The Brechtian Exception: From Weimar to the Cold War

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The Brechtian Exception: From Weimar to the Cold War

Paul Haacke

diacritics, Volume 40, Number 3, Fall 2012, pp. 56-85 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/dia.2012.0010

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v040/40.3.haacke.html
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THE BRECHTIAN

EXCEPTION

FROM WEIMAR TOTHE COLD WAR

Paul haacke


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DIACRITICS Volume 40.3 (2012) 5683 2012 by The Johns Hopkins Universit y Press

Paul Haacke has held post-doctoralteaching positions at the Universityo Caliornia, Berkeley and New YorkUniversity, having received his PhDin Comparative Literature and FilmStudies rom Berkeley in 2011. His workhas appeared in a variety o publications,including French Forum, In These Times,and the architecture magazine Pin-Up,and an essay is orthcoming in an edited

volume entitled Philosophy and Kaka.

Was Bertolt Brecht un-American? Or un-German? Did he believe in the need for a stateof exception, whether in politics or in art? Although largely absurd, these were some ofthe questions he found himself confronting when called before the House Un-AmericanActivities Committee (HUAC) in Washington, DC on October 30, 1947. Of course he wasnot and had never been a citizen of the United States; he had lived in California for onlysix years, arriving almost a decade after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933. As a guest in thecountry, he was nonetheless forced to testify because of his obvious interests in Marx-ism, his support for the social-democratic Free Germany movement, and his personal

connections to suspected Communists like the composer Hanns Eisler, who had workedwith him on many of his pedagogical learning-plays (Lehrstcke) and was ultimatelydeported in 1948. Brecht left for Europe of his own accord only a day after his hearingand never returned; after waiting a year in Switzerland for a visa to reenter Germany, heeventually settled in the Russian-occupied zone of the newly divided Berlin, where hedirected the Berliner Ensemble theater company until his death in 1956.

Much to the surprise of the HUAC, Brecht had never been a member of the Com-munist Party. He was exposed not as a Communist, but rather as a curiously elusive

writer and critic who had championed the right to aesthetic freedom and political dis-sent throughout his career. At the center of his trial was an almost comical discussionof his play,Die Manahme; although literally translated as The Measure or The Pro-cedure, and generally referred to in English as The Measures Taken, the title was con-sistently mistranslated by the HUAC asDisciplinary Measures. As early as 1943, the FBIattempted a close examination of the script, which it called The Disciplinary Measure,and concluded that it was a self-styled educational play which advocates Communistworld revolution by violent means.1 More thoughtful interpretations ofThe Measures

Taken have managed to discuss its political plotRussian agitators attempting to spreadCommunist thought in prerevolutionary Chinawhile at the same time recognizing thatit is not simply ideological but also aesthetic.2 Less often attended to is the particularhistorical context in which it and Brechts other Lehrstcke were conceived and firstperformed: the early 1930s in Germany, soon before Hitlers rise to power and at theheight of Brechts growing friendship with Walter Benjamin. Even a basic understand-ing of this background makes it clear that it was not Brecht but rather the FBI and theHUAC who believed that disciplinary measures should be taken against those who takeexception to political rule.

A careful reading ofThe Measures Taken is only one step in approaching the complexquestions of aesthetics and politics raised by Brechts trial. At least as important to ex-amine are Brechts critical writings and conversations with Benjamin, his writings onJapanese No theater, and the other Lehrstcke that he wrote between 1929 and 1933especially The Exception and the Rule (Die Ausnahme und die Regel), The Yes-Sayer (DerJasager) and The No-Sayer (Der Neinsager). While Brechts call for a non-Aristotelianform of epic drama as an alternative to tragic drama is well rehearsed, especially thanksto the pioneering work of Benjamin, the Lehrstck requires recognition as yet another

Brechtian genre. In turn, although Brechts innovative methods of estrangement and


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Gestus did obviously attempt to get beyond such time-honored Aristotelian notions ofpity, fear, pathos, and catharsis, most of his plays at the same time depend on modesofmimesis (imitation, representation),peripeteia (reversal, change in fortune), and an-agnorisis (recognition, discovery), and he in fact admitted his ultimate submission toAristotles laws in his private notes, as we shall see. Since the waning of the Cold War,more recent scholarship has also examined Brechts interest in Chinese and Japaneseaesthetics, which, as alternatives to Greco-centric traditions, helped provide the basisfor his theory of the Alienation effector, perhaps better, Estrangement effect (Ver-

fremdungseffekt)as well as his development of theLehrstck while he was still living inGermany.3 In addition, as I discuss below, Brechts early Orientalist studies no doubt in-fluenced his concern for Japanese-Americans living in California during World War II,whose fate as enemy aliens he described specifically in terms of exception and rule.

Why did Brecht focus on these particular ideas of exception and rule during the riseof both National Socialism in Germany and McCarthyism in the United States? My argu-ment here is that Brechts explicit comparisons between German and American excep-tionalism during and after World War II hark back to his ideas ofAusnahme, Manahme,

yes-saying, and no-saying, which all recur throughout his Lehrstcke, and which weredeveloped at least in part through friendly discussions about aesthetics with Benjaminin critical response to the politics of Carl Schmitt. Prior to this turn in Brechts thinking,the notion of the exception held no particular significance in his work. For instance,in The Threepenny Opera, when Polly declares Im an exception (Dann mach ich ebeneine Ausnahme) to justify her decision to stay married to Macheath instead of obeyingher parents wish for her to get divorced, her turn-of-phrase is hardly suggestive of thepolitical. In the following years, however, as Brecht gravitated more toward Marxism

and also learned about Schmitts influential, right-wing theory of the state of excep-tion or state of emergency (Ausnahmezustand), he found it increasingly necessary todefend mimetic representation specifically in terms of taking exception to political rule.In turn, it was by rejecting this belief in aesthetic freedom that the National Socialistregime managed to blacklist Brecht as undeutsch, and that the FBI and HUAC latersuspected him of being un-American. Each read his writings exclusively for ideologi-cal purposes, and thus refused to recognize their varied aesthetic forms. Such national-istic methods of interpreting and critiquing Brechts workwhether as undeutsch or asun-Americanderived not only from a tyrannical opposition to the politics for which hepresumably stood, but also from an intellectual refusal, if not a hermeneutic inability, toread for anything other than politics.

>> Mimsis, Rognition, nd agory

The conflict between politics and aesthetics in Western philosophy dates back to thedisagreement between Aristotle and Plato over the uses and abuses of mimesis for so-ciety. Aristotle was of course a great defender of mimesis. In this respect he differed

from Plato, who argued (in the form of his own rather artful dialogues) that it should


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Of course Benjamin never lived to see what became of Brecht after the war, let alonethe many other exiles and refugees who fled to the United States. It would be illuminat-ing to compare his interpretation of Plato to that of Leo Strauss, given the latters impacton American political thought after his own flight from Nazi Germany. Although sucha line of investigation is outside the scope of this essay, it is connected to the work ofSchmitt, an important interlocutor for Strauss as well as for Benjamin and the Marxist

political theorist Karl Korsch, who werearguably Brechts closest friends and ad-

vocates in Berlins academic community.For Brecht and Benjamin in particular, thecritique of Schmitts theory of sovereigndecisionism involved a defense of aesthet-ics against decisionist politics and nation-alismor, more specifically, of mimeticrepresentation as a form of exception toabsolutist rule.

