THE USE of humour and parody in anti-fascist art has proved to be a source ofpersistent controversy and debate. Therejection of humour in this context is largelystill dominated by Theodor W. Adorno’snotorious 1962 critique of Bertolt Brecht.However, this critique is problematic andneeds to be revisited. Brecht and HannsEisler’s play Schweyk im zweiten Weltkriegwas at the centre of these debates. Eventhough its key role has not been recognized,the work sheds special light on the positionsunder contention as well as the aesthetic andpolitical stakes involved. A close look at theartistic strategies and reception history ofthis work will also illuminate the problemswith blanket rejections of humour.

In this article I show that humour andparody were key to Brecht and Eisler’s strat -egy of resistance to neo-fascism, which theysaw as an imminent threat in the post warperiod. The article will trace the devel op -ment of the play through its various stages,

including Eisler’s crucial later musi cal addi -tions in 1959 and 1961, and recon struct therole of Schweyk in stimulating key debatesabout the problems and possibilities ofhumour in anti-fascist art. The short andparodic interludes of the ‘higher regions’ andthe controversies they sparked following theplay’s 1959 West German premiere will beconsidered in detail. To this day, these inter -ludes exemplify the problematic yet power -ful nature of political parody. Criticallyreading Adorno’s case against Brecht’s use ofparody, the article concludes that Brecht’splay and Eisler’s music attain a more com -plex and defensible position with respect toresistance to fascism than Adorno allows.

From the Habsburgs to the Nazis

Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg is based onJaroslav Hašek’s 1923 unfinished novel TheFateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk,whose protagonist became the German Left’s

318 ntq 30:4 (november 2014) © cambridge university press doi:10.1017/S0266464X14000669

Anna Papaeti

Humour and the Representation ofFascism in Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg:Adorno contra Brecht and Hanns EislerBertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg occupies a key butunder-recognized place in debates about humour in anti-fascist art in the late 1950s andearly 1960s – debates largely dominated by Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of Brecht’ssatirical plays on the Third Reich. In this article Anna Papaeti examines the artisticstrategies and reception history of Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg in the context of suchdebates. Focusing in particular on Eisler’s musical additions for the parodic ‘higherregions’ interludes, as well as on the controversies sparked by the 1959 West Germanpremiere, she analyzes the play’s role in stimulating key debates, showing how Brecht’splay and Eisler’s music attain a more complex and defensible position of resistance tofascism than was allowed in Adorno’s critique. Anna Papaeti has a doctorate from King’sCollege London, has worked at the Royal Opera House, London, and as AssociateDramaturg at the Greek National Opera, Athens. Her postdoctoral research includes aDAAD fellowship on Hanns Eisler (Universität der Künste, Berlin, 2010) and a Marie CurieIntra-European Fellowship (University of Göttingen, 2011–14) on the use of music by theGreek military junta. She has previously published in such journals as Opera Quarterly,Music and Politics, and The World of Music , and in edited scholarly volumes.

Key terms: anti-fascist humour, Harry Buckwitz, Berliner Ensemble, Hanns Ernst Jäger.

favourite example of passive resistance torepressive power. A Czech writer andanarchist, Hašek (1883–1923) intended Švejkto be a four-volume novel, but his suddendeath left it unfinished.

Hašek’s Švejk consists of a number ofcomic episodes during which Švejk, a Czechdog-dealer, uses his wit to survive a series ofadventures during the First World War. Hisinventiveness and the irony of his words andactions make him an anti-hero. By pre -tending to be an idiot, he manages to survivenumerous tricky situations, unmasking theugliness and futility of war as well as thecorruption and incompetence of authority. Inthis sense, Švejk has become emblematic ofpassive resistance: that is, resistance throughwily non-cooperation, rather than particip -ation in direct, organized struggles. One wayor another, the passive resister fails to dowhat the occupier tells him/her to do.

Projecting Hašek’s anti-hero forward intime to the Nazi occupation of Prague, Brechtand Eisler’s Schweyk im zweiten Weltkriegemploys many comic elements and charac -ters, as well as parodies of Hitler, his gen -erals and the SS. Consisting of a pro logue,eight scenes, and an epilogue, it portrays thecommon people of Prague in their everydayattempts to survive the Nazi occupation. Itsepisodes are centred on the Chalice pub, in aPrague swarming with SS men, Gestapo spies,informers, and collabo rators.

The half-wit Schweyk, the hungry photog -rapher Baloun, and the pub’s landlady MrsKopecka are not in the armed resistance.How ever, these episodes bring out theirshared hardships, their aversion to the Naziregime, and their solidarity and patriotism.Short interludes remove us to the ‘higherregions’, where Hitler talks with his gen -erals. The play ends with the deadly marchto Stalingrad and the defeat of the Germanarmy, whose disillusionment is expressed inthe ‘Deutsche Miserere’, and with the his -toric confrontation between Schweyk andHitler, lost on their way to Stalingrad, wan -der ing in the bitter snow.

Behind Brecht and Eisler’s play lies acomplicated prehistory, as eminent figures ofGerman theatre in exile sought to construct

an effective anti-fascist art work around thisappealing character. Hašek’s novel was firststaged by Erwin Piscator in January 1928 inBerlin as Die Abenteuer des braven SoldatenSchwejk. When the Second World War brokeout, Piscator wished to turn it into an anti-war film. In 1937 Brecht, who had been amember of the play’s dramaturgical collec -tive, wished to be involved in the project.1

Although the film never came to be, Piscatordid not give up. In the early 1940s he beganthinking of a revised version for a New Yorktheatre, counting on Brecht’s contribution.

