Bertolt Brecht and Rudyard Kipling: A Marxist's Imperialist Mentor [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9783110810875, 9789027930576

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STUDIES IN GENERAL AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Volume 3

BERTOLT BRECHT AND RUDYARD KIPLING A MARXIST'S

IMPERIALIST

by

J A M E S K. L Y O N University

of

Florida

1975

MOUTON THE H A G U E • PARIS

MENTOR

© Copyright 1975 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers All unpublished material by Bertolt Brecht cited in this study © copyright 1968 by Stefan S. Brecht

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 73-94231

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., The Hague

for Reinhold

Grimm

"Er hat Vorschläge gemacht"

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author wishes to acknowledge A. P. Watt & Sons of London who, on behalf of the Kipling Estate, granted permission to quote from Kipling's works; to Paul List Verlag, Munich, which authorized the use of citations from Kipling's writings in German translation; and to Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main, which allowed quotations from Brecht's works to appear in this study.

PREFACE

During October, 1970, this author mentioned to Bertolt Brecht's widow and daughter that he was doing a study on that writer's debt to Kipling. They responded with delight. They confirmed that Kipling was a well-known figure in the Brecht household and called him one of Brecht's important literary godfathers. It was as though they took great pleasure in having this aspect of his private world finally receive wider attention. In reality, news of Kipling's ubiquitous presence in Brecht's lyrics and dramatic works should surprise few of those who are reasonably well-acquainted with critical literature on the German dramatist. As early as 1930 one commentator called him "Rudyard Brecht". John Willett's observation in 1959 summarizes what others have often observed and repeated: "Kipling provided the poetic setting for Brecht's Anglo-Saxon mythology of the twenties . . . this influence lasted into Brecht's later w o r k . . . . Kipling remained till the last among those few twentieth century writers for whose work Brecht had any deep regard." But this study does not intend to erect a "graceful monument to the obvious". The same critics and scholars who universally acknowledge Kipling's impact on Brecht have had no real idea of its scope. Misconceptions and errors have crept in, such as the view that Kipling's influence was transmitted to Brecht primarily through the ballads (the short stories were of equal importance), and that it fades after the early years, notably after Man is Man in 1926. In other words, the amount of Kipling in Brecht has never even been measured accurately. What follows does not purport to be a conventional study of

X

PREFACE

the "influence" one writer allegedly exerted on another. Brecht was a different kind of reader and writer who did not allow himself to be "influenced" in the conventional way. Rather he committed what some might consider to be brazen pilfering of material from Kipling which he then appropriated verbatim or reworked slightly before incorporating into his own works, in most cases without acknowledging it. He learned from Kipling as Archibald MacLeish claims any real writer learns from earlier writers, i.e. the way a boy learns from an apple o r c h a r d - h e simply steals what he has a taste for and can carry off. Brecht had strong tastes and a powerful carrying capacity. Should a reader come away muttering that Brecht was a thief, this author would feel no compulsion to disagree. It should, however, be remembered that by similar criteria Shakespeare, too, might be called a thief. Among other things, this study intends to gauge one aspect of so-called "influence" by cataloging all known passages from Kipling that Brecht borrowed. In the course of such a quantitative listing, it will also examine how much of Kipling's œuvre was familiar to him, how and when he became acquainted with it, and something of the intensity and duration of this exposure. Further, it will explore something of the creative process and how Brecht went about assimilating this material in his work. As one might expect, the bulk of Kipling material enters his poetry, a category under which songs from plays have been included. Brecht, in the estimation of this author, was fundamentally a lyricist who turned to the stage, and doubtless one of the best who wrote in the German language in the twentieth century. With the exception of Man is Man where it is omnipresent, Kipling's influence enters the dramas chiefly through songs or other brief lyrical passages. There are dangers in this study that this author readily admits. For instance, it was easy after discovering so much Kipling in Brecht to find traces of him everywhere in the literary landscape. This temptation was resisted wherever possible, but perhaps not always completely. Some of the affinities that drew Brecht to Kipling will also be discussed, though here, too, a certain amount

PREFACE

XI

of speculation is unavoidable. Another danger lies in the limitation imposed by such a narrow focus. When the reader lays down this book, he should quickly remind himself how much Brecht also drew from Chinese, Greek, Latin, French, and American literature. Kipling was but one of several literary godfathers, albeit an important one. Relative good fortune attended most of this investigation. A number of Brecht's contemporaries or collaborators, while advanced in age, are still living today. Often they supplied helpful clues. Dr. Hans Otto Miinsterer, for example, a close friend from Brecht's youthful Augsburg days, provided information that corroborated some findings and led to others. The playwright Carl Zuckmayer graciously responded to inquiries about Brecht's knowledge of Kipling during the early Berlin years after Brecht had introduced him to the Anglo-Saxon poet. Elisabeth Hauptmann, a close collaborator from 1924 to the close of his life, submitted to extensive interviews and answered lengthy correspondence. She qualified as the best single source of information on Brecht's acquaintance with Kipling, particularly since she translated some of the English writer's poems into German for Brecht. Though four or five decades had elapsed since some of the events these associates attempted to recall, their recollections corresponded closely and could be verified almost without exception. This method of re-creating literary history from oral history is, of course, limited because of the inaccuracy of human memory. Nevertheless, it offers possibilities of hearing details that usually disappear when a writer's contemporaries die. My deepest thanks to them for their help. Unstinting help was also forthcoming from the Bertolt Brecht Archives, especially in the person of Herta Ramthun. Whether in deciphering illegible handwriting or ferreting out obscure references to Kipling, she threw herself into this study as if it were her own. John Willett transmitted helpful insights and gave needed encouragement. Stefan Brecht graciously gave permission to consult the Brecht material located in Houghton Library at Harvard University. My colleagues Professor Henry Hatfield, Kuno Francke, Professor of German Art and Culture at Harvard Uni-

XII

PREFACE

versity, and Professor George Tunstall of the University of Florida, read the manuscript at various stages in its evolution and offered helpful suggestions. A Canaday Humanities Grant from Harvard University allowed this project to be started during the summer of 1968, and a travel grant from the American Philosophical Society made possible a trip to East Berlin and the Brecht Archives in April, 1969. To all of them my warmest thanks. Though not customary to thank the deceased, two of them deserve special acknowledgment for their unusual help on this study - Mrs. Flora V. Livingston, and Rudyard Kipling himself. Mrs. Livingston assembled and donated to Houghton Library the splendid Kipling collection now there. Its completeness simplified research considerably. It was Kipling, however, who suggested to her that she might also wish to gather translations of his works. As a result, her collection includes a list of Kipling titles in German unmatched by almost any German library. Since Brecht knew most of his Kipling in translation, this collection made comparisons easy. From it at least half a dozen works known to Brecht by at least four different translators were tracked down. Finally, thanks are due to Bernhard Blume, a teacher, scholar, and friend in whose seminar on Brecht this author was first introduced to the world of a writer who absorbed so much from Kipling. I am deeply grateful to my wife Dorothy Ann for more than can be said. One day she put a guileless question to me: "When will you start writing?" I am glad she asked. Gainesville, Florida

March, 1973

CONTENTS

Acknowledgment Preface I. II.

III.

IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI.

vii ix

Collaboration, Affinity, and Original Creativity The Augsburg Years A. Early Encounters B. Kipling in Translation C. Kipling's Verse Translations . . . . Learning from Kipling: The Lyrics . . . . A. The Poet's Language B. Structural Features Exploiting Kipling's Prose Brecht's "Many Inventions" using Leopold Lindau's Translations The Berlin Years The World of "Man is Man" "Rudyard Brecht": The Late Twenties . . . Kipling in a Marxist World The Final Years "Never the Twain shall meet"? - Conclusions .

1 4 4 7 8 19 19 23 33 40 54 70 88 97 109 112

Appendices

125

Works consulted

131

Index

134

I COLLABORATION, AFFINITY, AND ORIGINAL CREATIVITY

"Gehört nicht alles, was die Vor- und Mitwelt geleistet, dem Dichter von Rechts wegen an? Warum soll er sich scheuen, Blumen zu nehmen, wo er sie findet? Nur durch Aneignung fremder Schätze entsteht ein Großes." Goethe in conversation with Friedrich von Müller, Dec. 17, 1824

In the exhilarating theater atmosphere of Berlin in 1923, two of Germany's most promising young dramatists met. The 27-year old, politically engaged Carl Zuckmayer from the Rhineland tried to interest the politically uncommitted Bertolt Brecht, a 25-year old from Augsburg, in the writings of Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukäcs. Brecht showed little interest, but he reciprocated by giving Zuckmayer some works of Rudyard Kipling with the comment: "You can learn from him" (An dem kannst du lernen"). 1 Brecht knew whereof he spoke, for he had already learned a great deal from Kipling, and he was to learn more. Or, more accurately, he would borrow more from Kipling for his own creative efforts. The English writer belonged to the many collaborators that he found in various countries and literatures. For him, literary creativity was a collective effort of all the co-workers he could gather to provide him with materials, supply him with ideas, and help him create. No matter if they were living or dead, geographically present or absent, whether they wrote in German or some other tongue, or whether they knew him. Brecht was alarmingly 1 Carl Zuckmayer, Als wär's ein Stück von mir: Hören der (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1966), p. 381.

Freundschaft

2

COLLABORATION, AFFINITY, AND ORIGINAL CREATIVITY

careless with such details and surprisingly generous in borrowing.2 In this as well as in other matters, Brecht represents a radical departure from a writer's relationship to tradition as it had been known since Romanticism. He was contemptuous of "original creativity". In his view, the notion of plagiarism was an outgrowth of bourgeois property concepts that arose in the late Middle Ages. Half in jest, but with considerable accuracy he observed that every period of literary greatness was based more or less on its plagiarism.8 He lamented the fact that he had not yet accomplished anything significant in this area. Why, he asked, would anyone who knows the value of a striking expression try to improve on it when he can simply appropriate it?4 But he boldly announced that he intended to re-establish plagiarism in its "ancient inherent rights" by restoring it to social acceptability.5 His brash observation that our age no longer had the genius to write a work like the Chinese classic whose 100,000 words contained 90,000 words of direct quotation8 implied that this young genius intended to show that such a thing could be done. Brecht succeeded in his intentions better than almost any single twentieth century writer, with the possible exception of Joyce, and Kipling 2

Reinhold Grimm, Brecht und die Weltliteratur (Nuremberg: Hans Carl, 1961) lists over forty different writers from whom Brecht drew or quoted directly in his own works. 3 "Natürlich basiert so ziemlich jede Blütezeit der Literatur auf der Kraft und Unschuld ihrer Plagiate", Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), XVIII, 101. This is the most complete edition of Brecht's works published. For the moment at least, it represents the closest thing to a standard edition. Reference to it in the text will be by volume and page number, e.g. GW XII, 53. The titles of Brecht's plays are considered sufficiently well-known to be given in English throughout the text. 4 "Jemand, der den Wert eines guten Ausdrucks kennt, wird ihn lieber übernehmen, als dasselbe noch einmal anders auszudrücken (wenn es wirklich dasselbe ist) und dadurch einen neuen Ausdruck zu schaffen, der entweder hinter dem alten zurückbleibt oder ihn beschämt", GW XIX, 411. 5 In defense of his plagiarisms in Edward II, he excuses himself for not answering immediately " . . . weil ich die immer schon geplante Ehrung des literarischen Plagiats und seine Wiedereinsetzung in seine alten angestammten Rechte nicht zu einem ungünstigen Zeitpunkt . . . loslassen wollte, wo ich auf dem Gebiet des Plagiats noch nichts Rechtes geleistet hatte", GW XVIII, 79. • In one of the Keuner stories entitled "Originalität", GW XII, 379-380.

COLLABORATION, AFFINITY, AND ORIGINAL CREATIVITY

3

helped him do it. The mental intimacy that drew Brecht to a poet whose name had become synonymous with British imperialism waxed and waned at varying points in his life, but it remained one of the few literary friendships that endured until the end of his life. Brecht recognized in Kipling a kindred spirit, and he expressed this sense of congeniality in many ways. One of the most appropriate consisted of two page numbers penciled inside the back cover of an English edition of Kipling's verse which he owned at his death. One referred to a poem he must have found especially interesting or congenial, for it cast Homer in the role of a plagiarist. The poem was "When 'Omer Smote 'is Bloomin' Lyre". Sometime in the 1950's, Brecht himself had expressed admiration for the "compilers" of the Homeric epics who, by contemporary standards, would have been dubbed "plagiarists".7 In this text treating of such plagiarism, he found an expression of his own views on creativity (done with gentle mockery) and what he might have considered a reasonably accurate portrayal of his own writing habits: When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre, He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea; An' what he thought 'e might require, 'E went an' took - the same as me! The market-girls an' fishermen, The shepherds an' the sailors, too, They 'eard old songs turn up again, But kep' it quiet - same as you! They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed. They didn't tell, nor make a fuss, But winked at 'Omer down the road, An' 'e winked back — the same as us! These lines might well stand as a motto for this entire relationship. Rudyard's Kipling's writings had fallen into the hands of one of the most unscrupulous and brilliantly sovereign imaginations in twentieth century literature. The results would have surprised Kipling himself. 7

"jene hochgebildeten Kompilatoren der Homerischen Epen" (GW XIX,

504).

II THE AUGSBURG YEARS

A. EARLY ENCOUNTERS

Brecht first mentions Kipling in a note written in 1920 entitled "Über die deutsche Literatur". After lamenting the lack of orientation in German literature, he goes on to speak parenthetically of the totally different type of material found in Kipling and Knut Hansun ("Wenn man Kipling liest und Hamsun, dann ist das Material ein grundverschiedenes, ebenso der Gesichtswinkel..." (GW XVIII, 4). Though this Statement reveals almost nothing about how much Kipling he had read, a note from the following year testifies that he knew both the imperialist and the Kipling of The Jungle Books. This second entry is also striking in another light - its contents adumbrate the basic theme of the play In the Jungle of the Cities about the modern metropolis as a jungle with its victims, its hostile ambiance, and its impenetrability. Here Kipling ought to receive credit along with Rimbaud's "Une Saison en Enfer" and Jensen's Das Rad as one of the sources that sparked this drama. The note reads: Als ich mir überlegte, was Kipling für die Nation machte, die die Welt 'zivilisiert', kam ich zu der epochalen Entdeckung, daß eigentlich noch kein Mensch die große Stadt als Dschungel beschrieben hat. Wo sind ihre Helden, ihre Kolonisatoren, ihre Opfer? Die Feindseligkeit der großen Stadt, ihre bösartige, steinerne Konsistenz, ihre babylonische Sprachverwirrung, kurz: ihre Poesie ist noch nicht geschaffen. (GW XVIII, 14)

Later in 1921 he began to formulate the "poetry of the metropolis" in the first sketches of this drama. 1 1

To my knowledge, only one critic has seen the relationship between this

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

5

His earliest encounters with Kipling's work, however, go back several years before these notations. Rather than establishing precise dates, priority must be given to a vital question too often ignored: did he know Kipling in the original or in translation? The overwhelming evidence speaks for translations. Kurt Wolfel examines the three translations of Kipling's verse that were available to the young Brecht before 1920 and concludes that although he could have known them, he probably read Kipling in the original.2 But he should have begun by asking whether Brecht's knowledge of English would have allowed him to read an exceedingly difficult poetic language filled with slang, dialect, and idioms that can perplex native speakers of English. Based on further evidence, the answer appears to be a distinct "no". His friend Hans Otto Miinsterer, a close associate from 1917 to 1922, recalls that Brecht learned some English as a pupil at the school he attended (a Realgymnasium), though he cannot recall whether it was a required or optional subject. He feels that if it was optional, Brecht probably learned next to nothing.3 The type of Realgymnasium Brecht attended normally made English a required subject at that time, and there is no question that he did learn some English there. The possibility also exists that he was exposed to a few Kipling poems or short stories in his English classes, since several editions containing them were used in German schools of the day. This would make his first encounter very early. Miinsterer considers such an encounter with Kipling in the classroom unlikely, and the wave of anti-British sentiment that

play and Kipling. In speaking of it, Max Högel, "Bertolt Brecht" in Lebensbilder aus dem bayerischen Schwaben (Munich: Max Hueber, 1961), says: "Er war reif geworden für die Darstellung des Kampfes aller gegen alle 'Im Dickicht der Städte' (1921-1922) . . . Kiplings exotische Kraftmenschenwelt schien ihm geeignet zur Verkehrung in sein dämonisch-nihilistisches Traumreich", pp. 408-409. 2 Kurt Wülfel, "Kipling or His Translators? The Question of Brecht's Acquaintance with Kipling's Ballads" in Essays in German Language, Culture and Society, eds. Siegbert S. Prawer, S. Hinton Thomas and Leonard Forster (London: The Institute of Germanic Studies, 1969), p. 242. 3 Münsterer, letter dated October 24, 1968.

6

T H E AUGSBURG YEARS

swept Germany in August of 1914 makes it even less likely that school officials would have sponsored the best known literary spokesman of the British Empire in their classrooms between then and 1917 when Brecht finished school. Because there are no records available on his grades or the texts used in his school (they were destroyed in World War II), the matter must be filed with the other unanswered questions about Brecht's beginnings. Through the school, then, Brecht knew at least the rudiments of English. Münsterer reports that he periodically interjected English words or phrases into his early poetry and conversation, such as a poem about a missed rendezvous from which Münsterer recalls the English sentence, "And who not came, was she". One can only agree with his judgment that Brecht's English was something less than pure ("ich glaube, es war nicht ganz hasenrein"). He also thinks that Brecht read Kipling only in translation, for he does not recall hearing him talk of reading anything in the English original.4 Carl Zuckmayer adds his testimony on Brecht's poor knowledge of English. He confirms that in Berlin of the mid 1920's, Brecht knew very little English, and that he read Kipling in German translation.5 Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht's closest co-worker for many years who translated a good deal of English material for him between 1925-1930 (Kipling poems, John Gay's Beggar's Opera, Chinese poems and plays from Arthur Waley's English renderings), confirms his rather limited grasp of English during this later period in Berlin. According to her, he could not have managed Kipling in the original at this time.6 In the thirties and forties Brecht did become rather proficient in English and acquired a sizeable vocabulary. He read voraciously in it, especially murder mysteries. But in this earliest period his grasp was still limited. Because of this, one must turn to German translations to know when and what he read. *

Ibid. "Brecht konnte damals wenig Englisch und las Kipling in der deutschen Übersetzung", Zuckmayer, letter to this author dated April 25, 1969. 6 In an interview in Berlin, April 15, 1969. 5

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

7

B. KIPLING I N T R A N S L A T I O N

Germany discovered Kipling early. Leopold Rosenzweig's translation in 1894 of The Light that Failed led the way. There followed two separate German versions of The Jungle Books in 1898 and 1899, which heralded a surge of interest that occurred around the turn of the century. Kaysers Neues Bücher Lexikon lists sixteen new titles in the period between 1899-1902, and between 19031906 these are augmented by several Kipling readers published in English for use as school texts. By 1914 there had appeared abridged or complete editions of Actions and Reactions, Captains Courageous, Just So Stories, Kim, Life's Handicaps, Many Inventions, The Naulahka, Puck of Pook's Hill, Soldier Tales, Soldiers Three, and Stalky & Co. Most important for Brecht, three different editions of translated poems also came out between 19101917. In 1910 Hanns Sachs published thirteen poems in a translation entitled Soldaten-Lieder und andere Gedichte von Rudyard Kipling in the Julius Zeitler Verlag, Leipzig. Marx Möller followed with his rendering of the "Barrack-Room Ballads" (Balladen aus dem Biwak) in the Vita Verlag, Berlin, 1911, and in 1917 Duncker Verlag in Weimar presented an edition by Otto Hauser called Rudyard Kipling, Indische Balladen. Kipling's works did not achieve the popularity Karl May's did, but respectable publication figures and the testimony of contemporaries leave no doubt that they found a large audience of youth and adults who read them for their high entertainment value.7 The Jungle Books, Kim, and The Light that Failed led in popularity. Several editions of The Jungle Books were in circulation after 1900. Together the two largest editions went through nearly 100,000 copies by 1923. By 1909 The Light that Failed was in the eighth German printing, while Kim, though translated only in 1908, had sold 12,000 copies by 1912. Münsterer remembers the popularity and availability of inexpensive editions of The Jungle Books and The Light that Failed during his youth. He feels cer7

For an account of Kipling's popularity among youthful readers of the Wilhelminan era, see Willy Haas, Die Belle Epoque (Munich: Desch, 1967), pp. 242-250.

8

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

tain Brecht knew them, a conjecture which will be corroborated shortly.8 But he also recalls specifically two of the above verse translations with which Brecht was familiar, the Sachs and the Hauser renderings. Because critics claim that it was the Kipling of the "Barrack-Room Ballads" who made the strongest impact on the developing poet, these verse translations deserve closer investigation.

C. KIPLING V E R S E T R A N S L A T I O N S

Münsterer recalls that Brecht and his friends bought and learned much from booklets in an inexpensive paperback series entitled Aus fremden Gärten.9 The complete translated title reads: From Exotic Gardens. A Collection of the Significant and Interesting Literature of Foreign Nations. Translated and Edited by Otto Hauser. Among more than ninety titles representing literatures as diverse as France, China, Croatia, and America, Brecht found a collection of five long Kipling ballads: "The Last Suttee", "The Sacrifice of Er-Heb", "Evarra and His Gods", "The Ballad of The King's Jest", and "The Ballad of East and West". The misleading German title that dubbed them "Indian ballads" (they were in reality ballads about India, not indigenous literature) was symptomatic for Hauser's reliability as a translator. Critics caustically observed after the appearance of one new booklet in this series that Hauser had added a ninety-ninth language to the other ninety-eight he did not know. In his examination of the three verse translations that Brecht might have read, Wölfel correctly points out that this edition could not have introduced him to the world of soldiers and adventurers he came to associate with Kipling.10 None of this verse belonged to the original "Barrack-Room Ballads"; it dealt primarily with Indian life in India. After using a stylistic comparison to establish if Brecht learned from Hauser's extremely free renderings (which catch little of the 8 8

Münsterer letter dated August 25, 1968.

Hans Otto Münsterer, Bert Brecht. Erinnerungen 1922 (Zurich: Verlag die Arche, 1963), p. 49. 10 Wölfel, p. 239.

aus den Jahren

1917-

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

9

flavor of Kipling), Wölfel draws the curious conclusion that "Hauser's Kipling sounds like Brecht in the places where we are particularly reminded of the British poet." 11 He speaks of a "possible link" in common stylistic devices, but he seems to be misled by looking for the wrong thing. Even at this early age, Brecht had far too sovereign an imagination to subserviently imitate another's style. He was primarily after material; Kipling's style, as filtered through this translator, was important, but in this case scarcely worthy of imitation. Brecht did, however, learn something of substance from Hauser's rendering - it could have been at least one source of his acquaintance with "The Ballad of East and West". If, as shown above, his inadequate English limited him to German versions, he could have learned of it only here, for neither Sachs nor Möller included it among their translations. In this case as so often, information for facts about the early period must be deduced from later works. Elisabeth Hauptmann confirms that Brecht knew at least the opening lines of this ballad when he settled permanently in Berlin in 1924. 12 She adds that the opening and closing lines were well-known in Germany at the time. Thus Brecht's sources are reduced to two possibilities - either he heard it from someone who read Kipling in the original (or the Hauser translation), or he read it himself in the Hauser translation, for in 1934 he uses the opening lines of this ballad in the poem "Der Kaledonische Markt" (GW IX, 534). The words are not Hauser's, as a comparison shows Brecht: "Zwischen Ost und West gibt's keine Brücken" Hat ihr bezahlter Barde geschrien. Hauser: Oh, Ost ist Ost und West ist West, die bleiben einander fern. 11

Wölfel, p. 238. Letter dated August 16, 1969; again during an interview in Berlin on October 29, 1970. 12

10

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

But since Brecht here is not quoting verbatim from any known German rendering of the ballad, one must assume that he is paraphrasing this well-known line. Whether he read it in Hauser or heard it must remain a matter of conjecture. In addition to Hauser's translation, Munsterer also remembers the ready availability of the Hanns Sachs translation of 1910. He claims that Brecht owned and used it.13 It is true that this edition was found in Brecht's library when he died in 1956, but there is no evidence that this was the same copy he had owned as a youth. The fact that it is a 1910 edition suggests it might have been, but Margarete Steffin's signature inside the front cover indicates that this particular copy had belonged to her. In all likelihood it came into his possession sometime during his Danish exile in the late thirties when Miss Steffin collaborated with him, or possibly when she died in Moscow in 1941 while traveling across Russia with the Brecht family. There are no notes or markings in the margins to indicate whether Brecht ever used it. Miinsterer's claim remains the sole evidence for an early acquaintance with this version. Sachs included thirteen poems in this book, seven of them from the "Barrack-Room Ballads": "To Thomas Atkins", "The Widow at Windsor", "The Widow's Party", "Snarleylow", "Mandalay", "Gentlemen-Rankers", and "Fuzzy Wuzzy". The other six were "The Last Suttee", "Evarra and His Gods", "The Ballad of Boh Da Thone", "The Sacrifice of Er-Heb", "The Conundrum of the Workshops", and "An Imperial Rescript". Wolfel quickly disposes of any stylistic influences Sachs might have exerted. He speaks of the "academic purism" of his language which aims at "smoothness, avoiding all harshness and unconventionalities".14 But Wolfel fails to recognize that the world of Kipling which entered Brecht's early poetry was delineated and elaborated more clearly here than in either of the other two translations, especially in Sachs's lucid introduction. If he in fact read 13

Hans Otto Munsterer, Bert Brecht. Erinnerungen, p. 49, intimates this in an ambiguous statement. But in a letter dated August 25, 1968, he feels he can say "with certainty" that Brecht owned it. » Wolfel, p. 236.

11

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

it, Brecht would have gleaned the kind of lore about the British Colonial Army that provides the marrow for his play Man is Man. Here Sachs describes "Thomas Atkins", a nickname for the British soldier, and his relative unpopularity because of coarse manners and a life style that bordered on lawlessness. H e states that in contrast to continental armies composed of all social classes, the British army drew primarily from the lower classes, especially from the rural population in impoverished regions such as Ireland. This explains why the majority of British soldiers were Irish. Nor was the pay good enough to lure most workers into the heat of the tropics; consequently the army also attracted adventurers who found the petty-bourgeois narrowness of England too confining and who had often overstepped the line between criminality and legality. 15 According to Sachs, Kipling depicted the life of the soldier in all its excesses without passing judgment, a practice Brecht would have hailed. His last paragraph deals with the directness of the soldiers' language as Kipling reproduces it: Kipling hat sich aus dem rohen Soldatendialekt eine Sprache von wundervoller Unmittelbarkeit geschaffen. Dazu kommt ein Rhythmus, der Dinge, die noch kein Dichter wiederzugeben versucht hat, aus den Versen heraustönen läßt; den Sturmlauf einer angreifenden Truppe, die unregelmäßige Detonation einer Gewehrsalve, das Rasseln einer rostigen Ankerkette oder das Anschlagen der Wellen an die Schiffswand, das und tausend ähnliche Dinge hat er in das Silbenmaß eines Gedichtes zu bannen verstanden.16 From this description alone, Brecht would have learned something that he later attempted with some of his verses. Despite Wölfel's negative evaluation of the Sachs translation, Brecht would have acquired from it a more accurate taste of formal balladesque elements than from the other two. Sachs faithfully imitates the catchy rhythms and the long metrical lines as Kipling used them. H e is careful to reproduce the choruses with their repetitions. In the poem "Gentlemen-Rankers", for example, the reader can readily hear the familiar music hall melody that 15 Hanns Sachs, transl., Soldaten-Lieder und andere Gedichte Kipling (Leipzig: Julius Zeitler, 1910), pp. 1-3. 16 Sachs, p. 4.

von

Rudyard

12

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

accompanies its refrain. All of this is blurred in the other two translations. While in some cases Sachs gave priority to fidelity over beauty, it is precisely this faithfulness which often helps him to come closest to capturing Kipling's tone, as one example from "Mandalay" shows: Kipling:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst. Sachs:

Schafft mich östlich nur von Suez, alles and're ist mir wurst, Wo die zehn Gebot' nicht gelten und ein Mann sich holt 'nen Durst. Möller:

Laß mich über Suez fahren / Wo noch jeder Kerl was gilt Wo nicht jeden, der mal Durst hat, / Frömmelnd man als Säufer schilt.

Marx Möller's translation of 1911 (Balladen aus dem Biwak), the third available to Brecht, is used above for a comparison because Wölfel considers his "adaptations" of Kipling, which many of them are, closer in tone and style to the language and world of Kipling than either of the other two. By inference he concludes that Möller "is the only one who could possibly have given Brecht a more extensive insight into the world of Kipling's ballads", though he has no evidence that Brecht ever read Möller.17 Nor does the above passage seem to substantiate his claim. Yet Wölfel is partly right without being aware of it. Brecht did in fact know Möller's translation, as conclusive evidence will show, though he probably also learned as much about Kipling's world from the Sachs version. What Brecht acquired from Möller's renderings was far more than an "insight into the world of Kipling's ballads" - it was in fact Möller's (and indirectly Kipling's) literary property, perhaps the earliest known example of what was later to become large"

Wölfel, p. 242.

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

13

scale pilfering. It also offers the first conclusive proof that he knew one of these verse translations. Elisabeth Hauptmann pointed out to this author a passage from a song in the Brecht-Feuchtwanger adaptation of Marlowe's Edward the Second that she thought had a tie-in with Kipling.18 She recalls that Brecht was delighted with the unusual word Witfrauenkleid. The passage reads: Die Mädchen von England im Witfrauenkleid Ihre Buhle vermodert vor Bannockbride

(GW I, 216)

In Marlowe the same lines read: Maidens of England, sore may you mourn, For your lemans you have lost at Bannocksbourn, (Act II, Scene 2)

Hauptmann was right. The spoor leads directly to the Möller edition of the complete "Barrack-Room Ballads" and his rendering of Kipling's "The Widow at Windsor", where the unusual word Witfrauenkleid, which he interpolates in the first line, represents his own invention: Kipling: "Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead?

Möller: Die Witwe zu Windsor im Witfrauenkleid Hat viele Millonen im Spind

Here Möller's liberties with the original sounded different enough to strike Brecht's fancy. It was the unique formulation for a widow's dress that had not appeared at all in the original which he read sometime before 1925 (probably in his Augsburg years), brought to Berlin, and varied slightly for use in a totally different context. A few years later in a reply to one of Alfred Kerr's several charges of plagiarism, Brecht sardonically notes that Kerr had missed some well-camouflaged passages in Edward the Second which derived from Verlaine and Kipling. He unquestion18

Interview in Berlin, April 15, 1969.