For some it might appear contrarianto argue for the significance of mimesisand recognition in Brechts dramatic the-

ory, given the well-rehearsed understanding of Brechtian epic drama as being opposedto Aristotelian tragic drama (or more recent theoretical arguments defining the perfor-mative in opposition to the pedagogical). But it is also obvious that Brecht was deeplyindebted to Aristotles Poetics despiteor in fact because ofhis concerted attempt toget beyond it. Even his most didactic Lehrstcke include scenes of performative mim-

ing, masking, tragic error, recognition, and violent catastrophe, all of which are centralto Aristotles understanding of tragedy. Perhaps the best evidence of Brechts persistentdevotion to the Greek philosopher may be found in his own 1921 copy of the Poetics, inwhich he slipped a typewritten page of fragmented notes, written in all lowercase, thattry to come to terms with its basic tenets (only recently published in German thanks toan exhibition commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of his birth). Presumedto have been written in the mid-1930s, when he finished writing hisLehrstcke and leftGermany, Brechts response to Aristotle begins with a clear and bold defense:

aristotle is in no way a dethroned lawgiver or the dramatist o the present. the proper signi-cance o his laws are still not understood by the scholars, yet so much do they rule!9

What were Aristotles aesthetic laws, then? As Brecht points out in his notes, theywere based primarily on the principle ofmimesis, which may be translated as imitation,representation, performance, or, in German, Nachahmung. For Plato and Aristotle, theidea of mimesis did not stand for any kind of reflection theory or realism of verisimili-tude, as is often presumed by modern critics, but for an aesthetic form of representationbased on illusion, deception, or masking. While diegesis was considered a trustworthy,

historical method of relating the facts, mimesis was taken to be a poetic mode of perfor-

The critique o Schmitts theory o

sovereign decisionism involved a deense

o aesthetics against decisionist politics

and nationalismor, more specifcally, o

mimetic representation as a orm o

exception to absolutist rule.


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The Brechtian Exception >> Paul Haacke 61

mative showing, a theatricaland, for Plato, also effeminate and dangerousmode ofrepresentation that made its mark above all on the stage.

Brechts critique ofNachahmungin his notes on Aristotle involves an inquiry intothe possibilities of a pre-mimetic vorahmende, a word he invents apparently to signifythe beforeness of representation rather than its translated afterwardsness. Although thisspeculative notion is rather undeveloped in his notes, his attempt to conceive of imita-tion as both a method of translation and as a learning process is clear:

in imitation the process o translation reaches its decisive conclusion. it should be permittedto call contemporary perormance pre-mimetic (vorahmende) in order to really do justice toit. . . . imitation was understood rom the beginning as an aesthetic phenomenon. in any case,it was not its purpose to deal with the aesthetic. one gains knowledge through imitation.10

Only a few years before writing these notes, Brecht began embarking on his projectfor an explicitly practical theater that would not simply aim to make representations ofthe world for audiences, but would actually teach them to rethink and ultimately refunc-tion the very world around them. He established the term Lehrstck in 1929 with The

Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent (Das Badener Lehrstck vom Einverstndnis), which wasloosely based onLindberghs Flight (Der Flug der Lindberghs) of the previous year. Com-menting on this new form, he wrote that it aims for the imitation of highly qualifiedmodels (Nachahmung hochqualifizierter Muster) and suspends aesthetic rules (sthe-tische Mastbe) for the shaping of characters, which are generally valid for the show-piece.11 These two key conceptsimitation and aesthetic ruleswould become evenmore important for Brechts theory and practice in the years to come.

Brechts later published essays tend to avoid reference to Nachahmungin favor ofthe termAbbildung, but this alternative conception of aesthetic representation is also amimetic one. Generally, he conceives ofAbbildungas a performative process that depictsreality through poetic or theatrical illusion, and thus need not bear an exact or preciseresemblance to it. In fact, he argues that this has been the case throughout the history ofWestern theater:

And we must always remember that the pleasure given by representations (Abbildungen) osuch dierent sorts hardly ever depended on the representations likeness to the thing por-trayed. Incorrectness, or considerable improbability even, was hardly or not at all disturbing,

so long as the incorrectness had a certain consistency and the improbability remained o aconstant kind. All that mattered was the illusion o compelling momentum in the story told,and this was created by all sorts o poetic and theatrical means.12

Brecht did ultimately aim for a theater that would attempt to represent reality ratherthan delight in the merely culinary pleasures of illusory entertainment: The theaterhas to become engaged with reality if it is to be able and allowed to turn out effective rep-resentations of reality.13 That said, his theory does not reject pleasure, entertainment, orperformative representation, and his central concept of the Verfremdungseffekt is by no

means an alternative to mimetic illusion, but rather goes hand in hand with it: Elegant


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movement and graceful grouping, for a start, can alienate, and inventive miming greatlyhelps the story.14

The performative aspects of Brechts dramatic theory have been emphasized inFredric Jamesons impressive study, Brecht and Method, which focuses to some extenton Brechts turn to East Asian poetics as an alternative to Greco-centric classicism. 15Drawing mainly from the work of Antony Tatlow, Jameson discusses how this ChineseBrecht became invested in a kind of Marxist Confucianism that was most apparent insuch works as The Good Person of Szechuan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Me-Ti: The Book

of Twists and Turns (and, we might add, the collaborative efforts of Brecht and ElisabethHauptmann to translate classical Chinese poetry and Japanese No plays into German,from Arthur Waleys translations into English).16 What is surprisingly absent from thisanalysis, given Jamesons bold call to always historicize, is a consideration of Brechtsown historical context, including the extent to which one may read his plays as nationalallegories of either Germany or the United States, if not also international allegoriesof wartime and postwar history on a larger, global scale. Of particular curiosity is whyBrecht came to develop such a great interest in both Chinese and Japanese cultures dur-

ing his years in Weimar Berlin, having never been to either country and having only readthe literature in English translation. Why did he come to believe that his epic theaterimitated an Asian archetype (das asiatische Vorbild), as he argued in his 1930 essayThe Way to Great Contemporary Theater?17 And why did he focus so much on Alien-ation Effects in Chinese Acting in his 1936 essay of that name, effectively defining theformer in relation to the latter?18 Surely this was not simply a result of his visit to a Mos-cow performance of Chinese opera by Mei Lan-Fang, as a vulgar historicist interpreta-tion might suggest. For Brecht shared his growing interest in East Asia with many of hisGerman-speaking contemporaries in fields ranging from literature and the visual arts tosociology and psychology.19

One major reason for the German interest in China is no doubt the Reichs colo-nial control of Tsing-Tao in the Shandong province, which it occupied following the

1901 Boxer Rebellion until Japan gainedpossession of the territory after WorldWar I. The Weimar Republic in whichBrecht emerged as a writer and critic wasthus not only a postwar period of national

reconstruction and soul-searching, butalso of sudden decolonizationone thatgave way to both anticolonialist cosmo-politanism as well as resurgent aspirationsfor imperial expansion and domination.Brechts interest in East Asia at this time

was not simply symptomatic of imperial nostalgia, however, as the Chinese settings in somany of his plays gesture to the countrys contemporary political situationthe 192737

civil war between the Kuomintang Army and the Communist Peoples Liberation Army.

The Weimar Republic in which Brecht

emerged as a writer and critic was thus

not only a postwar period o nationalreconstruction and soul-searching, but

also o sudden decolonization.


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More importantly, his project of reorienting Western poetics away from Greece and to-ward China was part of a larger attempt at critiquing and estrangingif not even refunc-tioningEuropean cultural politics instead of allowing it to fall into the self-pitying willto power evinced by the reactionary, Spenglerian discourse of The Decline of the West.

In Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting, Brecht makes it clear that his recognitionof the similarities between his newly developed dramatic theory and the long-standingtraditions of Chinese theater also involves a recognition of the decentering or estrang-ing of European culture. According to his limited research, there had been a long history

of self-referential techniques of defamiliarization or estrangement in Chinese actingwell before he arrived at the concept of the Verfremdungseffekt (and also, we might add,before Viktor Shklovsky developed his earlier, similar concept ofostranenie). However,because these techniques were so radically new to Western aesthetics, they could beused to provoke in European audiences a sense of critical distance not only from thework being performed, but also from Eurocentric or Greco-centric mimetic traditionsthat were generally taken for granted. This is why Brecht sees the fact that there is nofourth wall in Chinese drama not as a lack, but rather as an enabling possibility for self-

awareness: Above all, the Chinese artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besidesthe three surrounding him. He expresses his awareness of being watched.20 Likewise,he argues that the experience of European audiences watching Chinese drama involvesnot only an estrangement from the performance itself, but also a recognition on the partof the audience as Europeans that they are indeed European:

When one sees the Chinese acting it is at rst very hard to discount the eeling o estrange-ment which they produce in us as Europeans. One has to be able to imagine them achievingan A-eect among their Chinese spectators too.21

In this way, the effect of alienation or estrangement inevitably results in a corollary ef-fect of recognitionarguably a Brechtian version of Aristotles concept of anagnorisis.In A Short Organum For the Theatre, Brecht defines it as follows: A depiction thatestranges is one that allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes itseem unfamiliar.22 Such recognition must take place both on the part of the actors, whomust recognize their own performative practice even as they perform it, and on the partof the spectators, who become aware of their roles as spectators and of their positions inthe world at large.