By July 1942, however, Brecht had beguncontemplating his own version of Schweyk(which he now spells with a ‘y’), first in -tended as a collaboration between Kurt Weilland Threepenny Opera impresario Ernst-JosefAufricht.2 Both Brecht and Aufricht aimed ata Broadway production, and therefore sawthe collaboration with Weill as crucial. In try -ing to secure this, Brecht provided a centralfemale character for Lotte Lenya: MrsKopecka, the proprietor of the Chalice pub.Soon, however, this collaboration fell apart.Weill’s unhappiness with the English trans -lation is well documented. However, themost important reason for his withdrawalwas the possibility of a lawsuit by Piscator.Unaware of Brecht’s project, Piscator alsoplanned a Broadway production with AlfredKreyborg, which was announced on 22 June1943 by the New York Times. After the rejec -tion from Weill, Brecht asked Hanns Eisler tocompose the music.

Despite Brecht’s hopes for a New Yorkperformance, in the end neither Brecht norPiscator was able to stage the piece in theUSA. In fact, the work did not receive itspremiere until 1957 in Warsaw. According toHerbert Kunst, Brecht himself prevented theplay from being performed immediately afterthe war, when requested by German theatresin 1946; at that time, he stated that the workwas unfinished.3 He returned to the play,Kunst notes, during the last year of his life.

This account, however, has been recentlycontra dicted by the singer Gisela May, whoplayed Mrs Kopecka at the 1962 East-German prem iere of the Berliner Ensemble,and went on to perform the role for the next

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twenty years. May reports that when Brechtreturned to Germany he tried to get Schweykperformed in Leipzig – much earlier than1956 – sending his play (which was not yet inprint) to her father, the chief dramaturgthere.4 May’s father suggested to Brecht that,even though the first part was very good, thesecond still needed some work. In response,May recalls, Brecht demanded the manu -script’s immediate return. Brecht’s decision tocomplete and stage Schweyk as early as 1949 isimportant here in the light of post-war deb -ates regarding the representation of traumaticand geno ci dal his tory in general, and ofSchweyk’s parodic interludes of the ‘higherregions’ in particu lar; this decision is dis -cussed below.

Staging Schweyk

Since its world premiere in Warsaw in 1957,Brecht and Eisler’s Schweyk has been critic -ized as a flawed play. In addition to thegeneral discomfort over Brecht’s transpo -sition of Hašek’s plot to the Second WorldWar, the use of humour and political parody,in particular, have exercised critics. Anarticle on 30 March 1957 in Der Spiegel, titled‘Braver Schweyk’, remarked the discomfortexpressed by Polish critics: Jan Kott describedthe change of historic context as ‘an artistic

mistake’; Andre Wirth noted that fascismcrushed and defeated the personal freedomdisplayed by Schweyk, while the Zycie Wars -zawy (Warsaw Life) categorically remarkedthat ‘Hitler’s Germany was not an operettastate’.5

Similar criticism was voiced on the occa -sion of Schweyk’s West German premiere inFrankfurt am Main on 22 May 1959. Directedby Harry Buckwitz, it featured sets andcostumes by Teo Otto. Hanns Ernst Jägerplayed the title-role. Its box-office successwas noticed by the international press:‘Frankfurt Hails Satire on Nazis,’ the NewYork Times reports only two days after thepremiere.6 The ‘higher regions’ interludesbecame central to debates over parody andartistic representations of fascist terror. Thesewere inspired by a caricature drawn byillustrator Arthur Szyk. Published in Collier’smagazine on 17 January 1942, it shows Hitlerand his generals in front of a globe, under theheading ‘Don’t believe a word of it’.

Intended by Brecht as horror fairy tales,these interludes satirically imitate Hitler andhis generals, causing the uneasiness of critics.Brecht’s interludes in the higher regions, allof which include Hitler, are profoundlyironic and occur three times in the play – inthe opening Prologue, and before ScenesFour and Seven.

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Above left: Hanns Eisler, composer of the score for Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg. Above right: Hanns Ernst Jägerin the the title-role of the TV film of Schweyk (1961, directed by Rainer Wolffhardt.

In the Prologue, Hitler, surrounded by hiscourt, is presented as an ignorant and narcis -sistic totalitarian subject. He wishes not onlyto conquer the world, but also to be loved bythe Little Man:

hitlerWie, mein lieber Chef der Polizei und SSSteht eigentlich der kleine Mann zu mir?Ich meine nicht nur hierSondern auch der in Österreich und der

Tschechei

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Illustration by Arthur Szyk, from Collier’s, 17 January 1942. Reproduced with the co-operation of the Arthur SzykSociety, Burlingame, CA.

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(Oder wie diese Länder geheißen haben, es ist einerlei)

Ist er für mich oder – liebt er mich?

[Tell me, since you’re the head of my police andSS / How would you say the little man viewsme? / Not just the Germans only / But those inAustria, Czecho-what’s-its-name / (What the hellare those small countries called, on my map theyall look the same) / Do they support me and – loveme indeed?]7

The second and third interludes, which aremuch shorter, show Hitler discussing withGoering and von Bock respectively the needfor more tanks, weaponry, and the ‘cheerful’labour of the ‘European little man’. Hitlerappears one last time in the Epilogue. Therehe has fallen from the ‘higher regions’ and isfinally confronted with the little man he hadbeen so eager to understand. The Epilogue,which is longer than all of the earlier inter -ludes, stages the encounter between Hitlerand Schweyk, lost on their way to Stalingrad.

