Bertolt Brecht play on nazi Germany

This video from Britain says about itself:

Fear and Misery of the Third Reich

1 July 2014

Drama Unit 2 2012, King Edward VI College, Stourbridge.

By Len Phelan in Britain:

More light on the darkness

Wednesday 13th January 2016

A revival of Bertolt Brecht’s chilling portrait of life under the nazis needs a clearer focus, says LEN PHELAN

Fear and Misery of the Third Reich
Union Theatre, London SE1
4/5

BERTOLT BRECHT’S reputation in this country rests largely upon productions of plays such as The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage or The Caucasian Chalk Circle, works in which he employs epic theatre techniques to “make the familiar strange” and thus lay bare the underlying contradictions of societies based upon ruling class exploitation and the ideological mechanisms underpinning it.

Written in the same period as these great works, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich is something of an exception in its abandonment of parable and historical revisionism to speak directly to audiences about contemporary events.

Premiered in 1938 in Paris, when Brecht was in exile from the Hitler regime in Germany, it’s a series of scenes which deliver short, sharp jabs at the nazi solar plexus and lay bare the brutality of national socialist reality.

It depicts a Germany which from the top — the judiciary, scientists, the teaching profession — to the bottom — the poor and the unemployed — is riddled with poverty, violence and the ever-present fear of betrayal.

Phil Willmott’s production at the Union Theatre effectively conveys the horrifying bleakness of that era, not least the consequences for those who openly resisted, and it points up the virulent strain of anti-semitic scapegoatism nurtured by the regime.

Thus we see a judge driven to distraction in his attempts to square the circle in the case against an innocent Jewish shop owner but who has to come up with a verdict which will satisfy the conflicting demands of the nazi hierarchy.

In another emotionally charged scene at the conclusion, a Jewish woman decides to tell her husband she is leaving to save his career as a clinician, while he assures her that her self-imposed exile will only last a few weeks as he hands her the fur coat she won’t be needing until winter.

That malign motif of the most intimate personal betrayal runs throughout. A school teacher and his wife whip themselves into a frenzy of paranoia over whether their son will betray them to the Hitler Youth, while a maid wonders whether her brownshirt boyfriend will use the same deceitful trick he employs to identify the “grumblers” in the dole queues on her.

Yet however laudable the efforts of cast and director are in realising Brecht’s dark and sardonic vignettes, this production doesn’t really answer the question Willmott poses in his programme note as to whether Fear and Misery is now nothing more than a “period piece.”

Rather than drawing on unattributed quotes from the Guardian facilely bemoaning the impotence of silent majorities in the face of motivated violent minorities in “Hitler’s Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China and Cambodia under Pol Pot,” he might find Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov’s definition of fascism worth considering.

As early as 1928, he viewed it as “the dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of financial capitalism,” which not only carries out “an organised massacre of the working class” but in its foreign policy “cultivates zoological hatred against other peoples.”

As a Marxist, Brecht understood this definition of fascism and it implicitly underpins this hugely important play, with its depiction of war abroad and repression at home in pursuit of the nazis’ “guns before butter” policy.

And without it, his work does indeed come across as a period piece and the uncomfortable resonances it has with the rise of the ultra-right in France, Germany and Ukraine, or indeed this country, can only appear to be the consequence of inexplicable and irresistible phenomena rather than as the extremes resorted to by the ruling class to maintain their dominance.

Any interpretation which ignores that analysis ultimately confuses rather than clarifies understanding — but that shouldn’t stop you from going to see a well-produced piece of work and drawing your own conclusions.

Runs until January 30, box office: uniontheatre.biz

Several of us from the World Socialist Web Site, Sybille Fuchs, Stefan Steinberg and myself, spoke for some time to Stephen Parker, author of a new biography of the German playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life. We posted a review of the work yesterday: here.

Exile as an Intellectual Way of Life: The collaboration of Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht: here.

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