14

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

ably meant this one. He adds that he failed to mention them only because he feared that in any dispute, half-educated literati might in fact insist they were his own (GW XVIII, 78-79). As usual, he was acutely aware of his sources, however insignificant or obscure. Appropriating a few lines like this and burying them elsewhere in an unrelated context was characteristic of the way he worked. He would carry an interesting formulation around with him in his head for years and use it again at a propitious moment. That moment came again in 1934 when, while visiting London, he wrote the fragmentary poem known as "Der Kaledonische Markt". In it he mocks the Kipling original by returning to the earlier formulation almost exactly as he had once read it in Moller: U n d die W i t w e v o n W i n d s o r i m Witfrauenkleid Steckt das G e l d in den Strumpf u n d grinst und kargt

{GW

I X , 534)

Just how much more he took from Moller's inexpensive paperback version (it sold for 2.50 Reichmarks) is difficult to say, but several other features of the work demand attention for what he also might have learned from them. First, this version contains all twenty-one of Kipling's original "Barrack-Room Ballads", the only such translation in which they were found. Further, he learned from the English title on the facing page that this collection was entitled "Barrack-Room Ballads" - a fact he could not have gleaned from the Hauser or Sachs translations. Were it not for a lone note from the year 1938, one might suspect that he never heard this title. But three entries on a later note card confirm that he h a d - " d e r gelbe jack - cholera - barrackenballaden".19 Brecht apparently confused two aspects of Kipling. The first entry, which refers to yellow fever, will be discussed in connection with his film story Die Fliege. He then seems to connect Kipling's poem "Cholera Camp", which Elisabeth Hauptmann had translated for him in 1925-1926, with the "Barrack-Room Ballads". Here his mind short-circuited temporarily, for it does 19 Material found in Bertolt Brecht Archives under no. 805/11. All further references to archive material will be designated by "BBA", with the corresponding folder and page numbers following.

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

15

not belong to the original "Barrack-Room Ballads". But in the process he reveals that he had at least heard the name "BarrackRoom Ballads", and that he associates this poem by Kipling with that collection. Were it not for Moller (or a later exposure to the English original which cannot be documented), he would never have known the name. How much it helped him to have English titles listed for each poem is a matter of conjecture, but at least one such title has significance because of the way he later parodied the poem it names. His parody substantiates that he either knew and recalled the English title for the poem "Mandalay" from Moller, or that he knew the Sachs translation. Sachs, who left the title exactly as Kipling wrote it, rendered the poem quite accurately. Moller's "adaptation" on the other hand mutilated it almost beyond recognition. The title read "By the Ancient Temple Gates" ("Vor den alten Tempeltoren"), and the ubiquitous references to "Mandalay" (twelve times in the original, eleven in Sachs' version) were reduced to one occurrence. It would have been virtually impossible for a German reader to know the poem was even entitled "Mandalay" without reference to either the English title in Moller or to Sachs's version. Yet Brecht knew the original title and the contents well, as his parody entitled "Der Song von Mandelay" [sic] in Happy End (1929) and Mahagonny (1930) prove.20 Moller's translation probably also supplied Brecht much poetic "raw material" for the later play Man is Man. It abounds in lore about the life and habits of British soldiers in colonial India. There, for instance, he would have read the poem "Loot" with its admonition to use care when looting a pagan temple, a situation that Brecht expanded into an entire scene of the play. He also would have heard recurrent references to the feared sergeant, to types of military punishment, to the attitude of hopelessness that manifested itself in both bloodthirstiness and in a lethargic sense of resignation among the troops. He also could have gleaned from Moller's German the names "Tommy" and "Johnny" as 20

For a listing of different versions of this song, see Bertolt Brecht Archiv: Bestandsverzeichnis des literarischen Nachlasses, ed. Herta Ramthun, vol. I, Stucke (Berlin: Aufbau, 1969), pp. 56-57.

16

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

generic designations for the British soldier (both are used this way in Man is Man). Either from Möller or from a collection of Kipling short stories entitled Soldatengeschichten to be discussed later he picked up the term "Nigger" used by the British army as an appellation for the indigenous Indian population, particularly those against whom they fought battles. Since the inhabitants of India are not negroid, this represents the type of specialized terminology that must come from a specific source. Möller not only reproduced the term in German where it occurs in the originals of "Snarleyow" and "Loot"; he interjects it into "Oonts", though the word is missing from the original. Later chapters, particularly those dealing with The Threepenny Opera, will return to other specific ways that Brecht profited from Möller's translation. For the moment, however, it is important to note that his debt to Kipling's translators was not only of influence on his language, though he found the language to be congenial, but also to the material and ideas he digested from them. Thus any attempts to date the earliest encounter with Kipling should be based on similarities in poetic material as well as on stylistic devices. Dating exact encounters with specific works by Kipling before 1920 is at best a risky game. For example, Schuhmann claims to find both thematic similarities and verbatim borrowings from Kipling's "Gentlemen-Rankers" in Möller's translation. They allegedly occur in a 1915 poem entitled "Der Fähnrich" (GW VIII, 6).21 The passage in Möller and Brecht reads: Möller

(Kipling):

Und wenn die Wachlaterne so blinkt, Als wollte das Grausen sie schreiben An die kahle Wand, so daß jeder es sieht All das Elend, das unsere Träume durchzieht Brecht-.

Schrieb es mit steilen, zittrigen Lettern neben der flatternden Stallaterne. 21

Klaus Schuhmann, Der Lyriker Bertolt Brecht; 1913-1933 (Berlin: Rütten

and Loening, 1964), p. 114.

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

17

Sah, bevor er es schrieb, in das Dunkel, seltsam geschüttelt, hinaus Wo ein Gespenst herschattete, grauenhaft, fremd und fern. While stylistic resemblances and a similar tone do suggest some affinity in their manner of expression, Wölfel is right in pointing out that they are not convincing.22 In a poem written in 1917 or 1918 entitled "Von einem Maler" (GW VIII, 30), Brecht's flair for the imaginative led him to describe exotic paintings by his friend Caspar Neher. They portrayed far-off jungle and desert regions where the artist shoots "Braune Männer" and where the geography extends over a number of British Crown Colonies from the Ganges to Peshawur, Ceylon, and Port Said. Here internal evidence suggests that he already knew Kipling, but nothing definite can be established. The title of the poem "Larrys Ballade von der Mama Armee" (GW VIII, 39) written in 1919 doubtless alludes to the British Indian Army rather than the German army. Brecht's British soldiers in Man is Man, the play most obviously connected to Kipling's world, also speak of the army as their "Mama" ("die Mama, wie wir die Armee im Scherz getauft haben" GW I, 330). This ballad deals with the young recruits serving their "Mama" under a burning sun. Its image of rice and fish, dust and swamps, mosquitoes, and omnipresent death might have derived from any one of a dozen of Kipling's short stories or poems. The young recruit is also a stock character in many of Kipling's ballads and tales. The images of rice and fish from this poem recur again in Man is Man as staples in the British soldiers' diet. When asked by Galy Gay what they eat, they reply: "Gedörrte Fische und Reis" (GW 1, 370). Wölfel offers the most reasonable solution to the problem of dating. After noting that poems like "Ballade auf vielen Schiffen" (1920), "Ballade von den Seeräubern" (1918) and "Das Schiff" (1919) bear the distinct impress of Kipling, he argues that 1918 must stand as the terminus ante quem for an encounter. He would even set it as early as 1916, for he perceives a marked break in form and subject matter that year in "Das Lied der Eisenbahn22

Wölfel, pp. 239-240.

18

THE AUGSBURG YEARS

truppe von Fort Donald" which shows for the first time "the tone and the world, the formal and contextual characteristics which, in the Hauspostille remind us so strongly of Kipling".23 Whatever the exact date, it is safe to conclude that many encounters occurred in Augsburg before Brecht first recorded them in 1920. The above paraphrases or verbatim quotations from Kipling's verse corroborate that he had read quite early Moller's translation of the "Barrack-Room Ballads" as well as Hauser's renderings of several other ballads. It can also be concluded with reasonable certainty that he knew the edition of poems Sachs had translated as "soldier's songs". Miinsterer claims he did,24 and the fact that he owned this particular volume when he died reflects a habit of acquiring works later in life that as a young man he had read and liked. Because his inadequate grasp of English limited him to these translations, the trouble he took to become acquainted with all three (no others existed in Germany at the time) bespeaks the keenness of his interest. He had not been exposed to more than a small part of Kipling's verse, albeit a well-known part. But this exposure was to have a decisive influence on Brecht's development as a poet.

2

»

24

Wolfel, p. 242. Miinsterer, letter dated August 25, 1968.

ni LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

A. THE POET'S LANGUAGE

As a young man growing up in Augsburg, Brecht reacted strongly against the exaggerated pathos of expressionist poetry of his day and the saccharine, overwrought preciosity of Rilke's verse. Sometime between 1915 and 1918 his own experimentation and search for new lyrical techniques (he reached maturity as a lyric poet long before he did as a dramatist) resulted in a mode of expression much different from that of his age. Critics have insisted that this was caused by his encounter with Kipling's verse as much as by any other single factor. Reinhold Grimm conjectures that Kipling's impact on his language was perhaps decisive for the early Brecht. He notes that none of his contemporaries even approximated this curious new tone.1 To Klaus Schuhmann it seems that Kipling's ballads can be heard behind Brecht's poems of 1916-1917,2 while Kurt Wolfel maintains that "Das Lied von [sic] der Eisenbahntruppe von Fort Donald", written in the summer of 1916, marks a break with the form and subject matter of the earlier poems and displays formal and contextual characteristics that remind us strongly of Kipling.3 If this is true, by 1918 at the latest Kipling's language from the "Barrack-Room Ballads" had made an impression. Curiously, Brecht himself failed to acknowledge this influence in an essay written sometime after 1950 entitled "Wo ich gelernt habe" (GW XIX, 502). In it he speaks of a 1

Grimm, Brecht und die Weltliteratur, p. 62. Schuhmann, p. 41. 3 Wolfel, p. 242. 2

20

LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

variety of impulses that entered his early verse, such as popular hit tunes of the day, songs of women workers in his father's paper factory, church hymns and chorales, and, to a lesser extent, folk songs. Kipling's name is conspicuously missing. Lion Feuchtwanger on the other hand, who met Brecht while the struggling dramatist was still living in Augsburg (and Munich), states unequivocally that two of the strongest influences on him at the time were in fact the ballads of Kipling and Wedekind: "Unter den Zeitgenossen beeindruckten ihn in jenen Jahren am stärksten Kipling und Wedekind; seine frühen Balladen pflegte er auf die Art Wedekinds gell und mit Lust zu singen."4 These contradictory views are not only a result of the obfuscation Brecht loved to indulge in. Later in his life he also tended to overstate the common or folk elements from which he drew his poetry. Like all of Brecht's statements, it must be taken with caution, for in light of testimony by Feuchtwanger, Zuckmayer, Miss Hauptmann, Münsterer, and others who knew him well, the young Brecht learned much about the poet's craft from Kipling. The British balladeer gave him a model that almost no other German writer of the day (with the exception of Wedekind the cabarettist) could have provided. Brecht recalls that during his youth no self-respecting German poet was writing ballads (GW XIX, 413). Nor were ballads from recent or contemporary literature respectable enough as literature to be studied in the schoolroom of the time. As a consequence he turned to sub-literary sources in Germany, such as the Bänkelsang, to Wedekind's cabaret ballads, or to foreign models, in this case Kipling. The elements that attracted him to Kipling were something he could find nowhere else in German literature. In his style and thought, by age twenty the youthful poet of Swabian extraction probably stood farther outside the mainstream of the German lyric tradition than any poet in two centuries. He rejected Goethe and Schiller, Hölderlin and Heine as teachers, and with them the entire "pontifical" and "profane" lines of German letters, as he 4

Lion Feuchtwanger, "Bertolt Brecht" in Erinnerungen Hubert Witt (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1964), p. 362.

an Brecht,

ed.

LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

21

called them.® When, in his 1941 Rettung of Kipling as a lyric poet T. S. Eliot summarized why that writer had fallen from grace before critics and literati, he unwittingly emphasized the very features that appealed to the young Brecht in Augsburg. Reduced to a single denominator, it was Kipling's use of language. The almost excessive lucidity against which Eliot defended the Victorian poet, the occasional nature of much of his poetry, and the quality that makes them best when read aloud (or sung) all have their counterparts in the early verse of the Hauspostille. Like Kipling, Brecht avoided "musical" or excessively sonorous poetic diction in favor of harsher, more vigorous diction and rhythms. For the apprentice poet, these ballads represented a salutary contrast to the self-conscious, esoteric worlds of private poetic symbolism that had dominated European verse since Rimbaud and Mallarmé. The German and his English counterpart both wanted to communicate, and both unabashedly wrote for real audiences (in Brecht's case he actually sang his early ballads in taverns). One observer notes that Brecht was attracted to Kipling's poems "because of their quite shameless derivation from the music hall. Their 'vulgarity', using the word in its highest sense, their direct appeal, both as sound and in their context, was recognized by him as their finest characteristic... Kipling transmitted to Brecht a new perspective on poetic language. The young poet doubtless knew from biographical sketches in editions of the time that the Englishman had received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907. Yet nowhere in German or any other literature that he was acquainted with at the time could he have found a serious writer who lent literary respectability to colloquial speech as Kipling did. He had raised the language of the "other ranks" to semi-respectability, a type of poetic diction that was even less en vogue during Brecht's youth than it had been in England before Kipling. Brecht's own inclinations were in this 5

Bertolt Brecht, Über Lyrik, eds. Elisabeth Hauptmann and Rosemarie Hill (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), p. 90. 8 Jack Dunman, "Kipling and the Modern World", The Kipling Journal, 36 (June, 1969), p. 10.

22

LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

direction. He was probably delighted to read in Möller's translation such vernacular terms as verrecken or trollen, slang such as "Dem Feldwebel hab' ich eine geknallt,/Die hat nur so gesessen" (Möller, p. 102), or such idiomatic expressions as "da liegt der Hund begraben" (Möller, p. 115). Here it can safely be claimed that Kipling exerted a distinct influence on the young Brecht by demonstrating that poetry which used common speech could still be taken seriously. Kipling's aggressive, coarse, even brutal diction also provided a model for the kind of language the young Brecht tried to cultivate. The opening stanza of the "Cells" in Möller's translation, which far outdoes the understated English original in its strident, crude mode of expression, might be interchanged with any of a dozen Brechtian ballads. To compare the tone, it appears with three stanzas from Brecht's "Lied der Galgenvögel" (GW VIII, 35): Kipling: Mein Kopf ist wie eine Harmonika! Meine Zunge ist zerstochen! Mein Mund ist mir verschimmelt beinah, Und ich bin total gebrochen! Aber ich hatte da auch meinen Jux, Als ich die Wache da puffte! Nun brumme ich wegen all der Schlucks, und weil ich den Feldwebel knuffte! (p. 101)

Brecht: Daß euer schlechtes Brot uns nicht tut drucken Spüln wir's hinab mit eurem schlechten Wein Daß wir uns ja nicht schon zu früh verschlucken Auch werden einst wir schrecklich durstig sein Wir lassen euch für eure schlechten Weine Neidlos und edel euer Abendmahl... Wir haben Sünden. - Sorgen han wir keine. Ihr aber habt dafür eure Moral. Wir stopfen uns den Wanst mit guten Sachen Das kost' euch Zähren viel und vielen Schweiß. Wir haben oft das Maul zu voll zum Lachen Ihr habt es oft zu voll vom Kyrieleis.

LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

23

Brecht perceived as T. S. Eliot did that Kipling used poetry almost purely as an instrument, and that for him the poem was something intended to "act". 7 When later in life he spoke of the "gestic" quality of language, which has something to do with vividness and epigrammatic directness of speech, he was characterizing a type of poetic diction that he had encountered as a youth in the verse of Rudyard Kipling.8 One example can demonstrate this type of language in the Möller translation. Brecht read in "Fuzzy-Wuzzy": "Daß, eh' wir es ahnen, sein Schrei uns umgellt" (p. 33), where the last phrase has something of the vividness and pregnancy that induces fear. Because this and similar passages were rendered so freely and yet effectively, one would have to speak of the influence Rudyard Kipling's world and Marx Möller's German translation had on the young Brecht. It is also this "gestic" quality of Kipling's language (in Möller's rendering) that made much of his work so accessible to the visual imagination. Dozens of Brecht's poems have precisely the same quality - concrete situations that can easily be visualized and dramatized. A number of them in fact became dramatic episodes in plays. In Kipling he had found a congenial foe of Gedankenlyrik whose poetry was usually spoken by a readily identifiable lyric voice in an easily recognizable situation. This appealed to his sense of the factual and the concrete. B. STRUCTURAL FEATURES

In examining formal and stylistic elements he might have learned, it is necessary to isolate traits and techniques in Brecht's poetry that have counterparts in the particular Kipling poems he knew. This does not, of course, constitute absolute proof of stylistic influence; but it comes as close as any method can to assessing his debt in formal matters to the craftsman Kipling. After examining the verse translations of Kipling, Wölfel con7

A Choice of Kiplings Verse, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), p. 18. 8 See his essay "Über reimlose Lyrik mit unregelmäßigen Rhythmen", GW XIX, p. 398.

24

LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

eludes that despite Sach's painstaking correctness in reproducing wording, meter, verse arrangement, and stanzaic form, there is little in the thirteen poems he rendered that immediately reminds us of the early Brecht.9 This is true of the language, but one structural feature in this edition certainly might have struck Brecht Kipling's peculiar and frequent use of a refrain in his ballads. He also could have encountered this in the Möller version of "Cells", but that translator generally eliminated or abridged Kipling's refrains so ruthlessly that their absence distorted many poems beyond recognition. Sachs, however, faithfully preserved them, and it was probably from his edition that Brecht learned some of the subtleties of this form. In his early ballads Brecht often varied a single line that recurred at the end of several successive stanzas, a practice which in effect created a one-line refrain that served as a commentary on the preceding lines. The way he does it is typical of something he would have found in Sachs' version of Kipling's ballads. For example, at the end of each stanza in the German rendering of the "Widow at Windsor" he would have read a one-line refrain varied in the following manner: "Arme Teufel! - gehn zu Falle dabei"; "Arme Teufel! - Viktorias Söhn'!"; "Arme Teufel! - Mit uns sagt man: Halt!"; "Arme Teufel! - gar heiß ist die Luft!"; "Arme Teufel! - kommen nie mehr nach Haus!". Brecht does essentially the same thing at the end of each stanza in "Die Legende der Dirne Evlyn Roe" (GW VIII, 18) where one reads: "Die junge Evlyn Roe"; "Die arme Evlyn Roe"; "So ist es Evlyn Roe"; "Die Dirne Evlyn Roe"; "Die fromme Evlyn Roe"; and finally "Die arme Evlyn Roe". In both "Mandalay" and "Gentlemen Rankers" Sachs also leaves intact the entire refrain that follows each stanza, while Möller drops them in one and abridges them in the other. In what might be called an "objective-reflective" type of structuring, Brecht uses the refrain much as it appears in the Sachs translation. The first part of each stanza in the ballad consists of objective narrative by an unidentified third person, whereas the voice in the refrain that follows shifts to an identifiable first person who 9

W ö l f e l , pp. 238-239.

LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

25

then reflects on the foregoing narrative. Material from the Sachs translation of "Gentlemen Rankers" and Brecht's "Ballade von den Seeräubern" (GW VIII, 224) illuminates this structural similarity:

Kipling: Für die Legion Verlor'ner, die Kohorte, die verflucht Für die Brüder, die der gleichen Schmerzen Raub, Singt ein Herrensohn aus England, weich gewöhnt in leichter Zucht, Und der Kaiserin Dragoner mit Verlaub. Ja, Dragoner aus dem Heere, der einst saß auf eigner Mähre, Und er ritt zum Teufel im Galopp, Denn die Welt war nicht aus Pappen, da er konnte bar berappen, Aber heut' ist der Sergeant schon mehr als grob. Wir sind arme kleine Lämmer und kein Stall in der Näh'. Bää! Bää! ää! Wir sind schwarze Schafe, verirrt im Schnee, Bää! - ää - ää! Gemeine Soldaten aus vornehmem Haus, Führen zur Hölle in Saus und in Braus, Gott hab' Erbarmen und hilf uns heraus, Bää! Yah! Bäh!

Brecht: Von Branntwein toll und Finsternissen! Von unerhörten Güssen naß! Vom Frost eisweißer Nacht zerrissen! Im Mastkorb, von Gesichten blaß! Von Sonne nackt gebrannt und krank! (Die hatten sie im Winter lieb) Aus Hunger, Fieber und Gestank Sang alles, was noch übrigblieb: O Himmel, strahlender Azur! Enormer Wind, die Segel bläh! Laßt Wind und Himmel fahren! Nur Laßt uns um Sankt Marie die See! In both ballads the refrain is actually sung by the subjects of the narrative. In the ballad "Das Lied der Eisenbahntruppe von Fort Fort Donald" (GW VIII, 13), Brecht also employs the same objective-reflective structure. Here, too, the refrain is sung by the

26

LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

very group of men described in the preceding narrative.10 The form of both writers' ballads also reveals strong similarities in the sophisticated use of a slightly varied last line of a stanza. In the Möller translation of "Soldier, Soldier", for example, a single verse repeated at the end of the first eight stanzas represents the advice of a returning soldier to a waiting girl that she should find a new love. It reads: "Such' dir einen andern Schatz." After the final stanza it is transformed into "Dann nimm mich zu deinem Schatz!" The young Brecht likewise used fixed phrases as the closing lines of his stanzas, such as in the "Ballade vom Weib und dem Soldaten" (GW VIII, 239) where each stanza closes alternately with "Sagten zum Weib die Soldaten" or "Sagte das Weib zum Soldaten". But as the poem moves toward its culmination, that line is subtly but distinctly transformed into a question that reveals who has the last word: "Und was sagten dem Weib die Soldaten?" While Brecht might have encountered similar structures in folk songs, Kipling's poetry also taught him how to make such telling changes in an otherwise trivial line. The comparison of Möller's translation of "Soldier, Soldier" with Brecht's "Ballade vom Weib und dem Soldaten" also suggests another feature his verse shares with Kipling - the extensive use of dialogue within a ballad. In other ballads such as the "Ballade von der Freundschaft" (GW VIII, 235) or "Auslassungen eines Märtyrers" (GW VIII ,37), Brecht is equally liberal in allowing characters to carry on dialogue. This does not necessarily prove that he learned this device from Kipling. If, however, one accepts his claim that he learned very little from the German folk song of his day, then Kipling becomes the next most likely source, for most of the "Barrack-Room Ballads" use extensive dialogue of one sort or another. The same holds true for the large amount of first person direct address that Brecht uses. Both he and Kipling wrote many Rollengedichte, a natural vehicle for this mode of speech. In Kipling the Augsburg youth discovered a writer whose poems avoided the 10

Schuhmann, p. 114, suggests that the refrain in both these Brechtian ballads seem to have been inspired by Kipling, though he offers no evidence for it.

LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

27

interiorization of the poet's world, one who used poetry as an objective form of expression. Rollengedichte, dramatic monologues seen through the eyes of and spoken by a fictitious persona, such as an abandoned maiden or an Irish private, prevent a direct confrontation between the reader and the subjective poetic ego that created the poem. During Brecht's youth, few German writers cultivated this particular lyric form, one which lends itself especially well to the ballad. But Kipling excelled at it, and this fact did not escape Brecht. "Dramatic monologue", the closest English approximation of Rollengedicht, fails to imply that the lyric voice assumes a clearly identifiable role in the poem, in contrast, for example, to the poetic persona in the conventional poem that need not have a particular identity or viewpoint. Often, too, it consists of more than a simple monologue. Sometimes the voice comes from a group of speakers who use the first person plural form to relate their experiences, such as the pirates or soldiers who sing or speak in some Brechtian ballads. A Rollengedicht can also have several speakers in it, a fact which by definition extends it beyond a simple monologue. Nearly every one of "Barrack-Room Ballads" has these features. "Tommy" is plainly a British soldier speaking, and "Snarleylow" is related by a trooper in the regiment who witnessed the event. "Cells" is told by a soldier who admits that "I'm here in the clink for a thundering drink and blacking the Corporal's eye", while the speaker in "Screw-Guns" opens by relating how "I walk in my old brown gaiters along o' my old brown mule" that pulls the gun. This is the least subjective type of verse; the poet objectifies the subjective ego by transferring it to another person who allegedly speaks for him without relying on the poet's viewpoint. This depersonalization of the poet's role is particularly well-suited to the ballad, and it represents that escape from emotion which both poets strove to achieve in much of their verse. It is no coincidence that Brecht the dramatist found such ballads so appealing. By definition they are miniature dramatic episodes that employ a speaker and a clear plot line. When writing lyrics, Brecht's strong sense of the dramatic (and the epic) drew him to

28

LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

a verse form that had a natural proximity to the drama, or could at least be used effectively in a dramatic context. In effect every song in his plays is such a dramatic monologue, for it is assigned to be sung by a character who clearly has a dramatic existence of his own. Many of Brecht's early poems are dramatic monologues-"Vom armen B.B." (GW VIII, 261); "Von den verführten Mädchen" (GW VIII, 251); and "Lied der verderbten Unschuld beim Wäschefalten" (GW VIII, 196) to mention a few from the Hauspostille. Critics who have called "Das Schiff" (GW VIII, 179) a sister to Kipling's "The Derelict" have done so in part because the poetic voice in both cases is that of the ship itself speaking in the first person while describing its gradual dissolution.11 This calls for a special kind of imagination that can project itself into or create characters (and, in some cases, creatures or inanimate objects) that are foreign to the writer's subjective experience. To write a ballad spoken or related by a character resembles what the dramatist does when he creates roles. In spite of his aversion to drama as a form (he refused in 1897 to write a play suggested by a friend) Kipling was possessed of such an imagination. In fact, the wide variety of situations he used in his dramatic monologues suggests that the scope of his imagination was probably as extensive as Brecht's. With equal ease he could assume the voice of a rabbi in "The Rabbi's Song", or an English king in "My Father's Chair", or of the women of the Danes who fought England in "Harp Song of the Dane Women". And when, in a poem of the same name, he projected himself into a situation of "The Prodigal Son" from the Bible, he underscored another of the affinities that binds him to the young Brecht - his aversion to the selfrighteous moralizing of those who "look too good and talk too wise". Brecht, too, wrote poems on how he suffered under such catechizing by others (see "Auslassungen eine Märtyers" GW VIII, 37), and though he was not familiar with this Kipling poem 11

Wölf el, p. 232; John Willett, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects (London: Methuen, 1959; third revised edition, 1967), p. 89; and Eric Bentley in notes to his translation of Die Hauspostille entitled Manual of Piety. Poems by Bertolt Brecht (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 285.

LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

29

at the time, he would have cheered the prodigal's decision that "The fatted calf is dressed for me, / But the husks have greater zest for me, / I think the pigs will be best for me, / So I'm off to the Yards afresh." He created a similar situation and put like words into the mouth of Kragler, the protagonist in Drums in the Night, when he abandoned those whom he considered to be the self-righteous zealots of the revolution and stated: "ich bin ein Schwein, und das Schwein geht heim" (GW I, 123). Brecht not only saw and learned about writing dramatic-style verse out of the "Barrack-Room Ballads"; he found examples of such verse in The Jungle Books, which he also discovered early. In the story "Her Majesty's Servants", for example, the Army's camp animals speak in dramatic monologues, while in the "Parade-Song of the Camp-Animals" each animal in turn assumes the poetic voice in dramatic monologues similar to what one finds in Brecht's song "O Falladah, die du hangest!" (GW VIII, 61 also known as "Ein Pferd klagt an") where a dead horse narrates the action. While he probably patterned this particular poem after a talking horse named "Falada" in the Grimm's fairy tale "The Goose Girl", the model of Kipling's talking animals was also there. The strain of irony that runs through the original "BarrackRoom Ballads" doubtless struck Brecht, particularly because Möller improved on the original by gratuitously adding it in instances where it was absent. A line from "Fuzzy-Wuzzy" in Möller's version quotes British soldiers who speak of killing natives in the same matter-of-fact tone that Brecht's pirates might have used: "Wir schössen Dum-Dums! Das war night fein" (p. 31). Möller also emends the first stanza of "The Widow at Windsor" to make it even more bitterly ironic than the original: "Die Witwe zu Windsor im Witfrauenkleid / Ein Hoch! und ein Hoch den Kanonen! / Und ein Hoch den Menschen und Pferden im Streit / Bei so magern Bettelrationen!" (p. 5). The type of ironic twist in this passage where the final line invalidates the apparent thrust of the first three occurs so often in Brecht's poems that it could almost be called a structural principle, as one example illustrates: "Paule war gestorben / Und Anna saß dabei /

30

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Und das ganze Leben war ihr verdorben / Durch diese verfluchte Schweinerei" (GW VIII, 155). Brecht's early love poems also have an ironic tone similar to Kipling's mocking treatment of young love. In "The Ballad of Boh Da Thone" that he knew from the Sachs edition, he had read how romantic love had failed to make an impact on a newlymarried officer ("ihre ewige Liebe, vier Monate alt"). One is reminded of his "Erinnerung an die Marie A." or "Ballade vom Tod der Anna Gewolkegesicht" where love is nice while it lasts, but ephemeral and unmemorable. For both sensitive young men, irony seemed to be the escape mechanism used to neutralize excessive feeling. But Kipling's irony could also be biting, and this, too, appealed to young Brecht. He knew, for example, "The Widow at Windsor" and "The Widow's Party" from Moller's translation of the "Barrack-Room Ballads", though he was not aware of the stir they caused in England for their disrespectful treatment of the Queen. But he sensed that the lamentation for the poor devils who would never see home and the bitter reference to the loss of half a company so the widow could give her party did not constitute a glorification of Queen and Empire. For a sensitive young poet who had become an outspoken pacifist by the end of World War I, it would have been easy to interpret these as anti-war poems. He himself had begun sometime in 1915-1916 to write equally bitter poems about those dying in The Great War, e.g. "Der belgische Acker"; "Karsamstagslegende", and especially the famous "Legende vom toten Soldaten" that later qualified him for a Nazi blacklist. Brecht would have responded positively to most of the "Barrack-Room Ballads", which were presented through the eyes of the little man who fights wars for a ruling class he does not know, or from the perspective of those who lose regardless of the outcome. The voice in "Gentlemen Rankers", for example, is that of a soldier who dies for an impersonal cause before he has begun to live. In "Soldier, Soldier", it is a young girl waiting for a soldier who never returns. From the outset Brecht's natural sympathies lay with the underdog, especially those who suffered innocently. His indignation may or may not

LEARNING FROM KIPLING: THE LYRICS

31

have been stronger than Kipling's, but the mordant irony he used to voice it might have come straight from the "Barrack-Room Ballads". This is not to say that Brecht acquired all he knew about using irony in his verse from Kipling. His own proclivity was to write this way. But his homing instinct had led him to a writer whose ironic approach to much of his material taught him how to use this weapon more skillfully. Both Kipling and Brecht also wrote highly quotable lyrics, a practice they cultivated in later years when both turned to the epigram as a form. A sententious element found in Kipling's early ballads also characterized the young Brecht's lyrics. He learned from such translations as "Snarleylow" that a bit of moralizing in aphoristic form could make an effective point: "Und dieser Geschichte Moral soll sein / Im Felde steht ihr ganz einsam allein! / Ihr habt nicht Bruder noch Weib noch Kind! / Ihr siegt nur, wo schnelle Kanonen sind" (Möller, p. 60). From the beginning Brecht also had a strong propensity for his own peculiar brand of moralizing, and Kipling was at least a model from whom he might have learned how to interweave sententiae or maxims into his ballads without becoming ludicrous. A refrain from the "Lied der verderbten Unschuld beim Wäschefalten" (GW VIII, 197) approximates what might be one of Kipling's rhyming proverbs: "Mit Sparen und mit Fasten / Erholt sich keine Frau. / Liegt Linnen lang im Kasten / Wird's auch im Kasten grau." Brecht learned much of importance about ballad-writing from Kipling's lyrics, but one must be careful not to exaggerate this influence or base it on erroneous evidence. When Wölfel asserts that a high frequency of interrogative sentences, the use of parentheses, and type-faces that interchange normal and italic type all attest to Kipling's influence on the early verse, he assumes that Brecht read the English original.12 In the German texts Brecht actually knew and used, none of these features is conspicuous. Grimm also speaks of two other structural traits some early ballads share with Kipling's poems in the original language-the use of internal rhyme, and the frequent exclamations and inter12

Wölfel, p. 239.