Brechts understanding of Japanese theater was due in part to the work of one of hismain collaborators during this period, Elisabeth Hauptmann, who first introduced himto Arthur Waleys 1921 translations collected in The No Plays of Japan after obtaining acopy of the book during a trip to London in 1928. Brecht read it over the next few years,and eventually he and Hauptmann decided to consider one play, Taniko, as a mimeticmodel (Vorbild) for the pair ofLehrstcke that came to be called The Yes-Sayer and TheNo-Sayer. Hauptmann also studied the writings of the Japanese actor and critic ZeamiMotokiyo (c. 1363c. 1443), and later noted that one of the main similarities between

him and Brecht was their similar concepts of imitation. Reflecting on the origins of The


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Yes-Sayer and The No-Sayer in a 1966 interview, she commented: Again and again one isreminded of Brecht, for example when one reads Zeamis remarks on imitation.23

One especially suggestive aspect of Brechts aesthetics is its uncanny allegoricalmethod, perhaps most overt in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which depicts a gang-sters growing tyranny over Chicago as a means of critiquing Hitlers rise to power inGermany. It is thus surprising that a theory of allegory is so undeveloped in both hisown writings as well as those of his critics, especially considering that Benjamin wrotean extensive chapter on Allegory and Trauerspiel in his study of baroque drama.24

BrechtsLehrstcke, as well as The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which was alsowritten in his final years in Berlin, typify this increasingly allegorical turn in his work.Similar to the historic London ofThe Threepenny Opera and the American urbanism ofIn the Jungle of Cities, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and The Resistible Riseof Arturo Ui, the Chinese settings in so many of BrechtsLehrstcke not only worked toestrange German audiences from their own potentially nationalistic historical context,but also performed an allegorical association between the places being represented andthe places in which they were being performed. In this way, Brechts mimetic turn to

China and Japan was motivated not only by political beliefs but by aesthetic methodsand specifically, an aesthetics of alienation and allegory that aimed to estrange Germanyfrom itself during what was becoming an increasingly foreign and questionable periodin its national history.

>> T exption nd t R

What is the purpose of aesthetic estrangement beyond mere recognition? BrechtsLehr-stcke show how scenes of recognition are not only accompanied by processes of reflec-tion and understanding regarding a given practice or malpractice, but also of consent,dissent, and remediation. This is particularly evident in The Exception and the Rule, inwhich estrangement from custom is represented in political-juristic terms of exceptionto rule. In the plays conclusion, the actors address the audience in a call to recognizethat some rules may be wrong and thus in need of change:

We ask you:I its not strange, nd it estranging (beremdlich)!

I its amiliar, nd it inexplicable (unerklrlich)!Whatever is usual should surprise you,Whatever is the rule, recognize as an abuse (Mibrauch)And where you have recognized an abuseProvide a remedy!25

The Exception and the Rule follows three characters traveling through the desert in pur-suit of oil: one who exploits and two who are exploited, as the actors tell us in theiropening remarks. Their mission is an explicitly imperialist and capitalist one, in this

case through the fictional Asian desert of Yahi (presumably based on the Gobi desert


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in northern China). The plays vaguely imagined Chinese setting should by now makesome sense, but it takes a bit more background information to understand how the con-cept of the exception that it employsespecially the possibility for the exception toactually become the rulerelates to Schmitts contemporary political-juristic theory oftheAusnahmezustand.

Much attention has been paid in recent years to the impact of Schmitts work in po-litical thought since the Weimar period. Some of the most well-known contemporaryContinental philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, Gior-

gio Agamben, Jrgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavojiek, have devoted considerable time and energy to grapplingwith his radical critique of liberalism and his openly Nazi poli-tics.26 American political theory can be traced back to Schmittswork largely through the mediation of Strauss. Although mostof the prominent American followers of Strauss have been la-beled neoconservative, many of the European thinkers whohave responded to Schmitts work have done so from the Left.27

While Habermas has made a concerted effort to argue againstSchmitts theories, and Mouffe has adopted his critique of lib-eralism for the sake of radical democratic socialism, both Der-rida and Agamben have taken up his work with particular inter-est in his correspondence with Walter Benjamin. Despite thisburgeoning interest in Benjamins ideological engagement withSchmitt, however, relatively little attention has been devotedto Benjamins aesthetic critique of Schmitts political theory,especially in relation to his extensive writings on Brecht, andthere has been even less recognition of Brechts relationship toSchmitt both during and after his time in Weimar Germany.

As far as I have been able to discern, Brecht kept a cleardistance from Schmitt and made no explicit references to himdespite the fact that he was well aware of his political theory;Schmitt, on the other hand, did refer to Brecht several times inwriting, and so may have been more influenced by him than theother way around.28 Although Brecht owned a first edition of

Schmitts 1921 book, On Dictatorship (Die Diktatur), an examination of it in his librarysuggests that he probably didnt read much of it: aside from the introduction, table ofcontents, and index pages, only the first nine pages and about ten pages from the fifthchapter (on the French Revolution and Napoleon) were cut open. Instead, Brechts criti-cal engagement with Schmitt presumably derived above all from his conversations withBenjamin. The conclusion to one of their exchanges, promptly following a public talkthat Schmitt gave in Berlin on Problems of Democracy, was recorded in Benjaminsdiary entry of April 21, 1930: Schmitt / Agreement Hate Suspicion (Schmitt / Einver-

stndnis Ha Verdchtigung).29 The first term, which may be translated either as agree-

BERTHOLT BRECHT,NEW YORK, 1945Gelatin silver printPhotograph by Dorothy Norman(19051997) 2000 The University o ArizonaFoundation

Git o Mr. Richard Gold. Photographycourtesy o the Herbert F. Johnson Mu-seum o Art, Cornell University.


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ment, mutual understanding, approval, or consent, is a central concept in Schmitts OnDictatorship, but what Benjamin meant by it remains an open question. It could repre-sent the agreement that Benjamin and Schmitt managed to share despite their differ-ences, the agreement between Benjamin and Brecht to either hate or suspect Schmitt, orsomething else entirely.30

The same year that Benjamin recorded this exchange, Brecht wrote three of his mostfamous Lehrstcke, each of which appears to make oblique references to Schmitt: TheYes-Sayer and The No-Sayer, which open with a chorus singing the importance ofEin-

verstndnis; The Measures Taken, which includes a character named Karl Schmitt fromBerlin; and The Exception and the Rule, whose title and theme are closely related toSchmitts theory of theAusnahmezustand. The consonance betweenDie Manahme andDie Ausnahme may have been mere coincidence, but the associations between the two

plays and their relationship to Schmittstheory of the Ausnahmezustand wouldsurely not have been lost on Brecht dur-ing this increasingly politicized and po-

larized period.Is The Exception and the Rule thusan aesthetic critique of political excep-tionalism? One scene halfway throughthe play suggests as much, as it restages

Schmitts basic distinction between friend and enemy in Marxist terms of exploitation,and turns the theory of decisionism on its head by exposing the unjust crisis that theexploited is forced into at the hands of the exploiter. For Schmitt, decisionism rejectsboth liberalism as well as revolution, upholding instead a form of exceptional sover-eignty that goes beyond negotiation and discussion and overrules questions of politicalillegitimacy altogether. As he writes in Political Theology, the essence of liberalism isnegotiation, and dictatorship is the opposite of discussion.31 In turn, Schmitt arguesthat all law is situational law because it depends on exceptional decisiveness ratherthan normative discussion: like every other order, the legal order rests on a decisionand not on a norm.32

While for Schmitt, sovereign is he who decides on the exception, 33 for Brecht, theexploited is he who is denied the free choice of making his own sovereign decision.

