Vol. 51 No. 3 1984 - page 431

RONALD HAYMAN
431
Brechtian drama is more comic than tragic, and the comedy
depends less on wit than on guile and intrigue. Brecht admired
Hasek's
Schweyk
more than any other modern novel, and when he
eventually came to resurrect the character against the background of
World War II , it was noticeable that the new Schweyk spoke in
much the same way as Matti (in
Puntila)
and Mother Courage . Even
with people of their own class, they seldom say what they are feeling,
but embedded in their rambling anecdotes are sharply subversive
points.
It is also noticeable that there are no revolutionary heroes in
Brecht's plays to match the heroines who are converted to radicalism
and violence- St. Joan of the Stockyards, Senora Carrar, Pelagea
Vlassova in
The Mother,
Simone Machard. Most of the central male
characters are either glorified, like Azdak in
The Caucasian Chalk Circle,
for siding with the people, or vilified for failing to. Galileo is unique
in starting as one kind of character and ending as another. The
downgrading of Mother Courage came partly in rewriting and partly
in production . In the
1939
draft , she lost her elder son because she
momentarily let him out of her sight to offer the sergeant a drink; in
later drafts she is trying to sell the man a belt . After Therese Giehse
had won more sympathy in the Zurich production of
1941
than
Brecht wanted her to have, the script was changed, and the
1948
Courage never gives away any of her officers' shirts in scene five. In
the
1950
revival, the final line was changed to make the play end
with her decision: "I must get back to business."
One way of charting Brecht's development would be to notice
changes in his attitude to egoism . The first Baal is an apotheosis of
egoism, but having detached himself progressively from the
character, Brecht condemned the play in
1954
as "lacking in
wisdom." He never wrote the didactic plays he had been planning
around
1930
under the title
The Evil Baal the Antisocial Man,
and the
word "egoist" was to have featured in the title of another play he
never completed,
Downfall of the EgoistJohann Patzer.
This was started
in
1927
and still had not been abandoned in
1930.
It
represents
Brecht's last attempt at a semi-autobiographical play, though he was
also trying in it to explain the economic collapse of
1917-19
and the
failure of the revolution in Western Europe .
As in
Man is Man,
a group of four soldiers is in danger of severe
punishment. Listed as dead during the third year of the war, the
crew of a tank stays in hiding. Fatzer, the strongest personality,
seems dependent for his survival on the others , but he is pushed for–
ward by their weakness, and eventually he can survive only by leav-
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