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jections.13 Moller's translation does in fact render many of the ballads in an exclamatory tone by strewing exclamations points throughout the text (every sentence in "Danny Deever", for example, is punctuated with one or more), and it is possible that Brecht learned from this. But it is unlikely that he acquired any skill in the use of internal rhyme by imitating the Kipling poems he knew, for it is almost totally lacking in Moller's translation, and Sachs's rendering so dilutes it that one could scarcely speak of it as a characteristic of Kipling's verse. In relative terms, Brecht's exposure to Kipling's verse was not extensive. The total number of different poems in the Hauser, Moller, and Sachs translations was only twenty-nine. Yet it was probably because of them as much as any single element that the young poet in Augsburg found his own lyric voice. Significantly, in all the early verse there is not a single poem that qualifies as an outright imitation of his teacher. He was devoted to learning from his mentor, not imitating him. Kipling's verse had nourished a highly original mind with the necessary forms and material to make it independent. At the same time, however, it had left unmistakable traces scattered at dozens of points throughout that work.

11

Grimm, Brecht und die Weltliteratur, p. 62.

IV EXPLOITING KIPLING'S PROSE

In spite of its impact 011 Brecht, relatively little of Kipling's verse was known to him. By contrast, he was familiar with far more of that writer's prose than has generally been realized, though his relationship to it was not as a pupil. From the verse he learned; from the prose he borrowed. As a young writer, Brecht was constantly foraging for themes, ideas, and linguistic stuff. Whatever this voracious young reader "thought 'e might require" from Kipling's prose, such as a striking image or a well-turned phrase, he noted carefully and stored up for later use. A date for the earliest encounter with the prose writings of Kipling is more elusive than with the verse, since they leave virtually no tell-tale marks in Brecht's early works. Given Brecht's reading habits, Kipling's popularity among youthful readers, and the availability of his works in Germany, a date before the outbreak of World War I does not seem unreasonable. Certainly 1918 is the terminus ante quem. Sometime in Augsburg when the boy "Eugen" (as he was known to his family) was maturing into "Bert" Brecht, he became familiar with at least six major prose works by Kipling: Kim; The Jungle Books; The Light that Failed; Just So Stories; most of the short stories in Many Inventions; and at least one story from Life's Handicaps. Part of the information on this reading comes from contemporaries; most of it, however, was supplied by Brecht himself when he corroborated it through direct acknowledgment or outright appropriation of materials whose source can be traced. The world he found in Kipling's prose seized the young German's imagination. He would have delighted in the exploits of

34

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Kipling's Soldiers Three "somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, / Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst." They shared many traits with the outlaws, outcasts, and reckless adventurers that populated his early verse and drama. And he was no doubt drawn to The Jungle Books because of his fascination with the far-away and the exotic, two elements that became a trademark of his own early poetry. In The Jungle Books he also discovered an exotic world not yet ravished by man. Beneath his own veneer of cynical bravado the young Brecht had an idyllic strain in his makeup. Even at this time he harbored a strong loathing for civilized western society because of its inhumanity in crushing the weak and hardening those who survived. His desire for a social order that encouraged the survival of the unfittest later led him quite naturally to Marxism. In The Jungle Books he read several passages that appealed to this yearning for a life unspoiled by civilization. Münsterer is sure Brecht knew The Jungle Books during the Augsburg years,1 and Brecht confirmed it in an unpublished notebook entry written in 1926. It reads: "Das Gesetz der Städte: Der kleine Junge wie Mowgli in der großen Stadt."2 Mowgli, of course, is the protagonist of several stories in The Jungle Books, though he also appears in the short story "In the Rukh". What Brecht intended to do with the material is uncertain. Was he thinking of the episodes where Mowgli encounters civilization and finds it difficult to abandon the Law of the Jungle for the Law of Man (e.g. in "Tiger, Tiger" or "The Spring Running")? One thing is certain - the idea of innocence in a hostile human environment, which Mowgli personified, appealed to Brecht. It became a basic motif in later dramas. Here Kipling acted as a purveyor of an idea that Brecht liked. A second unpublished note from the mid twenties alludes to an episode Brecht must have recalled from reading The Jungle Books. Now he incorporated it into specific plans for something far removed from Kipling's setting. Brecht's note was intended as the basis for what in Germany 1 2

Münsterer, letter dated April 15, 1969. BBA 817/09.

EXPLOITING KIPLING'S PROSE

35

was called a Revue, an untranslatable term for a type of stage entertainment distantly related to Broadway musicals. In 1926 he planned to write such a show for the German producer Max Reinhardt parodying the Americanization of life in Berlin and showing how the metropolis had become a civilized madhouse. His note describing the escape from this world reads: "Wie sich der kleine Max die Südsee vorstellt 1) Idyllisches Leben (das Kochtöpchen) Das rassige Maorimädchen schön wie die Sonne 2) Die Tierchen. Bändigung eines Königstigers durch die Macht der Persönlichkeit. Nämlich durch den bloßen Blick."3 In the story "How Fear Came to the Jungle", the boy Mowgli encounters Shere Khan the Tiger and stares him down. Later Mowgli learns that the Tiger fears Man's gaze and either runs from it or springs on Man from behind during all but one night of the year. Taming a tiger by staring it down, something that would have fascinated the young poet, probably came straight from a Kipling story. At least twice in the early twenties Brecht used the name "Moti Gui" or "Moti Guj", a hint that by the time he came to Berlin he had read at least the tale of "Moti Guj - Mutineer" originally found in Life's Handicaps, and perhaps other stories in that collection. In his earliest working notes (late 1921 or early 1922) for the play In the Jungle of the Cities, Shlink's secretary was named "Schurri Guy". When Brecht finished the first version, however, he had transformed him into "Moti Gui", a name that remained through the 1923 premiere in Munich.4 Again Brecht left no traces of the translation he used. Several were available, though in some cases the sequence in relation to other stories had been altered because different stories from various Kipling works were collected into a single German edition. At least two German versions with the title "Moti Guj - Meuterer" were circulating in inexpensive editions during Brecht's youth. While he reportedly loved to invent exotic or freakish 3

BBA 424/83. See a copy of the playbill for the 1923 premiere included in Bertolt Brecht, Im Dickicht der Städte: Erstfassung und Materialien, ed. Giesela E. Bahr (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), p. 11.

4

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EXPLOITING KIPLING'S PROSE

names for his early characters (cf. Bolleboll, Gougou, Mankyboddle, Glubb, Bulltrotter), it stretches credibility to think that he would have hit upon this name without knowing the story, especially if one knows the contents of what is surely one of the most entertaining prose works Kipling wrote. Its description of a drinking elephant and its drunken master are equal to Brecht's wittiest dramatic scenes. His own penchant for exotic-sounding names is doubtless at work here, too, and he probably found it simpler to borrow than to invent. The confirmation that he actually knew "Moti Guj" came in 1922. In that year he attempted to write a drama entitled Hannibal based on Grabbe's play of the same name. Though he never completed it, several scenes were finished. In two of them he endowed Hannibal's elephant with a curious n a m e - M o t i (the historical name was Surus).5 An elephant named Moti in a play written in 1922 can have only one source - Kipling's elephant story "Moti Guj - Mutineer". Sometime between 1915-1918, and perhaps earlier, Brecht also read Kipling's The Light that Failed in a German translation. Miinsterer, who heard him speak of it during the Augsburg years, thinks he owned an inexpensive paperback edition that had been strongly "de-imperialized".6 But the evidence leads to another version - Leopold Rosenzweig's full-length translation done in 1894 with the title rendered as Das Licht erlosch. It had had the distinction of introducing Kipling's work into Germany three years after this novel first appeared as a full-length book in England. Elisabeth Hauptmann recalls that Brecht spoke of it in Berlin as a work he had read during his youth. According to her, the title appealed to him for its curious ring.7 But far more than the title caught his fancy, as evidence of direct borrowing will confirm. From Rosenzweig's 1894 version (all later printings were identical), Brecht lifted almost verbatim an epigraph preceding chap5 BBA 520/12 and 520/43. 8 Munsterer, letter of August 25, 1968. In a letter of April 25, 1969, Carl Zuckmayer confirmed that Brecht already knew this work when that writer first met him in Berlin. 7 Elisabeth Hauptmann, interview of April 15, 1969.

EXPLOITING KIPLING'S PROSE

37

ter twelve. Originally he planned to use it as a song for his play In the Jungle of the Cities. Except for minor changes in punctuation and in one or two words, it remained essentially Rosenzweig's translation: Kipling: There were three friends that buried the fourth The mould in his mouth and the dust in his eyes; And they went south, and east, and north, — The strong man fights, but the sick man dies. There were three friends that spoke of the dead, The strong man fights, but the sick man dies. 'And would he were here with us now', they said, 'The sun in our face and the wind in our eyes.' 8 Rosenzweig: Drei Freunde, die legten den vierten ins Grab Den Moder im Mund und die Erd' im Gesicht; Zogen 'nauf nach dem Norden, nach dem Süden hinab Der kranke Mann stirbt und der starke Mann ficht. Drei Freunde, die sprachen vom toten Freund Der kranke Mann stirbt und der starke Mann ficht — Und sagten: 'War er doch mit uns hier vereint, Den Wind in den Augen und die Sonn' im Gesicht." Brecht: (John und Mankyboddle singen): Drei Freunde, die legten den vierten ins Grab, den Moder im Mund und die Erd im Gesicht. Zogen 'nauf nach dem Norden, nach dem Süden hinab, Der kranke Mann stirbt und der starke Mann ficht. Drei Freunde, die sprachen vom toten Freund, der kranke Mann stirbt und der starke Mann ficht. Sie sagten: War er nur mit uns hier vereint, den Wind in den Augen und die Sonn im Gesicht.» Kipling often preceded his prose chapters with short epigraphs (such as ballad stanzas) like this one, usually his own creations. 8 Rudyard Kipling, The Light that Failed in The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling, Burwash edition (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941), XV, 163. • Bertolt Brecht, Im Dickicht der Städte: Erstfassung und Materialien, p. 67.

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EXPLOITING KIPLING'S PROSE

They functioned much like the signs Brecht later used in plays to announce to the viewers what dramatic action to expect in the scene that followed. That the poet-playwright found these particularly appealing is instructive, both for their possible effect on his dramatic practices and because prose works like this and others transmitted bits of Kipling verse that he would not have encountered otherwise. The first version of In the Jungle of the Cities where these ballad stanzas appear dates from the winter of 1921-1922. Though Brecht dropped them from the final stage version of 1923, the song itself never left him. Zuckmayer recalls hearing him sing a ballad around 1924-1925 with the lines "Der starke Mann ficht und der schwache Mann stirbt", which was no doubt the same song.10 For years he carried with him lines and images from it that would find their way into disparate works widely separated in time and concept. For example, the three friends that bury the fourth clearly spell out the basic plot line in Man is Man (1925-1926) where three friends have lost a fourth and wish for his return. Line three probably supplied the rhythmic and substantive stuff for a verse in the famous "Ballade vom Weib und dem Soldaten": Kipling: A n d they went south, and east, and north, -

Rosenzweig: Zogen 'nauf nach dem Norden, nach dem Süden hinab

Brecht. Hinab nach dem Süden, nach dem Norden hinauf. (GW VIII, 239)

Even though the sentence structure is inverted, a verse like this in a Brechtian ballad dealing with a soldier theme is more than coincidence. It was in fact Kipling who inspired the entire ballad, as the next chapter will show. Though he plundered Kipling's prose freely, he also left much of what he read by that author untouched. Carl Zuckmayer re10

Zuckmayer, Als war's ein Stück von mir, p. 380.

EXPLOITING KIPLING'S PROSE

39

ports, for example, that he had read Kim during the Augsburg years, and that it was one of the works Brecht gave him in 1923 when he was still dividing his time among Augsburg, Munich, and Berlin.11 But not a trace of that novel turns up in the prose, verse, or drama. And he definitely knew the story "The Elephant's Child", from which it might be inferred that he was also familiar with the other Just So Stories (his plans for a children's poem or play based on that story are documented in chapter X). When he read it is uncertain, though the nature of the stories themselves suggests it was during his youth. But one searches in vain through Brecht's early period for evidence of borrowing from this collection. Material from Kipling that is present runs through his writings like a hidden thread and surfaces only from time to time. Man is Man represents that work by Brecht where Kipling emerges most completely and visibly. But even there, much of Kipling that he knew never appears. What Brecht borrowed had little influence on his prose style. But as a source of useful formulations and images, Kipling was second to none in Brecht's creative career. Again as in the case of the poetry, his debt is more to Kipling's translators than directly to Kipling. They rendered the material into usable form for him, sometimes changing the texts in ways that struck Brecht more than the original might have done. One of these translators, Leopold Lindau, had such an effect on Brecht's creative efforts that his rendering of Kipling's Many Inventions deserves special attention.

"

Zuckmayer, letter dated April 25, 1969.

V BRECHTS "MANY INVENTIONS" USING LEOPOLD LINDAU'S TRANSLATIONS

Sometime during his Augsburg years, and definitely before 1920, Brecht read a translation of Kipling's short stories by Leopold Lindau, an obscure writer active around the turn of the century. He had turned out several volumes of lightweight fiction (novels and short stories) with titles such as Das rote Tuch, Gute Gesellschaft, Türkische Geschichten, Liebesheiraten, Der Flirt, Robert Ashton, and Schweigen. In 1900 he translated nine stories from Kipling's Many Inventions: "In the Rukh"; "The Disturber of Traffic"; "My Lord the Elephant"; "The Finest Story in the World"; "A Matter of Fact"; "The Lost Legion"; "Love-O'-Women"; "Judson and the Empire"; and "The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot". They were published that year in Berlin by the E. Fleischel Verlag under the title Mancherlei neue Geschichten von Rudyard Kipling. When his translation reached a fourth printing in 1913, the publishers changed the title to Mylord der Elefant. Mancherlei neue Geschichten von Rudyard Kipling. The cover illustration on this and two more printings before 1920 depicted an elephant with great white tusks, its mouth open, and a mahout perched on its head, a picture characteristic of the type of Unterhaltungsliteratur these stories were intended to provide. The question of what particular printing of Lindau's translation Brecht knew is of little consequence, since they were all identical. As in so many of Kipling's works, bits of verse also preceded or followed the stories. Several tales even contained lines of verse or complete poems as integral parts of their text. The extreme difficulty of translating Kipling's verse into German probably

BRECHT'S "MANY INVENTIONS"

41

explains in part why so few translations existed outside prose texts. But unless a translator of prose also rendered the lyrics that attended a prose story, he would destroy the integrity of the text. Lindau's translation passes muster well on this count and in the matter of transmitting Kipling accurately and well. It was from such a translation of a single stanza of verse at the end of the short story "Love-O'-Women" (Lindau translated it as "Frauenlieb") that Brecht drew his inspiration for the "Ballade vom Weib und dem Soldaten". "Inspiration" in this case meant that he appropriated the stanza almost verbatim from Lindau and proceeded to write this splendid ballad around it. A comparison of texts with the seminal third stanza of his poem makes it obvious that his debt here is more to Lindau than to Kipling directly: Kipling-. Oh, do not despise the advice of the wise, Learn wisdom from those that are older, And don't try for things that are out of your reach An' that's what the Girl told the Soldier! Soldier! Soldier! Oh, that's what the Girl told the Soldier! Lindau: Ach bitter bereut, wer des Weisen Rat scheut, Und vom Alter sich nicht läßt beraten. Ach zu hoch nicht hinaus! Es läuft übel aus! So sprach das Weib zum Soldaten! Soldaten! Soldaten! So sprach das Weib zum Soldaten! Brecht (stanza three): Ach, bitter bereut, wer des Weisen Rat scheut Und vom Alter sich nicht läßt beraten. Ach, zu hoch nicht hinaus, es geht übel aus! Sagte das Weib zum Soldaten. (GW VIII, 239)

Brecht has reduced the punctuation to a minimum, as he typically did with his own poems. The only changes he made in the text itself were the substitution of geht for läuft in line three, sagte for

42

BRECHT'S "MANY INVENTIONS"

so sprach in line four, and the reduction of the girl's repeated plea to a single line. The fact that before 1940 this poem appeared only at the end of this story and nowhere else in Kipling's collected poems or stories in German translation further corroborates that Brecht spared himself the effort of translating what had already been done. This habit of reworking and refining translations of Kipling done by someone else became typical for his manner of working with the British writer. The plot of "Love-O'-Women", the nickname for an unscrupulous rake who dies of syphilis in the arms of a woman he had once degraded and abandoned (she is now a prostitute), no doubt found an avid reader in the young Brecht. But it is the stanza Kipling sets at the end as a moral warning against reckless living that sparked a poem totally different in tone from Kipling's story - a subtly pacifistic poem. The idea of a woman remonstrating with a headstrong, foolhardy soldier not to be so reckless (and by implication bloodthirsty) lent itself to a natural setting for this kind of poem and created a dramatic situation he exploited later when this ballad became the nucleus for the second scene in Mother Courage. There it served as an outspoken warning against the foolhardy daring of Courage's son Eilif and of all soldiers who relish war. The evolution and peregrinations of this simple stanza from Kipling and the various forms it took through Brecht's works form a fascinating study. He had no compunction about re-using good material, and he did it in a highly original manner, even though he was casual about crediting the original source. But in the early stages of this poem, he came surprisingly close to doing just that. In the original, Kipling concludes "Love-O'-Women" with the comment that the narrator walks off singing this stanza as a "shrill quick-step". Lindau comes to the reader's aid by interpreting and rendering it as "ein Soldatenlied, das die Leute beim Geschwindmarsch zu singen lieben".1 When Brecht first 1

Rudyard Kipling, Mylord der Elefant. Mancherlei neue Geschichten von Rudyard Kipling, transl. Leopold Lindau (Berlin: E. Fleischel, fourth printing, 1913), p. 234.

BRECHT'S "MANY INVENTIONS"

43

documented the existence of his completed poem in a typewritten index to the Hauspostille that he drew up in 1922, he entitled it "Ballade von den Soldaten".2 In a strict literal sense, he was no doubt justified in saying no more. True, Kipling was the source where he first read it, but Lindau's note could have allowed the conclusion that it was an anonymous soldiers' marching song, a fact Brecht's title freely admits. The next step in its evolution comes in 1923 when he planned to incorporate one stanza of this Kipling-inspired ballad into the fourth scene of the play In the Jungle of the Cities entitled "Sacrifice of the Family" ("Opferung der Familie"). In Erich Engel's director's script, a marginal note calls for John Garga and Mankyboddle to sing the following stanza while Mae is speaking: Das Schießgewehr schießt Und das Spießmesser spießt Und das Wasser frißt auf, die drin waten. Was könnt ihr gegen Eis Bleibt weg, s'ist nicht weis, Sagte das Weib zum Soldaten.3

Though it was dropped from the Munich stage version in lieu of a German rendering of "Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest",4 Brecht did not discard it. He picked it up under the title "Ballade von dem Soldaten" in the 1926 collection of poems entitled Taschenpostille and almost acknowledged Kipling by appending the remark "Nach einer englischen Soldatenballade". Whether he lapsed or intentionally omitted this remark from the 1927 Hauspostille, where the poem was now entitled "Die Ballade von dem Soldaten", is uncertain, but no comment alludes to Kipling's role. Nor does it when Eilif sings the ballad in scene two of Mother Courage. But when Wieland Herzfelde included this among one hundred of Brecht's poems he anthologized with Brecht's blessing in 1950-1951, the poet finally gave Kipling a credit line. A notation in his own handwriting beneath the title on a printer's page proof of this poem bears the simple remark "Nach Kipling". His 2

BBA 452/67. Brecht, Dickicht: Erstfassung und Materialien, p. 120. * Ibid., p. 121. 8

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failure to do so earlier was a simple matter of his laxity in matters of intellectual property rather than intentional suppression. During more than three decades, he was conscious that he had snatched the single stanza that catalyzed this poem from the end of a short story by Kipling, and he had no qualms about admitting it, albeit belatedly. The title story of Mylord der Elefant opens by mentioning Ortheris, Mulvaney and Learoyd, Kipling's famous "Soldiers Three". Though it is not certain when and where he first encountered them or how well he knew them (they recur in several dozen stories throughout various collections), Lindau's footnote on the first page, designed to clarify the names, reveals enough about provenience, characteristics, and adventures of these inseparable three that Brecht would have needed to go no further to gain ample information on them. The footnote reads: Terenz Mulvaney, Stanley Ortheris und Learoyd, der erste ein Irländer, der zweite ein cynischer Londoner Gassenbube, der dritte ein schwerfälliger, melancholischer Bauersohn aus der Grafshire Yorkshire, sind Soldaten in der englischen Armee. Sie spielen hervorragende Rollen in vielen von Kiplings Novellen. Er hat sie seinen Lesern zuerst in einer seiner frühesten Erzählungen: "The three Musketeers" vorgestellt und ihnen später eine ganze Sammlung von Novellen "Soldiers Three" gewidmet. Diese Sammlung ist eines von Kiplings populärsten Werken. Sie hat in wenigen Jahren zehn Auflagen erlebt, (p. 75) Probably Brecht did know more than just this description, as later evidence will show. Nevertheless his acquaintance with this passage documents one specific source of his knowledge about the "Soldiers Three" who later play such a role in Man is Man and in several poems. Another story in Lindau's translation supports the conjecture that Brecht drew much exotic elephant lore from Kipling's stories. The image of the elephant recurs in works as early as The Elephant Calf and Man is Man (1925-1926) and as late as The Good Woman of Setzuan (1940). The brief Keuner vignette devoted to extolling an elephant's qualities and known as "Herr K.s Lieblingstier" offers a summary of elephant exotica not commonly known to children whose acquaintance is limited to picture books,

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45

zoos, and circuses: "Er kann traurig werden. Er kann zornig werden. Er tanzt gern. Er stirbt im D i c k i c h t . . . Er trinkt gern und wird fröhlich" (GW XII, 388). In Lindau's version of "My Lord the Elephant" the action centers on an elephant's fondness for whiskey and rum. In "Moti Guj - Mutineer", that elephant not only thrives on liquor and on the drinking bouts he engages in with his mahout; he also alternately displays near-human moods of gentleness, sadness, and anger. In "Toomai of the Elephants" which Brecht already knew from The Jungle Books, there is an extensive description of a boy who observed elephants dancing and a reference to the fact that elephants go off alone in the jungle to die. Other stories such as "The Disturber of Traffic" (found in this translation by Lindau) and "Her Majesty's Servants" deal exclusively with elephants' unique characteristics. The poet definitely knew translations of all the above stories. In Lindau's collection Brecht also found a wealth of the exoticsounding names that were so appealing to him. Conceivably Kipling might have been the purveyor of nearly every AngloSaxon proper name and most of the exotic place names he used, though they were so current in magazines and popular literature of the twenties that it is impossible to claim Kipling as the sole source. In Lindau's translation alone he encountered "Tom", "Jenny", "Larry", "Mackie", "Bilbao" and "Benares", "Jim", "Johnny", "Georgie", "Punjab", "Mandalay", "Burma", "Surabaya", "Peshawur", and numerous others, all of which Brecht used at some point in his writings. These names all occur in Kipling's short stories; very few turn up in his ballads, another fact which emphasizes that the relative impact of Kipling's prose has been underestimated. Just how many of these names he owes to Kipling is difficult to say because of the sovereign way his imagination assimilated and re-created from many different sources. But at least one name offers some persuasive evidence that he took careful note of it. In Lindau's translation he frequently came upon the name "Mackie", especially in "Love-O'-Women" where it occurs in an unforgettable context as the name of a soldier who has just been shot by a jealous husband. It is repeated half a dozen times, and

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a reader would not soon forget it. Several years later when he worked on The Threepenny Opera, he gave Macheath the nickname "Mackie". This was one of the few names from John Gay's original text that he altered. Elisabeth Hauptmann feels certain that he created it independently for its sound, but Kipling's influence cannot be dismissed completely. In such cases one can only say that through Kipling he was well-exposed to the name "Mackie" and others well before employing them himself. Long after his Augsburg years he still remembered the Lindau translation and returned to it for more material. No date is certain, but the appearance of the typescript suggests the mid 1930's as the time when he took a poem from the text of "The Finest Story in the World" (German "Die beste Geschichte der Welt"), reworked it slightly, and gave it a new title. The 1967 edition of Brecht's collected works published it for the first time and inadvertently listed it as one of Brecht's Kipling translations.5 A comparison of texts, however, proves that Leopold Lindau ought to get credit as translator: Kipling:

SONG OF THE GALLEY SLAVES

We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails were low. Will you never let us go? We ate bread and onions when you took towns, or ran aboard quickly when you were beaten back by the foe. The captains walked up and down the deck in fair weather singing songs, but we were below. We fainted with our chins on the oars and you did not see that we were idle, for we still swung to and fro. Will you never let us go? The salt made the oar-handles like shark-skin; our knees were cut to the bone with salt-cracks; our hair was stuck to our foreheads; and our lips were cut to our gums, and you whipped us because we could not row. 5

In defense of Miss Hauptmann, the general editor of this edition, it should be stated that such an error is easy to commit (and easy to excuse) in matters relating to Brecht. At his death he left among his papers literally dozens of such borrowed poems which bore all the earmarks of original works. In the case of this poem, it had an original title, marginal notes in the poet's handwriting, and other characteristics that made it look like his own work.

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Will you never let us go? But in a little time we shall run out of the portholes as the water runs along the oar-blade, and though you tell the others to row after us you will never catch us till you catch the oar-thresh and tie up the winds in the belly of the sail. Aho! Will you never let us go? Lindau: Wir haben für dich gerudert, als der Wind Wider uns war und die Segel schlaff hingen. Willst du uns nie freilassen? Wir haben trockenes Brot gegessen und Zwiebeln, Während du Städte erobert hast Oder geflohen bist, wenn die Feinde Dich zurückgeschlagen hatten. Die Hauptleute gingen auf Deck Und freuten sich des schönen Wetters Und sangen Lieder; aber wir Waren tief unten. Wir schmachteten, und Unser Kinn sank auf die Ruder. Du aber konntest es nicht sehen, Denn unsere Körper bewegten sich Noch immer hin und her. Willst du uns niemals freilassen? Das Salz des Meeres macht die Ruder rauh Wie die Haut des Hais. Das Salz hat das Fleisch von unseren Knieen gefressen Bis zum Knochen. Unser Haar Klebt an den Schläfen. Durchgefressen bis zum Zahn sind unsre Lippen. Deine Aufseher haben uns gepeitscht, Weil wir nicht rudern können! Willst du uns niemals freilassen? Aber über ein Kleines werden wir Durch die Luken verschwinden, wie Das Wasser, das die Ruder entlang läuft. Wenn ihr auch den anderen befehlt, Hinter uns her zu rudern, Ihr werdet uns nicht einholen,

BRECHT'S " M A N Y INVENTIONS"

Bis ihr das Flugwasser der Ruder fangt, Bis ihr den Wind in den Segeln fangen könnt! Aho! Brecht's Version:

GESANG DER PUNISCHEN SOLDATEN

Wir haben für dich gerudert, als der Wind Wider uns war und die Segel schlaff hingen. Willst du uns nie freilassen? Wir haben trockenes Brot gegessen und Zwiebeln Während du Städte erobert hast Oder geflohen bist, wenn die Feinde Dich zurückgeschlagen hatten. Die Hauptleute gingen auf Deck Und freuten sich des schönen Wetters Und sangen Lieder, aber wir Waren tief unten. Wir schmachteten, und Unser Kinn sank auf die Ruder Du aber konntest es nicht sehen Denn unsre Körper bewegten sich Noch immer hin und her. Willst du uns nie freilassen? Das Salz des Meeres macht die Ruder rauh Wie die Haut des Hais Das Salz hat das Fleisch von unseren Knieen gefressen Bis zum Knochen, unser Haar Klebt an den Schläfen Durchgefressen bis zum Zahn sind unsre Lippen Deine Aufseher haben uns gepeitscht Weil wir nicht rudern können. Willst du uns nie freilassen? Aber über ein kleines werden wir Durch die Luken verschwinden wie Das Wasser, das die Ruder entlangläuft. Wenn ihr auch den anderen befehlt Hinter uns her zu rudern Ihr werdet uns nicht einholen Bis ihr das Flugwasser der Ruder fangt Bis ihr den Wind in den Segeln fangen könnt. Aho! Will du uns nie freilassen? (GW X, 1059)

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49

A line-by-line comparison of the text turns up many small differences, but none persuasive enough to argue that Brecht's "translation" is original. With three exceptions, all can be subsumed under the categories of changes in orthography and punctuation. As meaningful as such variations can be in some poems, they do little to change, subvert, or extend Lindau's text. Considering Brecht's admitted practice of dropping nearly all punctuation at the ends of lines in his own poetry, a principle he has applied here, too, the differences between the two versions become even more inconsequential. He does make three changes in wording. The substitution of nie for niemals in stanza four, line six deserves little attention, since it is of limited importance. But when he also adds the line "Willst du uns nie freilassen" following the last stanza where Lindau's version does not have it, it raises the question of whether or not he had Kipling's original in front of him, since it also appears there. Likely he did not. Brecht's sure poetic instinct for repeating an effective refrain line at a strategic point was welldeveloped, and it could have prompted him to add the line at the end independently of Kipling. In addition, the translation's wording, syntax, and metrical structure are uniquely Lindau's. The poem's printed image on the page in the Lindau translation is clearly verse, while in Kipling's original the printed lines of this song are indistinguishable from the prose narrative of the story. It seems curious that if Brecht had known the original, he would have followed Lindau on every matter of structure and form and used the English model only to make this one minor change in a poem he likely could have translated far better himself. The unique title he created for a poem that had no title in its original context (in 1940 it was included for the first time in an edition of Kipling's collected poems under the title "Song of the Galley Slaves") gives a hint about his intentions with this poem. In Kipling's fantastic story, the figure who sings it recalls previous existences or incarnations with frightening realism. This song is a dramatic monologue sung as he relives one such incarnation, that of a galley-slave. In the Lindau translation, the first line he speaks after completing the song reads: "Wissen Sie,

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das ist so ein Lied wie es die Galeerensklaven singen" (p. 145). This line probably triggered in Brecht's mind an idea for a situation where he could use it. The playwright recognized the dramatic potential of the galley slave role and ignored the other elements of the story. During the 1930's he was working on plans for a drama about Rome as a capitalistic social system based on its exploitation of the proletariat. Originally he must have contemplated setting it during the time of the Punic Wars when the Romans used captured Carthaginian soldiers in their galleys. While this is only conjecture, it seems likely that he conceived of these captives singing this as a song of protest during the dramatic action. Both the projected historical setting of the play and his own political orientation during the thirties support this view. This natural song of protest by oppressed slaves against their exploiters and masters has many counterparts in his own political protest lyrics, especially those written for German workers under Hitler. For example, the image of the masters walking the decks above while the slaves labored below corresponds to a similar image juxtaposing oben and unten that he used literally dozens of times in his poems and plays. The drama in which he planned to use this song never materialized, but the outcome of his studies was the prose piece Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Cäsar* Technically this song is neither a legitimate translation by Brecht nor an original reworking of the kind he did in The Threepenny Opera with François Villon's ballads. But it is not unique. In chapter IX we shall see another example where he has a character in a movie sing a ballad by Kipling because it happened to fit so well at a given point. For him appropriateness, not original ownership, determined whether something should be used. Besides the examples from the Lindau rendering cited above, 6 Another possibility is that Brecht intended to use this in his unfinished Hannibal drama of 1922. While the appearance of the paper on which it is typed and the nature of the material make it seem more probable that it came from the time of his Danish exile, the Hannibal drama cannot be dismissed altogether. I am grateful to Herta Ramthun of the Brecht Archives for suggesting this possibility.