Brechts reversal of Schmitt shows that questioning or overturning a given rule can be alegitimate, decisive exception to sovereign power in its own right. In this way, it is akin toBenjamins own memorable reversal of Schmitt in his essay On the Concept of History:The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we liveis not the exception but the rule (Die Tradition der Unterdrckten belehrt uns darber,da der Ausnahmezustand, in dem wir leben, die Regel ist).34

How does Brecht depict this reversal on stage? In The Exception and the Rule, theoppressor and the oppressed are represented by the Merchant and the Coolie (or, in

German,Der Kuli, a now pejorative term used to refer to an indentured Asian slave or

While or Schmitt, sovereign is he who

decides on the exception, or Brecht, the

exploited is he who is denied the ree choiceo making his own sovereign decision.


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manual laborer). When they reach a riverbank in one of the central scenes of the play, theMerchant demands that his servant join him in swimming to the other side. The Cooliehesitates, fearing the dangerous risk in crossing and recognizing his exploited role, bothin the present and as he imagines it would remain on the other side. What am I to do?he asks himself, and then proceeds to sing a song expressing his recognition of the appar-ently tragic situation into which he has been forced:

Here is the river.To swim across is dangerous.Look: There are two men on the riverbank.One swims across, the otherHesitates.Is the rst brave? The second cowardly?No: On the other sideOne o the two has business.

The rst emerges with a smile rom the dangerous water

Onto the opposite bank which he has conquered:He now sets oot on his property and eats new ood.The second emerges rom the dangerous waterInto nothing:Gasping, and weaker than beore, he now conrontsNew dangers.So: Are both brave?Are both wise?

They conquered the river together butThey are not both conquerors.

WE and YOU AND IAre not the same thing.WE deeat the oeBut YOU deeat ME.35

Responding to this song of complaint, the Merchant threatens the Coolie with his

gun and says bluntly, Shall we bet you get across? My money makes me fear bandits andoverlook the dangerous state of the river. His power over the Coolies life is thus basedless on decisive sovereignty or disciplinary force than on the threat of violence. Singinghis own song, he closes the scene and the crisis of decision it has staged by showing howhe has made the Coolies decision for him:

This is how man overcomes the desert and the rushing river,And how man overcomes himselAnd wins the oil, the oil he so needs.36


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The plays violent pseudo-catastrophe takes place later, when the Merchant mistak-enly believes the Coolie is trying to rebel and immediately kills him in a strategic, pre-emptive strike. At the plays conclusion, when the Merchant is put on trial, the Judgerules him innocent for acting out of self-defense, singing: Such is the rule: an eye for aneye. / Only a fool waits for an exception.37 While the play ultimately allows for the Mer-chant to be found innocent by the judges, it ends with the actors call for the audience tolearn from this case a higher justice that is based on critical exceptionalism in place ofabsolute rule. Such calls for critical engagement are at once pedagogical and performa-

tive, given that their educational lessons are professed by actors on the stage. In turn, asChristoph Menke has shown, these actors ironically call attention to their role as actorswhile at the same time playing characters who appear able to choose their own fatesinstead of submitting to the fate of tragedy.38 Although it may seem obvious or trivial toinsist that Brechts plays are indeed plays, their aesthetic dimension is often overlookedby critics, and was completely ignored by the HUAC in its interpretation ofThe MeasuresTaken, which in fact consists of a play within a play.

Performative questions about practice or malpractice, agreement or disagreement,

and consent or dissent are also foregrounded in what is arguably Brechts best-knownpair of learning-plays, The Yes-Sayer and The No-Sayer, which are adapted (in large mea-sure word-for-word) from the Japanese No play Taniko. Following the Japanese model,both plays open with the Great Chorus posing the problem of agreement or consent(Einverstndnis) as the ultimate object of learning, thereby upholding a direct opposi-tion to Schmittian calls for nonnegotiable, sovereign rule:

What we must learn above all is consent.Many say yes, and yet there is no consent.

Many are not asked, and manyConsent to wrong things. Thereore:What we must learn above all is consent.39

Consent, we eventually learn, depends to a large extent on sacrifice and custom, whichmay in turn be distinguished in terms of customary practice (Brauch) and malpractice(Mibrauch). In The Yes-Sayer, this comes to light after a disease has struck an unnamedcity, where among the afflicted victims is the mother of a certain boy. When a teacher de-cides to lead a group over the mountains in search of medicine, the boy demands to come

along and is eventually allowed to join them. Over the course of their journey, however,the boy falls ill. According to the lands ancient custom (Brauch), he who falls ill in sucha situation is required to give himself up and not be taken back home. When remindedof the custom of not turning back, the boy answers that he understands (Ich verstehe),and when asked if he consents to being left behind, he pauses to reflect and then agrees:Yes, I consent (Ja, ich bin einverstanden). The teacher responds, He has answered inaccordance with necessity (Er hat der Notwendigkeit gem geantwortet),40 and so thedecision is made to hurl him into the valley and sacrifice his life both for the sake of fol-

lowing the rule of custom as well as for the immediate, pragmatic aim of obtaining themedicine needed for saving the city.


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Here again the decision is not due to any form of sovereign exception, but is ratherthe result of consent (Einverstndnis) in accordance with (gem) the rule of custom(Brauch) or necessity (Notwendigkeit) after a process of reflection (Nachdenken). In thefirst play, the decision in question involves the boys consent to his own self-sacrifice. Hispersonal decision-making process is then taken further in the sequel, The No-Sayer, inwhich virtually the same story is introduced before being promptly reversed: this time,after another pause of reflection, the boy decides to disagree with a No: Nein. Ich binnicht einverstanden. In refusing to consent to the Great Custom, he calls instead for a

new custom to replace itthat of rethinking every new situation: As for the old GreatCustom, I see no rhyme or reason in it. What I need is a new Great Custom to be intro-duced at once, to wit, the Custom of rethinking every new situation.41

While the first play upholds the consent of the boy to the rule of custom, the secondupholds the boys decision to take exception to this rule, which leads in turn to the con-sent of the teacher and other students to a new practice of situational critique. Takentogether, the plays do not suggest any single right decision, as the either/or questionis left open to the situational logic behind each decision. In both cases, the privileged

modes of decision-making involve processes of negotiation and agreement rather thansovereign exceptionalism, above all when the custom is ultimately overruled by a new,antiauthoritarian exceptionalism of continual rethinking and reflecting.42

This antiauthoritarian conception of decision-makingwhich is based on inter-personal dialogue, recognition, and both consent and dissentposes an implicit chal-lenge to Schmitts theory of decisionism. For while the Yes-Sayer and the No-Sayer arecapable of making decisions through consent as well as dissent, decisionist sovereigntynot only forbids the dissent of its subjects, but is in turn incapable of saying No to itsown absolutism. Schmitts theory is thus based on rule rather than exception to rule, andthus is not really situationist at all, since it inevitably upholds the sameness of sovereignpower rather than the difference of alternative situations and actors. The Schmittiansovereign can only maintain the law or override it with his own higher law, and so inany case must always represent the fixity of rule. Because he supersedes distinctionsbetween consent and dissent or agreement and disagreement, there can be for him onlyrule, and thus never any exception to speak of.

