yesterday's conversation:
I often think of a tribunal before which I am being questioned.
'What was that? Do you really mean that seriously?' I would then
have to admit: not quite seriously. After all I think too much about
artistic matters, about what would go well on the stage, to be quite
serious; but when I have answered this important question in the
negative, I will add a still more important affirmation: that my
conduct is
legitimate.
This formulation, it is true, came later in the conversation. Brecht had
begun with doubts not of the legitimacy but of the effectiveness of his
procedure. With a sentence that arose from some remarks I had made
on Gerhart Hauptmann : " I sometimes wonder whether they are not,
after all, the only writers who really achieve anything: the
writers of
substance,
I mean." By this Brecht means writers who are entirely
serious. And to explain this idea he starts from the fiction that
Confucius had written a tragedy or Lenin a novel. One would think
this inadmissible, he declares, conduct unworthy of them. "Let us
suppose that you read an excellent political novel and afterwards find
out it is by Lenin; your opinion of both would be changed, and to the
disadvantage of both. Nor would Confucius be allowed to write a play
by Euripides, it would be thought undignified. Yet his parables are
not." In short, all this points to a distinction between two literary
types: on one hand, the visionary who is serious, and on the other
hand, the reflective man who is not quite serious. Here I raise the
question of Kafka. To which of the two groups does he belong? I know:
the question cannot be decided. And precisely this is for Brecht a sign
that Kafka, whom he considers a great writer, like Kleist, Grabbe or