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other internal evidence from the text argues that the strident, unsentimental diction, the aggressive tone, and the language of the "other ranks" found in these stories probably made the same kind of impression on Brecht's imagination that critics have claimed Kipling's lyrics did. Such an affinity of language occurs in "The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot" (German, "Authentischer Bericht über das Leben und Thun der Badalia Herodsfoot"), though its stark portrayal of the poverty and violence of slum life also must have found a sympathetic reader in the young Brecht. The title figure, a spirited young slum mother who loses her baby shortly after her husband abandons her, joins forces with an interdenominational church missionary society that attempts to succor and convert the slum dwellers. In both tone and manner of reasoning, Badalia's explanation to one of the mission's trustees that the interest of the poor in God and religion ceases when they have eaten and drunk sounds like something Brecht might have written: "Ich bin aus Gunnison Street," sagte sie eines Tages zu der gestrengen Frau Jessel, "und ich weiß, was ich sage. Die Leute machen sich nichts aus Ihrer Religion, nicht einen Pfifferling . . . es ist etwas anderes, wenn es ans Sterben geht; dann kommt die Religion ganz recht, aber bis dahin wollen die Leute vor allem essen und trinken. Die Männer sagen darum zu allem: ja. Deshalb erklärt auch der Lump Nick Lappworth, daß er sich bekehren will und all solches dummes Zeug. Der wird sein ganzes Leben lang ein Lump bleiben; und seine Frau, die hat schon gar nichts von all dem Gelde, das Sie ihm geben." (p. 281)

One sentence here might have come directly out of Brecht, or perhaps more accurately, Brecht might have taken it directly from here: "Die Männer sagen darum zu allem: ja." In the nineteenth scene of the opera Mahagonny the men stage a play about how God came to Mahagonny to judge them. They respond to each accusation of immorality and improbity with the statement: "Ja, sagten die Männer von Mahagonny" (GW II, 559). They are willing to acknowledge any accusation and to acquiesce to nearly anything if it will further their own ends. When she talks of God in irreverent, almost unconcerned

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fashion, one hears echoes of the same kind of arguments that recur in Brecht's poems and plays. Badalia astonishes an indigent old woman by her observation "daß es ebenso gut möglich sei, daß es überhaupt keinen Gott gäbe - 'und wenn es einen gibt, so kann das Ihnen und mir egal sein; so - nun essen Sie aber erst diesen Weingelee' " (p. 287). The delightful twist at the end where the question of God's existence suddenly loses significance in face of the food at hand and the need to help someone would be worthy of Brecht at his best. Lindau's reproduction of the pungent idiom of the streets in Kipling's tale sounds in translation as though it came directly out of a Brecht play. Badalia reduces the matter of poverty vs. ownership to its simplest possible terms with concrete images that allow little room for rejoinder: "Stiefel sind Stiefel, besonders wenn man welche hat, und wenn man die, die einem gegeben werden, unten und oben hat ausbessern lassen. Und Gelee ist Gelee, das heißt ebenfalls, wenn man welchen hat! Von dem billigen Portwein halt ich nun absolut nichts, aber es ist doch besser, als gar nichts, obgleich er viel schneller alle sein wird, als ein halbes Maß Gin" (p. 283). Such salty language and incontrovertible logic that strip an argument of sophistry and leave no answer but the one given sound like Mother Courage or Azdak or even Grusche speaking. But rather than Courage or Azdak, Badalia Herodsfoot is closer to those feminine embodiments of goodness in Brecht's plays who experience the difficulties of being good in a corrupt world. Johanna Dark in Saint Joan of the Stockyards and Shen Te in The Good Woman of Setzuan bear more similarities to Badalia and her type of goodness than coincidence alone would normally allow, though Grusche in The Caucasian Chalk Circle and even Simone in The Visions of Simone Machard also have similar traits. A naive and sometimes cunning determination to do good in a world which does not tolerate it, a desire to alleviate suffering which meets with ingratitude and resentment, and selfeffacement almost to the point of self-destruction mark Brecht's figures as well as Kipling's Badalia. Though no specific links to Brecht's works can be made, the affinities in language and thought between this story and the

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poet's world give some idea what he was reading and assimilating from Kipling before 1920. Long before he became an avowed Marxist, Badalia Herodsfoot provided him with a prototype for his later female personifications of social and human concern. Four of the five remaining stories in Lindau's collection deal with British colonialism and imperialism. Sometimes the tone is humorous, sometimes serious. These tales are "In the Rukh"; "The Disturber of Traffic"; "The Lost Legion"; and "Judson and the Empire". The fifth relates a fantastic adventure at sea ( " A Matter of Fact"). None of them has much affinity with Brecht's works or thought. At this time in his life, at least, it seems he chose to ignore Kipling's jingoism and draw on the literary and universally human features he found in these stories. What he discovered would not have been possible without the help of an obscure translator who deserves to be added to the large list of his known collaborators: Leopold Lindau.

VI THE BERLIN YEARS

In spite of Brecht's meteor-like rise on the German stage of the period, the mid and late twenties, according to one critic, still remain a time of relative obscurity in his life.1 This observation is valid for his collaboration with Miss Elisabeth Hauptmann, whose role as a transmitter of Kipling material at this time has generally escaped notice. Through her, Brecht embarked on a project dealing with the imperialist writer that left its mark on a number of later works. In November, 1924, shortly after he had settled permanently in Berlin, Brecht became acquainted with this young woman who had already begun a writing career of her own. She quickly joined the group of friends and collaborators that his charismatic personality seemed to attract. For the next nine years until he fled Germany in 1933, she collaborated with him on nearly every significant drama he wrote and on much of the poetry and prose. Miss Hauptmann, who died in April, 1973, was qualified as perhaps the best single source of information on this period of Brecht's life. She was also a uniquely qualified informant on his relationship to Kipling, for she, along with Marx Moller, Leopold Lindau, and Leopold Rosenzweig, became the fourth agent who helped transmit Kipling to him. Though he had been exposed to many popular translations of Kipling's ballads and prose works before coming to Berlin, his association with Miss Hauptmann after 1924 marked a new phase in this acquaintance. She not only knew some of the English 1

Reinhold Grimm, in foreword to Fritz Sternberg, Der Dichter und die Ratio: Erinnerungen an Bertolt Brecht (Gottingen: Sachse und Pohl, 1963),

p. 5.

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55

poet's writings; she was able to read and translate a certain amount of them from the original, though she admits it was presumptuous because her English was really not that good. 2 Relative to Brecht, however, she was fluent. Miss Hauptmann confirms that Brecht already knew at least Kim, The Jungle Books, and The Light that Failed when she first met him, though she claims he had no Kipling books in his possession at the time. Her contribution was to expand his vistas by introducing him to previously unknown Kipling ballads in her own translations from the English. These entered a receptive and fertile imagination. For the first time Brecht exploited Kipling ballads in a manner that made them easily recognizable in his own works. Lines, stanzas, and complete songs began to appear which can be traced directly to a specific Kipling poem Miss Hauptmann had translated. If sheer quantity of borrowed material were an accurate measure, his contact during this period was as important for him as any earlier exposure had been. As part of their collective creative efforts Brecht often asked friends and collaborators in Berlin to read something and report on it. Many times they also furnished him with unsolicited materials and ideas for poems, prose stories, and plays. In 1925 Miss Hauptmann, who also translated works from English as part of her livelihood, began to do German renderings of Kipling ballads in the hope that he might like them or find them useful. In the beginning, at least, she claims she translated them only "for fun" ("Ich war auf Spaß aus"). Between 1925-1927 she did at least six ballads which Brecht had not known before, and which had never been published in German translation. They were "Cholera Camp", "The Ladies", "Mary, Pity Women", "The Song of the Banjo", "When Earth's Last Picture is Painted", and "The Married Man". Brecht liked her translations. According to her, Kipling's language appealed to his Swabian sense of humor because of its wit, its understatement, and its "gestic" quality. In

2

Unless otherwise noted, information in this chapter originating with Miss Hauptmann was obtained by the author during three interviews held on April 15, 1969; April 18, 1969, and October 29, 1970.

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characteristic fashion, he took her translations, reworked them to a degree that they could be considered his own, and proceeded to use them when and wherever they were suitable. Miss Hauptmann modestly calls her efforts Vorubersetzungen or "preliminary translations". She denies virtually any credit for the final versions, even though she had done what Brecht could not have done by translating these poems for him directly from the English. She claims that "He was the poet", thereby lending more weight to his reworkings than to her efforts at rendering Kipling into German. In fact, he made relatively few changes in her texts of "The Ladies", "Cholera Camp", or "Mary, Pity Women", the only ones where her preliminary translations are available for comparison. But as with his revisions of K. L. Ammer's Villon ballads in translation, the changes were decisive. Two different times he revised "Mary, Pity Women". Many of the revisions confine themselves to altered verb tenses and punctuation. But his sure poetic instinct for the right word comes out in the most trivial differences, as a comparison of a few lines shows: Hauptmann

Brecht

Du hast mir gebracht nur Kummer Und die Ruinierte, das bin ich. Wir können verhungern, sagst du.

Du hast mir gebracht nur Harm Und die Ruinierte war ich. Vielleicht verhungert ihr, sagst du.

Ich will den Namen, nichts weiter

Ich will den Namen, nichts weiter.

Ein Papier zum Zeigen, oh, Ich will keine Hure werden. O, Gott, ich liebe dich so.

Ein Papier zum Zeigen! Oh! Und keine Hure sein . . . O, Gott, ich liebe dich so. s

To give due credit, it should be admitted that Miss Hauptmann's translations were not without distinction, which Brecht acknowledged by making as few changes as he did. She does not recall translating any other Kipling poems for him at this time, though she may have done so. But the publication of three of these poems in Brecht's versions during the late twenties serves today as a seismographic reading on some previously undetected activity. His translation of "The Ladies" first appeared in the Berlin 3 BBA 5/31 and 163/23.

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magazine Die Dame in August, 1927 (p. 8) under its English title. That same year List Verlag in Leipzig also published his "Cholera Camp" translation in its annual Almanack des Paul List Verlages (pp. 27-30) with the German article "Der" preceding the title. "Mary, Pity Women" turned up in the Almanack des Paul List Verlages of 1930 (pp. 121-123) with a German title "Maria, Fürsprecherin der Frauen". Behind this tie-in with List Verlag lies the story of one of Brecht's many projects that never materialized beyond the conceptual stages. It involved the tantalizing prospect of an edition of Kipling ballads translated into German by the most gifted young German poet of the day, one whose language and style were perhaps closer to the British poet's than anyone who had written in German. Shortly after meeting Miss Hauptmann, and to some degree because of her translations, Brecht began to lay plans for publishing his own selection of Kipling in German translation. Early in 1925 he proposed this to the Gustav Kiepenheuer publishing house in Berlin, apparently with the intention of using his own versions of the poems. Kiepenheuer expressed interest and solicited Brecht's suggestions on how to proceed, 4 but nothing concrete ever came of this attempt. In 1926-1927, List Verlag in Leipzig began publishing a multiple-volume edition of Kipling's works in German under the general editorship of Hans Reisiger. As the various volumes of prose works began to appear, Hauptmann also saw the possibility of working on this edition by doing some translations of the poetry. She mentioned it to Brecht, and together they wrote and inquired if Reisiger needed translators. In his reply, this editor claimed he was interested and asked if Brecht would be willing to provide translations of the poems. He expressed dissatisfaction with what he felt were the faulty translations of the "BarrackRoom Ballads" available in the Marx Möller edition of 1911, and he wanted better ones. 5 4

Unpublished letter, Kiepenheuer to Brecht dated February 26, 1925, BBA 1080/35-36. 5 Unpublished letter, Reisiger to Brecht dated January 1, 1926, BBA 720/ 3-6.

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Judging by a later letter he wrote to Brecht however, he was having difficulty convincing List that such a multi-volume venture was profitable, and he informed Brecht and Hauptmann that List did not have the money to include a volume of poems in their edition. Yet Reisiger himself obviously wanted to have the poems appear. He asked them to send their translations to him. As a result, a rather loose working arrangement (with no contract) came about in 1926. Reisiger also had the publishing house send Brecht an English edition of Kipling's ballads from which to do further translations. Presumably some or all of the six poems mentioned above were intended for the List edition. After Hauptmann submitted their translation of "The Ladies" to Die Dame (she claims she intentionally omitted her name because Brecht's alone carried more weight), Brecht inquired whether Reisiger had any objections to its publication of this poem. He did not. On the contrary, in his reply of March 16, 1927, he encouraged Brecht to publish Kipling translations wherever possible in newspapers and magazines as the best means of persuading List to add a volume of Kipling poetry to their edition.6 But he stipulated that in the future Brecht must notify List beforehand of such publication. Reisiger also expressed the hope that an edition of Kipling poems in Brecht's translations would in fact materialize ("Ich hoffe sehr, daß es dort [in List Verlag] auch zu der Herausgabe eines von Ihnen übersetzten Gedichtbandes kommen wird"). If his other volumes in the Kipling edition were successful, List would be more favorably disposed toward a volume of poetry which would conclude the edition. Finally, he asked that Brecht check the English edition List had sent him and locate a passage in a poem dealing with cigar smoking that List wanted to publish in Querschnitt in the English original. According to Reisiger, it began: "There is peace in the Larrange, / There is peace in the Henry Clay" (the line actually reads: "There's peace in a Laranga, there's calm in a Henry Clay"). Whether or not Brecht located the passage is uncertain. But if he did, he would have read one of Kipling's least distinguished 6

Letter f r o m Reisiger to Brecht in BBA 720/37-40.

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but most delightful poems - an encomium to the joys of cigar smoking that he would have found congenial to his views and descriptive of his own habits - a poem called "The Betrothed" with its observation that "a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke". Reisiger's edition, though originally planned to be larger, reached ten volumes in 1927 and then suddenly stopped. The putative volume containing the translations of Kipling's poetry, which was to have constituted the last one in the edition, never appeared.7 Why the project foundered is a matter of conjecture. List may have run out of money, and Brecht was not sending in translations. His involvement in the theater was becoming more intense as his reputation spread, and this was no doubt a factor. Man is Man was performed in 1926, as was Baal. In 1927 he collaborated with Kurt Weill on the Songspiel known as The Little Mahagonny (Das kleine Mahagonny) and saw it performed at the Baden-Baden music festival the same year. In the winter of 19271928 he began work on The Threepenny Opera, which was performed in August, 1928. Since these represent only a small part of the dozen or so projects underway at any given time, it seems the Kipling translations simply became a casualty of overextended creative ambitions. Miss Hauptmann testifies that the extreme difficulty of rendering the English of Kipling's ballads into German also played a significant role for her, a fact confirmed by the still relatively small number of his poems available in Germany at the time (no further translations had appeared beyond the twenty-nine poems rendered by Hauser, Moller, and Sachs between 1910-1917). Miss Hauptmann was also carrying on her own independent writing as well as collaborating with Brecht on his plays, and it left her little time to translate. Without her preliminary translations to work from, Brecht submitted to more immediate pressures and neglected the Kipling poems. Despite this abortive project, he by no means forgot Kipling or 7

In 1965 List published a new, three-volume edition of Kipling in German translation based on Reisiger's edition. It included Brecht's translations of "Cholera Camp" and "Mary, Pity Women" in vol. Ill, pp. 940-944, the same ones that were not used for the List edition nearly forty years earlier.

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these poems. Tremors from at least two of them continued to be felt for the next decade at disparate points in his works. "Mary, Pity Women", for example, seized his imagination and never let go. It proved to be the most prolific of his translations because of what it generated. The basic love-hate paradox Kipling expressed in this poem was as unconventional in its attitude toward love as some of Brecht's earlier love lyrics were. The translation he did of this poem is only one of several ways he exploited the language and imagery for use at points far removed in time from the original. Kipling's poem echoed the bittersweet cry of a girl who still loved the man who had left her. At the time Miss Hauptmann was translating this and other Kipling for him during late 1925early 1926, he was collaborating with Lion Feuchtwanger, a playwright fourteen years his senior, on revising a Kiplingesque drama Feuchtwanger had written in 1916 with the title Warren Hastings. Gouverneur von Indien. (Chapter VII will say more on Brecht's and Kipling's presence in this drama). The final version was completed in early 1926, though not premiered in the Berlin Staatstheater until June 12, 1928. Among other things it bore a new title, Kalkutta, 4. Mai and a song by Brecht called "Surabaya Johnny". Though the text of the song does not appear in the printed edition of the play, in the stage version it was the same "Surabaya Johnny" that later appeared in Happy End and that, according to a note by Elisabeth Hauptmann, "was sired by a translation of a Kipling poem".8 She later confirmed in private conversation that "Mary, Pity Women" was indeed the poem she meant, a fact that is readily apparent from a comparison of both poems. As Act II of Kalkutta, 4. Mai opens, Lady Marjorie Hike, an eighteenth century "emancipated woman", plays the guitar and half sings, half speaks this dramatic monologue of a young girl abandoned by a callous lover who claimed he was working for the 8

Miss Hauptmann's note is found in Bertolt Brecht: Gedichte (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1960), II, 257. Information that it was in fact Brecht's song of the same name was contained in letters from Elisabeth Hauptmann dated August 16, 1969; from the Bertolt Brecht Archives dated February 5. 1970; and from Marta Feuchtwanger dated September 14, 1969.

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British railroad in colonial India, but who was in fact probably a freebooter. The stage directions at this point indicate that she "singt und steppt den Surabaya Johnny". 9 Feuchtwanger's widow recalls that it was done as a Sprechgesang.10 It would have delighted Brecht to know that Kipling claimed as his source for this ballad of a girl "'00 was mistook in 'er m a n " the account of an "elderly but upright barmaid" whom he heard in a London pub he frequented. 1 1 Brecht did not know this, but he did recognize the dramatic potential of the girl's dilemma. Drawing heavily on his translation of Kipling's poem for material, he gave the anonymous adventurer-lover a name he had read in its component parts many times in Kipling. From there he wrote his own poem on the topic. A comparison of a few lines shows the highly original way he integrated slightly altered lines from his Kipling translation into his original creation: Kipling-. I 'ate you, grinnin' there . . . You done the worst you know. I 'ate you, grinnin' there . . . Ah, Gawd, I love you so! Your 'eart? You 'aven't none . . . Ah, Gawd, I love you so! Brecht translation: Ich höre, dich geht's nichts an . . . Du warst nur roher als roh! Ich hasse dich, wie du da stehst und grinst... O Gott, ich liebe dich so. Dein Herz? Du hast keins .. . O Gott, ich liebe dich so. (GW X, 1055) 9

Lion Feuchtwanger, Gesammelte Werke XI. Stücke in Prosa (Amsterdam: Querido, 1936), p. 50. 10 Letter from Marta Feuchtwanger dated September 14, 1969. 11 Rudyard Kipling, A Book of Words; Souvenirs of France; Something of Myself in The Collected Works XXIV (New York: Doubleday, Doran. 1941), 411-412.

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"Das Lied vom Surabaya-Johnny" Ich hasse dich so, Johnny Wie du dastehst und grinst, Johnny Nimm die Pfeife aus dem Maul, du Hund. Surabaya-Johnny, warum bist du so roh? Surabaya-Johnny, mein Gott, ich liebe dich so. Surabaya-Johnny, warum bin ich nicht froh? Du hast kein Herz, Johnny, und ich liebe dich so. (GW VIII, 325) Brecht identified the faithless lover by name, retained the lovehate motif, and created a first-rate poem from an otherwise undistinguished source. Judging by the manner verses and material from "Mary, Pity Women" and its immediate offspring "Surabaya Johnny" wander throughout his works after this point, he seems to have sensed a certain paternal pride in both of them. In The Threepenny Opera of 1928 he used verbatim an entire stanza from his translation of the "Mary, Pity Women" ballad, the brief refrain entitled "Hübsch als es währte (for comparison of texts, see Chapter VIII). What he did with it reflects his gift for turning the inherently dramatic situation of the poem into an actual dramatic episode in a play. This ballad qua dramatic monologue of an abandoned girl became the song Polly Peachum sang when Macheath left her and fled London on their wedding day (GW II, 438). Perhaps he felt his "Lied vom Surabaya-Johnny" did not receive adequate exposure in the 1928 performance, or perhaps he sensed a certain fondness for it - whatever the case, it turned up again in his collaborative effort with Elisabeth Hauptmann the next year entitled Happy End, this time with a melody by Kurt Weill. When he first wrote this song based on "Mary, Pity Women", he added a pipe to the grinning face of Kipling's roué as a symbol of Surabaya-Johnny's insensitivity and indifference to the girl's plight. Based on this pipe, one can follow the transition of Surabaya-Johnny into a character chronologically and geographically far removed from the original, but nevertheless a dramatic reincarnation in totally different form - the cook in Mother Courage.

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In the earliest version of this play, Brecht in fact used the "Surabaya-Johnny" song. The prostitute Jessie, who later became Yvette, relates how someone named "Johnny" (also "Henny"; this is the later "Pfeifenpieter") seduced and then abandoned her. She wants to warn Kattrin about the danger of love in order to steel the girl against it. "Mother Courage: da wird keine abgehärtet. Jessie: dann erzähls, weil mir davon leichter wird, SIE SINGT DAS LIED VOM SURABAYA JOHNNY."12 Brecht soon changed the title to "Das Lied vom Pfeif- und Trommel-Henny", though the music and text were still essentially "Surabaya-Johnny". Except for dropping the refrain, he made only minor revisions in the text, such as the replacement of "Burma" with "Utrecht" in the opening lines: Das Lied vom Pfeif- und

Trommel-Henny

ich war jung, Gott, erst 16 Jahre du kämest von Utrecht herauf und sagtest, ich solle mit dir gehn du kämest für alles a u f 1 3

Brecht had this version (sung to Kurt Weill's melody) used in the Zurich production of 1941. Only after Paul Dessau wrote entirely new music for the songs in the play was it dropped in favor of "Das Lied vom Fraternisieren". In a later stage version done by the Berlin Ensemble, faint traces of Surabaya-Johnny are still apparent. When the cook tries to become physically intimate with Mother Courage, she replies with a line from the Surabaya-Johnny song: "Nehmens die Pfeif aus dem Maul, wenn ich mit Ihnen Sprech" (cf. "Nimm die Pfeife aus dem Maul, du Hund").14 and the prostitute Yvette, a typical abandoned girl whom the cook deserted after an earlier erotic encounter, focuses on this pipe as a symbol of his callous disregard for feelings of real affection: " . . . aber das wußte ich damals noch nicht, auch nicht, daß er schon damals eine andere ge12

BBA 490/28. BBA 490/27. 14 Bertolt Brecht, Materialien zu Brechts 'Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder', ed. Werner Hecht ( = Edition Suhrkamp 50) (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), p. 30. «

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habt hat und sie ihn überhaupt schon Pfeifenpieter genannt haben, weil er die Pfeif nicht aus dem Maul genommen hat dabei, so beiläufig wars bei ihm" (GW IV, 1370). Outlines of "Mary, Pity Women" as its basis have been blurred by this time, but it was Kipling's unidentified and unfeeling lover in that poem who served as the model and spiritual progenitor for Surabaya-Johnny, Pfeif-und-Trommel-Henny, and "Pfeifenpieter". In the mid-thirties, a variation on the Surabaya-Johnny motif turns up again in the "Lied der liebenden Witwe" (GW IX, 566). Brecht planned to use it in a drama called Die Freuden und Leiden der kleineren Seeleute. Again the woman is torn between revulsion and love for a worthless man. Her deprecations are offset by the same involuntary admission of love heard from SurabayaJohnny's helpless victim: Hätte ich Vernunft für sieben Groschen Hätt ich nie gewährt, um was er leider bat Sondern hätte ihn sogleich verdroschen Wenn er mir, wie es geschah, zu nahe trat. Ach, wenn er sich doch zum Teufel scherte! (Wenn ich ihn nur nicht so sehr begehrte.) When Elisabeth Hauptmann and Benno Besson were adapting Ben Jonson's Volpone in the early 1950's, Brecht wrote the text for two songs to be used in it. In one he returned to a similar theme again based on the love-hate paradox of "Mary, Pity Women". In the "Lied der Magd", another abandoned girl describes the man who left her for another love. Surabaya-Johnny had stood there grinning; here the unidentified lover laughs shamelessly at her plight. And in the same breath that both girls curse the men who left them, they also confess how hopelessly they love them: "Das Lied vom Surabaya-Johnny" Du hast mich betrogen, Johnny, in der ersten Stund Ich hasse dich so, Johnny Wie du dastehst und grinst, Johnny Surabaya-Johnny, warum bist du so roh? Surabaya-Johnny, mein Gott, ich liebe dich so.

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Du hast kein Herz, Johnny, und ich liebe dich so.

(GW VIII, 325-26) "Lied der Magd" Hat sie das? Und das? Und das? So frug ich. Doch der aller Scham und Sitte Bare Lachen tut er! Und jetzt weiß genug ich: Sie hat nichts. Doch hat sie die Denare! Hol der Teufel ihn und die Megäre! Wenn ich nur nicht so in ihn verschossen wäre!

(GW X, 1001)i5 Nothing in the published translations of "The Ladies" and "Cholera Camp" generated the significant number of scenes and songs that "Mary, Pity Women" did, though Brecht doubtless subscribed to the attitude toward erotic experience expressed in "The Ladies". After four love affairs with white, half-caste, and black girls, the ballad narrator summarizes: "An' I learned about women from 'er!" (Brecht: "Und ich lernte was von Frauen bei ihr"). But the greatest lesson he learned was that "the Colonel's Lady an' Judy O'Grady / Are sisters under their skins!" (Brecht: "Des Obersten Lady und Judy O'Grady / Sind Schwestern unter der Haut"). By publishing this in a respected woman's magazine in 1927, Brecht was using Kipling to pay his female readers a lefthanded compliment for their didactic skills as lovers. In contrast to "Mary, Pity Women", he did not immediately exploit his translation of Kipling's "Cholera Camp". During the late thirties, however, he returned to it in the English original and used it in a most incongruous setting (see Chapter IX). Miss Hauptmann, who kept the preliminary translations she did of "Song of the Banjo" and "When Earth's Last Picture is Painted" (the manuscript for a translation of "The Married Man" cannot be located), provides almost the only information available on these poems. She recalls that the opening line of the 15

Elisabeth Hauptmann confirmed that "Lied der liebenden Witwe" and "Lied der Magd" are in fact legitimate descendants of "Mary, Pity Woman". She claims that when writing them, Brecht was fully aware of their derivation (interview, October 29, 1970).

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"Song of the Banjo" in Brecht's version read: Kipling: "You couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile" Brechv. " 'nen Bechsteinfliigel schleppst du nicht 'ne halbe Meile"

Likewise she reports that Brecht was particularly attracted by the pivotal lines in her translation of "The Married Man" which justify the bachelor's foolhardy daring: "The bachelor 'e fights for one / As joyful as can be; / But the married man don't call it fun, / Because 'e fights for three - . " Here Brecht found another expression of the philosophy of the adventurer that he came to associate with Kipling's world. The German poet made only a few notes on Miss Hauptmann's translation of "When Earth's Last Picture is Painted", but what he absorbed left telling clues at several points in his work. The poem itself deals with the joy all artists will sense in some transcendent state when they work for sheer delight instead of for money or fame. Because its basic thrust seems alien to Brecht's views, the entire poem is reproduced before examining what he borrowed: When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried, When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died, We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it - lie down for an aeon or two, Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew. And those that were good shall be happy: they shall sit in a golden chair; They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair. They shall find real saints to draw from - Magdalene, Peter, and Paul; They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all' And only The Master shall praise us, and only The Master shall blame;

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And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame, But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of the Things as They are!

Brecht ignored the poem's central idea in favor of something altogether different-he went for the images and formulations. He found line five appealing as a poetic formulation for something totally different from Kipling's intention. The "golden chair" on which "good" painters (and artists generally) shall sit symbolized beatific rest and the freedom to create as one wished. According to Miss Hauptmann, Brecht took it and intentionally converted it (in the plural) into a symbol of the self-satisfied, elitist position attained by successful writers who produce exclusive literature high in aesthetic quality but devoid of social value or concern. Armed with this corrupted Kipling image, he attacked these literati in a 1930 poem entitled "Lied der preiswerten Lyriker". Stanza eight employs this image to pour out his contempt for the paid literary minions of a capitalistic society: Und Habt ihr sonst immer bezahlt! Dies Trocknen der Tränen! / Und nicht nur das habt ihr gerne bezahlt! Auch das, was wir denen / Sagten, die nicht wie ihr auf die goldenen Stühle gesetzt sind / Habt ihr sonst immer bezahlt! Dies Trocknen der Tränen! / Und dies Trösten derer, die von euch verletzt sind!" (GW IX, 485). Kipling's image also recurs in the opening lines of the famous poem written in 1939, "Die Literatur wird durchforscht werden": "Die auf die goldenen Stühle gesetzt sind, zu schreiben / Werden gefragt werden nach denen, die / Ihnen die Röcke webten" (GW IX, 740). Miss Hauptmann, who supplied information on the origin of both passages, attests that each time he was clearly aware of using an image taken from Kipling.16 The phrase in the final line of Kipling's poem about "The God of Things as They are" also appealed to him for its pragmatism 18 At least two other passages repeat the image of a golden chair or throne. See Roundheads and Peakheads, GW II, 1023, and also "Das Lied vom Sankt Nimmerleinstag" in The Good Woman of Setzuan, GW IV, 1562.

