On Commitment

Re-View ON COMMITMENT Theodor Adorno [This is the final part of a two-part essay. The first section appeared in the Fall 1978 issue of PAJ-Editors.] Politics and Poetic Tone Contemporary literary Germany is anxious to separate Brecht the artist from Brecht the politician. The major writer must be saved for the West, if possible placed on a pedestal as an all-German poet, and so neutralized au-dessus de la mcl e. There is truth in this to the extent that both Brecht's artistic force, and his devious and uncontrollable intelligence, went well beyond the official credos and prescribed aesthetics of the People's Democracies. All the same, Brecht must be defended against this defense of him. His work, with its often patent weaknesses, would not have had such power if it were not saturated with politics. Even its most questionable creations , such as The Measures Taken, generate an immediate awareness that issues of the utmost seriousness are at stake. To this extent, Brecht's claim that he used his theatre to make men think was justified. It is futile to try to separate the beauties, real or imaginary, of his works from their political intentions. The task of an immanent critique, which alone is dialectical, is rather to synthesize assessment of the validity of his forms with that of his politics. Sartre's chapter "Why write?" contains the undeniable statement that: "Nobody can suppose for a moment that is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism." Nor could one be written in praise of the Moscow Trials, even if such praise was bestowed before Stalin actually had Zinoviev and Bukharin murdered. 2 The political falsehood stains the aesthetic form. Where Brecht distorts the real social problems discussed in his epic drama, in order to prove a thesis, the whole structure and foundation of the play itself crumbles. Mother Courage is an illustrated primer intended to reduce to absurdity S8 Montecuccoli's dictum that war feeds on war. The camp follower who uses the Thirty Years' War to make a life for her children thereby becomes responsible for their ruin. But in the play, this responsibility follows rigorously neither from the overall situation of the war itself nor from the individual behavior of the petty profiteer; if Mother Courage had not been absent at the critical moment, the disaster would not have happened, and the fact that she has to be absent to earn some money remains completely generic in relation to the action. The picture-book technique which Brecht needs to spell out his thesis prevents him from proving it. A sociopolitical analysis, of the sort Marx and Engels sketched in their criticism of Lassalle's play Franz von Sickingen, would show that Brecht's simplistic equation of the Thirty Years' War with a modern war excludes precisely what is crucial for the behavior and fate of Mother Courage in Grimmelshausen's original drama. Because the society of the Thirty Years' War was not the functional capitalist society of modern times, we cannot even poetically stipulate a closed functional system in which the lives and deaths of private individuals directly reveal economic laws. But Brecht needed the old lawless days as an image of his own, precisely because he saw clearly that the society of his own age could no longer be directly comprehended in terms of people and things. His attempt to reconstruct the reality of society thus led first to a false social model and then to a dramatic implausibility. Bad politics becomes bad art and vice versa. But the less works have to proclaim what they cannot completely believe themselves, the more telling they become in their own right; and the less they need a surplus of meaning beyond their being. For the rest, the real interested parties in every camp would be probably as successful in surviving wars today as they have always been. Aporia of this sort multiply until they affect the Brechtian tone itself, the very fiber of his poetic art. Undoubted though their uniqueness may be-qualities which the mature Brecht may have thought unimportant-they were poisoned by the untruth of his politics...