In Buckwitz’s 1959 staging of the ‘higherregions’, Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbelsand von Bock appear in waxed masks, stand -ing around a globe before a huge swastika(see photo opposite). Suspended in an elev -ated space linked to the stage by a carpetedstaircase, the Nazi high officials are clearlyseparated from the lives of the main char -acters. The globe – referring to Chaplin’s TheGreat Dictator as well as staging Szyk’scaricature – fills with blood each time Hitlerputs his hand on it (accord ing to Brecht’sstage direction). Whereas for Brecht theseinterludes were written in the style of ‘ahorror fairy tale’, Buckwitz saw them as a‘bloody panopticon’ of power.8

Years before Adorno’s criticism of Brecht’sparodic treatment of the Nazis, these inter -ludes triggered controversy at a public dis -cussion that followed Schweyk’s Frankfurtpremiere. To the sur prise of the organizers,who did not anticipate such attendance forthe event, some 1,200 people turned up tohear a panel discuss and debate the play. Thehall filled to capacity, and at the last minuteadditional arrangements had to be made.9

The impressive attendance is indicative notonly of the depth of interest in subjects deal -ing with the war, but also of Brecht’s popu -

larity at a time when, due to escalating ColdWar tensions, his plays were increasinglyabsent from the West-German repertory.10

The panel in Frankfurt included speakersfrom both East (GDR) and West Germany(FRG). Representing the East were HeleneWeigel, Hanns Eisler, Erich Engel, ManfredWekwerth, and Elisabeth Hauptmann, amongothers. The West German panellists wereHarry Buckwitz, the dramaturg GüntherSkopnik, Siegfried Unseld from SuhrkampVerlag, Joachim Kaiser from SüddeutscheZeitung, and the writer Erich Franzen fromMunich.

The main question put to the panel andthe audience was: ‘Had Brecht gone too far –had he made the Nazis too entertaining?’Some panellists were sure that he had. Kaiserargued that Brecht’s ‘anti-fascist musical’trivialized the Nazi regime: ‘If the SS be -comes an object of laughter, then it is nolonger the SS.’11 Kaiser contended thatSchweyk, the indestructible little man whofearlessly interacts with agents of power,bears little resemblance to the commonpeople who trembled before the Nazis. Thetension of the ensuing discussion is legible inHelene Weigel’s response to Kaiser: ‘If youmean that one cannot laugh about murder,then we cannot continue the discussionhere.’12

In defence of Schweyk, director Erich Engelcited Brecht’s words that laughter is ‘thebest way to overcome fear and to dispelmisery’.13 On his part, Eisler defended theuse of parody. The point, he argued, was notto give an accurate portrayal of the ThirdReich but to provide a typology of wide -spread ‘passive resistance’. The jokes, hesaid, are not harmless, given their night mar -ish background. Insofar as they reveal anddegrade the enemy, they are not trivializing:‘This play is not harmless for Germany, it isvery tragic.’14

Humour and Parody: Adorno contra Brecht

Eisler’s defence of the use of humour andparody in Schweyk during the 1959 discus -sion in Frankfurt is at odds with the domin -ant position emerging from these post-war

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Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg, the Harry Buckwitz production, Frankfurt am Main, 1959. © Günter Englert.Musikarchiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Used by permission.

debates – a position prefigured in Adorno’scontroversial 1951 dictum ‘After Auschwitz,to write a poem is barbaric.’15 As a socialcatastrophe that also demonstrates art’sfailure to prevent it, Auschwitz radicallycompromises traditional forms of artisticrepresentation and expression.

In elaborat ing this challenge to art’s very‘right to exist’, Adorno criticizes Brecht’sparo dic treatment of the Nazis in two essays:‘Commit ment’ (1962) and ‘Is Art Light -hearted?’ (1967). Here I concentrate on thelatter, in which Adorno qualifies his positionon the impact of Auschwitz on art, while alsores ponding to Schweyk. For Adorno, the struc - ture of artistic semblance or illusion (Schein)ensures that all works of art will share anirreducible element of lightness or cheer -fulness (Heiterkeit).16 At first allied with thepromise of happiness, this lightness changescharacter under the pressure of history.

In the tense dialectic between lightnessand seriousness, he argues that this promisesurvives even in artistic expressions of des -pair: ‘The fact that through its very existenceit stands outside the dominant [sic] spell thatprevails allies it to a promise of happiness, apromise it itself somehow expresses in itsexpression of despair.’17 After Auschwitz, artis bound to resist lightheartedness ratherthan naively indulge it. The social catast -rophe can only be represented negativelyand indirectly, he concludes, offering SamuelBeckett as a model of negative presentation.

Adorno lived in Frankfurt at the time ofSchweyk’s West German premiere, and wasaware of the work and the debate that tookplace eight years before he wrote ‘Is ArtLighthearted?’. He criticizes Brecht’s humor -ous treatment of Hitler, arguing that thistrivializes Nazi power and violence.18 ForAdorno, polemical parodies of this kind arequestionable because they falsify history andrisk incomprehension:

Several years ago there was a debate aboutwhether fascism could be presented in comic orparodistic form without that constituting anoutrage against its victims. . . . Times were stillgood when Hašek wrote Schweyk [sic], with nooksand crannies and sloppiness right in the middle ofthe system of horror. But comedies about fascism

become accomplices of the silly mode of think -ing that considered fascism beaten in advancebecause the strongest battalions in world historywere against it.19

It is unlikely that, as Adorno rightly implies,Hašek’s Schweyk would have survived longunder the Nazis, something that Eisler andBrecht also acknowledge.20 For both Brechtand Adorno, literature’s emancipatory poten - tial is crucial for the emergence of auto no -mous subjectivity. Adorno located the socialconditions of fascism in two tendencies oflate capitalism – ‘integration’ and ‘adminis -tration’. Both tendencies, in his view, con -tinued to characterize the post-war period.In its absolute form, integration becomesgenocidal, and this for Adorno was demon -strated in Auschwitz.21

If art is to confront this traumatic demon -stration and attempt to express the terror ofgenocide, Adorno contended, then it mustresist the element of aesthetic enjoyment.After Auschwitz, this element of pleasurenot only adds insult to the injury of thevictims, but, ‘objectively, it degenerates intocynicism, no matter how much it dependson kindness and understanding’.22 Adornoelab o rates this point in Negative Dialectics,emphasizing that Auschwitz forces art toconfront its own failure to have prevented oreffectively resisted it.