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(in his translation it read "Der Gott der Dinge, wie sie sind"). He found this expression so congenial that he employed it verbatim several times throughout his writings. It first occurred in an essay on his dramatic theories later called "Die dialektische Dramatik" (1931). He even acknowledged Kipling's authorship indirectly by setting the phrase in quotation marks: "Die Welt, wie sie ist, sollte gezeigt und anerkannt, ihre eigene Schonungslosigkeit als ihre Größe schonungslos aufgewiesen werden: ihr Gott sollte sein 'der Gott der Dinge, wie sie sind' " (GW XV, 218). Speaking of his friend Caspar Neher later in the same essay, he attributed to him the Kipling quotation in the context of some remarks Neher supposedly made about the play Baal: "Und an den Anfang setzte er einige große Wände, auf die jene Figuren gemalt waren, die dann im Stück den Verkehr Baals ausmachten, 'die Opfer', und sagte: 'So, mit denen muß er auskommen. Hier herrschte der Gott der Dinge, wie sie sind' " (GW XV, 219). "The God of Things as They are" also enters the 1930 play The Exception and the Rule as a line in a song "Der kranke Mann stirbt und der starke Mann ficht". Nor was Brecht satisfied with this verbatim borrowing alone - he also drew on the epigraph preceding Chapter 12 of The Light that Failed in Rosenzweig's translation for his title and opening line. From them he assembled a song that scarcely sounds like Kipling (see Chapter IV). It reads: Der kranke Mann stirbt und der starke Mann ficht Und das ist gut so. Dem Starken wird geholfen, dem Schwachen hilft man nicht Und das ist gut so. Laß fallen, was fällt, gib ihm noch einen Tritt Denn das ist gut so. Es setzt sich zum Essen, wer den Sieg sich erstritt Das ist gut so. Und der Koch nach der Schlacht zählt die Toten nicht mit Und er tut gut so. Und der Gott der Dinge, wie sie sind, schuf Herr und Knecht! Und das war gut so. Und wem's gut geht, der ist gut; und wem's schlecht geht, der ist schlecht Und das ist gut so. (GW II, 807-808)

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The structure of this song reveals something about the eclectic way Brecht worked. He fused different images that he had encountered years apart in two disparate Kipling sources into a cohesive piece of work that demands respect as an autonomous creation. Leopold Rosenzweig in the Augsburg period and Elisabeth Hauptmann in the mid 1920's had introduced him to material from Kipling that his sovereign imagination joined as a song in 1930. Ironically, one aspect of this song might be said to point to its origins. Brecht puts it in the mouth of a representative of imperialism, here an unscrupulous merchant. The quotability of Kipling formulations reflects how his writings might be said to have "influenced" Brecht after the early years. However incompatible he found outlooks or ideologies, he was able to ignore them and focus on the usefulness or Gebrauchswert. The amount of borrowed creations woven into the fabric of his own works by this writer who knew the value of a good expression was the highest commendation Brecht could give another writer. How much more Kipling came to him through Elisabeth Hauptmann can probably never be determined exactly. The passing of over four decades, and a lifetime of activity, have blurred memories and obscured details. It can safely be stated, however, that she, probably more than any single person or source, transmitted to Brecht those elements from Kipling that are most evident in his world after 1925 and that can be followed most easily to their sources.

VII THE WORLD OF MAN IS MAN

Man is Man, overtly the most "Kiplingesque" of all his works, holds an unusual place among Brecht's dramas for another reason. It is one of the few in which a good deal of obscurity surrounds its exact sources. Baal was a reaction to Johst's Der Einsame; The Yea-Say er derived from a Japanese Nöh play; Puntila was sparked by the Finnish tales of Hella Wuolijoki, and Mother Courage had a work by Johan Ludvig Runeberg as a basis, to mention a few examples. With the exception of Alfred Döblin's novel Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun, which will be discussed later, it is generally assumed that Brecht modelled this play on material he drew from Kipling. Yet herein lies the problem. While the world of the British Colonial Army associated with Rudyard Kipling dominates this drama, no specific works by Kipling seem remotely connected with its themes or central plot. In this sense it has both more and less Kipling than almost any other Brechtian play. The origin and development of this drama are in part responsible for this paradox. As early as 1917 Brecht had discovered the idea that human identity is interchangeable. He distilled it in a poem entitled "Das war der Bürger Galgei" (GW VIII, 84). In it the identity of the citizen Galgei is transformed by "wicked men" who claim he is someone else named "Pick". He dies without refuting them: Er könnt es nicht beweisen Es stand ihm keiner bei. Steht nicht im Katechismus Daß er der Galgei sei.

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71

Der Name stand im Kirchbuch Und am Begräbnisstein? Der Bürger Galgei konnte Gut auch ein andrer sein, (stanzas 2, 3, GW VIII, 84-85). Galgei, who would later be christened "Galy Gay", marked the beginning of a dramatic concept that likewise underwent a shift almost as radical as the restructuring of Galy Gay into Jeraiah Jip. By 1918 Brecht intended to use this concept in a drama called Galgei oder Der dicke Mann auf der Schiffsschaukel-1 A note from 1919 expands on the idea: "Galgei auf der Schaukel. Ein einfacher Mann wird von einer zweifelhaften Sorte von Spaßvögeln getrieben, die Rolle eines Andern zu spielen." 2 When he settled permanently in Berlin in 1924, Brecht was still carrying with him the germ seeds of this drama set in Augsburg with a petty-bourgeois German protagonist named Galgei. Between then and 1925, when he finally began work on what became the transformation of an Irish dockworker named Galy Gay in the military barracks of Kilkoa, the concept underwent a drastic change that might be called a "Kiplingization". Augsburg was dropped, and India under the rule of the British Colonial Army replaced it. The "wicked m e n " became ruffian soldiers in that army, and the exotic lore about the British army in India that Kipling transmitted to the western world better than any other writer replaced the banal atmosphere of Wilhelminan Germany. This removal from the familiar environs of Augsburg to the extremities of civilization as Europeans knew it was essentially an attempt at estrangement, a fantasy trip into an exotic realm that had probably never existed in that form. Exactly what happened will likely never be known. The strong dose of Kipling that had been injected into Brecht's mind during the past decade began to cause a positive reaction in Berlin. This first manifested itself around 1923-1924 in a fragmentary (unpublished) poem that stands as one of the precursors to the final, 1 Münsterer, Bert Brecht: Erinnerungen, pp. 93-94; Bertolt Bestandsverzeichnis I, 276. 2 Bertolt Brecht Archiv, Bestandsverzeichnis I, 277.

Brecht

Archiv,

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Kiplingized version of Man is Man. Seven completed stanzas of "Der tote Kolonialsoldat" (BBA 451/29) describe what is obviously the death of a British soldier in India, though no place name is given. It relates how he is buried, and specifically how his face is covered, an aspect which seems to adumbrate the loss of identity central to the later play. A telling note on its connection with Kipling's India appears opposite stanzas three and four. The poet inserted the words "ref [refrain]: Soldaten wohnen, auf den kanonen", which is the opening line of the chorus in the famous "Kanonensong" that launched The Threepenny Opera on its way to international success. There, two veterans of the British Indian Army join in a musical recapitulation of their military adventures from "Cap to Couch Behar" and recall with gusto how they slaughtered the natives in battle. This poem deals with similar adventures. In another fragmentary warm-up exercise for Man is Man that probably originated around 1924, he seemed about to use Kipling's ballad "Cholera Camp" in his text. An unpublished note entitled "Geschichte vom gelben Jack" (BBA 459/28-30) has a character named "Cake" who recounts how British soldiers fighting against the Sikhs in India once went several weeks without finding water. Cake, who becomes the soldier Jesse in the stage version (in the earliest written draft he is known alternately as "Cake" and "Jesse Cakewater", BBA 150/48-51), relates how they marched around the Punjal [sic] delta for several weeks: "dann kam die cholera und sie hießen ihn den gelben Jack, das Lied hieß ungefähr so: xx und sie sangen / es oftmals am Tag, und der Unterhaltung wegen . . . " . The text of the song the men sang at this point does not appear, but the one Brecht had in mind was probably Kipling's ballad "Cholera Camp", since he uses it again in another context with identical factors: yellow jack, a song, "Cholera Camp". The outline for the film script called Die Fliege (1938) reconstructs a similar situation where soldiers suffering from "der gelbe Jack" sing a chorus of Kipling's ballad "Cholera Camp". Brecht, who attended the University of Munich with plans to study medicine, knew that cholera was not the same as yellow fever. He was no doubt acting consciously. Kipling's ballad dealt

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with utter helplessness in the face of "ten deaths a day", and this attitude was more important than accuracy. In a fashion typical of a hedonistic young nihilist, Brecht has Cake relate how the men divided into those who swore to abstain from women, whiskey, and smoking, and those who mocked the cholera. The idea for the formei may have come from the ballad's observations that "There ain't no fun in women nor there ain't no bite to drink; / It's much too wet for shootin', we can only march and think." But the result is the same for both abstainers and mockers - they all die. Nothing of this Brechtian vignette of British army life enters the completed Man is Man except the character "Cake" alias Jesse. But it represents another symptom of the creative fermentation going on in Brecht's mind as he prepared to recast the world of Kipling and create his own mythological British India. At the same time Brecht was writing Man is Man, Kipling's influence erupted in yet another of his creative activities. In the fall of 1925 and the winter of 1926, he assisted Lion Feuchtwanger in revising that writer's Warren Hastings, a play written in 1916. Perhaps "insisted" would be more accurate than "assisted", for Feuchtwanger's widow claims that Brecht was the prime mover in undertaking the revision at a time when her husband was turning away from the drama to the novel. 3 Brecht's hand is evident throughout in such matters as diction, lore about India, and dramatic structuring. Besides adding the "Surabaya-Johnny" song, Brecht Anglicized proper names ("Marianne Baronin Imhoff" in the 1916 version became "Lady Marjorie Hike"), invented a newly constructed "Punjab highway" (Pandschabstrasse) to describe one of Hastings' activities as a colonial governor, dropped some of the references to Hastings' pragmatic humanitarianism in feeding the starving masses, added statements on the corruption of the Indian court system and how Englishmen claimed they could not get a fair trial - in short, he "imperialized" the play. Judging by the diction, Brecht also must have been responsible for adding the passage near the end that described how the East India Co. came to India, 3

Letter from Marta Feuchtwanger dated September 14, 1969.

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became a prostitute, and did business under the pretext of the Bible, Law and Order, etc.: Sehen Sie, dieses talentierte Mädchen hat immer verstanden, die Moral im Rücken zu haben wie ein Schiffsegel den Wind. Mit Wind kam es überallhin. Vorne eröffnete es eine Verkaufsstube mit Bibeln, Gesetzbüchern und Weltanschauung, hinten aber lag das große Etablissement für besondere Geschäfte, die mit Bibeln und Gesetzbüchern nur ganz wenig zu tun haben. Vorne wie hinten nährte man sich vom Reis des Landes. Vorne an der Fassade, die dem Strand zugekehrt war, arbeiteten einige würdige Herren in Gehröcken, die, da ihre Artikel schwach gingen, viel Zeit hatten, sich einwandfreie Etiketts auszudenken und das Geld, das hinten gemacht wurde, in Kisten zu packen und nach London zu schicken, und die ab und zu, wenn sie ihre zeitraubenden Nasen verwirrend in das hintere Etablissement stecken, auf dieselben geschlagen werden müssen.4

Based on these and other revisions, Brecht was very much aware of English colonialism and imperialism when he was writing Man is Man during 1925-1926. Much of his understanding had come through Kipling's prose. And the prose he knew best contained a number of stories treating the exploits of three inseparable reprobates whose life style and adventures went farther than any single factor in shaping the world of Man is Man - Kipling's Soldiers Three. Elisabeth Hauptmann remembers that Brecht was already wellacquainted with the Soldiers Three when she met him in 1924. He had used the epigraph about "three friends that buried the fourth" as early as 1921 in the first version of In the Jungle of the Cities. While he probably encountered the three even earlier, this passage comes closer to qualifying as the source for major plot elements in the play than any known work. The loss of the fourth friend and their wish, "And would that he were here with us now", reproduce the basic conflict that leads to Galy Gay's transformation-three inseparable comrades have lost their fourth man, though not by death, and they desperately need him back. While the idea of transformability in human identity probably was Brecht's invention, the three soldier friends unquestionably derive from Kipling. * Feuchtwanger, Gesammelte Werke XI, 72.

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The most persuasive and perhaps only conclusive evidence of direct borrowing from Kipling in this play centers around the famous "temple episode" where Uria, Jesse, and Polly try to rescue Jeraiah Jip, who was trapped inside when they tried to steal copper out of the pagoda. Their motivation, viz. to get money for beer, has many counterparts in Kipling's tales. Schumacher asserts that Brecht used an episode from his friend Alfred Doblin's novel Die drei Spriinge des Wang-lun as the basis for the temple scene.5 In this novel, the title character's pigtail becomes entangled in tar on the roof when he breaks into a temple, and he must pull out the hair to free himself, thereby leaving a tell-tale bald spot.6 But a story by Kipling, specifically the first one from Life's Handicaps known as "The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney", is responsible for the main plot elements of the play after the three return to the temple and try to rescue Jip. To understand how much of Kipling Brecht retained, a brief recapitulation of "Krishna Mulvaney" is necessary. As is usually the case, Learoyd, Ortheris, and Mulvaney are thirsty but penniless. Mulvaney comes upon one Dearsley, a railroad construction superintendent in charge of a gang of coolies, who raffles off a magnificent palanquin (Mulvaney refers to it as a "sedan chair") to the workers each week, only to force the winner to return it or lose his job. Mulvaney, acting in the name of "justice", agrees to fight him for it. He takes his two friends with him, and Dearsley chooses Learoyd as his opponent. Learoyd trounces the superintendent soundly. Now it devolves upon Mulvaney to turn the palanquin into money for beer. On pay day he loads it full of beer bottles, hires native bearers to carry him, and sets out to do so. On the way he calls on Dearsley to mock him. By being maliciously hospitable, Dearsley gets Mulvaney drunk and puts him, palanquin and all, on a train for Benares. From this point on, events begin to parallel those in Man is Man. Mulvaney sobers up enough to realize he has been duped, but when 5

Ernst Schumacher, Die dramatischen Versuche Bertolt Brechts: 19181933 (Berlin: Riitten and Loening, 1955), p. 517. s A detailed comparison of similarities in the two episodes is found in Frederic Ewen, Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His A rt, and His Times (New York: Citadel, 1967), p. 139.

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priests recognized the palanquin as one that belongs to a certain prestigious maharanee, they carry it into the temple with him inside before he can escape. After witnessing a "Queen's Praying", he wraps himself in the silk lining of the palanquin, impersonates the god Krishna before the assembled royal beauties, and departs. On the way he relieves a priest of 434 rupees and a gold necklace in return for having bequeathed to the temple a "miraculous reputashin" for the next fifty years. It is not known with certainty what German translation of this story Brecht read; that he read and remembered it can hardly be doubted.7 The palaquin in which both the drunken Mulvaney and Jip are carried into a temple is the most obvious point of contact, though both also assume the roles of gods when they sober up. A recondite but unmistakeable allusion to "Krishna Mulvaney" offers persuasive evidence of this filial relationship. After Jip begins to come to his senses (he has been removed from the palanquin and placed in a prayer box), his first impression is that he is riding on a train. The priest assures him, however, that it is only an after-effect of the beer in his head: JIP: Steigen wir b a l d aus, Jesse? D i e s e r Car w a c k e l t s o s c h a u d e r h a f t u n d ist so e n g w i e ein Wasserklosett. wang: H e r r Soldat, g l a u b e nicht, d u seist in e i n e m E i s e n b a h n w a g e n . E s ist einzig das Bier in d e i n e m e h r e n w e r t e n K o p f , das schaukelt. (GW I, 3 2 4 )

These are more than the phantasies of a drunkard; this is obscured Kipling. The reference to being on a train seems almost gratuitous unless one recalls that Mulvaney did in fact ride on a 7

A readily accessible German translation that this author thinks Brecht knew was Soldaten-Geschichten, transl. General von Sickart (Berlin: Vita, 1900). A s so often happened, the translator made a selection of thematically related Kipling stories from disparate works. In this collection, all dealt with the Soldiers Three. "Krishna Mulvaney" appeared as the first one; the others were "The G o d from the Machine"; "Private Learoyd's Story"; "The Big Drunk Draf'"; "With the Main Guard"; and "In the Matter of a Private".

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train in the palanquin while he was drunk. Sleeping during most of the ten hour trip to Benares, he remembers half waking at one point: "Einmal bin ich halb wach geworden, und in meinem Kopf hat es schrecklich rumort - ein Klappern und Rollen und Rasseln, wie ich's noch nie erlebt habe. . . Jungens, der Lärm war nicht vom Bier, er war von einem Zug." 8 Unless one knows the incident behind this passage, it has virtually no meaning as Brecht uses it. In the context of Kipling's story, however, it becomes evident that both have been "railroaded", one in a figurative, the other in a literal sense. In "Krishna Mulvaney" priests dragged the palanquin into the temple; in Brecht one priest and his assistant pull the palanquin in which the drunken Jip is hiding out of the rain and into the temple. In contrast to Kipling, Brecht's priest removes Jip from the palanquin and stuffs him into a prayer box. But his reason for doing so corresponds to Mulvaney's awareness that his presence as a god had economic value for the temple. In Man is Man the priest recognizes this, too, and decides to transform him into a god and attract more paying devotees to the temple ("Wir können höchstens einen Gott aus ihm machen", GW I, 321). Now the rapacious priest, not the soldier, has the bright idea that the only thing to do is to exploit the situation for pecuniary gain. He instructs his assistant to hang banners on the pagoda and publicize the god's arrival, for a god is no good if word does not get around ("Was hilft ein Gott, wenn es sich nicht herumspricht?" GW I, 321.). When it does, Jip's poundings on the sides of the prayer box are construed as divine thunderings to signal the worshippers that they must contribute according to the number of knocks they hear. After Jip becomes sober, the priest keeps up the fiction by replying to his query of how he came there by addressing him half as a soldier and half as a god: JIP:

Wie bin ich denn hierhergekommen? 8

Since Brecht read all such passages in translation, von Sickart's German version is used here and in subsequent passages to show the similarity of textual material to Brecht's own writings.

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Durch die Luft, Herr General, du bist durch die Luft gekommen. JIP:

Wo war ich denn, wie du mich gefunden hast? WANG:

Du hast geruht, in einem alten Palankin zu wohnen, Erhabener. (GW I, 326)

As Jip hears that his regiment and his companions have left for the Punjab mountains, he asks what he was doing when they departed. The reply supports the point that Mulvaney with his legendary thirst served as the model for Jip: "Bier, viel Bier, tausend Flaschen" (GW I, 326). Jip, like Mulvaney had instigated the original action to get money for beer. Mulvaney filled his palanquin with beer bottles, while Jip filled his with vomit from his heavy drinking. In Brecht, the priest Wang has the voice of "einer fetten Ratte" (GW I, 325). In Kipling, Mulvaney talks of "ein fetter Priester" who knocks on the palanquin while trying to awaken the sleeping inhabitant. This priest recognizes the palanquin as that of the prominent Maharanee of Gokral-Seetarun. When he fails to awaken Mulvaney, he uses a line that Brecht later reproduced with considerable fidelity if he did not consciously imitate it: "Ein fetter Priester klopft an meiner Tür. Ich . . . rühre mich nicht. 'Die alte Kuh schläft', sagt er zu einem andern. 'Laß sie schlafen', sagt der."» In Brecht, the three soldiers enter the temple and hear groans emanating from the prayer box: POLLY:

Was ist das, Herr? WANG:

Das ist meine Milchkuh, die im Schlaf liegt. (GW I, 322)

The appelation "cow" that both use to designate the woman al6

Von Sickart, p. 45.

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legedly sleeping inside is surely more than coincidence. It is difficult to believe that Brecht did not have Kipling's temple incident in mind. Other circumstantial evidence could also be added: the similarity in the temple ceremonies (Kipling describes the burning of butter, the strange music, the singing; Brecht depicts the burning of camel dung balls, a drum beating, strange music being played by a gramophone); or the unwavering assurance the soldiers feel that their missing comrade will return in time (if Mulvaney does not return before the end of three days, he will be jailed; if Jip does not return before sunrise, his machine-gun squad will be arrested as thieves). None of the correspondences cited above offers absolute proof of borrowing. Taken in toto, they make a persuasive argument that "Krishna Mulvaney" almost certainly provided the raw material for this incident, an episode connected to the central plot only in as much as it disposes of Jip so that the transmogrification of Galy Gay can take place. It was stated earlier that the restructuring of a human being's identity in this play was probably Brecht's original idea. While this is true, at least one tale by Kipling almost might have introduced him to the notion of obliterating a man's identity-the story of "The Man Who Was". Available in several translated German collections of Kipling's tales before 1920, it tells the chilling story of a former officer in the British Army who was robbed of his identity and personality through imprisonment and maltreatment by the Russians after being captured at Sebastopol in 1854. Returning to his old regiment years later, the man does not even know his name until it is located in the regimental rolls. Within a few days he dies. While one is tempted to suspect Brecht of knowing this story, it is pure speculation. To be safe, it must be classified under the rubric of "near-Kipling" in Man is Man those elements which have counterparts in the British writer's works, but where no proof of contact exists. Brecht has made it particularly tantalizing for the reader in many instances where elements look suspiciously Kiplingesque, but where a known tie-in is missing. Just how many of the Anglicisms and how much Anglo-Saxon lore he drew from the English

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story-teller is almost impossible to say. An earlier draft of the play (BBA 150) contains considerably more English words than the 1926 and 1931 versions - "camp", "queen", "sergeant", "Tommies", "Worchesterregiment" [sic], "London Times", "Daily Telegraph", "cholera", "three cheers" and many others. These and certain general information on the British army could have come through the inevitable lore about the enemy army that was current in Germany during World War I, such as the designation "Tommy" or the song "It's a Long Way to Tipperary", both of which recur with great frequency in this early version (on almost every page Brecht has one character or the other strike up a chorus of "Tipperary", a practice he excludes from the final rendering). But most of his specialized knowledge about the British Indian Army must have come through this literary spokesman of the Empire, though specific sources are elusive because he uses precisely those elements which recur in many Kipling short stories. There is, for example, the use of army elephants that play such an important role in the stories of India (e.g. "Her Majesty's Servants"). The three comrades employ a ruse connected with Galy Gay's alleged sale of the army elephant Billy Humph to gain control over him. The use of the term "nigger" as an appellation for the indigenous population was mentioned above (p. 16) as something Brecht found in Möller's translation of the "BarrackRoom Ballads". In a German rendering of the short stories by von Sickart that Brecht might have read, a footnote in the story of "Krishna Mulvaney" explains that "Für den ungebildeten Engländer ist jeder Farbige ein 'Nigger'." 11 ' In Man is Man Brecht seizes on this bit of lore in the "Song von Witwe Begbicks Trinksalon" where the soldiers sing of fighting against "Niggers": Und brüllt die Schlacht im Pandschabvale Fahr'n wir in Witwe Begbicks Tank Mit Rauch und mit schwarzen Ale Erst mal die Niggerfront entlang.

(GW I, 310) 10

Ibid., p. 15.

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Repeated references in Man is Man to the staggering quantities of beer consumed by the troops have dozens of models in Kipling. Brecht's anachronistic designation of the British soldiers of 1925 as "redcoats" {Rotröcke) in early versions of this play likely harkens back to the Sachs or Möller translations that use this term. From short stories Brecht would have gained the impression that the majority of the military actions by the British Colonial Army were fought along the northern border. Consequently he creates an army whose duty in this play is ". . . an den nördlichen Grenzen Ordnung zu schaffen" (GW I, 300) and whose troops are ordered to action in a Tibetan mountain pass midway through the play. Kipling's place names also constituted a treasure trove of the exotic-sounding names he loved to use. He drew on them freely in this play and elsewhere, from "Punjab" and "Peschawur" to "Rankerdan" and "Calcutta". These are but a few of many "Kiplingisms" that testify of a debt without revealing where it was incurred. Brecht's genius in taking another's creative raw material and reshaping it almost beyond recognition accounts for the problem a reader has when he clearly perceives something Kiplingesque here but fails to recognize a specific source. Several examples will further illustrate this phenomenon of "submerged Kiplingisms". The text of the Poem "Loot", for example, which he knew from the "Barrack-Room Ballads", would furnish ideal background effects for the temple break-in episode: "Now remember when you're 'acking round a gilded Burma god / That 'is eyes is often very precious stones." The ballad singer's attitude coincides with the views of Brecht's fighting men: "So, if my song you'll 'ear, I will learn you plain an' clear / 'Ow to pay yourself for fightin' overtime." Brecht also outfits his soldiers with a reputation for stealing. Galy Gay's wife tells him to avoid soldiers because they are "die schlimmsten Menschen auf der W e l t . . . man muß froh sein, wenn sie nicht einbrechen und töten" (GW I, 299). This, too, could have originated in any number of Kipling stories which recount the thievery that the lower ranks engaged in to supplement their meager pay. Brecht absorbed it all, but he looted more

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skillfully than Kipling's soldiers and left fewer clues - only suspicions. The opening scene of the play is likely such a passage where he looted carefully. As he leaves the house, Galy Gay's wife observes: "Du bist wie ein Elefant, der das schwerfälligste Tier der Tierwelt ist, aber er läuft wie ein Güterzug, wenn er ins Laufen kommt" (GW I, 299). Later Galy himself tells the soldiers: "aber ich bin wie ein Personenzug, wenn ich ins Laufen komme" (GW I, 307). In a German translation of "Moti Guj - Mutineer", Brecht had read a similar bit of elephant exotica: "Elefanten laufen nicht im Galopp. Sie bewegen sich mit wechselnder Geschwindigkeit. Wenn ein Elefant einen Expresszug einholen wollte, würde er nicht galoppieren, aber den Expresszug würde er einholen." 11 The words Güterzug, Personenzug, Expresszug, when added to the identical claim that an elephant can run with the speed of a train in spite of its cumbersome gait, constitute an unexpected bit of Kipling hidden in the opening lines. Here Brecht probably borrowed consciously and varied freely without altering the substance. The transmogrification of Sergeant Fairchild from "Bloody Five" into a weak-kneed coward testifies that here, too, Brecht was using specialized army lore drawn from Kipling's stories. To ward off "attacks of sensuality" that accompanied heavy rains, he asks the widow Begbick for help. She demands that he change into civilian clothes before she will help him. He consents, and the result is a loss of respect in the eyes of his men. For them the act of donning civilian clothes betokens a loss of virility. Because the army is about to depart for the north, this change of status is also tantamount to desertion. When he first appears in this attire and gives an order, Uria responds by knocking off his hat (GW I, 354). There follows the humorous sharpshooting event in which he becomes the laughing stock of the troops when he fails to hit an egg with his army revolver. Knowing something of Kipling makes this loss of prowess assume different dimensions. Repeatedly one hears of the 11

Rudyard Kipling, Tiergeschichten, 1901), p. 76.

no translator listed (Berlin: Vita,

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contempt his soldiers feel for the British civilian employees in India, especially civil servants. This is an essential element, for example, in the "Krishna Mulvaney" story. But their ultimate scorn is reserved for former soldiers who take civilian positions in India. Precisely this had happened to Mulvaney in the story of "The Big Drunk Draf" which was one of those tales Brecht knew from collections dealing with the Soldiers Three. Mulvaney, retired from the service, returned to India because of his wife. He then experienced that "great and terrible fall" into semi-disgrace in the eyes of his old comrades. This explains Fairchild's sensitivity about civilian clothes as a badge of ignominy at several points in the play: "Ja, meutert, ihr Söhne einer Kanone! Seht meinen Anzug und lacht!" (GW I, 354); "Wo ist mein Name . . . ? Sogar mein Rock ist dahin, den ich getragen habe" (GW I, 368); "Was habe ich für ein Kleid an? Ziemt sich das für mich?" (GW I, 368). Mulvaney's wife tried to coax him into letting his beard grow, for "'Twas so civilian-like". Mulvaney, who yearned for the old life, resisted this attempt to brand him with the one badge that distinguished civilians from the military more than any other one - a beard. Again Brecht unobtrusively inserts this bit of exotica from Kipling into the play at a strategic point that marks the beginning of the final stage in Galy Gay's transformation. At the close of the trial, the third of four steps in this process, Galy Gay concludes the scene by saying: GALY GAY:

Witwe Begbick, ich bitte Sie, eine Schere zu holen und mir meinen Bart abzuschneiden. BEGBICK:

Warum? GALY GAY:

Ich weiß schon, warum.

(GW I, 349) Brecht knew why, too - from Kipling. Most interpreters have subscribed to the view that Man is Man depicts the world of Kipling's "Barrack-Room Ballads".12 Stef12

For a representative view, see Martin Esslin, Bertolt Brecht: The Man and His Work (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1960), p. 286.

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fensen, for example, considers the "Song von Witwe Begbicks Trinksalon" to be a parody based on the one of these ballads, though he does not specify which one.13 Willett has called attention to similarities in tone between the lines "Mach das Maul zu, Tommy, halt den Hut fest, Tommy" in this song and lines like "For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Tommy wait outside" from the ballad "Tommy".14 And echoes of the ballad "Loot" do reverberate through the temple pilfering scene. But the extent of Kipling's presence in this play far exceeds what Brecht could have gleaned from the "Barrack-Room Ballads" alone. The short stories constituted his primary source of lore for Man is Man. They, more than the "Barrack-Room Ballads", led to the creation of the Kiplingesque atmosphere one commonly associates with it. A cursory examination of what he did with material from the tales and the ballads seems to confirm this. With the exception of part of a single line derived from "The Widow at Windsor" that he used twice in his career, his works contain no further allusions to or images, paraphrases, or other material borrowed from the original "Barrack-Room Ballads". Given his admitted propensity for re-using what he liked, and given the large chunks of Kipling he borrowed from other sources, their impact was obviously limited. But he returned several times during his career to the Soldiers Three from the stories. True, by the time he was finished they had become independent creations only faintly similar to the originals; but the frequency of their recurrence reflects how well he knew them and what an impact they must have made. The stanza about "three friends that buried the fourth" first recorded in 1921 marks the chronological debut of these mythical three in Brecht's œuvre. The fragmentary poem "Der tote Kolonialsoldat" of 1923-1924 also alludes to them in its reference to the "Kanonensong". In its nascent form the "Kanonensong" was in fact called "Lied der drei Soldaten" (GW VIII, 127), and originally three British soldiers were to have sung it. Miss Hauptmann confirms that the Soldiers Three were the inspiration for it. 13

Steffen Steffensen, Bertolt Forlag, 1972), p. 15. »« Willett, p. 90.

