Brecht and Witkiewicz: Two Concepts of Revolution in the Drama of the Twenties

Brecht and Witkiewicz: Two Concepts of Revolution in the Drama of the Twenties Andrzej Wirth Great writers have often an unusual ability for social prognosis even when they differ radically in the evaluation of the predicted de­ velopments, as do the German playwright Bertolt Brecht and the Polish dramatist S. I. Witkiewicz. There are no indications whatever of mutual or unilateral influence exerted by either writer on the other; nor is there any evidence to suggest that Witkiewicz even knew Brecht, or vice versa. What makes this comparison tenable is the parallelism between their independently formed concepts of revolution, as express­ ed in their drama. The common source of inspiration thus becomes the October Revolution of 1917. Both writers draw certain strikingly similar conclusions about the implications of that event; yet their reactions to these presumed implications are diametrically opposed. There are certain parallels between the revolutionary experiences of Witkiewicz and Brecht. Bom in 1885, Witkiewicz was already thirtytwo at the time of the October Revolution, some thirteen years older than Brecht. He was well-travelled, aware of the artistic trends and social structure of Western Europe, and enriched with the perspective of exotic cultures as a result of his research expedition to the South Sea Islands with the noted Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. One might assume that these experiences prepared him to view the revolution with some detachment, a kind of intellectual “estrange­ ment-effect.” He experienced it first-hand, from both sides, as an infantry officer in the Tsarist regiment of the Imperial Life Guard, and after the fall of the ancien regime as a political commissar! As an artist and a social philosopher, Witkiewicz becomes henceforth a product of the Russian revolution. It was for him a model of the vio­ lent dissolution of the modern world, and it serves as the point of reference for his later, startlingly prophetic social prognosis. Brecht witnessed the revolutionary wave, as it swept through Europe in the early post-war period, from a provincial Bavarian town. His war experience was limited to his service as a medical orderly in a military hospital in Augsburg. Brecht also was granted the oppor198 Andrzej Wirth 199 tunity of participating in the great historical upheaval from both sides. In 1919, during the short-lived regime of the Soviet Govern­ ment of Bavaria, he was elected to the Augsburg Revolutionary Com­ mittee. Brecht may have somewhat overestimated the significance of his two days of revolutionary experience; he was often guilty of pre­ dating his political maturation. (For example in his speech accepting the Stalin Prize in Moscow, in 1955.) His own confession in the Ber­ lin Film Kurier (1928) sets his attitude in more convincing perspec­ tive: “ I was hardly different from the preponderant majority of the other soldiers, who, of course, had had enough of war, but were unpre­ pared to think politically. I do not recall this situation with pleasure today” (quoted in H. Mayer, Bertolt Brecht und die Tradition, pp. 24-25). Brecht, in fact, entered the 1920’s as an anarchist with ex­ istentialist longings; his early sympathy for revolution is colored with anarchism. Yet he approached the thirties as a would-be Marxist. The transition occurred gradually, beginning in about 1926 with his study of Das Kapital. Thus Brecht’s perception of revolution underwent a significant transformation during the twenties. On the other hand, Witkiewicz’s interpretation of the same revolution appears ready-made at the begin­ ning, and remains basically unchanged throughout the period under discussion. Brecht “corrected” his ideological concepts of the twenties only from the perspective of his later development, and accordingly changed even his original dramatic texts (compare the foreword to the 1954 edition of his collected plays). The 1920’s were also very pro­ ductive years for both writers. With one exception, all of the preserved dramatic texts written by Witkiewicz belong to this period, while Brecht’s development as dramatist continued through the next thirty-five years. I. The Concept of Hero-—Witkiewicz and Pre-Marxist Brecht The fame which Brecht attained on the basis of Drums in the Night (1922) was not due to the perception of the revolution which it con­ tained...