Brechts politics were clearly opposed to Schmitts, both before the war and after.Although they arguably shared an interest in critiquing liberal ideals of perpetual nego-

tiation as well as anarchist objections to political organization, Brecht represents con-sensual understanding as problematic in his Lehrstcke only insofar as it can becomea form of closure that rules out the possibility of open dissent. From this perspective,Yes-saying can result from coercion and compliance as well as from more voluntaryforms of mutual consent. And so, as much as Brecht recognized the political powers ofperformative speech, pedagogical discipline, and strict adherence to tradition, it is clearthat he also upheld the necessity of dissent and deliberative democratic dialogue, andthat he did so in aesthetic terms above all.43


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>> Disipin nd Dmory

The Measures Taken was written the same year as The Yes-Sayer and The No-Sayer and,like them, it is structured according to a narrative of goal-oriented legitimization, mu-tual consent, and eventual self-sacrifice. The plays are so similar that Brecht may haveconfused them to some extent in his hearing before the HUAC. Yet while The Yes-Sayerdraws from a traditional Japanese No play, The Measures Taken, which takes place inmodern China during the early years of Communist agitation for revolution, was much

more of Brechts own invention.Mimetic modes of performance are made explicit at the beginning of the play, when

the Russian Agitators and Young Comrade agree to don special masks in order to passas Chinese and teach the classics of Communist thought from within the culture theyhave entered rather than from the outside. The Agitators warn against falling prey to pity(Mitleid),44 but eventually the Young Comrade does just that. Feeling too much for theworkers and opposing the Agitators decision to wait for the right time for revolution, herips up the classic teachings, which, according to the song In Praise of the Party, are

derived from the recognition of reality (der Kenntnis der Wirklichkeit).45

He then com-mits a final betrayal in tearing off his mask, thereby putting the entire mission at risk byallowing the group to be recognized as foreigners. Here the Agitators methods may beinterpreted as going against Brechts own stated theory, given his demand for recogni-tion through estrangement rather than concealment through masking. In any case, thisscene highlights the extent to which they are indeed questionable players rather thantrustworthy representatives of a given truth or ideal.

In the next scene, the Chorus asks the Agitators what measures they have decided totake in response to the riots that have ensued from the Young Comrades act, stating thatone must be careful when theory is in a state of confusion, thus potentially suggestingthat the state of exception is more of an obfuscating idea than a practical situation:

What measures did you take?In times o extreme persecution and when theory is in a state o conusionFighters are expected to make a scheme o the siteAnd careully weigh all commitments and possibilities.46

The Agitators respond by explaining their final decision: to dispose of him altogether by

casting him into a lime pit. Yet just as the teacher in The Yes-Sayer first asks for the boysconsent before proceeding with the deadly custom, the Agitators make sure to ask theYoung Comrade if he agrees with their decision, to which he voluntarily says Yes, con-senting to the revolutionizing of the world (Ja sagend zur Revolutionierung der Welt).47

Not surprisingly, this decision that the Young Comrade should die for the sake ofCommunist revolution struck the FBI and the HUAC as grounds for investigation dur-ing the early years of the Red Scare. Brecht and Chief Investigator Robert Stripling ex-changed several minutes of debate about the play, which are worth quoting at length.

When Stripling first inquires about the meaning of the title, Brecht replies in German,


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and the translator David Baumgardt explains, Measures to be taken, or steps to betakenmeasures. Stripling demands further, Could it mean disciplinary measures?and Baumgardt says No. Stripling then asks Brecht to explain the meaning of the play,and Brecht answers: This play is the adaptation of an old religious Japanese play and iscalled a No Play, and follows quite closely this old story which shows the devotion for anideal until death . . . a religious idea.

Stripling: Didnt it have to do with the Communist Party?Brecht: Yes.Stripling: And discipline within the Communist Party?Brecht: Yes, yes; it is a new play, an adaptation. It had as a background the Russia-China othe years 1918 or 1919, or so. There some Communist agitators went to a sort o no mans landbetween the Russia which then was not a state and had no realStripling: Mr. Brecht, may I interrupt you? Would you consider the play to be pro-Communist or anti-Communist, or would it take a neutral position regarding Communists?Brecht: No; I would sayyou see, literature has the right and the duty to give to the publicthe ideas o the time. Now, in this playo course, I wrote about 20 plays, but in this play

I tried to express the eelings and the ideas o the German workers who then oughtagainst Hitler.

Stripling then reads aloud excerpts from the play before continuing his questions:

Stripling: Now, Mr. Brecht, will you tell the committee whether or not one o the charactersin this play was murdered by his comrade because it was in the best interest o the party, othe Communist Party; is that true?Brecht: No, it is not quite according to the story.

Stripling: Because he would not bow to discipline he was murdered by his comrades, isntthat true?Brecht: No; it is not really in it. You will nd when you read it careully, like in the old Japaneseplay where other ideas were at stake, this young man who died was convinced that he haddone damage to the mission he believed in and he agreed to that and he was about ready todie in order not to make greater such damage. So, he asks his comrades to help him, and allo them together help him to die. He jumps into an abyss and they lead him tenderly to thatabyss, and that is the story.

The Chairman:

I gather rom your remarks, rom your answer, that he was just killed, he wasnot murdered?Brecht: He wanted to die.The Chairman: So they kill him?Brecht: No; they did not kill himnot in this story. He killed himsel.48

What is particularly curious about Striplings anti-Communist critique here is hisinsistence on reading the actions of the Agitators in terms of discipline rather thanagreement or consent. The HUACs repeated mistranslation of the title as disciplinary

measures rather than measures taken or measures to be taken reveals the members


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deeper misreading of the play, and especially their ignorance of the mimetic dimensionsof both the Japanese No play on which it was based as well as Brechts reinterpretationof it through his revisionist aesthetics of estrangement and recognition.49

At another point in the recording of the trial, Eric Bentley (who provided commen-tary on the Folkways record of Brechts hearing) notes: Brecht would seem to be speak-ing here, not ofThe Measures Taken, but ofDer Jasager, He Who Says Yes, another play ofhis that is derived from the same No play as The Measures Taken. No one will ever knowwhether Brechts memory was playing him tricks, or whether he wanted to lead Mr.

Thomas a dance.50

Regardless of whether Brecht was actually misreading his own playor not, his role before the committee may itself be interpreted as a mimetic performancerather than a straight, diegetic account (represented better by his prepared statement,which was not accepted as testimony). One might otherwise argue that his answers werenot at all elusive but simply attempted to be faithful to the performative complexity andambiguity of the play under discussion. In either case, his testimony is a clear defenseof aesthetic freedom in opposition to political absolutism. For as much as Brecht de-fended a quasi-scientific theory about arts ability to effectively represent reality, he also

insisted on the potentially open-ended nature of aesthetic performance, its inability tobe fully subordinated to disciplinary rules of either prescription or interpretation. Thisis why the Yes-Sayers in his plays never consent out of mere submission or subjec-tion, but rather through dialectical processes of dialogue, negotiation, and interpersonaldecision-making. And it is ultimately why the No-Sayers stand not only for freedom ofspeech, but for art itself.

Brecht had already imagined a trial scenario that would force him to make a decisionbetween earnestness and art years before he came to the United States, as Benjaminnotes in an entry from his Conversations with Brecht dated July 6, 1934. Soon after dis-

cussing Benjamins essay The Author as Producer, their exchange turns to questions ofartistic license. Here, Brecht confesses that he had often imagined himself being inter-rogated by a tribunal. In narrating the scene, he represents himself as answering No tothe question of whether he is really serious about what he says, and admits that even if itis less effective to do so, he nonetheless upholds the right to be artistic above all:

Brecht, in the course o yesterdays conversation: I oten imagine being interrogated by atribunal. Now tell us, Mr. Brecht, are you really in earnest? I would have to admit no, Im

not completely in earnest. I think too much about artistic problems, you know, about whatis good or the theatre, to be completely in earnest. But having said no to that importantquestion, I would add something still more important: namely, that my attitude ispermissible(Erlaubt). I must admit he said this ater the conversation had been going on or some littletime. He started by expressing doubt, not as to whether his attitude was permissible, butwhether it was eective.51

Brecht would later argue that such aesthetic permissibility is a basic necessity for de-mocracy itself. For although the democratic process allows for both persuasion and co-


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ercion in order to achieve agreement, it nonetheless depends on performative modes ofsocial interaction that are characteristic of dramatic dialogue. In the written speech thathe prepared for the HUAC, Brecht drew parallels between the repression of democracyin Germany and in the United States, suggesting a provocative comparison between Hit-lers assaults on un-German people, art, and ideas and McCarthys campaign againstun-American Activities. Referring to his early years as a playwright in the Weimar pe-riod, he wrote:

For a time, Germany was on the path to democracy. There was reedom o speech and oartistic expression. In the second hal o the 1920s, however, the old reactionary militaristorces began to regain strength. . . . Voices could already be heard demanding that ree ar-tistic expression and ree speech should be silenced. Humanist, socialist, even Christian ideaswere called undeutsch (un-German), a word which I hardly can think o without Hitlerswolsh intonation.52

Brecht also dwelled on the term undeutsch in an earlier piece of writing presumedto have been written in 1933, the year he went into exile from Germany. He left this type-

written self-interview unpublished during his lifetime, apparently keeping it to himselfby slipping it into his edition of AristotlesMetaphysik. Beginning with the question Areyou a Jew?, he asked himself point-blank why his books had been blacklisted in hishomeland as undeutsch. Although written well before his trial in the United States, it isstartling how much this piece of personal writing reads as if he is already putting himselfon trial:

Are you a Jew?No.