This problem of complicity, or art’s sharein ‘social guilt’, calls radically into questionart’s very right to exist and compels artists todevelop ‘negative’ and critically self-reflec tivemeans of representation.23 Hence Adorno’spreference for Beckett’s modernism, with itsnegative way of processing the social catas -trophe. Transformed by actual history, art’scheerfulness is not only trivializing, it con -tributes to the ongoing social catas trophe byencouraging submission and conformityrather than fostering critical subjectivity.

In Defence of Brecht

Adorno’s criticism has had such reson ancethat to this day its arguments are repro -duced. John Willett and Ralph Manheim’sintroduction to the English translation of the

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play echoes Adorno, calling Brecht’s deci -sion to keep these interludes in as ‘an error ofjudgement and of political sensitivity’, as‘escapist, a witless insult to war’s victims’,and damaging to those who had no experi -ence with the regime.24

Although Adorno’s criticism certainlyholds true for works of the ‘culture industry’,it becomes problematic when mountedagainst Brecht and Eisler, whose collabo -rations aimed at critical reflection and action.While sharing Adorno’s worries about thesocial catastrophe’s paralyzing effects on art,Brecht developed a divergent artistic strategy.As he put it in a letter of 1946, his ‘dialecticalrealism’ aimed to transform the audience‘into social experimenters’, while ‘the critiqueof the reality shown should be tapped as amain source of artistic enjoyment’.25

Such a strategy is always realized as anintervention into a specific context and thuscan not be separated from the actual struggleswith which it engages. Adorno’s critique,however, fails to recognize Schweyk as anintervention, disdaining to treat fully andseriously its text and music and ignoring thedetails of its context.

As the theorist Gene Ray points out in acritical reading of Adorno’s attack on Brechtin ‘Commitment’, Adorno’s case is ultim -ately undone by his consistent avoidance ofcontext. Adorno criticizes ‘works written fora real and shifting context of struggle’, butelides the concrete situations to whichBrecht’s works responded. In this sense,examining the context and the effects of theart work are vital in understanding andevaluating it as an intervention. Even accord -ing to Adorno’s own dialectical methodo -logy, the avoidance of contextual specificityis a serious failing.26

Neither Brecht nor Eisler was under anyillusions that passive resistance alone couldoverthrow oppressive regimes. Neverthe less,their humorous fable of passive resistanceaimed precisely to depict the people whowere not organized in the armed resistance,and tried to show that their ‘passivity’ wasby no means complicity. A possible motiv -ation behind Brecht’s persistent attempts tostage Schweyk was his increasing preoccu -

pation from 1943 onwards with the way theWest perceived the Germans – that is, asNazis and collaborators.

In August 1943, around the time Brechtwas working on Schweyk, he and otherGerman immigrants prepared a statementthat included the need to ‘distinguish clearlybetween the Hitler regime and the classeslinked to it on the one hand and the Germanpeople on the other’.27 Telling is his letter toThomas Mann, in response to the latter’sdoubts about such a difference. Brecht pointsout to Mann the sheer size of German resist -ance, underlining the émigrés’ ‘heavyrespon sibility towards those fighters’.28 Heexpressed a similar preoccupation in theKriegsfibel (War Primer), the collection ofcaption-like poems Brecht wrote in exile toaccompany images he clipped from news -papers between 1938 and 1945:

Ich hör die Herren in Downing Street euch scheltenWeil ihr’s gelitten, trüget ihr die Schuld.Wie dem nun sei: die Herren schelten seltenDer Völker unerklärliche Geduld.

[I hear the men of Downing Street accuse you /Saying you stuck it out, so it’s your fault. / Theymay be right, but when did they last choose to /Chide people’s strange reluctance to revolt?]29

In a 1946 letter to Eric Bentley, Brecht insistedon the transformative potential of plays writ -ten in times of revolution and world war: ‘Inperiods when social orders are disinteg rat ingliterature does not necessarily disintegrate.Some literature is one of the factors of dis -integration.’30

Sharing Adorno’s sense of artistic im -passe, Brecht wrote in the same letter aboutthe difficulty of working in ‘the mixed smellof corpses and prosperity’. He expresses hisconcern that fascism was not entirelydefeated, but threatened to return in newforms. For Brecht, the process of culturalmourning after 1945 is inseparable from therenewed struggle against neo-fascism. In hisdialectical theatre, humour is just one ofnumerous means by which the world is rep -resented to the audience for critical reflec tion.

Brecht later elaborated his ideas on dia -lectical theatre in A Short Organum for theTheatre (1948).31 Estrangement or Verfremdung

– Brecht’s techniques of interruption andblocking – aimed at opening critical dis cur -sive spaces. Among these techniques, whichinclude a separation of elements as opposedto Richard Wagner’s fused spectacle, Brechtalso counts abrupt changes from serious tocomic, aiming to thwart the illusion thatsociety is natural and unchangeable:

Estrangement effects have long been known inthe theatre and in other arts. The fact is that wealways get an estrangement effect when art doesnot sustain the illusion that the viewer is face toface with nature itself. In theatre, for instance, theobjective world is estranged by the invention ofversification or by a highly personal style or byabrupt shifts between verse and prose or between theserious and the comic. I myself make use of est -range ment effects (including the old ones men -tioned above) to show that the nature of humansociety is not all that natural.32

This technique is widely employed in Schweyk,where the protagonist is a constant source ofhumour. The conversation between Schweykand Bretschneider, an SS agent, with regardto the failed attempt on Hitler’s life is indic -ative of this constant shift. Indeed, Schweyk’sencounters with power generate laughter.

schweyk Wahrscheinlich eine billige. Heutstellens alles in der Massenproduktion her,und dann wundern sie sich, wenn es keineQualität is. Warum, so ein Artikel is nichtmit der Liebe gemacht, wie früher eine Hand -arbeit, hab ich recht? Aber daß sie für einesolche Gelegenheit keine bessere Bomb wählen,is eine Nachlässig keit von ihrer Seit. In CeskyKrumlov hat ein Schlachter einmal . . .

bretschneider Das nennen Sie eine Nach -lässigkeit, wenn der Führer beinah seinen Todfindet?