Brechts

Gedichte

(Copenhagen: Akademisk

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But as so often happened, Brecht liberated them from their original source and ended up with a Kipling-inspired but highly original creation. The next step in their evolution is possibly subject to dispute - the long lyric cycle known as "Die drei Soldaten: Ein Kinderbuch" (VIII, 340) of 1932. One might well argue that it has nothing to do with Kipling's Soldiers Three, and that Brecht's admitted fascination with the numeral three makes its application to soldiers who personify Hunger, Accident, and Coughing (presumably tuberculosis) purely coincidental. No doubt there is something to this. Furthermore, they have just fought in the First World War (on whose side one does not learn), which removes them even further from Kipling. But like Kipling's Soldiers Three, they, too, are half-civilized anarchists who live outside conventional law and create as it were their own laws and social order. Willett is right in seeing Kipling as the ancestor of all Brecht's bloated and caricatured soldiers in this and later works.15 One wonders how a highly self-conscious writer like Brecht who knew the Soldiers Three so well could have used the same designation without hearing overtones of Kipling's three. Consciously or not, he linked them loosely to a line that goes back to British Colonial India. The final evolutionary stage is reached in the "Gesang von den drei metaphysischen Soldaten" (GW VIII, 395) written shortly after the previous one. In both title and content it extends the idea of three soldiers as metaphoric figures. The editors of this edition point out the connection between it and the lyric cycle "Die drei Soldaten".16 Without being too bold, one might also assert that Kipling's Soldiers Three are legitimate, albeit distant ancestors of this poem, too. Brecht's fascination with Kipling's Soldiers Three and their exploits can be explained without difficulty. They fit into the rubric of the adventurers, freebooters, outsiders, and anarchists he used to populate the landscape of his early poems and stories. In another sense, they are only one step removed from the gangster types he turned to in later works. He himself forged this link be"

16

Ibid., p. 91. GW X , "Anmerkungen", p. 11.

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tween gangsters in uniform and gangsters generally in The Threepenny Opera, for Macheath was a veteran of the British Colonial Army in India. His progenitors can be found in the Soldiers Three. Doubtless one could mine Man is Man for a good deal more hidden material that has counterparts in tales of the Soldiers Three and others by Kipling. Jesse, Uria, and Polly take turns reminding one of Mulvaney, and Galy Gay is typical of the civilian innocent who falls into their hands and gets "fleeced". Willett is certainly correct in seeing a relationship between Kipling's soldiers, the three protagonists in this play, and the Good Soldier Schweik.17 His observation that "Galy Gay is really a Schweik fallen among Mulvaneys" rings true, though it is uncertain whether Brecht was aware of Schweik while writing Man is Man.ls The mock execution of Galy Gay has faint similarities with the ballad "Danny Deever"; the "Ach, wie war es lustig in Uganda" song from The Elephant Calf, which contains reminiscences of soldiers who fought against Papa Kruger in the Boer War, also stands in the tradition of "Fuzzy-Wuzzy"; it might have come from any one of a number of ballads about the Boer War. Peter Horst Neumann sees the eleventh scene as a variation of the situation in "My Lord the Elephant" (which Brecht knew in the Lindau collection) where one elephant blocks the movement of an entire British Army unit through a mountain pass in the north when it refuses to cross a bridge.19 Mulvaney finally persuades the beast to move on, thus clearing the pass. By analogy, Galy Gay, who is "unaufhaltsam wie ein Kriegselefant", clears a pass in the mountains for troops delayed in their march to Tibet. This analogy sounds plausible, but proving it is an exercise in futility. Like each example mentioned above, Kipling's presence is both indisputable and obscured. "

Willett, p. 91. John Willett in a letter dated August 26, 1968. The first exposure to Hasek's character that can be established definitely came when Brecht helped adapt the novel for Erwin Piscator's stage in 1927. 19 Peter Horst Neumann, Der Weise und der Elefant. Zwei Brecht Studien (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1970), pp. 85-86. 18

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Man is Man represents something of a watershed in the relationship of the two writers. Never again will Kipling dominate a work as he does here. That is not to say that Brecht either forgets or abandons him. But because of the playwright's political and artistic development after 1926, he will in the future turn to him less frequently and more selectively. In nearly every case, however, Kipling will be clearly discernible.

VIII "RUDYARD BRECHT": THE LATE TWENTIES

While Man is Man was the most Kiplingesque of Brecht's works to this point, it took The Threepenny Opera to ignite a controversy that made his reputation as a plagiarist and called public attention to what looked like more of Kipling in his work. Ironically, it began when Brecht himself announced that he was using the literary property of Villon and Kipling. But in the case of Kipling at least, the critics came very near to swallowing a red herring. A subheading on the original theater bill of the August, 1928, production of this musical play advertised that ballads by François Villon and Rudyard Kipling were interspersed throughout the play ("Eingelegte Balladen von François Villon und Rudyard Kipling"). Knowing how evident the English writer's influence was in Man is Man, theater-goers apparently assumed they were hearing a good deal of him here, too. For nearly nine months nothing was said. Then Alfred Kerr, Brecht's archenemy among Berlin critics whose review of the premiere had combined restrained praise with left-handed compliments, lashed out in the Berliner Tageblatt of May 3, 1929, with charges that Brecht had plagiarized heavily for the play. He did not mention Kipling, but he had tracked down the very edition of Villon (in German translation) from which Brecht borrowed. Kipling was scarcely mentioned in the controversy, but the implication of plagiarism was equally strong. Had Kerr been able to track down a specific source there, too, he would have had no compunctions about exhibiting it. His failure had little to do with his knowledge of Kipling; the fact is that except for one short passage, no complete

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ballads by Kipling are present, the theater bill notwithstanding. What was once there had fallen victim to a common practice in the theater. In collaborating with the composer Kurt Weill on this production, Brecht was dealing with someone who had previously used texts by Villon and Kipling in a musical pantomime called "Die Zaubermacht" (1923). 1 Conceivably he could have learned something about both writers from Weill. But what he did use arose from his collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann. Early versions of the work when it was still known as Die Ludenoper contained two Kipling ballads intended to be sung as part of it - "The Ladies" and "Mary, Pity Women" in the Brecht-Hauptmann translations mentioned earlier. In act 2, scene 2 Macheath sang "Die Ballade von den Ladies" while waiting in the Tintenfisch Hotel for the prostitutes who eventually betrayed him (BBA 2106/76, 82). The text of this song was almost identical to the one published in the magazine Die Dame the previous year. In the second act, third scene set in Newgate prison, Macheath tried to convince Lucy that he was not married to Polly Peachum. Lucy replied by singing the entire text of "Maria, Fürsprecherin der Frauen" (BBA 2106/97-98). The stanza that began "Hübsch als es währte" had already been sung once earlier in the play (BBA 2106/72), and now it was repeated in its full context. In general there was a good deal more in this version that one might associate with Kipling. In reference to Macheath, more is reported about his days as a soldier in India that makes him sound like a reincarnation of Terence Mulvaney: "Mit 17 lahren ging er zur Armee in Indien. Obwohl er ein tüchtiger Soldat war, mußte er doch wegen mehrerer Verbrechen zur Verantwortung gezogen werden. Zwei Jahre nach seiner Abstrafung tauchte er in London auf" (BBA 2106/97). One also reads of Macheath's and Tiger Brown's fighting days in India. While Macheath was trying to bargain his way out of prison with bribes, Tiger Brown sentimentalized about their military experiences: 1

Willett, p. 130.

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. . . Meinst du, ich habe Petschwar vergessen? MACHEATH:

(Kraftlos): 200, aber sofort. Sofort, sofort! BROWN:

Und Saipong und Asserbeidschan und Sire, wie wir im Dschungel standen, Schulter an Schulter, und die Shiks [sie] meuterten und du s a g t e s t . . . (BBA 2106/139)

As the play moved closer to actual performance, Brecht had to alter and cut drastically. Among the discarded passages were the two ballads and much of the material on India. The stage scripts reproduced by Felix Bloch Erben of Berlin in 1928 still contained them, which means they were not dropped until late in the staging. But Hauptmann prevailed on Brecht to retain at least one stanza from "Mary, Pity Women". It had already been set to music by Kurt Weill, and she felt that both the music and the text were especially good and deserved to be saved. The result was the charming eight-line refrain "Hübsch als es währte" that Polly sings when Macheath has to flee on their wedding day. The text was taken verbatim from Miss Hauptmann's translation of that poem done two years earlier for Brecht. When Polly sings it in the play, one cannot be certain where true sentiment ends and parody begins, but it is woven so perfectly into the production as the lament of an abandoned bride that one would scarcely guess its derivation: Kipling-. Nice while it lasted, an' now it is over Tear out your 'eart an' good-bye to your lover! What's the use o' grievin', when the mother that bore you (Mary, pity women!) knew it all before you? Hauptmann/Brecht". Hübsch als es währte Und nun ist's vorüber Reiß aus dein Herz Sag "leb wohl", mein Lieber!

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W a s hilft all dein Jammer Leih, Maria, dein Ohr mir! W e n n m e i n e Mutter selber Wußte all das vor mir?

(GW II, 438) Indirectly Brecht acknowledged Kipling as his source here when he set this passage in quotation marks in the original German version. It represented the only Kipling verse left in production at the time it opened. Amid the disputes and difficulties during the final hectic days before the premiere, no one thought of a trivial matter like revising the playbill and striking the notation about the Kipling ballads.2 Had he been aware of it, Brecht probably would have been delighted that the playbill succeeded in misleading his audience. He himself delighted in such "mystification" - leg-pulling to confuse his public. This is probably one of the few cases where he gave more credit to a source than was actually due. Yet Kipling was evident to first-nighters in another song that, according to eyewitnesses, brought down the house - the "Kanonensong" sung by Macheath and Tiger Brown during the first act.3 The audience did not know of its genesis as a corollary to "Der tote Kolonialsoldat" or its derivation from the Soldiers Three with an original title that read "Lied der drei Soldaten". But they clearly recognized this derivative Kipling as a replay from the world of Man is Man transferred to modern London two veterans of the British army reminisce on their military adventures in India. From it they deduced that there must have been a good deal more Kipling here. The nickname "Tiger" Brown had the same exotic ring to it that "Bloody Five" did, while the exploits recounted in the song recalled the unscrupulous attitudes of Una, Jesse, and Polly who lived in a world where laws that governed normal civilized society did not apply. This song's propinquity to Kipling goes beyond a superficial 2

For an account of the misfortunes that preceded the production of The Threepenny Opera, see Ernst Josef Aufricht, Erzähle, damit du dein Recht erweist (Berlin: Propyläen, 1966), pp. 64-74. 3 Aufricht, pp. 77-78.

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link with the mythical world of Man is Man. It has similarities in some ways with the "Barrack-Room Ballads". From the Möller translation Brecht knew at least two poems that treat of exsoldiers reminiscing on their wars against the heathens in exotic climes - "Fuzzy-Wuzzy" and "Gunga Din". A third, "Mandalay", portrays a veteran longing to return to the East, while in "The Ballad of Boh Da Thone" a newly-married but retired officer in India yearns for the excitement of army life. "Fuzzy-Wuzzy" also comes close in tone and substance to being a legitimate ancestor. There one reads of the savage fighting against some "pore benighted heathen": "Then 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an' the missis and the kid; / Our orders was to break you, an' of course we went an' did. / We sloshed you with Martinis, an' it wasn't 'ardly fair; / But for all the odds agin' you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square." In another regard, however, this song is the obverse of "FuzzyWuzzy". Brecht stressed only the savage delight these veterans felt in their slaughter of the heathen. Gone is the respect for the enemy's prowess as a fighting man. In its place is a bittersweet parody on the brutality that leads to senseless killing. Some of this is perhaps implicit in Kipling; Brecht makes it explicit and comes up with a distinctly non-Kiplingesque message in a Kiplingesque setting. Willy Haas claims that in the original script of this play Brecht made a notation following this song that read "nach Kipling". In his dispute with Kerr, Brecht is said to have submitted this as evidence to counterbalance the charges of plagiarism, for though he credited Kipling, it was in fact his own. 4 But no such notation appears in any extant stage script, nor did Brecht say any such thing in print. Even so, Haas inadvertently makes a valid point. The British writer's influence was in fact there, and it was so obvious to viewers that few would have disputed it. This Kipling-inspired "Kanonensong" later followed a characteristic pattern in Brecht's works by liberating itself increasingly from the orginal source until the identity of that source was ob4 Willy Haas, Bertolt Brecht in Köpfe loqium Verlag, 1958), p. 52.

des XX. Jahrhunderts

(Berlin: Col-

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scured. Brecht was not one to create something ex nihilo if he could re-use familiar material that he happened to be carrying around with him. In 1946 when he restructured this song into "Der neue Kanonensong" ("Fritz war SA und Karl war Partei / Und Albert bekam doch den Posten" (GWII, 491), he was scarcely thinking of any debt to Kipling. But again the three soldiers (Schmitt, Krause, Meier) who carry the action and typify this mentality trace their lineage indirectly to Kipling's Soldiers Three. The specific source for "Der Kanonensong", is, however, none of the above, but Kipling's poem "Screw-Guns" which Brecht knew from Marx Moller's translation of the "Barrack-Room Ballads". That translator had come to the assistance of his German readers by interpreting the somewhat obscure title dealing with these two-piece cannons that are screwed together and used in rocky terrain. He rendered the title simply as "Kanonen". The connection between this and Brecht's title represents a logical extension - a song about cannons by the soldiers who used them against the heathen. A cover illustration on Moller's translation also portrayed two former Indian Army soldiers singing together. One with a mustache wearing a pith helmet and a tropical uniform has his arm slung around the shoulder of another dressed in the uniform of a Buckingham Palace guard. Judging by the title printed on the cover (Balladen aus dem Biwak), one would assume they were reminiscing on their military experiences in India. This drawing, coupled with a ballad about cannons within the book, provided the essential ingredients Brecht needed for one of his most rousing songs. Another point offers further confirmatory evidence. This involves the nature of Moller's translation. By taking considerable liberties with the original, he managed to make his ballad more bloodthirsty than Kipling did, thereby setting the stage for the direction it took in Brecht's hands. Comparison of the third stanza illustrates how Moller brutalizes the tone when compared with the original: Kipling:

If a man doesn't work, why, we drills 'im an' teaches 'im 'ow to behave

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If a beggar can't march, why, we kills 'im an' rattles 'im into 'is grave. You've got to stand up to our business an' spring without snatchin' or fuss. D'you say that you sweat with the field guns? By God, you must lather with us - 'Tss! 'Tss!

Möller: Wenn so ein Kerl hier nicht ordentlich schafft, Wollen wir ihn zu Manieren schon zwingen! Fehlt so'nem Lumpen zum Laufen die Kraft, Wollen wir ihn zur Strecke schon bringen! Frisch! An die Arbeit! Wir kennen kein Schonen! Ohne mit der Wimper zu zucken! Was? Heiß machten euch unsre Kanonen? Gnade euch Gott, Kerls, Blut sollt ihr spucken! (p. 108)

Kipling's poetic voice addresses the soldiers who man the guns. It tells them what discipline and hard work are involved for those serving on a screw-gun crew opposed to the easier field guns. But Möller has introduced an ambiguity that makes it possible to read it as a threat directed against the heathen whom the soldiers are fighting. Even this is secondary to an innovation Möller made that is duplicated in Brecht's song - the rhythm as determined by the meter he selects. If one sings the first four lines of Möller's stanza above to the tempo of the Kurt Weill music using the Brecht text of the "Kanonensong" for comparison, the similarity is striking: John was darunter und Jim war dabei Und Georgie ist Sergeant geworden Doch die Armee, sie fragt keinen, wer er sei Und sie marschierte hinauf nach dem Norden.

(GW II, 419)

Rhythmically the passages are virtually interchangeable. It is Kipling's translator, not Kipling himself to whom Brecht is indebted here. Nor was it The Threepenny Opera alone that brought the Kiplingesque side of Brecht into strong public view. Both Mahagonny and Happy End contained various elements that popular thinking imagined to have originated with the writer of tales of

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the Soldiers Three. One interpreter claims that a conservative Leipzig audience that broke up the premiere of Mahagonny objected to a cynical portrayal of America qua Germany which was in fact inspired by Kipling.5 The brutal, lawless atmosphere, the jungle-like struggle for existence, and the rowdyism commonly associated with Kipling's British Indian Army tales do occur here; but they also do in Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp, which is a more likely model. Much the same can be said of Happy End - there is a good deal less Kipling here than meets the eye. No doubt the lyrics Brecht wrote for it do have that flavor, especially the "SurabayaJohnny" song modelled on "Mary, Pity Women". The rousing "Matrosen-Song" (VIII, 321) is also sung by hard-drinking, cigarsmoking seamen who share certain features with the Soldiers Three. They even sail to Burma whence Surabaya-Johnny came, an exotic setting that in Brecht's works seems to have been frequented by outcasts and desperate characters. Willett claims further that the song "Bills Ballhaus in Bilbao" is Kiplinginspired, though he gives no source.6 Again it sounds Kiplingesque, but most of this is sham, or at best pseudo-Kipling. The exploits and profanings of virile seamen or lawless soldiers in India and Southeast Asia could have been invented as easily as they could have been borrowed, for Brecht had been creating these types for his poems and plays from the beginning. The common denominator that caused audiences to associate these and other features of the play with Kipling's world was the parody of Kipling's ballad "Mandalay" that appeared in both productions. As early as 1923 Brecht had begun to write a caricature of that ballad,7 and in 1929 it appeared full-blown as a bawdy song about a far different kind of love than Kipling's British soldier was celebrating. Now "Der Song von Mandelay" is about a bordello in an exotic Southeast Asian landscape: Mutter Goddams Puff in Mandelay Sieben Bretter an 'ner griinen See. 5 Hogel, p. 429. 8 Willett, p. 91. 7 Bertolt Brecht-Archiv: Bestandverzeichnis des literarischen Nachlasses. Vol. II, Gedichte, ed. Herta Ramthun (Berlin: Aufbau, 1970), p. 56.

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"RUDYARD BRECHT": THE LATE TWENTIES Goddam, was ist das für ein Etablissement! D a stehen ja schon fünfzehn die Bretterwand entlang In der Hand die Uhr und mit Hohe! Gibt's denn nur ein Mensch in Mandelay? (GW VIII, 324)

This parody in turn sparked an episode in Mahagonny where the action dramatizes precisely what the text had described. In the fourteenth scene, a group of men waiting their turn in line outside a bordello urge each other to "strike up the 'Song of Mandalay' " while impatiently waiting their turns ("Stimmt ihn an, den Song von Mandelay" GW II, 534). And there is also a passing reference to a "Bar von Mandelay" (GW II, 519). Without some knowledge of the object being parodied, a reader would find the reference to a "Song of Mandalay" in this context meaningless. But Brecht was far too conscious of his art to use this name gratuitously. He was thumbing his nose at the nostalgic, somewhat sentimental love ballad of one of Kipling's returned soldiers. This obvious reference, the somewhat less apparent but nevertheless direct derivation of "Hübsch als es währte" and "Surabaya Johnny" from Kipling, and the tone and language in The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, and Happy End all combined to give Brecht this reputation for imitating Kipling. In 1930 Kurt Tucholsky preceded one of his poems with an epigraph that summarized the popular view of the day. It read simply "Damn! Rudyard Brecht". 8 Ironically, it appeared at a time when Kipling was withdrawing from Brecht's creative world.

8 Kurt Tucholsky, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Mary Gerold-Tucholsky and Fritz J. Raddatz (Reinbek/Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961), III, p. 544.

IX KIPLING IN A MARXIST WORLD

Contrary to expectation, Brecht did not abjure his debt to Kipling after maturing politically in the late twenties and turning to Communism. Critics frequently insist that the influence abates after the mid 1920's,1 a time when he embraces Marxist doctrine fully. This is at least partially true, though John Willett correctly notes that Kipling casts his shadow over the entire length of Brecht's work.2 But after coming of age politically, his stance becomes ambivalent. Most frequently Kipling served as a whipping boy for British imperialism, though a begrudging admiration also broke through periodically. The didactic plays of the 1928-1931 period, which represent his own creative efforts to come to terms with theoretical Marxism, are nearly devoid of anything drawn from that writer. Gone is the world of adventurers, of Kraftmenschen, and of far-off India (or America) that stood under Kipling's star. Only once does he borrow from Kipling for one of these plays. The song "Der kranke Mann stirbt und der starke Mann ficht" (which he wrote years earlier) in The Exception and the Rule fuses lines taken from at least two separate Kipling sources into a condemnation of imperialism. But almost as if to emphasize his ambivalent attitude, he then employs the same formulation in two separate section headings of The Threepenny Novel for nonpropagandistic purposes. In the third book one reads a title "Der kranke Mann stirbt" (GW XIII, 1060), followed by another section entitled "Der starke Mann ficht" (GW XIII, 1069). Here no 1 1

Schumann, p. 41. Willett, pp. 90-91.

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apparent moral judgment is passed. Kipling is not clearly visible in either case, and were one not to know the source, one would hardly perceive him. During his visit to London in 1934, Brecht wrote a verse fragment entitled "The Caledonian Market" ("Der Kaledonische Markt", (GW IX, 534). In it he lashes out at the inequality he saw in British society. He quotes the opening lines of the "Ballad of East and West" in German and attributes them to the "paid bard" of colonialism: "Zwischen Ost und West gibt's keine Brücken" Hat ihr bezahlter Barde geschrien. U n d doch sah ich hinter des Ozeans Rücken Solche Brücken und sah sie darüber ziehn.

In 1934 he also wrote a series of children's poems entitled "Alfabet" (GW IX, 511) consisting of a quatrain devoted to each letter of the alphabet. The letter "i" does not mention the unofficial poet laureate of the Empire by name when it treats of India, but in a stanza with an Ogden Nash-like rhyme one hears how Brecht now views the country he associated most intimately with him: "Indien ist ein reiches Land. / Die Engländer stehlen dort allerhand. / Die Leute in Indien / Müssen sich drein findien." Sometime during 1939-1940, Brecht also saw the English film "Gunga Din" based on Kipling's ballad of that title. He erroneously stated that it was based on a "short story by Kipling" ("Film . . . der nach einer Novelle Kiplings gebaut ist" GW XV, 430), probably because a trio of military men suspiciously similar to Kipling's "Soldiers Three" appeared in it, though they were officers and not enlisted men. He criticized the imperialist mentality that could portray British soldiers so positively and the indigenous population as though several thousand years of Indian culture had never existed. He also castigated the misuse of a medium like the film to lull the public into mindless acceptance of such attitudes (GW XV, 430).3 But his lapse in calling "Gunga 3

For a still photo of a scene from the film he saw, see John Willett, Brecht on Theatre. The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1964), following p. 144.

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Din" a story by Kipling demonstrates how ideological considerations had blurred his recollection of a ballad he had read more than twenty years earlier. In 1934 and again in 1936, the year of Kipling's death, he visited London. But he never bothered to meet one of his favorite childhood authors, no doubt in part because of his new political orientation. One also wonders if he did not wish to avoid seeing a childhood idol toppled, particularly one who seized his imagination and still had not let go. The "popular" aspect of Kipling's art that drew him initially also explains further why Brecht's later political ideology did not lead him to renounce that writer completely. Brecht and most Marxists in the thirties felt a strong commitment to reach the working classes by giving their art the broadest possible appeal. Kipling had mastered the technique, and Brecht admired it. No doubt, too, he admired the masterly use of "proletarian" speech as well as the essentially sympathetic portrayal of the lower classes found in many of Kipling's poems and stories. Passages from his theoretical writings during the thirties also reveal a certain respect. In an essay on non-Aristotelian dramatic theory ("über rationellen und emotionellen Standpunkt", GW XV, 242) he maintains that his didactic plays, the most rational form of art, likewise have the strongest emotional impact. Emotions in art have their roots in social classes and special interests, a fact that can be observed in a comparison of Rimbaud's "Bateau ivre" with Kipling's "Ballad of East and West": "Und, was beinahe noch beweiskräftiger ist, man kann ohne Schwierigkeit durch einen Vergleich etwa des 'Bateau ivre' mit Kiplings 'Ballade von Ost und West' Verschiedenheiten des französischen Imperialismus der Mitte des neunzehnten und des englischen vom Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts feststellen. Schwieriger ist es, wie schon Marx bemerkt, die Wirkung solcher Gedichte auf uns zu erklären" (GW XV, 243). Here he stops short of an outright condemnation of Kipling and even implies that the English writer's ballad might have affected him positively, which it had indeed at one time. It contained several of the elements that fascinated him during the Augsburg years - clashing worlds, the everpresent threat of violence, and the conflict between two strong men try-

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ing to subdue each other (a struggle which bears a faint resemblance to the one-on-one conflict carried out In the Jungle of the Cities). At one point in 1938 he used Kipling material without resorting to any name-calling or censure at all. During his Danish exile Brecht wrote both plot summaries and longer stories intended for use as movies. In one such film story called "Die Fliege" (1938) he turned again to the British balladeer's material for the sake of artistry rather than ideology. "Die Fliege" gives an account of Dr. Walter Reed's dramatic experiments in Cuba which proved that mosquitoes caused yellow fever. Brecht embellished the historical facts with some artistic flourishes. Reed, for example, convinced that mosquitoes were the carriers, reduced it to a logical assertion that Brecht has him mutter throughout: "two times two is four", a rationally empirical outlook reminiscent of his Francis Bacon story "Das Experiment". Kipling enters at a moment when one of the volunteers for the experiment, a soldier named Kissinger (Brecht faithfully retained the historical names) is passing time in a bungalow waiting to be infected by a mosquito. One hears him singing a truncated version of "Cholera Camp" which seems to sum up the man's feelings at the moment: Und aus dem Bungalow heraus, worin der Soldat Kissinger und der Angestellte Moran saßen und auf den Gelben Jack warteten, kam ein Gesang, und der Soldat Kissinger sang Kiplings Ballade vom Cholera Camp, in der es sehr schön heißt: We've got the cholerer in camp - it's worse than forty fights; We're dyin' in the wilderness the same as Isrulites. It's before us, an' be'ind us, an' we cannot get away, An' the doctor's just reported we've ten more to-day! There ain't no fun in women nor there ain't no bite to drink; It's much too wet for shootin'; we can only march and think; An' at evenin', down the nullahs, we can 'ear the jackals say, "Get up, you rotten beggars, you've ten more to-day!" Our Colonel's white an' twitterly - 'e gets no sleep nor food, But mucks about in 'orspital where nothing does no good. 'E send us 'eaps o' comfort all bought from 'is pay But there aren't much comfort 'andy on ten deaths a day. Dieser Gesang verstummte eines schönen Morgens, denn jetzt lag der

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Soldat Kissinger mit 40 Grad Fieber und unaushaltbaren Schmerzen, und Moran konnte ihm auch nicht helfen. 4

The English text here represents stanzas one, three, and five of the original. They were copied (with slight errors) from an edition of Kipling's poems given to him two years earlier during a visit to London. Apparently the other stanzas were consciously deleted. The curious way Brecht seemed to equate cholera with yellow fever here and elsewhere was no accident. He knew the difference. His penchant for finding common denominators in disparate elements had led him to a similar attempt in "Die Geschichte vom gelben Jack" ("dann kam die cholera, und sie hiessen ihn den gelben jack", BBA 459/29). Around the mid-twenties he had read some of Paul de Kruif's works, probably Microbe Hunters among others. It was published in a German translation of 1926 that devoted an entire chapter to Walter Reed's fight against yellow fever and called the fever by the same nickname he used "yellow jack". Hauptmann reports that Brecht had plans to dramatize some of the incidents in de Kruif's book. Though he changed some aspects for the sake of a good story, there is little doubt that de Kruif supplied at least the basic plot elements for "Die Fliege". If, then, he had not already known the nickname or the difference between cholera and yellow fever, he did by 1926. His persistence in equating the two sprang from artistic motivations. From his earliest poems Brecht delighted in portraying men, usually soldiers or seamen, at some lone outpost or on some lone ship who faced an utterly hopeless situation that usually ended in death. "Der Tsingtausoldat" (GW VIII, 11); "Das Lied der Eisenbahntruppe von Fort Donald" (GW VIII, 13); "Von des Cortez Leuten" (GW VIII, 222); "Ballade von den Seeräubern" (GW VIII, 224); and "Der Matrosen-Song" (GW VIII, 321) are but a few examples where he explored men's behavior in a situation of hopelessness. Sometimes the reaction was despair, sometimes fear, sometimes defiance, often an admixture of these and 4

Bertolt Brecht, Texte für Filme (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), eds. Werner Hecht and Wolfgang Gersch, II, 422.

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other emotions. Kipling's ballad dealt with this kind of extreme situation where cholera raked a unit; the men lived from day to day waiting their turn to die. It appealed to Brecht. Whether this extremity manifested itself in the form of yellow fever or cholera or a hostile forest or a malevolent jungle or a raging ocean seemed secondary. In the case of cholera and yellow fever, both were so devastatingly final that with a little imagination they could be interchanged. He did just that, and the artistic result was the soldier Kissinger singing Kipling's "Cholera Camp" while waiting to die of yellow fever in Cuba. The statement that the ballad delivers its message so well ("Kiplings B a l l a d e . . . in der es sehr schön heißt") emphasizes that Brecht was after appropriateness of attitude for a given situation and not strict scientific literalness. But the film was never produced, and the chance to see Brecht display Kipling in yet another work was lost. When he visited London in 1936, Brecht received a gift from one Gerda Singer, a native-born German who was living there. He had known her earlier from her Berlin days, and mutual friends in London again brought them together. The gift: a complete edition of Kipling's poems.5 If he had lost interest, this seems to have rekindled it. The circumstances surrounding the gift are obscure. Had he requested that she buy it for him? Had she heard him talking about Kipling during his visit? Nothing is known beyond her inscription inside the front cover: "Für Brecht - London, 1936. Gerda Singer". But a newspaper clipping that Brecht pasted inside the final pages (p. 806) of this edition, a book he retained until the end of his life, adds a bit of information about his ambivalent attitude. The clipping comes from The New York Times of February 6, 1936 (p. 15). Perhaps Miss Singer gave it to him, or a friend sent it. It deals with a Kipling memorial exhibition held in Harvard University's Widener Library during February of that year. The caption and the lead paragraph of the article 5

The book given to Brecht, which he retained until his death, was Rudyard Kipling's Verse: 1885-1932. Inclusive Edition (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., third impression 1936). All subsequent references to this edition will designate it as Kipling's "inclusive edition".