Then why are your books put on the blacklist as un-German?The National Socialists consider only a part o all Germans to be German. Those who have adierent view o social questions than Herr Hitler are generally considered un-German. And

just like many million Germans, I have a dierent view o social questions than Herr Hitler.Did you ee Germany?I was in Vienna or a public reading. There I heard that Herr Hitler wished to lead German a-airs without having people around who have my opinions. Because o the truly extraordinarypower he had others give him toward this goal, I had to postpone my return.53

About ten years later, Brecht began to raise similar concerns about his relationship toAmericanism, and ultimately defined US wartime nationalism and xenophobic racismin terms of exception and rule. He was responding in his journal to a newspaper ar-ticle entitled Seek to Till Aliens Land, which discussed how so-called native Ameri-canshere meaning Americans of European descentwere taking over land in South-ern California after the Japanese-Americans who had been working there had been sentto internment camps as enemy aliens. Beside a clipping of the article, under the dateFebruary 26, 1942, Brecht wrote:


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We are, those o us o German descent, enemy aliens, and the ear persists that we will haveto go away rom the coasts i they dont make an exception or Hitlers enemies. The Japa-nese shermen and gardeners here are being sent into camps. They were always unpopularamong the armers here, and now there is ear o their disloyalty. Exception and rule.54

Each of these personal responses helped form the basis for Brechts eventual compar-ison of the undeutsch and the un-American in his prepared statement for the HUAC.From here, he goes on to describe the various persecutions that were staged as politi-cal witch hunts (wurden politische Hexenverfolgungen inszeniert), including the drastic

measures (Manahmen) taken against the 1930 American film adaptation ofAll Quiet onthe Western Front, which prepared the way for the censorious control of all mass cul-ture and art under the National Socialist regime. According to Brecht, these disciplinarymeasures were conceived and performed as the intellectual preparation for total war, inwhich the total enemy is culture.55 In being suspected of un-American activities whileliving as a guest in the United States, Brecht found that his work was being sentenced toa similar kind of suspicion and persecution that had led him to be labeled undeutschin Germany. The image of the witch hunt would go on to play a crucial role in his third

version ofLife of Galileo (which he revised to take into account the ethics of science afterthe US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), as well as Arthur Millers allegorical play,The Crucible, which hit the stage six years later in 1953.

Brecht left the United States shortly after his trial in 1947 and settled in the Sovietsector of eastern Berlin. Only a few years later, however, he found himself confrontingquestions about the Manahme and Ausnahme once again. When East German work-ers rose up against the Communist government to protest its newly established laborpolicies, and were in turn suppressed through a violent crackdown administered by the

Soviet army, Brecht was evidently confused: 17th june has alienated the whole of ex-istence (hat die ganze existenz verfremdet),56 he wrote in his journal. Surprisingly, hedidnt oppose the army or take the side of the people, and thus appears to have betrayedhis long-held concern for consent, dissent, and remediation. Brechts most famous re-sponse to the 1953 uprising is his ironic poem The Solution (Die Lsung), whichseems to mock the governments response without actually committing to either side ofthe conflict, but in his more private writings he rationalized the military crackdown asa necessary means of establishing post-war peace. Not only did he write letters to EastGerman and Soviet officials declaring his continued support,57 but he also attempted tojustify the armys actions in his journals, and suggested that the uprising was unworthyof solidarity because the working classes had been duped by a confluence of capitalistand fascist forces. Although he called the violence terrible and critiqued the economicpolicies (Manahmen) of the government as misguided, he nonetheless defended theSoviet army in the end as the only force that is capable of coping with what he believedto be the capitalism of the fascist era in renewed strength.59

Gnter Grass later ridiculed Brecht for this apparent hypocrisy in his satirical play ThePlebeians Rehearse the Uprising: A German Tragedy (Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand: Eindeutsches Trauerspiel), which revolves around Brechts attempt to stage Shakespeares

Th B h E P l H k 75


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Coriolanus during the summer of 1953. While Grasss subtitle alludes to the same genreof the Trauerspiel that Benjamin examined in his study of the baroque, he was probablynot aware of the fact that Brecht and Benjamin actually discussed Coriolanus togetheronly a few days after their apparent agreement about Schmitt in 1930, and then againin 1931 (on a day that also remarkably happened to be the 17th of June).60 Grass may beright that Brecht ended up becoming more of a Yes-Sayer than a No-Sayer duringhis final years in East Germany. Yet although ideas of decisionist sovereignty seem closeat hand in Brechts questionable attempts to defend the military crackdown, as if he ul-

timately consented to Schmittian decisionism despite his earlier critiques, it is worthnoting that he avoided the termEinverstndnis when excusing the governments refusalto establish an agreement with the workers, preferring the term Zustimmung, and thathe did not defend the tasks that had to be performed asManahmen, but rather asAuf-gaben. And so in choosing the rule of the party over the resistance of the workers, Brechtalso sacrificed many of the terms that helped define his otherwise exceptional legacy oftaking exception to the violence of political rule.

This aesthetic legacy is perhaps best represented in the conclusion to the statementthat he hoped to present to the HUAC, which in no uncertain terms defends the neces-sity of art for the cause of freedom:

My activities, even those against Hitler, have always been purely literary activities o a strictlyindependent nature. As a guest o the United States, I rerained rom political activities con-cerning this country even in a literary orm. . . . Being called beore the Un-American Activi-ties Committee, however, I eel ree or the rst time to say a ew words about Americanmatters: looking back at my experiences as a playwright and a poet in the Europe o the lasttwo decades, I wish to say that the great American people would lose much and risk much i

they allowed anybody to restrict the ree competition o ideas in cultural elds, or to intererewith art, which must be ree in order to be art.61

Here, the more Brecht repeats the word activities, the more he calls attention to thevery name of the committee that he was addressing. While he may have been mockingit to some extent, his words appear earnest, as if he honestly were asking himself thequestion: what does it really mean to be un-American? Or un-German? In claiming theright to take exception to American policy for the first time, Brecht recalls his own essayon the difficulty of finding the courage to write the truth, which was first published in

the United States that same year.62 His final warning strikes a somewhat more mournfultone, however, as if he recognized that the free competition of ideas in cultural fieldswould remain at risk in the United States even despite the Constitutions unique protec-tion of the right to free speech. Indeed, assaults on democratic freedom since the ColdWar have continued to be launched in the very name of defending democracy, and fromthe culture wars of the 1980s to the USA Patriot Act during the war on terror, arthas remained vulnerable to political measures taken against it.63 The freedom of art mayalways be at risk for the very reason that it is so open to question, but as Brechts case

reminds us, it is only by taking risks that art is able to test the limits of freedom itself.