[schweyk Probably a cheap one. Every thing’smass-produced these days, and then peopleare surprised when they don’t get the qualitystuff. Stands to reason something like thatcan’t be made with the same loving care likewhen they were hand-done, I mean doesn’t it?But I must say they were a bit careless not topick a better bomb for a job like that. Thereused to be a butcher in Cesky Krumlov who . . .

bretschneider You call it careless when theFührer is nearly killed?]

Similar discussions take place with SS-Lieutenant Bullinger at the Gestapo in Scene

Two, making the scene far more complicated,given the audience’s knowledge of the terrorof Nazi occupation and the implications ofSchweyk’s talk. Such juxtaposition becomeseven graver at the end of the play with thedeadly march of the German troops to Stalin -grad, making one shudder.

In fact, Schweyk’s humorously idiotic yetdefiant language is rather explosive. JoachimKaiser was right to point out, in the 1959Frank furt debates, that Schweyk is not theaverage little man. But this is not a weaknesson Brecht’s part, since he is not aiming at asimple identification with the character.Schweyk’s renowned idiocy makes the stateand its discourse appear ridiculous. Take, forexample, his anti-communist slogans on theway to Stalingrad in Scene Eight: ‘Ich habdort nix verlorn, ich komm zu Hilf undschitz die Zivilisation vorn Bolschewismusund ihr auch’ [‘I’m not looking for anything,I’m coming to help protect civilizationagainst Bolshevism just like you’]. As Eislerpoints out, Schweyk’s mouthing of the state’svoice sounds ‘absurd’ and ‘idiotic’, ‘unmask -ing the enemy’.33 In this way humour be -comes social criticism.

Music as Critical Commentary

Eisler’s music for Brecht’s Schweyk im zweitenWeltkrieg both comments on and contributesto the action. It consists of a wide range ofelements that together mirror and reinforcethe different levels of discourse of Brecht’splay. Thought by Eisler to be the mostimportant of his works for Brecht, he did nothesitate to call it ‘almost a small opera’ in theBrechtian sense.34 The score was writtenpartly in 1943 and completed in 1956. How -ever, Eisler added orchestral intermezzi in1959, and composed additional music for the‘higher regions’ in 1961, turning Schweyk intoone of his lengthiest stage scores. Withregard to the music of the ‘higher regions’,Eisler decided to expand the 12-bar ‘higherregions’ Vorspiel into more extended musicalsections, also setting the text to music.

The musical references of this ‘horror fairytale’ are operatic and non-Brechtian. Eislermusically complements the Nazi parodies

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with operatic parodies alluding to the musi -cal influence of Wagner, Hitler’s favouritecomposer. This connection is firmly madefrom the very first interlude, in which thereis a quotation of the so-called Tristan motif(though in a different pitch) from Wagner’sfamous prelude to Tristan und Isolde.

This quotation is heard at the point whenHimmler answers Hitler’s agonized ques -tion about how he is seen in Europe by theLittle Man. Following Hitler’s abrupt, chro -matic and high-pitched vocal line, a langu -age filled with pathos and empty gestures,the silences of the Tristan motif stand out as

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Hanns Eisler, Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg, first interlude in the ‘higher regions’. Musikarchiv, Akademie derKünste, Berlin. Used by permission.

both parodic and critical. Himmler’s three-note descending phrase ‘Mein Führer’ bringsto mind Tristan’s address to King Marke inthe final scene of Act Two (‘O König’) after heand Isolde are caught.

Eisler plays here with the intervals:Tristan’s descending minor third (B-G#) isinverted into Himmler’s major sixth (B-D).Singing deformed opera, Eisler notes, ‘thefascist leaders are exposed as bad Wagneriansingers’, and their music is ‘wickedly reveal -ing’.35 Juxtaposed with the simple, direct,and memorable songs that take up most ofthe work, the music of the ‘higher regions’sounds disconnected, false, and is deeplyironic. This contrast, impossible to ignore,thus becomes critical commentary.

From Folk Song to Mass Song

The orchestral intermezzi constitute anotherlayer of the music. They include folk dances,adding national colour. Eisler’s use of dancessuch as the beseda and polka, along with folkmelodies he had heard as a student in Pragueand later as a soldier in Czechoslovakia, isnot only indebted to his wish to paint thecharacters with national colours. During hisyears in exile, Eisler wrote repeatedly aboutthe importance of folk music, dances, and thepeople’s song. In his discussion on working-class music in 1935, Eisler focuses on therevolutionary potential of genuine folkmusic, whose importance he locates in theabsence of the ‘difference bet ween entertain -ment and serious music’: 36

There are two sorts of folk songs, the genuine andthe false. The genuine folk song originated inearlier centuries from the people themselves. Thefalse folk song is the product of a corrupt andsordid entertainment industry which ‘borrows’the idiom of the genuine folk song, only in acoarser and distorted form. . . . On the other hand,the genuine folk song can be extremely valuable,both from a point of view of the text as well as ofthe music, and is genuine folk culture.37

The idea of dance and music of and for theordinary people is important for Eisler. Thesetexts and music could still contribute, he in -sisted, to the quest for critical and revolu -tion ary music. Central to the latter is the mass

song that comes to replace the folk song, asthe forms of folk art decline in capitalistsocieties. The international character of themass song reinforces its function in socialstruggles, adding a new dimension topeople’s song: ‘The mass song is a fightingsong of the modern working class and is, toa certain degree, folk song at a higher stagethan before, because it is international.’38