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read: "Unpublished and Rejected Kipling Poem on the World War Is Shown at Harvard. The following poem by Rudyard Kipling, hitherto unpublished, was rejected by an English magazine when the poet and author was at the height of his career. It is now included in a memorial exhibition of Kipling's works on display in the Widener Library at Harvard University." There follows the complete text of a poem entitled "Sons of the Suburbs". Brecht was ignorant of the circumstances surrounding the poem's rejection, though he might have guessed them from the contents. In 1916 Kipling had submitted it to the English weekly magazine Blighty, which was published for the troops and distributed free during the war. Its editorial board, which was said to be composed primarily of "old ladies of both sexes", objected to the poem on two counts: (1) its glorification of drink generally; and (2) the reference to a clergyman's daughter drinking. Kipling refused to alter it as recommended, and it never progressed beyond the printer's proofs, one of which found its way into Harvard's Kipling collection. 6 Even without this knowledge, Brecht's ability for selective enjoyment would have allowed him to relish this poem by one of his boyhood favorites regardless of differing political orientation. The Kipling he met here was having a bit of irreverent fun at the expense of British piety. Several lines from the chorus read: When the clergyman's daughter drinks nothing but water She's certain to finish on gin. If the aunt of the Vicar has never touched liquor Look out when she finds the champagne. But the bitterly ironic glorification of militarism and war probably attracted him most of all. The first stanza reads: The sons of the suburbs were carefully bred And quite unaccustomed to strife. For the lessons they learned in the books that they read 6

All material relating to this poem is found under call number EC 9.K6287.917s, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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KIPLING IN A MARXIST WORLD Had taught them the value of life. From Erith to Ealing they cherished a feeling That slaughter and battle were sin; From Hendon to Tooting they didn't like shooting And didn't intend to begin.

The poem then charts their transformation into bloodthirsty fighting men. They enter the war and fight at the outset in true British fashion - firmly but politely. But "Herman the Hun" does not, for "The tribes of the Teutons were otherwise trained / And broken to bloodshed from birth". As these refined young men gradually awaken to the fact "that killing has points of its own", things change: "finding it sport, I regret to report, / That they did it again and again". Brecht it seems was drawn to those factors in Kipling that Anglo-Saxon commentators have overlooked, but that allowed a dedicated Marxist to find common ground with an imperialist: an irony that raises serious doubts about Kipling's blindness to the evils of the British Empire. When he first read the "Sons of the Suburbs", the title would have sounded familiar for another reason. The "sons of the suburbs" ("die Söhne der Vorstädte") was a term Brecht had used to refer to his boyhood friends from Augsburg.7 It turns up from time to time in his notes and poems. Two such notes from the mid or late thirties may have been modelled on the Kipling formulation. The first appears on a slip of paper with another entry referring to the poem "Legende von der Entstehung des Buches Taoteking auf dem Weg des Laotse in die Emigration", which suggests 1937 or 1938 as a date. Apparently it was intended to be a poem that never materialized. The opening line recalls the Kipling poem where the "sons of the suburbs" went off to fight for England in World War I. Here, too, they are cast as soldiers: "Die Söhne der Vorstädte hatten gekämpft von Bagdad bis Nama. Sie legten die Gewehre weg" (BBA 9/16). Another fragment from this period refers simply to "Biddi und die Söhne der Vorstädte" (BBA 11/15), "Biddi" being a nickname for Brecht himself. This 7

According to information received from Miss Herta Ramthun, Bertolt Brecht Archives, in a letter dated July 4, 1968, and Reinhold Grimm in a letter of October 24, 1968.

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note relates to another poem written around 1937-1938 called "Die ärmeren Mitschüler aus den Vorstädten" (GW IX, 581) in which Brecht recalls his school days in Augsburg and the injustices perpetrated by a rigid class system against poorer pupils from the suburbs. In contrast to Kipling's sheltered young men, the "sons of the suburbs" in Germany came from a lower economic and social background than the city dwellers. Here Kipling's formulation is turned on its head and applied to the lower social strata in a stinging indictment of class distinctions. Two passages from the late thirties and early forties that have Kipling as their source employ the image of an elephant to demonstrate the effects of living in the jungle of imperialist capitalism. Years earlier in the stories "My Lord the Elephant", "MotiGuj-Mutineer", "Toomai of the Elephants", and "Her Majesty's Servants" (all of which he knew), Brecht had learned about the hierarchal division of labor among elephants, how the overseer elephants had tusks which they used to enforce work rules, and how several of them punished a renegade elephant by whipping him with chains or goring him with their tusks. None of this had left him. When he wrote The Good Woman of Setzuan between 1938-1940, he returned to these ideas for his song "Das Lied vom achten Elefanten" (GW IV, 1582) where the eighth elephant with the tusks is the overseer who forces the other seven captives to work. 8 Here Brecht had chosen an obscure but valid symbol for his ideological argument that workers are not only exploited, but that they often aid the exploiters. Again in the mid forties he returned to the same image, this time in the Kriegsfibel. Beneath two news photos of a German and a Russian tank driver, he uses what he learned about elephants from Kipling as a commentary on humans: Ein Bruderpaar, seht, das in Panzern fuhr Zu kämpfen um des einen Bruders Land! So grausam ist zum Elefanten nur Sein Bruder, der gezähmte Elefant. (GW X, 1045) 8

Neumann, p. 86.

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Here imperialist elephants again help him teach an ideological lesson against war. Sometime before 1941 he had become familiar enough with Kipling's well-known poem "If" to use it in a most unexpected place. An almost verbatim translation of two-and-one-half stanzas of this poem is disguised in the collection of Chinese wisdom literature known as the Me-ti Buch der Wendungen under the heading "Ideals of a Man in Former Times" ("Ideale eines Mannes in früheren Zeiten", GW XII, 566). A comparison of texts is informative for the similarities and differences it shows: Kipling, "If" If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too: If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good nor talk too wise: If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; Brecht, "Ideale eines Mannes in früheren Zeiten" Den Kopf behalten, wenn alle ihn verlieren; sich selber vertrauen, wenn alle an einem zweifeln; aber ihnen ihren Zweifel erlauben; warten können und nicht müde werden vom Warten; darüber Lügen hören, aber nicht teilnehmen an Lügen; oder gehasst werden und keinen Grund dazu geben und doch nicht zu gut aussehen und nicht zu weise reden; träumen können und nicht von Träumen beherrscht werden; denken können und Gedanken nicht zu seinem Ziel machen; Triumph und Unglück treffen und diese beiden Betrüger gleich behandeln; er-

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tragen können, die Wahrheit, die man gesprochen hat, verdreht zu hören von Schurken, die daraus eine Falle für Leichtgläubige machen; die Dinge zerbrochen sehen, an die man sein Leben gab, und sich bücken und sie wieder zusammenflicken mit abgenutzten Werkzeugen; einen Haufen aus allen seinen Gewinnen machen können und ihn riskieren an einen Wurf; und verlieren und wieder von vorn anfangen und niemals ein Wort sagen über seinen Verlust;

Though a more literal translation could hardly be imagined, significant changes have been made. First and most obvious is the elimination of the stanzaic structure and the rhyme scheme, an alteration that effectively conceals the nature of its original source. Secondly, the text breaks off midway through the third stanza of Kipling's original poem. In the twenty-volume 1967 edition, the editor of Brecht's prose remarks that this selection is a fragment. Hauptmann thinks that he might never have incorporated it into the final Me-ti as was done here because he had not finished it to his satisfaction. But chances are that he meant it that way. A typescript copy of an English version of this poem exists in the Brecht Archives (BBA 238/75). It looks as though it had been copied exactly from the text on pages 560-561 of the "inclusive edition" that Brecht owned. The terms "Triumph" and "Disaster", "Will", "Kings", and "Earth" are all capitalized as they were in the original; with the exception of a comma and a semicolon, the punctuation is identical, even including the dash following the title word; and the physical appearance reproduces that of the printed version right down to the indenting of every second line. Probably Margarete Steffin, one of Brecht's closest collaborators during his European exile, typed it for him and perhaps even rendered it into German. His working notes for the Me-Ti stories also contain an entry that lists "kiplings if" [sic] among the material he planned to use (BBA 134/26). But a telltale checkmark in his own handwriting on the typescript of the English text offers the most convincing evidence that he never intended to use the entire poem. It occurs at the end of the second stanza below the word "build". He undoubtedly wanted to signal the translator to stop there and to use only this much of the poem. This in turn suggests that the text to that point represented

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an organic whole to him and was not fragmentary. Either he or the translator felt it necessary to add four more lines, but the decision to omit the last four lines was no doubt his own. Their reference to walking with kings without losing the common touch, their homiletic injunction to fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, and their promise that such virtues make a man hardly fit his thinking at this or any other time. The elimination of these last four lines leads to the third major change. The conditional "if" clauses that comprise the bulk of the poem demand a conclusion. By dropping as he does the lines containing this conclusion, he can eliminate the "if". Through this small stylistic facelifting, and by giving the poem a title, he transformed conditional clauses into pungent aphoristic maxims that have the ring of Oriental wisdom literature about them. With a minimum of tampering and pruning he wrought maximum change, a testimony to his sure stylistic sense. Brecht had taken a somewhat homely bit of Anglo-Saxon edification literature and put it in a pseudo-Oriental setting. Kipling had involuntarily been transported to the East again. And who would argue that the change was for the worse?

X THE FINAL YEARS

Based on a diary entry of November 20, 1945, it would seem that by this time Brecht had conformed his views on Kipling to what the complete Marxist should be expected to think of an imperialist. He was responding to news of Ezra Pound's arrest in Italy and deportation to the United States when he noted: "EZRA POUND in Italien arretiert und wird als Verräter hierhergebracht. Etwas von feudaler Würde hängt um diese GEORGE, KIPLING, D'ANNUNCIO, POUND. Immerhin historische Figuren, nicht gerade auf den Märkten zu finden, eher in den Tempeln-am Rand der Märkte" (BBA 282/26). This act of grouping Kipling with three pronounced representatives of I'art pour I'art, which Brecht in turn equated with decadent bourgeois writing, constituted the bitterest verdict that could be brought against Kipling. These words are typical of the harsh, one-sided judgments that the Marxist Brecht often made and later mitigated through his actions. Though he no longer acknowledged Kipling as a collaborator, neither did he disavow what he had learned from him or the spiritual affinity he once felt. The British poet seems to have taken his place as a household friend alongside the Chinese philosophers he knew and admired. The Brecht family remembers hearing him talk about Kipling throughout the exile years and after returning to Germany. When he settled in East Berlin, he took with him the English edition of Kipling's inclusive poems given to him in London in 1936 and the Hanns Sachs collection of ballads (Soldatenlieder) that had once belonged to Margarete Steffin. And though his work building up the Berlin Ensemble left him little time for extensive reading in his last years, some-

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time in the 1950's he also acquired the German translation of another work by this author - the novel Kipling had written with Wolcott Balestier in 1892 entitled The Naulahka. Apparently the discovery of a lesser-known work by one of his childhood favorites still aroused his curiosity sufficiently to prompt him to buy it. Nor do these books found in his library constitute the only evidence that Kipling remained with him. The British poet also continued to make his presence felt in various writing projects until shortly before Brecht's death. As a boy or young man, and certainly before the age of eighteen, Brecht had read Kipling's Just So Stories. Now in the early 1950's he was thinking seriously and talking of a children's theater in East Berlin. He was also writing children's poetry at the time. Almost involuntarily, he returned to the Kipling of his youth for material. One unpublished note indicates that he planned either a children's poem or play based on the fifth of Kipling's Just So Stories entitled "The Elephant's Child" (popularly known as "How the Elephant Got its Trunk"). The notes in Brecht's handwriting are located on a typescript of the poem "Vom kriegerischen Lehrer".1 One reads: "Vom Stier Ferdinand", a reference to the children's story of "Ferdinand the Bull" that he might have known from the American Walt Disney film version. A second reads: "Vater-da war ein Kinn behaart", which might be an early version of the poem "Onkel Ede". The third states: "Kipling. Wie der Elefant seinen Rüssel bekam". Whether Brecht wanted to use it for a poem or play is unclear, since he never developed it beyond the conceptual stage. But it is clear that Kipling at this point was still very much on his mind. In 1950 Wieland Herzfelde, with Brecht's approval, began to assemble a collection of Brecht's poems that appeared the following year under the title Hundert Gedichte. On a page proof for this edition beneath the "Ballade vom Weib und dem Soldaten" Brecht penciled in the remark "Nach Kipling". It was not that he was seized by some need to confess more than three decades 1

BBA 74/36.

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after writing the poem. In earlier years he had also been disarmingly candid about his sources. But his more reflective relationship to Kipling gave him some distance he had not had in earlier decades, and he used it to correct an oversight. In 1955 he was asked to suggest books to be placed in a library of the National People's Army (nationale Volksarmee) of East Germany. He responded with a list that represented an amazing breadth of reading in world literature as well as in technical and specialized areas. He listed two titles by Kipling - The Light that Failed and The Jungle Books (BBA 2214/39). Both works by that writer were among the first he had read as a boy. There is a note of gentle irony in his exclusion of any stories about the Soldiers Three. Their notorious exploits, which likely had made a stronger impression on him than did any other single aspect of Kipling, were hardly models of behavior for men serving in the fledging army of the German Democratic Republic in 1955. During his 1954 adaptation of Farquhar's drama The Recruiting Officer, Brecht wrote a song for his version not found in the original. Willett sees it as a pastiche of Kipling,2 and one can easily hear overtones of the "Barrack-Room Ballads" or of Mulvaney and his comrades singing as Captain Plume presents his ballad extolling the soldiers' skill in making love. The theme and sentiment are distinctly Brecht's, but the bravado, the matter-offact language, the structure of the ballad, and the gentle irony could have come straight out of Kipling - or for that matter, from the young Brecht's poetry. In a sense Brecht had come full circle, for he was returning to the Kipling of the "Barrack-Room Ballads", The Jungle Books, the Just So Stories, and the Soldiers Three. This was the Kipling he knew best and continued to admire. Just why he continued to find him congenial throughout his life raises one of the most difficult questions to answer about that enigmatic German writer.

' Reported by Willett at Rutgers University, April 3, 1971. See also Willett's essay "The Poet Beneath The Skin", Brecht heute/Brecht Today. Jahrbuch der internationalen Brecht-Gesellschaft II (Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum, 1972), 88-104.

XI "NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET"? CONCLUSIONS

The contradiction inherent in the attraction that this "true-blue tory" writer held for the "true-red communist" has fascinated critics. John Willett, however, the first to perceive that Kipling's works cast their shadow over the entire length of Brecht's works, is the only one who has pursued this aspect of an improbable relationship to any conclusions.1 For him, "Kipling is an unsolved puzzle, even more than that strange (and largely undisclosed) man Brecht". 2 The numerous parallels between the two writers' lives suggested to Willett by Carrington's Kipling biography offer some illuminating facts for the present study. Willett points out that both men were steeped in the language of the Bible and the hymn-book; Kipling was personally acquainted with General Booth of the Salvation Army, while Brecht knew Booth from a biographical sketch, and the Salvation Army from first-hand experience.3 Both men were basically "unliterary", i.e. they respected people for the direction of their actions rather than the quality of their feelings. Both wrote as if they regarded their own gifts less as a mark of superiority than as an obligation. Both played down their own personalities and were contemptuous 1 John Willett, "Kipling", Poetry Review 62 (Spring, 1971), 67-75. "Trueblue tory" and "true-red communist" are terms Willett coins. See also Willett's unpublished manuscript for a stage production entitled "Never the Twain", dealing with Brecht and Kipling. 2 Willett, "Kipling", p. 72. 3 James K. Lyon, "The Source of Brecht's 'Vorbildliche Bekehrung eines Branntweinhándlers'", Modern Language Notes (October, 1969) pp. 802-806, which reports on Brecht's readings about General Booth. Further information supplied by Elisabeth Hauptmann, interviews on April 15 and 18,1969.

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of psychological interpretations, and both borrowed freely from other writers. Though neither cared much for the abstract concept of " l a b o r " , each sought to gear his own aesthetic to work: Kipling by his concern with the detailed " s h o p " of the new technology, and the men who talked it; Brecht by his love of the outward signs, performed on the stage or imprinted on an object, of a j o b well done. Willett observes that both men also had a splendid ear for dialogue. Further, Kipling and Brecht often wrote with musical settings in mind, and the proximity of their verse to the musichall is evident. B o t h tended to conceal their personal lives and not allow them to show in their works. What Willett says of Kipling could just as well apply to Brecht with only slight modification: " H e was indeed a born highbrow, exceedingly widely read, who, however, took great pains to conceal his artistic background and everything else to do with his personal l i f e . " 4 A n d the same "plebian tradition" that led Brecht to popular forms and clear language also marks Kipling's verse in its penchant for the dialect and slang that was the current coin of the barrack-room in the British Indian Colonial Army. In short, both shared a lowlevel strain that prompted them to give their art the broadest popular appeal. Willett concludes with considerable accuracy that " t o put it at its crudest, Brecht and the pre-1896 Kipling did seem to have something of a common approach to writing". 5 A s the material in this study has demonstrated, it was essentially the early Kipling that the German writer knew, the poet of the " B a r r a c k - R o o m B a l l a d s " , The Jungle Books, Soldiers Three, and other works from that writer's Indian period. Regardless of what he later read by the British author, it was always measured against or examined from the perspective of the Kipling he knew as a youth. This fact leads Willett to another conclusion about Kipling which comes perhaps closer than anyone has come to explaining what brought Brecht to him in spite of seemingly divergent ideological views. H e says: « s

Willett, "Kipling", p. 72. Ibid., p. 74.

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Judged by these early writings he [Kipling] was a populist, a literary innovator, a social critic who would qualify for any book of Radical Verse . . . , with his belief that "it will be the common people - the 3rd class carriages - that'll save us" . . . He might even have become a socialist in the wake of Morris . . . , but as it turned out he became something very different: not, as Professor Carrington makes clear, "the poet of orthodox conservatism" which he has sometimes been taken for, but "the very opposite of that, his admiration was always for the irregulars".6

"Populist", "literary innovator", "social critic", a belief that it would be the "common people that'll save us", and an admiration for the "irregulars" - any one of these statements would aptly describe the pre- or post Marxian Brecht almost as well as they fit Kipling. They also suggest the points of spiritual affinity that Brecht perceived so clearly. These were the constants in his youthful world view that led him quite naturally to Marxism, while they led Kipling in the opposite direction. When Brecht embraced Marxism as an ordering principle in his life, it was the result of a normal evolution or progression from certain views of man that had existed from the beginning. No matter that Kipling followed another ideological route; the essence of their closeness is found in a pre-ideological congeniality of attitudes toward man and art that persisted after their ideologies separated. From the beginning there were doubtless elements of both "selective affinity" as well as ignorance in this relationship. Kipling's Soldiers Three are blatant examples of a colonial army of occupation that exploits the local populace. Brecht either chose to ignore this, or he was not yet "politically mature" enough to be disturbed by it (he often took this position in later years regarding his early views).7 That he enjoyed their exploits, however, is indisputable. Another example of Brecht's ability to focus only on what he wished and to filter out other considerations might be seen in The Light that Failed, which he probably read sometime during World War I. Essentially it deals with the problem of the artist, in this case the artist in a war surrounded by war correspondents and fighting men. The "portrait of the artist" » Ibid., p. 73. "Mein politisches Wissen war damals beschämend gering ...", GW XIX, 397.

7

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theme would have had little appeal for Brecht. But the work can also be read as a powerful argument that great art, which in some cases arises out of human suffering, cannot emerge from the senseless slaughter of modern war.8 The painter Dick Heldar's two masterpieces were not his war sketches, and Brecht was bright enough to have grasped this, particularly at a time when his apparent enthusiasm at the outbreak of World War I was shifting to outspoken pacifism.® Here again he apparently aligned Kipling with his own views because, rightly or wrongly, material in this novel allowed him to see that writer as a pacifist at a time when he was becoming one himself. Beyond these selective affinities were other legitimate ones that Brecht must have sensed without knowing completely why. Both men were endowed from the outset with a strong social conscience. The young Kipling spoke out against social injustice even more strongly and bitterly than the young Brecht, who knew nothing of the scathing indictment of conditions in the Empire found in poems such as "Cleared" or "Gehazi". Nor had he read the sardonic poems that condemned social injustice, corrupt politics, and governmental bungling and stupidity, such as "The Old Issue", "The Lesson", "The Declaration of London", "The Wage Slaves", or "The Hyenas". The opening chapter of Brecht's Threepenny Novel with its description of a discharged soldier wounded in the Boer War who is now reduced to begging in London might have come straight from one of Kipling's poems criticizing the Boer War fiasco, such as "Chant Pagan" or "The Absent-Minded Beggar". It did not, despite striking similarities, for Brecht did not know them. But a similar strain of protest against things as they are can also be faintly heard throughout the "Barrack-Room Ballads" and in the early short stories, and Brecht perceived it. The Kipling from whom he learned was not the Kipling who has come to be associated with "The White Man's Burden", but the writer with a lively social conscience who as a young man was something of an iconoclast. 8

Dunman, p. 7. Reinhold Grimm, "Brecht's Beginnings", The Drama Review 12 (Fall, 1967), 22-34; Klaus Volker, Brecht Chrortik (Munich: Hanser, 1971).

9

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Another point of convergence has something to do with a basic outlook that was tempered by an abundance of old-fashioned "horse sense", a no-nonsense approach to life that despised artiness or artifice and that tried to follow the dictates of good judgment. The poet of Swabian peasant extraction and the son of an English architect and sculptor both subscribed to a utilitarian world view which emphasized that which was "reasonable". Kipling's criticisms of the British Empire, whether directed against a pompous M.P. visiting India ("Pagett, M.P.") or a commission that exonerated bureaucratic murder ("Cleared") have many counterparts in the German poet who hoped to see a reasonable world emerge from the "chaos of the planet". While Kipling was anything but a Marxist, his hatred of inhumanity, stupidity and injustice sprang from a desire for a "reasonable" order of things similar to that which led Brecht to embrace an ideology that promised to establish precisely such an order. Kipling's interests and belief in the "irregulars" or "common people" correspond in many ways to Brecht's early spiritual alliance with underdogs, outcasts (including criminals and adventurers), the downtrodden, and the forgotten people of society who for him later became the proletariat. In spite of, or perhaps because of his bourgeois background, Kipling also took a lively interest in one such element of British life, viz. the British soldier. Carrington points out that he pioneered in the literary treatment of this class: "Search English literature, and you will find no treatment of the English soldier on any adequate scale between Shakespeare and Kipling."10 By drawing heavily on their language, he had created a literary idiom based on common speech. Brecht, too, did much the same thing for German letters, though he found a precursor in Martin Luther, whose Bible translation he admittedly admired for its use of the pungent idiom of the people. But he was the first in twentieth century German letters to revive such language and use it in serious literature. If one were to strip his language of the hundreds of proverbs, aphorisms, bromides, admonitions, and clichés that constitute 10

Charles Carrington, Rudyard Macmillan, 1955), p. 106.

Kipling.

His Life and Work (London:

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daily speech, it would decimate his works and leave them poor indeed. The very features for which George Orwell faulted Kipling in a highbrow bit of critical demolition were those that Brecht found most appealing - the "shameful pleasure" one derives from the vitality and directness of his ballads; the "vulgar" quality of his verse; its proximity to the music hall; and their quality as rhyming proverbs, as "graceful monuments to the obvious".11 Their common interest in common speech as a literary harvest to be reaped by an enterprising writer was a natural outgrowth of this view. Brecht's plagiarism is now famous to the point of notoriety. A sonnet written in 1930 about plagiarizing François Villon's ballads contains views almost identical to those uttered in Kipling's poem "When 'Omer Smote 'is Bloomin' Lyre". He wrote: "Nehm jeder sich heraus, was er grad braucht! / Ich selber hab mir was herausgenommen" (GW VIII, 332). Kipling was not normally that candid, but he probably borrowed nearly as freely as Brecht did. An adequate study of Kipling's "plagiarism" has not been written, but chances are strong that when it is, many of the sources will be sub-literary materials, popular songs, or goods bearing the imprint "property of the common people", just as Brecht's do. Willett reports, for example, that the British writer went back to a 1609 songbook by Thomas Ravenscroft for the title of his Soldiers Three,™ a fact that would have delighted Brecht had he known the provenience of an idea that sparked a number of his own poems and songs. He did not, but again without knowing why, he sensed that here was a kindred spirit. For the early Kipling and for Brecht generally, their outlook on man and society shaped their views of art, and not the other way around. Kipling was fascinated by the vitality of the "forgotten classes" he wrote about. Something of Myself abounds in reports of discussions and experiences with seamen, barmaids, and soldiers who provided him with raw material for his tales and poems. In Abaft the Funnel, he describes hearing a singer in 11

George Orwell, "Rudyard Kipling", in Five Approaches of Literary Criticism, ed. Wilbur Scott (New York: Collier Books, 1962), pp. 161-176. 12 Willett, "Kipling", p. 71.

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CONCLUSIONS

a music-hall (John Willett thinks it might have been at Gatti's18) sing the ballad "At the Back of the Knightsbridge Barracks", which Kipling claims to have written down specifically for the unidentified performer. Its stirring success with the audience delighted Kipling and simultaneously caused him to wonder: "Who shall tell the springs that move the masses?",14 a question that both he and Brecht set out to answer. The German balladeer's early ventures into pubs and taverns to sing his own works, his interest in the Augsburg Plärrer (traveling fair) with its Moritaten and Bänkelsänger, and later productions of his plays where he used workers' choruses or school children who were then asked to criticize the works, all correspond to Kipling's keen interest in the "third-class-carriage set". This was not a case of high-brow slumming. Their interest in writing "songs of the people" was genuine, for each had discovered independently (and early) that the lower classes possessed legitimate art forms more vital than what they considered to be the effete poetry of contemporary literati, and both set out to ally themselves with the art forms of "the people". Kipling never knew Brecht personally, and probably he was unaware of his works. But if one were to substitute German place names and add the name "Bertolt Brecht" to a statement from Abaft the Funnel that was written while Brecht was still a boy, it would sound as though Kipling were foretelling the advent of this writer who owed so much to him: But it needs a more mighty intellect to write the Songs of the People. Some day a man will rise up from Bermondsey, Battersea or Bow, and he will be coarse, but clear-sighted, hard but infinitely and tenderly humorous, speaking the people's tongue, steeped in their lives and telling them in swinging, urging, dinging verse what it is that their inarticulate lips would express. H e will make them songs. Such songs! A n d all the little poets who pretend to sing to the people will scuttle away like rabbits . . , 16

Sometime after 1936 when he received a copy of Kipling's 13

Willett, "Kipling", p. 70. Rudyard Kipling, "My Great and Only" in Abaft the Funnel (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1909), p. 273. 15 Ibid., pp. 269-270. 14

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Inclusive Poems during a visit to London, Brecht pencilled two page numbers on the final blank page of that edition. The first refers to the poem "When 'Omer Smote 'is Bloomin' Lyre", one he admired for reasons that are now apparent. The second note refers to page 345 where he found the poem "The Craftsman". Brecht's attraction to it at a time when he was light years away from Kipling's ideological position can be explained in terms of a continuing compatability of views on creating from material drawn from the people. Kipling's poem deals with Shakespeare, but not Shakespeare, the immortal bard of Avon. It was the human Shakespeare: the poacher; the drunkard; the studious observer of human nature; the careful listener to common speech; the playwright who had to earn his bread; and above all it was Shakespeare presented as a craftsman, not an "artist". According to Kipling's poem it was a writer who found his model for Cleopatra in an alehouse; who drew his Juliet from a gypsy's song and his Lady Macbeth from a seven-year old girl drowning kittens without wincing; who modelled his Ophelia on a town girl whose body was fished from the Avon. Brecht must have found these views immensely sympathetic. He preferred to see himself as a "craftsman" not an "artist", and he had an unshakeable belief that a true craftsman could fashion great drama from the lives of common people as he tried to do. Again he found a confirmation of his views in a Kipling poem. Given the proximity of their early outlooks on art and life, it is no surprise that they employed similar methods in their early writing, especially in the verse. Plagiarism is the most obvious example, but another is the manner in which each wrote early poems with musical settings in mind. Here, too, the implicit justification was that art forms of the people were communal property to be used by all. Thus Kipling apparently conceived "Mandalay" to a popular waltz, while "Recessional" was written to the hymn tune now normally used for it.18 Numerous early poems by Brecht were also written with a specific popular tune or church hymn in mind, such as the "Erinnerung an die Marie A.", which "

Willet, "Kipling", p. 70.

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was originally based on a French tune popular in Germany during his youth known as "Verlorenes Glück",17 or his "Großer Dankchoral" written to the melody of the famous Protestant hymn "Lobe den Herren" by Joachim Neander. This practice, while not the result of direct influence, does reflect the phenomenon of an independent duplication of style in the lyric poetry of the two writers that make it easy to see Kipling behind Brecht's poems where there is no such presence at all. At some point in his development, Brecht "broke loose" from that writer's orbit and went his independent way. But both before and after this point his poetry employs a number of major structural devices, uses many major themes, treats similar topics, and draws on a large amount of imagery in which Kipling anticipated him by several decades. In each case in point, he did not know and could not have known the Kipling model which he approximated so closely. A limited number of examples of this curious phenomenon will underscore what strong structural similarities existed between two radically different writers. Brecht frequently prefaced poems with an epigraph taken from sources as disparate as a newspaper or the Bible, as well as from world literature or his own works. Whether in "Achttausend arme Leute kommen vor die Stadt" (GW VIII, 148) or "Dreihundert ermordete Kulis berichten an eine Internationale' (GW VIII, 296), the specific news account that inspired the poem stands as an epigraph to set the scene. Kipling had done precisely the same thing in a number of his poems, the most striking examples being "The Derelict", which he prefaces with an item from the Shipping News reporting that a derelict is still at sea, or "The English Flag", which follows a brief newspaper account of how the Union Jack remained flying above a burning building before finally being consumed. With both writers these epigraphs served more or less as stage directions for what would follow. No one has ever calculated how many poems in either man's works have as their source a specific objective event from the external world as opposed, say, to a mental event, or how many 17 H a n s Reimann, Literazzia. Ein Streifzug (Munich: Pohl & Co., 1953), I, pp. 58-59.

durchs Dickicht

der

Bücher

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poems are distinctly topical. But it would be a higher number than with most poets who have written since the end of the last century. This was occasional poetry, though not in the traditional sense. They did not write for specific occasions, but usually in reaction to them. Similar themes and motifs also recur throughout. For example, Brecht's poem "Die Legende der Dirne Evlyn Roe' (GW VIII, 18) reproduces the basic conflict situation that Kipling portrayed in his poem "Tomlinson". In both cases someone who dies is refused admittance to Heaven for being too sinful and likewise turned away at the gate of Hell for not being wicked enough. Another thematic and formal affinity can be seen in the poems where the lyric voice is a mother lamenting her child who has not returned from the war. Kipling's "My Boy Jack" or "Nativity" have counterparts in Brecht's "Lied einer deutschen Mutter" (GW X, 854), and perhaps in the "Eia popeia" cradle song at the end of Mother Courage where Courage laments the loss of her last child to the war (GW IV, 1436). The mother figure in general appears in relatively large numbers of poems by both writers. Similar themes and imagery occur in Kipling's "A Ballad of Jakko Hill" and Brecht's "Erinnerung an die Marie A." (GW VIII, 232), which both celebrate the joys of transient love. Kipling uses the image of driven mist to evoke the memory and symbolize the essence of love, while for Brecht it is a cloud that calls forth the same memory and symbolizes their drifting apart. Kipling's "A Song at Cock-Crow" dealing with Peter's betrayal of Christ also has a number of parallels in Brecht, who was particularly fond of this episode and image. He uses it, for example, in the brilliant lapidary verses of "Tagesanbruch" (GW X, 868) and in many passages in the dramas. And his "Lied von der Unzulänglichkeit menschlichen Strebens" (GW II, 465) in The Threepenny Opera, which draws on the image of the goddess Fortuna as the elusive tormentor who is present only when one is not aware of her, uses the same image and comes very close to duplicating the wording of Kipling's poem "The Wishing Caps". Brecht's near-obsession with death that dates from his earliest poems is reflected in the numerous brief epitaphs he wrote, e.g.