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1 Federal Bureau o Investigation le, BertoltBrecht, pt. 1a, p. 14. Thanks to the Freedom o Inor-mation Act, 369 pages that the FBI led on Brechtare now available or archival retrieval online at http://vault.bi.gov (although certain passages and all nameso participating sources, inormants, and agents havebeen redacted). According to these les, Brecht wasissued a Quota Immigrant Visa with no nationalitylisted on May 3, 1941, and was registered as an enemyalien with the US government in February 1942. From1943 until his departure in 1947, the FBI maintainedclose watch o his activities as well as his home, mail,acquaintances, riends, and amily. On February 21,

1945, a request was made or more advanced techni-cal surveillance to be adopted or the ollowingreasons: BERT BRECHT is the subject o a pendinginvestigation concerning his activities with respectto the Free German movement, the aim o which isthe development o a postwar German governmentriendly to Soviet Russia. BRECHTs activity in thisregard has been largely that o a propagandist in thathe writes or the Free German magazine in Mexico.He was also active in the organizational work resultingin the oundation o the Council or a DemocraticGermany (pt. 1b, p. 10). Technical surveillance oBrechts home was granted provided ull securityassured in a letter by J. Edgar Hoover dated April 9,1945 (pt. 1b, p. 22), and urther wiretapping o thoseriendly to him ollowed soon ater.

2 In their 1976 essay on Heiner Mllers transcen-dence o Brecht, David Bathrick and Andreas Huys-sen argue that most post-World War II scholarship onthe Lehrstckultimately participated in the politicso Cold War polarization (Bathrick and Huyssen,Producing Revolution). According to their helpulsurvey, critical opposition to Brecht tended to readThe Measures Taken in terms o tragedy, an approachdeveloped early on by Reinhold Grimm in the 1959essay Ideologische Tragdie und Tragdie der Ide-ologie: Versuch ber ein Lehrstck von Brecht. Thiswas ollowed by a more letist, anti-tragic re-politici-

zation o Brechts work in the late 1960s, representedabove all by Reiner Steinwegs articles in the journal

Alternative, his book, Das Lehrstck: Brechts Theorieeiner politisch-sthetischen Erziehung, and his editedvolume,Au Anregung Bertolt Brecht: Lehrstckemit Schlern, Arbeitern, Theaterleuten. Bathrick andHuyssen also identiy an apparently more subtlethird way, as represented by Wolgang Schivelbuschsstudy, Sozialistisches Drama nach Brecht, which, theyargue, picks up the traditional view o the play as atragedy and rees it rom the dead weight o cold wararguments without, however, abandoning the theoryitsel (Producing Revolution, 114). Also important

to recognize in the context o Cold-War-era Brechtscholarship is the challenging work o Peter Szondi,especially his essay Brechts Jasager und Neinsager.

3 For an in-depth study o Brechts productivereception o Japanese theater, see Oba, BertoltBrecht und das N-Theater. For a broader approach toBrechts comparative East-West aesthetics, see Tatlow,The Mask o Eviland Brechts Ost Asien.

4Benjamin, Selected Writings, 2.2:768.

5 For discussions o the correspondence betweenBenjamin and Schmitt, I have relied especially on We-ber, Taking Exception to Decision, Agamben, HomoSacerand State o Exception, and Kahn, Hamlet orHecuba: Carl Schmitts Decision. For discussion oBrechts relation to Schmitt, see Mller-Schll, DerEingri ins Politische and Wichtig zu lernen vorallem ist Einverstndnis. For Mller-Schlls in-depth

discussion oThe Measures Taken in particular, seeDie Massnahme au dem Boden einer unreinenVernunt. Finally, or the argument that Schmittspolitical theory conceptualizes aesthetics itsel as theenemy, see Levi, Carl Schmitt and the Question othe Aesthetic.

6 See Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht,or a rigorously researched study o their riendship;and Benjamins posthumous Understanding Brechtor

Notes



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essays on Brecht and transcriptions o their con-versations between 1931 and 1938. See also WalterBenjamin and Bertolt Brecht Discuss Franz Kaka inRokem, Philosophers and Thespians.

7 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 2.2:77374.

8 Ibid., 4:270.

9 aristoteles ist r die dramatiker der gegenwartkeineswegs ein entthronter gesetzgeber. die eigentli-che bedeutung seiner gesetze geht der wissenschatnoch gar nicht au, so sehr herrschen sie! (Wizisla,Bertolt Brecht 18981998, 171); this and all subsequent

translations rom German sources by the author, un-less otherwise indicated.

10 in der nachahmung ndet der prozess derbersetzung seinen entscheidenden abschluss. dieneuzeitliche darstellung msste man eine vorahmendenennen dren damit ihr gerechtigkeit widerhrt. . . .die nachahmung wird von anang an als sthetischesphnomen genommen. ihre zwecke beschtigen

jedenalls die aesthetik nicht. der mensch erwirbt sich

kenntnisse durch nachahmung (ibid.).11 Brecht, Zur Theorie des Lehrstcks, inSteinweg, Brechts Modell der Lehrstcke, 164. Onlylater did Brecht come upon Erich Auerbachs Mimesis:Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendlndischen Litera-tur, a 1946 copy o which he kept in his library. It wasevidently a git rom Eric Bentley, who inscribed hisbest wishes on the rst page.

12 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 182; Werke, 23:69.

13 Ibid., 186; Werke, 23:74.

14 Ibid., 204; Werke, 23:96.

15 Specically, Jameson discusses what he callsBrechts Chinese dimension (Brecht and Method, 3)and the Chinese Brecht (11); or his extended discus-sion o Tatlow, see 32.

16 For Waley (and, according to ElisabethHauptmann, also or earlier Japanese theater criticslike Zeami Motokiyo), theories and methods omimetic imitation were central to Japanese N the-ater: Though the N seems to us so little a realisticperormance, it was the development o imitation(mono-mane or miming) in the Yamato school oSarugaku which dierentiated it rom the rival mischool and led it rom dance to drama (Waley, TheN Plays o Japan, 3132).

17 Brecht, Der Weg zu grossem zeitgenssischemTheater, in Werke, 21:38081.

18 Brecht, Alienation Eects in Chinese Acting, inBrecht on Theatre, 91100.

19 A ew examples o prominent gures in artsand letters interested in Asia: Hermann Hesse (whoseparents were missionaries in India), Alred Dblin(especially his short story collection Der berallau Chao-lao-s), Franz Kaka (The Great Wall oChina), Fritz Lang (especially his early lm Destiny[Der Mde Tod]), Max Weber (who developed major

studies o religion in China and India), and Carl Jung(who, among other explorations into comparative spir-ituality, wrote the introduction to Richard WilhelmsGerman edition o the I Ching, the rst comprehen-sive translation o the text into a European language).

20 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 9192; Werke,22.1:201.

21 Ibid., 9596; Werke, 22.1:206.

22 Ibid., 192; translation modied. Ein verrem-dende Abbildung ist eine solche, die den Gegen-stand zwar erkennen, ihn aber doch zugleich remderscheinen lt (Werke, 23:81).

23 Steinweg, Brechts Modell der Lehrstcke, 215.

24 Benjamin dened baroque allegory as a xedimage and a xing sign with Chinese writing inmind: This is what determines allegory as a orm o

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writing. It is a schema; and as a schema it is an objecto knowledge; but it is not securely possessed until itbecomes a xed schema: at one and the same timea xed image and a xing sign. The baroque ideal o

knowledge, the process o storing, to which the vastlibraries are a monument, is realized in the externalappearance o the script. Almost as much as in Chinait is, in its visual character, not merely a sign o what isto be known but it is itsel an object worthy o knowl-edge (The Origin o German Tragic Drama, 184).

25 Brecht, Werke, 3:260.

26 See especially Derrida, Force o Law, Agam-

ben, Homo Sacerand State o Exception, Habermas,The Inclusion o the Other, and essays by iek andMoue, among others, in Moues edited collection,The Challenge o Carl Schmitt.