Eisler’s ideas are exemplified in theMoldau Song, for which he uses part of themelody from Smetana’s Vltava (1874) fromthe symphonic cycle Má vlast (My Father -land). Inspired by the river that runs throughPrague, Vltava, along with the rest of thecycle, represents an apotheosis of Czechnation alist ideals and the notion of father -land. Eisler had used motifs from Vltavabefore, namely in his score for the filmHangmen Also Die (1943), which deals withthe active resistance in Prague during theNazi occupation. The association of Smetana’sMá vlast with Czech identity and nationalismis clear. The Nazis also understood this. Theyeventually banned the cycle after enthu si -astic responses during performances – as forexample, that in Prague on 11 May 1939.39

Eisler’s use here highlights the spirit of theCzechs, on which the play draws continu -ously, not least through expressions such as‘true Czechs’ (‘richtige Tschechen’).

However, Eisler’s use of the Vltava motifis also an attempt to write a modern folksong, a mass song. Smetana’s emblematicmelody, which came to represent Czechiden tity, is in itself a kind of folk song, datingback to the Italian Renaissance.40 FromSmetana to Brecht and Eisler, the song con -tinued on its path as a ‘folk song’, becomingthe inspiration for Bob Dylan’s socially andpolitically charged song (and album) ‘TheTimes They are a-Changin’. According toVera Stegmann, Dylan had heard the songduring the show Brecht on Brecht, which left alasting influence on him: ‘It is only a smallstep from Brecht’s “Es wechseln die Zeite”,’translated by George Tabori as ‘times are a-changing’, to ‘Dylan’s song and the album“The Times They Are a-Changin’”.41 Speak -ing about his experience and the influence ofthe Brecht songs in his autobiographical

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account, Chronicles, Dylan’s language echoesHanns Eisler: ‘They were like folk songs innature, but unlike folk songs, too, becausethey were sophisticated.’42

Brecht’s lyrics for the Moldau Song pro -vided Eisler with the internationalist charac terhe was looking for. Brecht’s many arduousattempts to get the song right, attempts thatgave him ‘a glimmering of the agonies of theuntalented’, are well documented.43 Theydenote the important role he ascribed to thissong with regard to the play’s message – andalso structurally, since it is sung again at thevery end of the work. The lines ‘Das Großebleibt groß nicht und klein nicht das Kleine.Die Nacht hat zwölf Stunden, dann kommtschon der Tag’ [‘The great shall not staygreat, the darkness is lifting. The night hastwelve hours, but at last comes the day’] areboth international and diachronic.

In this sense, the Moldau Song gives us anexample of the mass song that comes from ablend of people’s traditions, has clarity butalso musical vigour and strong lyrics. It isdifferent from the fighting songs of the early1930s, characterized by the strong pulse ofmarches and their martial character. Theterror of war did not leave the aesthetic of thefighting song unaffected. Here, Brecht’s 1948journal concerns Eisler’s dislike of march ingsongs: ‘[Eisler] has now sublim ated his anti -pathy to the vulgarity and primi tiveness ofthe marching songs by absorbing the unitedfront song symphon ic ally, i.e. as a folk songin formally strict pieces.’44

This is not to suggest that the marcheswere dropped altogether: they appear inEisler’s cantata Bilder aus der Kriegsfibel (1957),among other works. The use of the brassmarching sounds and the chorus in Bild 9(No. 39 in Brecht’s Kriegsfibel), so reminiscentof Eisler’s earlier music, pays homage to theresistance of the people of Moscow, workersand farmers, who repel the Nazis in the nameof the people. Eisler here recalls the Kampf -musik of the 1920s and 1930s, so intrinsicallylinked with the revolutionary spirit of theSoviet people. This, however, is not the pre -vailing mood of the cantata, which soundsrather mournful, sombre yet dynamic,detached and passionate, playing (just like

Schweyk though in different ways) with thedialectic of mourning and resistance.

Cultural Mourning and Resistance

Schweyk and Kriegsfibel are linked in moreways than one, as they betray the attemptof both Brecht and Eisler to come to termswith the traumas of the war. As such, theyare exem plary of their dialectic of culturalmourn ing and resistance, developed in theirpost-war works. In Scene Three of Schweyk,Baloun is clandestinely selling postcards ofruined German cities as if they were porno -graphic pictures. A customer reads the captionon a postcard of cratered Cologne: ‘Hitler isteiner der größten Architekten aller Zeiten’[‘Hitler is one of the greatest architects of alltime’]. This caustic combination of photo-image and textual caption embedded in theplay directly echoes Brecht’s strategy in theKriegsfibel. And as the scene from Schweykshows, this dialectical strategy of ironic com -mentary also enabled Brecht to criticallyregister the aspect of obscenity that Adornoinsisted on. The short, pithy epigrams hewrote to accompany images clipped fromnews papers enabled Brecht to reflect on thedeep traumas inflicted by fascism and thetragic dimensions of the war. Thus it is noaccident that Eisler composed a cantata forsoli, male chorus, and orchestra based on fif -teen images of epigrams from the Kriegsfibelin 1957, one year after Brecht’s death.

Brecht and Eisler developed their ownkind of critical dialectic of mourning andresistance. Eisler’s Moldau Song is exem -plary of this dialectic: it is strong withoutbeing overpowering. Sung by the actors atthe play’s conclusion, it becomes the leit -motif of the work, enabling it to end on theupbeat of popular resistance and hope. ThatEisler succeeded in creating a song againstoppression that surpasses its temporal andnational context is clear in Jürgen Schebera’saccount of a performance at the BerlinerEnsemble in the autumn of 1968, a fewmonths after the suppression of the PragueSpring. Schebera recollects how Gisela Mayhad to interrupt her singing of the MoldauSong, due to the great applause after these

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lines:45 ‘Es wechseln die Zeiten. Die riesigenPläne der Mächtigen kommen am Ende zumHalt. Und gehn sie einher auch wie blutigeHähne. Es wechseln die Zeiten, da hilft keinGewalt’ [‘For times have to change. All theboundless ambitions of those now in powerwill soon have been spent. Like bloodspat -tered cocks they defend their positions. Buttimes have to change, which no force canprevent’]. The applause returned at the endof the song, and standing ovations inter -rupted the performance for five minutes.

