Brecht on Utopia

96 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW JOST HERMAND BRECHT ON UTOPIA Every literary scholar knows that there is a vast amount of secondary literature on Brecht.1 It would seem, indeed, that there is hardly a dark corner remaining in his works and conceptual universe which has not already been penetrated by the light of Germanistic, politico-historical, or sociological knowledge. However, the phenomenon of the "utopian," which is investigated so diligently in all other areas,2 has so far been treated only superficially in Brecht research.3 At first glance, the raising of such a question about an author like Brecht appears to be totally irrelevant . For is this writer not considered to be a materialist, firmly anchored in the here and now, someone who condemned every speculation which goes beyond the concrete political situation as mere fantasy or meaningless idealism? WhUe in the second half of his life, he became a Marxist who reasoned relatively consistently and who knew very well how contemptuously the classics of Marxism had spoken of the meaninglessness of such "utopian" hopes. Is it worthwhUe, in view of this, to pose such a question at all? Or does this imply the association with Brecht of something completely foreign, for which he had neither understanding nor interest? Did he not always limit himself in all of his major dramas to the critique of past or stUl existing societies based on exploitation; and did he not always envisage the classless society only indirectly, as an implicit contrast, which his parable for the theater, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, proves in the most radical form?4 When Brecht deals at all with the phenomenon of "change," he usually does so in a very "chinesisch-chimesisch" or cry?to-Hegelian mode by referring to those contradictions in the "continual flux of things" which result in constant movement. He thereby evokes a view of life which sees everything as flowing, transitory, and evolving, where there is nothing fixed and where the contrasts between old and new are entwined in a limitless variety of dialectical configurations. Thus, upon close examination, only continual flux seems to prevail in his works, which appears to exclude as a matter of course the fixation on a final goal of history in the sense of a detaUed picture of a utopia. Instead of devoting himself to a certain doctrine , Brecht prefers continually to doubt, to criticize, to pose new questions —even with respect to Marxism—in order not to become inflexible and meet changed situations with unchanged teachings. How, then, could Brecht's writings be thought to contain "utopian elements," in the stricter HERMAND 97 sense? And yet the category of the anticipated future has a central meaning for him also. For whoever begins to think about the process of history and develops into a consistent dialectician with the help of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, and others cannot avoid giving attention to the future, along with the past and the present. That is, if one of the three components is omitted from this three-step model, the result is unhistorical and therefore undialectical thought. Only those possess real historical consciousness who know not only where they are coming from and where they stand, but also: where they want to go. Everything else is only half- or third-truths. And Brecht— the anti-idealist—knew that only aU too well. Therefore, reflection on the future must have become an unavoidable problem even for him, although he always made fun of mere speculation. Little of this reflection can be found in Brecht's early period; that is, before his turn to Marxism from 1926 on. With cynical disdain for the expressionistic , paradisical utopias of a Landauer or Rathenau, he withdraws in these years to the position of an atheistic, anti-bourgeois outsider which verges not infrequently on the anarchic and bohemian. Thus, what Brecht holds up as "praiseworthy" before 1926 is almost exclusively that which is instinctual, asocial, or criminal, that is, the unconditional living of life to the fullest in order to at least extract some purely Lucullan or carnal pleasures from the universal "nothingness." His epicures, adventures, and pirates, in short, all of the Baal-like characters of...