27 Shadia B. Drury argues that a majority o intel-lectual and policy gures allied with the Reagan andBush administrations have identied themselves asStraussians, including ormer attorney general JohnAshcrot, ormer secretary o education William Ben-

nett, ormer chie o sta William Kristol, ormer as-sistant secretary o state or international organizationaairs, Alan Keyes, legal scholar and judge RobertBork, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, andormer deputy deense secretary Paul Wolowitz.See especially Drury, Leo Strauss and the AmericanRight, 3. Other ollowers o Strauss who have beenrecognized as part o the American neoconservativemovement include Daniel Bell, William F. BuckleySamuel Huntington, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol,Seymour Martin Lipset, Norman Podhoretz, andJames Q. Wilson. Some critics, such as Anne Nortonand especially Steven B. Smith, have argued thatStrauss has been misunderstood as a ounding athero the neoconservative movement, and that his workis somewhat more complicated and ambiguous thanboth his ollowers and opponents have acknowledged.For instance, Smith argues that there was in act ahostile takeover (Reading Leo Strauss, 3) o Strausss

work by the neoconservative movement, and thatStrauss was in act a riend o liberal democracyoneo the best riends democracy has ever had (ix). Nor-ton stops short at deending Strauss as a liberal, but

is careul to distinguish between Strausss studentsand his disciples, as well as what she calls Straussiangenealogies and Straussian geographies, and oersthe ollowing disclaimer: I am sorry or the nameStraussian because it implicates Strauss in views thatwere not always his own, but it is best to call peoplewhat they call themselves. Straussian is the namethese disciples have taken. The Straussians have madea conscious and deliberate eort to shape politics and

learning in the United States and abroad (Leo Straussand the Politics o American Empire, 7).

28 According to Hans-Dietrich Sander, althoughthere was never a direct connection between Brechtand Schmitt, Karl Korsch acted as an indirect liaisonbetween the two. Korsch was a close riend o Brechtswho communicated with Schmitt on several occasions.As Sander notes, Schmitt developed his own concepto Manahme in his political theory, and in his 1957

essay, Problem der Legalitt, he reerred to theGangster-Fhrer as a specically Brechtian gure:Legality becomes a poisoned weapon with which tostab a political opponent in the back. Ater all, in BertBrechts novel, the Gangster-Fhrer gives orders to hispeople: the job must be done strictly according to thelaw. This is where legality ends up as the language ogangsters. It had begun as a message rom the god-dess Reason (Sander, Die Massnahme, 146). Seealso Schmitt, Verassungsrechtliche Austze aus den

Jahren 19241954, 450.

29 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriten, 2.3:1372 (April21, 1930). Horst Bredekamp writes, Albert Salomon,Social Democrat and proessor o political philosophyat the Deutsche Hochschule r Politik in Berlintheone who had encouraged Benjamin to send his Trau-erspielbook to Schmittorganized a series o lecturescalled Problems o Democracy in the winter o192930. Schmitt was one o the participants. Shortly



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The Brechtian Exception Paul Haacke 79

thereater, Benjamin had a long discussion with BertoltBrecht, which he summarized in our words. In theirhighly emotional orm, they embody Benjamins para-doxical proximity to Schmitt: Schmitt / Agreement

Hate Suspicion (Bredekamp, From Walter Benjaminto Carl Schmitt, 266).

30 For an extended discussion o this key term in thework o both Brecht and Schmitt, see Mller-Schll,Wichtig zu lernen vor allem ist Einverstndnis.

31 Schmitt, Political Theology, 63.

32 Ibid., 13.

33 Ibid., 5.

34 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4:392; ber denBegri der Geschichte, 697.

35 Brecht, The Jewish Wie and Other Short Plays,12425; Werke, 3:24647.

36 Ibid., 125; translation amended; Werke, 3:247.

37 Ibid., 141; Werke, 3:258.

38 See Menke, The Untragic Hero: The Dialecti-cal Lehrstck, in Tragic Play, 11524.

39 Brecht, The Measures Taken and Other Lehr-stcke, 63; Werke, 3:59. Note that the English transla-tion discussed here derives rom the second version oDer Jasagerrather than the rst.

40 Ibid., 68; Werke, 3:64.

41 Ibid., 79; Werke, 3:71.42 At the very end o the 1920s, as he was embark-ing on his rst Lehrstcke, Brecht wrote in his journalabout the importance o reection (Nachdenken) as alearning processand the role o perormative decep-tion or aking (Schwindel) that can go along with it.Discussing a warm moment with his young son Stean,he recalled: 2 + 3 = 5, said Ste, and 2 + 2 = 4. Howmuch, I asked, is 3 + 3? Wait a minute, I need to think

about it, says Ste. My ather and I talk about otherthings, then Ste says: It is 6. I ask: How did you comeup with that? He says: through reection. Me: Whotold you that you need to reect? No one, he says,

I heard about reection and saw that you rest yourhead on your shoulder and sit still and thats reection.I have a unny way o reecting, I always count likethat a little bit. So, I say, a little bit o aking? Yeah, helaughs, a little bit. This cleverness, it comes rom thebrain, we only get it rom the brain (Brecht, Werke,26:292).

43 Jean-Luc Godard, in his 1995 lm,JLG/JLG:Autoportrait de dcembre, oers a remarkably similarunderstanding o the dialectical relationship betweenart and culture: There is the rule. There is the excep-tion. The rule is culture. Culture is a question o rules.It is part o the rules. Exception is a question o art.Everyone speaks the rule: cigarettes, computers,t-shirts, television, tourism, war (Godard,JLG/JLG,16). For a thoughtul philosophical reection on thisremark, see Kauman, Red Kant, 707.

44 Brecht, The Measures Taken and Other Lehr-stcke, 14; Werke, 3:106.

45 Ibid., 29; Werke, 3:120.

46 Ibid., 31; translation amended. Eure Manahme!/ In den Zeiten uerster Verolgung und der Verwir-rung der Theorie / Zeichnen die Kmper das Schemader Lage / Abzuwgen Einsatz und Mglichkeit(Werke, 3:122).

47 Ibid., 34; Werke, 3:125.48 Hearings regarding the Communist Infltration othe Motion Picture Industry, 49597.

49 The term Manahme appears to have beenused by various political parties during this period,rom the radical let to the radical right. In additionto Schmitts use o the term, many instances alsoappear throughout a 1933 booklet o Hitlers newlaws, a copy o which Brecht owned in his library. One

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may speculate, however, that Brechts more literaryand theatrical approach to the term was indebted toShakespeare, as he owned more than one copy oMeasure or Measure in his library. One o the German

editions, translated as Ma r Ma, was substantiallyunderlined and marked up.

50 Bentley, Bertholt Brecht beore the Committeeon Un-American Activities, 6.

51 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 1067.

52 Bentley, Thirty Years o Treason, 221; Brecht,Werke, 23:59.

53 Brecht, Werke, 26:299.54 Ibid., 27:62. The newspaper clipping appearswith the ollowing text: The back to the land move-ment is coming back to Southern Caliornia now thatthe Japanese have been evacuated rom most othe agricultural country in this area and thousands oacres o rich soil have been let which native Americanarmers can cultivate without the ormer difcultcompetition. Martin Giord, 26, is shown at let with

his wie, Dee, and daughter, Wanda, as he appliedor acreage beore Howard Wilcox at the county co-ordinators ofce here.

55 Ibid., 23:61.

56 Brecht,Journals 19341955, 454 (August 20,1953);Arbeitsjournal, 515.

57 See Clark, Hero or Villain?

58 Brecht, Werke, 23:249.59 Brecht,Journals 19341955, 455 (August 20,1953);Arbeitsjournal, 515.

60 25 April 1930: Hamlet [?] / Sprechweise / Co-riolan and 17 June 1931: Coriolan / Gesprch mit derNeher / Romeo und Juliet, in Benjamin, GesammelteSchriten, 2.3:1372.

61 Bentley, Thirty Years o Treason, 22223; Brecht,Werke, 23:61.

62 The nal version o Writing the Truth: Five

Difculties was published in German in April 1935.The English translation rst appeared in the tenthanniversary issue oTwice a Yearin 1948. See Brecht,Galileo, 133.

63 One o the more disturbing examples o thepolitical repression o art in the United States inrecent years is that o Steve Kurtz and the Critical ArtEnsemble. For more on Kurtzs story, see GregorySholette, Disciplining the Avant-Garde and Lynn

Hershman Leesons lm, Strange Culture (2007), star-ring Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan.



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Cdric Le Borgne, LE S VOYAGEURS

Durham, United Kingdom, 2011

Photo courtesy the artist

The Brechtian Exception: From Weimar to the Cold War

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