This incident is important because ithighlights how Brecht and Eisler’s Schweykwas understood beyond its Second WorldWar context, as a fable of people’s resistanceagainst oppressive regimes. A similar under -standing of the piece, this time however fromthe other side of divided Cold War Germany,is implied in a review of the 1959 Frankfurtproduction: ‘A song of hope that has, ofcourse, remained a song of hope for thosewho live by the Moldau.’46

The disruptive applause of the East Berlinaudience in autumn 1968 expressed both thethwarted expectations and hopes for a dif -ferent kind of communism and an abidingsolidarity after the suppres sion of the PragueSpring, In this way, Brecht and Eisler’s deci -sion to go ahead with the work after the warbecomes meaningful and defensible. Fromthe standpoint of social and political struggles,any work that manages to criticize statepower and repression and to inspire resist -ance becomes a weapon of struggle.

A new production of Schweyk was stagedat the Berliner Ensemble in 2009. Directed byManfred Karge, the production problem atic -ally omitted the ‘higher regions’ scenes. Thedecision to leave them out seems to be a clearconcession to Adorno’s ‘after-Auschwitz’criticism. According to Karge’s dramaturgHermann Wündrich, when Brecht wrote thepiece, which was intended for an Americanaudience, Auschwitz was not yet known.47

The implication here is twofold. First, the‘crude’ parodies of the ‘higher regions’addressed people who had no knowledge ofGerman politics – that is, American audi ences.Second, had Brecht known of Auschwitz, hewould not have written them.

A Tacit Answer to Adorno

Karge’s ‘correcting’ omission was favour -ably received by the press. One review goesas far as to say that Karge should be thankedfor getting rid of the grotesque imaginaryinterludes.48 Such reasoning is dubious, tosay the least. Although we may not knowprecisely how much Brecht knew about theHolocaust in the summer of 1943, he wascertainly very aware of it shortly after. In anycase, Brecht’s decision to go ahead with thework with no revisions was certainly aninformed one. It is directly linked to the con -tinued struggle against neo-fascism whichboth he and Eisler saw as urgent.

Furthermore, Eisler’s decision to composeextra music for these pieces in 1961 – wellafter his musical reflection on Auschwitz forAlain Resnais’ documentary Nuit et brouillard(1955), but also after the controversial discus -sion on parody in Frankfurt – adds a furtherlayer of aesthetic and political significance tothese parodic interludes. Although theseparts are uncomfortable and problematic,omitting them amounts to erasing the work’stensions, reinforced in both the text and themusic. Staging the conflict would be a muchmore effective solution than erasing it.

Even with their debatable problems, theissues of image and the manipulation of pub -lic opinion staged in the ‘higher regions’open directly on problems that remain acutefor us today. Brecht’s Verfremdung tech niquesand Eisler’s musical irony would allow forretaining the ‘higher regions’ characters andmusic, clarifying their historical context whilesimultaneously pointing to their problematicnature. A more rigorously Brechtian stagingwould link the work to ongoing strugglesand generate political force, inviting us asspectators to recover the position of ‘socialexperimenters’. It is precisely at this point of‘staging the conflict’ that Adorno and Brechtcould meet.

To conclude, Brecht and Eisler’s Schweykis far from being discredited by Adorno’scriticism of humour, despite the latter’ssharp theoretical thrust. Failing to engage indetail with the play and its context, Adornomisses the work’s direct links to struggle and

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its potentials for resistance. Whatever theplay’s flaws may be, critics cannot ignore thefact that it aims to inspire hope and a moreactive resistance in its audiences. As Eislerputs it, the aesthetic standards of a work ofart are not inflexible, but are determined by awork’s revolutionary purpose.49 Understoodin this context, Brecht and Eisler’s Schweykconstitutes a tacit answer to Adorno. Closeengagement with this work demonstratesthat the critical encounter between Adornoon the one hand and Brecht and Eisler on theother is not at all a settled affair. Today thisencounter remains a productive one.

Notes

A German-language version of this text (‘DenWiderstand komponieren: Bertolt Brechts und HannsEislers Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg’) appeared in HannsEisler: Angewandte Musik (Musik-Konzepte 12), ed. UlrichTadday (Munich: Edition text+ Kritik, 2012).

1. Bertolt Brecht, Letters, ed. John Willett, trans.Ralph Manheim (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 252–3.

2. Bertolt Brecht, Journals 1934–1955, ed. JohnWillett, trans. Hugh Rorrison (New York: Routledge,1993), p. 248.

3. Herbert Kunst, ‘Zur Enstehungsgeschichte’, inMaterialien zu Bertolt Brechts ‘Schweyk im zweiten Welt -krieg’, ed. Herbert Knust (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,1974), p. 155–6.

4. Gisela May, ‘Der Eine sang besser und der Andereeben nicht: Gisela May über Hanns Eisler im Theater’,Eisler-Mitteilungen, No. 44 (November 2007), p. 19.

5. ‘Brecht Premieren: braver Schweyk’, Der Spiegel27 March 1957 <www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41120961.html>, accessed 20 August 2012.

