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PARTISAN REVIEW
ing them behind. At first Brecht identified with the wily survivor;
the emphasis on his egoism came later. A chorus and an antichorus
are introduced to judge Fatzer, and Brecht identIfies more with
Koch, who is given authority to liquidate the individualist. Later
Koch is renamed Keuner, the name Brecht used for his alter ego in
The Stories of Herr Keuner.
Several of these themes recur in
The Remedial Measure,
the
didactic play in which three agitators liquidate a comrade who fails
to obey orders. Perhaps the play's secret subject is Brecht's attempt
to liquidate the more personal side of his own personality, to make
his egoistic features permanently indistinguishable from those of his
Marxist mask. Unlike his parents, who had neither the wisdom nor
the power to control him, the Control Chorus, representative of the
Party, is omniscient and irresistible. The play endorses its assump–
tion that dogma is good, emotion anarchic, and, therefore, evil. A
poet, said W . B. Yeats, "is never the bundle of accident and in–
coherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea,
something intended, complete." Brecht had not been reborn as an
altruist, but he had tried to multiply his egoism into a collective
ideal.