122

"NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET"? -

CONCLUSIONS

"Grabschrift 1919" (GW I X , 429); "Grabschrift für Gorki" (GW I X , 693); "Grabschrift für Rosa Luxemburg" (GW X , 958); and "Grabschrift aus dem Krieg des Hitler" (GW I X , 758), etc. In tone and structure some of them, particularly those in the Kriegsfibel, come quite close to Kipling's "Epitaphs of the W a r " written during World War I. For example the fifth epitaph of the Kriegsfibel called "Gedenktafel für im Krieg des Hitler gegen Frankreich Gefallene" (GW I X , 821) and one by Kipling called "Common Form" are accusations by the dead against those who sent them to their death. In both the common feature is the first person speaker's voice representing a dead soldier speaking from the grave. Another theme these epitaphs share is that of shell shock. The Kriegsfibel has an illustration of a shell shocked, demented German soldier over epitaph no. 58 which corresponds visually to the Kipling epitaph entitled "Shock" that treats the same matter. Both writers also do epitaphs on the pilots who bomb cities ( " R . A . F . Aged Eighteen" and Kriegsfibel no. 18, GW X , 1038), and both have epitaphs commemorating those who went down at sea. (Kipling's " V . A . D . (Mediterranean)", and Brecht's "Gedenktafel für die 4000, die im Krieg des Hitler gegen Norwegen versenkt wurden" GW I X , 822.) Both writers also tend to highlight the suffering of the innocent caught in the maelstrom of war. Kipling's victims are the raw recruit, the 18-year old R.A.F. pilot, the former clerk, the servant, and particulary the mother figure, while Brecht focuses on the exploited classes, the soldier pressed into duty against his will, the common worker, and also the mother figure. The Threepenny Opera suggests one final example of unconscious spiritual kinship, though Kipling never wrote anything remotely similar to this work. Of all Brecht's works, it is perhaps the most difficult to classify. It can hardly qualify as an opera, nor is it a stage play in the conventional sense, or even in the sense of Brecht's later plays with songs. One has difficulty relating it to any indigenous German tradition. If however, one turns to the British music-hall, one sees immediately what appears to be the source of its derivation. It was not, of course, and no

"NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET"? - CONCLUSIONS

123

doubt the German Revue popular in the twenties had a considerable influence on it. But Brecht's search for out-of-the-way forms had led him to create a style of popular entertainment that closely approximated one from which Kipling had drawn much for his ballads - music-hall performances. If the paradox of two such strange bedfellows seems less dissonant in light of the common views they shared, it does not mean that their relationship is void of ironies. One of the most striking was the manner in which Kipling portrayed the "Boche" almost from the beginning of his writings. The Germans do not fare well under his pen. Whether in poems such as "An Imperial Rescript" or in short stories such as "Reingelder and the German Flag", Kipling indulges in some of his most caustic invective and biting satire to portray the "ugly German". Brecht was probably unaware of this, though it would scarcely have made Kipling less interesting to him. But that someone who found Germany and Germans as distasteful as Kipling apparently did, should have influenced one of its most important writers in this century as decisively as he did, must stand as one of the more delightful ironies in this relationship. Another curiosity has to do with Kipling's rapid loss of influence on younger British writers after World War I. Literary trends passed him by so quickly that before the end of his life he was hopelessly out of fashion. T. S. Eliot's attempted rehabilitation notwithstanding, he has remained largely outside the mainstream of English letters in the middle of this century. But in crossing the Channel and catalyzing one of Germany's most gifted writers of the century, his works also had an indirect impact on one of the leading British language poets of this century - W. H. Auden. Breon Mitchell has called attention to the fact that the so-called "German influence" on Auden, who lived in Germany for a considerable time, was not transmitted through the theater as is commonly supposed.18 Instead, according to correspondence and conversations Mitchell had with Auden, it came 18 Breon Mitchell, "W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. The 'German Influence' ", Oxford German Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 165.

124

"NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET"? -

CONCLUSIONS

primarily through his acquaintance with Brecht's lyric poetry, especially the early poems in the Hauspostille where Kipling's impact is most evident. Again it seems ironic that by crossing the Channel, a young British poet was exposed to Kipling in a most pleasant fashion and probably without being aware of it - filtered through the German of Bertolt Brecht. The fact that Auden liked Brecht's poetry without recognizing Kipling clearly indicates how skillfully Brecht had woven the skeins from that writer's works into his own tapestries without allowing a foreign presence to be felt. And there may yet be other strands belonging to him which this study has not yet unraveled. Perhaps this relationship represents one more case of a major writer learning from a mediocre one. But perhaps, too, Brecht was right in recognizing something significant in his works. Whatever the answer, Bertolt Brecht would not have been the poet he was without the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. And without this imperialist mentor, who knows what might have happened to the style of a man who wrote some of the finest "poetry of the people" this century has known?

APPENDIX A

BRECHT'S ACQUAINTANCE WITH KIPLING'S WORKS: AN OVERVIEW

(Following each entry or series of entries, at least one source for Brecht's familiarity with the given work is recorded; further examples for any particular work can be found in the text itself.)

I. VERSE

A. Definitely knew: 1. All the "Barrack-Room Ballads": "To Thomas Atkins"; "Danny Deever"; "Tommy"; "Fuzzy Wuzzy"; "Soldier, Soldier"; "Screw Guns"; "Cells"; "Gunga Din"; "Oonts"; "Loot"; "Snarleylow"; "The Widow at Windsor"; "Belts"; "The Young British Soldier"; "Mandalay"; "Troopin"'; "The Widow's Party"; "Ford o'Kabul River"; "Gentlemen Rankers"; "Route Marchin'"; "Schillin' a Day" (source: Brecht's use of material from these poems, especially "The Widow at Windsor"). 2. "Mary, Pity Women" (source: Brecht's transla3. "Cholera Camp" tions of these 4. "The Ladies" poems) 5. "Song of the Galley Slaves" 6. "The Married Man" 7. "Song of the Banjo" (source: reported by Elisa8. "When Earth's Last Picture beth Hauptmann) is Painted" 9. "If - " (source: Brecht's translation used in Me Ti Geschichten, GW XII, 566).

126

APPENDICES

10. "The Sons of the Suburbs" (source: newspaper clipping in Kipling edition Brecht owned) (source: notes by Brecht 11. "The Craftsman" in Kipling edition 12. "When 'Omer Smote 'Is he owned refers Bloomin' Lyre" to these poems) 13. "The Ballad of East and West" (source: Brecht refers to it in "Der Kaledonische Markt" GW IX, 533) B. Probably knew, but not verifiable: 1. The following poems in the Hanns Sachs translations: "The Last Suttee"; "Evarra and His Gods"; "The Ballad of Bo Da Thone"; "The Sacrifice of Er-Heb"; "The Conundrum of the Workshops"; and "An Imperial Rescript" (source: Brecht owned this edition at his death). 2. The following poem from Otto Hauser's translation: "The Ballad of the King's Jest". All others in Hauser are duplicated in the Moller and Sachs volumes (source: report by Hans Otto Munsterer). 3. An undetermined number of other Kipling poems from the English edition of Rudyard Kipling's Verse: 18851932. Inclusive Edition (source: Brecht owned this edition from 1936 until his death).

II. LONGER PROSE WORKS

A. Definitely knew: 1. Kim (source: reports by Munsterer, Hauptmann, Zuckmayer) (source: Brecht used specific 2. The Light that Failed materials from Leopold Rosenzweig's translation in various works) B. Probably knew, but not verifiable: 1. The Naulahka (source: Brecht owned this edition at his death)

APPENDICES

127

III. COLLECTIONS OF STORIES

A. Definitely knew: 1. Just So Stories (source: Brecht's plans to dramatize "The Elephant's Child" from this collection) 2. The Jungle Books (source: Brecht's own references at various points to the complete edition and to the name "Mowgli") 3. The following stories from Life's Handicaps: "In the Rukh"; "The Disturber of Traffic"; "My Lord the Elephant"; "The Finest Story in the World"; "A Matter of Fact"; "The Lost Legion"; "Love-O'-Women"; "Judson and the Empire"; and "The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot" (source: Brecht's appropriation of specific material from Leopold Lindau's translation of these stories)

IV. INDIVIDUAL STORIES

A. Definitely knew: 1. "The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney" (source: Brecht used material from this story in Man is Man) 2. "Moti Guj - Mutineer" (source: Brecht used material from this story in Man is Man, used the name in his Hannibal drama) B. Probably knew, but not verifiable: A number of stories about Kipling's Soldiers Three, probably "The God from the Machine"; "Private Learoyd's Story"; "The Big Drunk Draf'"; "The Solid Muldoon"; "With the Main Guard"; and "In the matter of a Private" (source: these and the "Krishna Mulvaney" story appeared together in a single German translation; Brecht uses extensive lore drawn from Soldiers Three stories in Man is Man and in several songs)

APPENDIX B

KIPLING-INSPIRED MATERIAL IN BRECHT'S WORKS

(Only those published works that unquestionably use material from Kipling, or where a verifiable Kipling source helped inspire the work, appear below. Examples from further works, including all unpublished materials, that show affinities or appear to derive from Kipling, but where no verification is possible, are excluded. They are illustrated in the text.) I. DRAMA

In the Jungle of the Cities: Song "Drei Freunde, die legten den vierten ins Grab" from The Light that Failed (dropped from stage version); also the name "Moti Gui" in the stage premiere from "Moti Guj - Mutineer". Life of Edward the Second of England: Song "Die Madchen von England im Witfrauenkleid" cites line from "The Widow at Windsor". Man is Man: Jeraiah Jip's imprisonment in a palanquin and the ensuing episode in the pagoda from "The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney"; reference to Galy Gay as an elephant from "Moti Guj - Mutineer". Theme of three friends that buried a fourth from verse in The Light that Failed. The Threepenny Opera: "Kanonensong" from ballad "ScrewGuns"; "Hiibsch als es w'ahrte" a translation of "Mary, Pity Women". Happy End: "Der Song von Mandelay" parodies Kipling's "Mandalay"; song "Das Lied vom Surabaya Johnny" from "Mary, Pity Women".

APPENDICES

129

The Exception and the Rule: Song "Der kranke Mann stirbt und der starke Mann ficht" from The Light that Failed-, line about "Der Gott der Dinge, wie sie sind" from "When Earth's Last Picture is Painted". Mother Courage and Her Children: Song "Die Ballade von Weib und dem Soldaten" based on verse at end of story "Love-O'Women". The Good Woman of Setzuan: Song "Lied vom achten Elefanten" based on Kipling elephant stories, especially "Toomai of the Elephants" and "Moti Guj - Mutineer".

II. VERSE

"Die drei Soldaten. Ein Kinderbuch' drawn from and patterned and "Gesang von den drei metaphyafter Kipling's Soldiers sischen Soldaten" Three "Lied der preiswerten Lyriker" and both poems cite lines from "Die Literatur wird durchforscht "When Earth's Last Picwerden" ture is Painted" "Der Kanonen-Song - modelled on "Screw-Guns" "Die Ballade vom Weib und dem Soldaten" - from verse at end of story "Love-O'-Women" "Der Kaledonische Markt" - cites lines from "The Ballad of East East and West" and "The Widow at Windsor" "Das Lied von Surabaya Johnny" - based on "Mary, Pity "Lied der Magd" Women" "Lied der liebenden Witwe"

HI. PROSE

"Herr K's Lieblingstier" - cites material from "My Lord the Elephant" and "Moti Guj - Mutineer". The Threepenny Novel - chapter headings entitled "Der kranke man stirbt" und "Der starke Mann ficht" from The Light that Failed.

130

APPENDICES

"Ideale eines Mannes in früheren 1 verbatim rendering of Zeiten" from Me-ti Geschichten j poem "If -". Scenario for film Die Fliege - uses poem "Cholera Camp" verbatim.

IV. THEORETICAL WRITINGS

"Über den Beruf des Schauspielers" (GW XV, 430) "Über rationellen und emotionellen Standpunkt" (GW XV, 243) "Die dialektische Dramatik" (GW XV, 218, 219) and "Vorwort zu 'Aufbau einer Rolle'" (GW XVII, 1119)

mentions "Gunga Din". mentions "The Ballad of East and West". cite lines from "When Earth's Last Picture is Painted".

WORKS CONSULTED

I. UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL FROM BERTOLT BRECHT ARCHIVES (note: first number refers to folder, second number to page or sheet) 5/31 452/67 9/16 459/29 74/36 490/27-28 100/15 520/12; 43 134/26 720/37-40 163/23 805/11 238/75 817/09 282/26 2106/72; 76; 424/83 2214/39 451/33

II. BRECHT EDITIONS CITED Brecht, Bertolt, Gedichte, vol. II (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1960). —, Gesammelte Werke, 20 volumes (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). —, Im Dickicht der Städte: Erstfassung und Materialien. Ed. Giesela E. Bahr ( = Edition Suhrkamp 246) (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1968). —, Materialen zu Brechts "Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder", ed. Werner Hecht ( = Edition Suhrkamp 50) (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1964). —, Texte für Filme. Eds. Wolfgang Gersch and Werner Hecht (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1969). —, Über Lyrik, ed. Elisabeth Hauptmann und Rosemarie Hill ( = Edition Suhrkamp 70) (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1964). —, Manual of Piety. Poems by Bertold Brecht, transl. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1966). III. KIPLING EDITIONS CITED Note: When a work listed below is not a standard or first edition, the one that appears represents an edition Brecht owned or used. A.

ENGLISH

Kipling, Rudyard, Abaft the Funnel (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1909).

132

WORKS CONSULTED

—, A Choice of Kipling's Verse, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1941). —, The Collected Works. The Burwash edition of the Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling, 28 volumes (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941). —, Rudyard Kipling's Verse: 1885-1932. Inclusive Edition (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., third impression 1936). B.

GERMAN TRANSLATIONS

Kipling, Rudyard, Balladen aus dem Biwak, transl. Marx Möller (Berlin: Vita, 1911). —, Gesammelte Werke, 3 volumes, transl. Hans Reisiger, with an introduction by Carl Zuckmayer (Munich: Paul List, 1965). —, Kim. Ein Roman aus dem heutigen Indien, transl. Hans Reisiger (Berlin: Deutsche Buch Gemeinschaft, 1921). —, Das Licht erlosch. Roman, transl. Leopold Rosenzweig (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1899). —, Mylord der Elefant. Mancherlei neue Geschichten von Rudyard Kipling, transl. Leopold Lindau (Berlin: E. Fleischel, fourth printing, 1913). —, Naulahka: Das Staatsglück, transl. Emmy Becher (Berlin: Kulturelle Verlagsgemeinschaft, n.d.). —, Rudyard Kipling, Indische Balladen in series Aus fremden Gärten. Eine Sammlung bedeutender und interessanter Dichtungen fremder Völker übersetzt und herausgegeben von Otto Hauser (Weimar: Alexander Duncker, 1917). —, Soldaten-Geschichten, transl. General von Sickart (Berlin: Vita, 1900). —, Soldaten-Lieder und andere Gedichte von Rudyard Kipling. Transl. Hanns Sachs (Leipzig: Julius Zeitler, 1910). —, Tiergeschichten, no transl. (Berlin: Vita, 1901). IV. SECONDARY WORKS Aufricht, Ernst Josef, Erzähle, damit du dein Recht erweist (Berlin: Propyläen, 1966). Bertold Brecht Archiv: Bestandverzeichnis des literarischen Nachlasses, volume I Stücke, ed. Herta Ramthun (Berlin: aufbau, 1969); volume II Gedichte, 1970. Carrington, Charles, Rudyard Kipling. His Life and Work (London: Macmillan, 1955). Dunman, Jack, "Kipling and the Modern World", The Kipling Journal 36 (June 1969), 5-10. Esslin, Martin, Bertolt Brecht: The Man and His Work (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1960). Ewen, Fredric, Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art, and His Times (New York: Citadel, 1967). Feuchtwanger, Lion, Gesammelte Werke, volume XI, Stücke in Prosa (Amsterdam: Querido, 1936).

WORKS CONSULTED

133

Grimm, Reinhold, "Brecht's Beginnings", The Drama Review 12 (Fall, 1967), 22-34. —, Brecht und die Weltliteratur (Nuremburg: Hans Carl, 1961). Haas, Willy, Die Belle Epoque (Munich: Desch, 1967). —, Bertolt Brecht in series Köpfe des XX. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Colloqium Verlag, 1958). Högel, Max, "Bertolt Brecht", Lebensbilder aus dem bayerischen Schwaben (Munich: Max Hucber, 1961), 389-479. Lyon, James K., "The Source of Brecht's 'Vorbildliche Bekehrung eines Branntweinhändlers'", Modern Language Notes 84 (October, 1969), 802-806.

Mitchell, Breon, "W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. The 'German Influence'", Oxford German Studies I (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 163-171. Münsterer, Hans Otto, Bert Brecht, Erinnerungen aus den Jahren 1917-22 (Zurich: Verlag die Arche, 1963). Neumann, Peter Horst, Der Weise und der Elefant. Zwei Brecht Studien (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1970). Orwell, George, "Rudyard Kipling" in Five Approaches of Literary Criticism, ed. Wilbur Scott (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 161-176. Reimann, Hans, Literazzia. Ein Streifzug durchs Dickicht der Bücher (Munich: Pohl and Co., 1953). Schuhmann, Klaus, Der Lyriker Bertolt Brecht: 1913-1933 (Berlin: Rütten and Loening, 1964). Schumacher, Ernst, Die dramatischen Versuche Bertolt Brechts: 1918-1933 (Berlin: Rütten and Loening, 1955). Steffensen, Steffen, Bertolt Brechts Gedichte (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1972). Sternberg, Fritz, Der Dichter und die Ratio: Erinnerungen an Bertolt Brecht (Göttingen: Sachse and Pohl, 1963). Tucholsky, Kurt, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Mary Gerold-Tucholsky and Fritz I. Raddatz (Reinbek/Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961). Völker, Klaus, Brecht-Chronik (Munich: Hanser, 1971). Willett, John, Brecht on Theatre. The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1964). —, "Kipling", Poetry Review 62 (Spring, 1971), 69-75. —, "The Poet Beneath The Skin", Brecht heute/Brecht Today. Jahrbuch der internationalen Brecht-Gesellschaft II (Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum, 1972), 88-104. —, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects (London: Methuen, 1959; third revised edition, 1967). Wölfel, Kurt, "Kipling or His Translators? The Question of Brecht's Acquaintance with Kipling's Ballads", Essays in German Language, Culture and Society, eds. Siegbert S. Prawer, S. Hinton Thomas and Leonard Forster (London: The Institute of Germanic Studies, 1969), 231-244. Zuckmayer, Carl, Als war's ein Stück von mir: Hören der Freundschaft (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1966).

INDEX

Except for the names of Brecht's plays, which are sufficiently well-known to be given in English, all titles of works appear below in their original language. Names in the text cited only for purposes of comparison or identification have not been included in this index. "A Ballad of Jakko Hill," 121 "A Matter of Fact," 40, 53 "A Song at Cock-Crow," 121 Abaft The Funnel, 118 "Ach, wie war es lustig in Uganda," 86 "Achttausend arme Leute kommen vor die Stadt," 120 Actions and Reactions, 7 "Alfabet," 98 "An Imperial Rescript," 10, 123 Auden, W. H., 123-124 "Auslassungen eines Märtyrers," 26, 28 Baal, 59, 68, 70 Bacon, Francis, 100 B alestier, Wolcott, 110 "Ballade auf vielen Schiffen," 17 "Ballade vom Tod der Anna Gewölkegesicht," 30 "Ballade vom Weib und dem Soldaten," 26, 38, 41 "Ballade von den Seeräubern," 17, 25, 101 "Ballade von der Freundschaft," 26 Bänkelsang, 20, 118 "Barrack-Room Ballads," 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 26, 27, 30, 57, 83, 84, 92, 111, 113, 115 Berliner Tageblatt, 88

"Bills Ballhaus in Bilbao," 95 Blighty, 103 Bloch, Ernst, 1 Booth, General William, 112 Brecht, knowledge of English, 5-6 Captains Courageous, 7 "Cells," 22, 24, 27 "Chant Pagan," 115 "Cholera Camp," 14, 55, 56, 65, 7273, 100-102 "Cleared," 115, 116 "Common Form," 122 "Danny Deever," 32, 86 'Das Experiment," 100 "Das Gesetz der Städte," 34 Das Licht erlosch. See The Light that Failed "Das Lied der Eisenbahntruppe von Fort Donald," 17, 19, 25, 101 "Das Lied vom achten Elefanten," 105 "Das Lied vom Fraternisieren," 63 "Das Lied vom Pfeif- und TrommelHenny," 63 'Das Lied von der Unzulänglichkeit menschlichen Strebens," 121 "Das Lied vom Surabaya Johny," 61-65, 95 "Das Schiff," 17, 28

INDEX

"Das war der Bürger Galgei," 70-71 de Kruif, Paul, Microbe Hunters, 101 'Der belgische Acker," 30 Der dicke Mann auf der Schiffsschaukel, 71 "Der Fähnrich," 16 "Der Kaledonische Markt," 9,14, 98 "Der Matrosen-Song," 95, 101 "Der Kanonen-Song," 72, 84, 91-94 "Der neue Kanonensong," 93 "Der Song von Mandelay," 15, 9596 "Der tote Kolonialsoldat," 72, 84, 91 "Der Tsingtausoldat," 101 Dessau, Paul, 63 "Die ärmeren Mitschüler aus den Vorstädten," 105 Die Dame, 57, 58, 89 "Die dialektische Dramatik," 68 "Die drei Soldaten: Ein Kinderbuch," 85 Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun, 70, 75 "Die Fliege," 14, 72, 100-101 Die Freuden und Leiden der kleineren Seeleute, 64 Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Cäsar, 50 "Die Geschichte vom gelben Jack," 72, 101 "Die Legende von der Dirne Evlyn Roe," 24, 121 "Die Literatur wird durchforscht werden," 67 Die Ludenoper "Die Söhne der Vorstädte," 104 "Döblin, Alfred, 70, 75 Dramatic monologue, 26-29, 49, 60 "Dreihundert ermordete Kulis berichten an eine Internationale," 120 Drums in the Night, 29 Edward the Second, 13 "Eia Popeia," 121 Eliot, T. S., 21 23, 123 Engel, Erich, 43

135

Epigram, 31 Epigraphs, 36-38, 120 Epitaphs, 122 "Erinnerung an die Marie A.," 30, 120, 121 "Evarra and His Gods," 8, 10 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, 111 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 20, 60, 73 "Fuzzy-Wuzzy," 10, 23, 29, 86, 92 Gay, John, Beggar's Opera, 6 "Gedenktafel für die 4000, die im Krieg des Hitler...," 122 "Gedenktafel für die im Krieg des Hitler gegen Frankreich Gefallenen," 122 "Gehazi," 115 "Gentlemen Rankers," 10, 11, 15, 24, 25, 30 "Gesang der punischen Soldaten," 48 "Gesang von den drei metaphysischen Soldaten," 85 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich, 36 "Grabschrift aus dem Krieg des Hitler," 122 "Grabschrift für Gorki," 122 "Grabschrift für Rosa Luxemburg," 122 "Großer Dankchoral," 120 "Gunga Din," 92, 98-99 Hamsun, Knut, 4 Hannibal, 36 Happy End, 15, 60, 62, 94-96 "Harp Song of the Dane Women," 28 Hauptmann, Elisabeth, 6, 9, 13, 14, 20, 46, 54-69, 74, 101, 107 Hauser, Otto, 7, 8, 9, 10, 18, 32, 54, 59 Hauspostille, 18, 21, 28, 43, 124 "Her Majesty's Servants," 29, 45, 80, 105 "Herr K.s Lieblingstier," 44 Herzfelde, Wieland, 43,110 "How Fear Came to the Jungle," 35

136

INDEX

"Ideale eines Mannes in früheren Zeiten," 106 In the Jungle of the Cities, 4, 35, 37, 38, 43, 74, 100 "If," 106-108 "In the Rukh," 40, 53 "Judson and the Empire," 40, 53 "Just So Stories," 7, 33, 39, 110, 111 Kalkutta, 4. Mai, 60-61, 73-74 "Karsamstagslegende," 30 Kerr, Alfred, 13, 88 Kim, 7, 33, 39, 55 Kissinger (soldier), 100-102 Kriegsfibel, 105, 122 "Larrys Ballade von der Mama Armee," 17 "Legende von der Entstehung des Buches Taoteking . . . , " 104 "Lied der drei Soldaten," 84 "Lied der Galgenvögel," 22 "Lied der liebenden Witwe," 64 "Lied der Magd," 64 "Lied der preiswerten Lyriker," 67 "Lied der verderbten Unschuld beim Wäschefalten," 28, 31 "Lied einer deutschen Mutter," 121 Life's Handicaps, 7, 33, 35, 75 Lindau, Leopold, 39 , 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 54 "Loot," 16, 81 "Love-O'-Women," 40, 41, 42, 45 Lukäcs, Georg, 1 Mahagonny, 15, 51, 94-96 Mallarmé, Stephane, 21 Man is Man, 11, 15, 16, 17, 39, 44, 59, 70-87, 88, 92 "Mandalay," 11, 12, 15, 24, 92, 95, 119 Many Inventions, 7, 33, 39, 40 "Mary, Pity Women," 55, 56, 57, 6065, 89, 95 May, Karl, 7 Me-Ti Buch der Wendungen, 106107 Mother Courage and her Children,

42, 43, 62-64, 70 Möller, Marx, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 22, 23, 24, 26, 31, 32, 54, 57, 59, 81 "Moti-Guj - Mutineer," 35, 36, 45, 82, 105 "Mowgli," 34, 35 Münsterer, Hans Otto, 5, 6, 10, 18, 20 Music hall, 118, 122-123 "My Boy Jack," 121 "My Father's Chair," 28 "My Lord the Elephant," 40, 86, 105 "Nativity," 121 Neander, Joachim, 120 Neher, Caspar, 17, 68 "Nigger" = Indian, 16, 80 "O Falladah, die du hangest," 29 "Oonts," 16 "Pagett, M.P.," 116 "Parade-Song of the Camp Animals," 29 Paul List Verlag = publisher, 57-59 Plagiarism, 2-3, 88, 117, 119 Puck of Pook's Hill, 7 Puntila, 70 "R.A.F. Aged Eighteen," 122 Ravenscroft, Thomas, 117 "Recessional," 119 Reed, Dr. Walter, 100-101 "Reingelder and the German Flag," 123 Reisiger, Hans, 57-59 Rimbaud, Artur, 4, 21, 99 Rollengedicht. See "dramatic monologue" Rosenzweig, Leopold, 7, 36, 54, 68, 69 Runeberg, John Ludvig, 70 Sachs, Hanns, 7, 10, 11, 12, 15, 18, 24, 32, 59, 81, 109 Saint Joan of the Stockyards, 52 Schurri Guy, 35 Schweik, 86 "Screw Guns," 27. 93

INDEX Shakespeare, 119 Shere Khan the Tiger, 35 "Shock," 122 Singer, Gerda, 102 "Snarleylow," 10, 16, 27, 31 "Soldier, Soldier," 26, 30 Soldier's Tales, 7 Something of Myself, 117 "Song of the Galley-Slaves," 46, 49 ''Song von Witwe Begbicks Trinksalon," 80, 84 "Sons of the Suburbs," 102-104 Stalky & Co., 7 Steffin, Margarete, 10, 107, 109 "Tagesanbruch," 121 Taschenpostille, 43 "The Absent-Minded Beggar," 115 "The Ballad of Boh Da Thone," 10, 30, 92 "The Ballad of East and West," 8, 9, 98 "The Ballad of the King's Jest," 8 "The Betrothed," 58-59 "The Big Drunk D r a f , " 83 The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 52 "The Conundrum of the Workshops," 10 "The Craftsman," 119 "The Declaration of London," 115 "The Derelict," 28, 120 "The Disturber of Traffic," 40, 45, 53 The Elephant Calf, 44, 86 "The Elephant's Child," 110 "The English Flag," 120 The Exception and the Rule, 68, 97 "The Finest Story in the World," 40, 46 The Good Woman of Setzuan, 44, 52, 105 "The Goose Girl," 29 •The Hyenas," 115 "The Incarnation of Khishna Mulvaney," 75-79, 83 The Jungle Books, 4, 7, 29, 33, 34, 55, 111, 112 "The Ladies," 55, 56, 57, 65, 89 "The Last Suttee," 8, 10

137

"The Lesson," 115 The Light that Failed, 7, 33, 36, 55, 68, 111, 114 The Little Mahagonny, 59 "The Lost Legion," 40, 53 "The Man Who Was," 79 "The Married Man," 55, 65, 66 The Naulahka, 7, 110 The New York Times, 102 "The Old Issue," 115 "The Prodigal Son," 28 'The Rabbi's Song," 28 "The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot," 40, 51-53 "The Sacrifice of Er-Heb," 8, 10 "The Soldiers Three," 44, 74, 83, 84-86, 111, 112, 117 "The Song of the Banjo," 55, 65, 66 "The Spring Running," 34 "The strong man fights, but the sick man dies,"' 37, 38, 68, 97 The Threepenny Novel, 97, 115 The Threepenny Opera, 16, 46, 50, 59, 62, 72, 86, 88-94, 96, 121, 122 The Visions of Simone Machard, 52 "The Wage Slaves," 115 "The White Man's Burden," 115 "The Widow at Windsor," 10, 13, 24, 29, 30, 84 "The Widow's Party," 10, 30 "The Wishing Caps," 121 The Yea-Sayer, 70 "There were three friends that buried a fourth," 36-37, 74, 84 "Tiger, Tiger," 34 "To Thomas Atkins," 10, 11 "Tommy," 27, 84 "Tomlinson," 121 "Toomai of the Elephants," 45, 105 Tucholsky, Kurt, 96 "Über die deutsche Literatur," 4 "Uber rationellen und emotionellen Standpunkt," 99 "V.A.D. (Mediterranean)," 122 Villon, François, 50, 88, 117 "Vom armen B.B.," 28 "Von einem Maler," 17

138

INDEX

"Von den verführten Mädchen," 28 "Von des Cortez Leuten," 101 Waley, Arthur, 6 Warren Hastings. See Kalkutta, 4. Mai Wedekind, Frank, 20 Weill, Kurt, 59, 62, 89, 94 "When Earth's Last Picture is Painted," 55, 65, 66-69 'When 'Omer Smote 'is Bloomin'

Lyre," 3, 117, 119 Widener Library, Harvard University, 102 "Wo ich gelernt habe," 19 Wuolijoki, Hella, 70 Yellow jack. See "Die Geschichte vom gelben Jack" Zuckmayer, Carl, 1, 6, 20, 38