6. ‘Frankfurt Hails Satire on Nazis’, New York Times,24 May 1959, Harry-Buckwitz-Archiv (hereafter HBA)64 Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

7. Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 5 (Frank -furt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967); Schweyk in the SecondWorld War and The Visions of Simone Machard, ed. JohnWillett and Ralph Manheim, trans. William Rowlinson,Hugh Rank, and Ellen Rank (New York: Arcade, 2000).All quotations from the play are taken from theseeditions.

8. ‘“Brechts Schweyk im Kreuzfeuer”: Eine Dis -kussion im Frankfurter Volksbildunsheim’, Neue Presse,(Frankfurt), 6 June 1959, HBA 1001. Translations ofarchival material are my own.

9. Ibid.10. See ‘Sol Brecht gespielt werden?’, Die Volksbühne

Jahrgang, Frankfurt/Main, VIII, 11 (July 1959), HBA 64,p. 169–70.

11. ‘Keineswegs harmlos: Eine Brecht-Diskussion’,Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 June 1959, Hanns-Eisler-Archiv (hereafter HEA) 2742, Akademie derKünste.

12. ‘Brechts Schweyk im Kreuzfeuer’.13. ‘Brechts “Schweyk” und das Publikum’, Deutsche

Woche, Munich, 17 June 1959 , HBA 64.

14. Hanns Eisler, cited in ‘Keineswegs harmlos’.15. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and

Society’ [1951], in Prisms, trans. Samuel and ShierryWeber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), p. 17–34.

16. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Is Art Lighthearted?’[1967], Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nichol -sen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p.247–53; ‘Ist die Kunst heiter?,’ Gesammelte Schriften, Vol.11, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann(Frankfurt/Main, 1986), p. 599–606.

17. Ibid., p. 248.18. Ibid., p. 252.19. Ibid., p. 251–2. Here the English translator makes

Adorno anachronistically adopt Brecht’s spelling. In theGerman original, however, Adorno uses Hašek’s Schwejk.

20. See Brecht, Journals, p. 278, 280; Hanns Eisler, ARebel in Music, ed. Manfred Grabs, trans. Marjorie Meyer(Berlin: Seven Seas, 1978), p. 210.

21. ‘Genocide is the Absolute Integration’, in TheodorW. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (NewYork: Routledge, 1995), p. 362. For a discussion ofAdorno’s position on integration and administration,and their connection to modernity, see Gene Ray,‘History, Sublime, Terror: Notes on Culture’s Failureand the Social Catastrophe’, in Handbook of CulturalSociology, ed. Laura Grindstaff, John Hall, and Ming-Cheng Lo (London: Routledge, 2010); Terror and theSublime in Art and Critical Theory: from Auschwitz toHiroshima to September 11 and Beyond (New York: Pal -grave Macmillan, 2010).

22. Adorno, ‘Is Art Lighthearted?’, p. 251.23. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 366–7.24. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, Introduction

to Schweyk in the Second World War, p. xx.25. Brecht, Letters, p. 411.26. Gene Ray, ‘Dialectical Realism and Radical Com -

mitments: Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capital -ism’, Historical Materialism, No. 18 (2010), p. 3–24. I wouldlike to thank Gene Ray for many invigorating discus -sions on Brecht and Adorno, and for his response to adraft of this article.

27. Brecht, Journals, p. 288. 28. Brecht, Letters, p. 374.29. Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel in Gesammelte Werke

Vol. 10 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 1047; WarPrimer, ed. and trans. John Willet (London: Libris, 1998).

30. Brecht, Letters, p. 411.31. Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’,

Brecht on Theatre: the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. andtrans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 179–205.

32. Brecht, Letters, p. 543; translation modified, myemphasis.

33. Eisler, Rebel in Music, p. 208–9.34. Ibid., p. 205.35. Ibid., p. 205–6.36. Ibid., p. 135. 37. Ibid., p. 98.38. Ibid., p. 99.39. Sally Bick, ‘A Double Life in Hollywood: Hanns

Eisler’s Score for the Film Hangmen Also Die and theCovert Expressions of a Marxist Composer’, The MusicalQuarterly, XC, No. 1 (2010), p. 126.

40. The melody derives from Giuseppe Cenci’sRenaissance canzontetto Fuggi, fuggi, fuggi da quest cielo.It is also known as Aria di Mantova by Biagio Marini andMarco Uccellini. Its melody has appeared in popularsongs of several European countries, for example as theCzech folk song ‘Ko ka leze dírou’ (‘The Cat Crawls

through the Hole’). See John Walter Hill, ‘GiuseppeCenci’, Grove Music <www.oxfordmusiconline.com>;Christian Falvey, ‘Smetana’s “My Country”: a Sym -phonic Poem to the Nation’ <www.radio.cz/en/article/121632>, accessed 10 September 2012.

41. Vera Stegmann, ‘Perspectives on Hanns Eisler’,The International Brecht Society Yearbook 33: Gestus Music,ed. Friedemann J. Weidauer (University of Connecticut,2008), p. 142.

42. Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. I (New York: Simonand Schuster, 2004), p. 272.

43. Brecht, Journals, p. 296.44. Ibid., p. 413.45. Jürgen Schebera, ‘Eisler und die 68er: eine Um -

frage’, Eisler-Mitteilungen, 46 (October 2008), p. 23–4.46. ‘Schweyk im 2. Weltkrieg’, Nachtausgabe, Frank -

furt, 26 May 1959, HBA 64.47. I would like to thank Hermann Wündrich for

discussing the production with me.48. Peter Hans Göpfert, ‘Berliner Ensemble:

“Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg” von Bertolt Brechtund Hanns Eisler’, Kulturradio <www.kulturradio.de/rezensionen/buehne/2008/Berliner_Ensemble_Schweyk_im_Zweiten_Weltkrieg__.html>, accessed 22 June 2011.

49. Hanns Eisler, ‘Fortschritte in der Arbeiter -musikbewegung’, Schriften I: Musik und Politik 1924–48(Munich: Rogner and Bernhard, 1973), p. 114.

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