I somehow thought he would last forever, charming as always, joking, teasing, mocking, prickling, criticizing so wittily that the target of his pungent irony thought he was kidding, praising so ambiguously that those he loved thought he was criticizing, throwing mud pies in the faces of the powerful and calling them names, and boasting to one and all that he made lots of money being impolite.

“I most certainly am a member of the establishment,” Vonnegut told me that day over twenty years ago, I think it was the fall of 1985, in his town house on the East Side in Manhattan. An Amsterdam magazine had sent me to New York to interview the light of a “certain” American literature who so titillated, amused and charmed Europeans by ridiculing the ridiculous sides of America, by his playful lack of reverence for institutions and authority and for all the things that too many people take too seriously.

“No one is more in its center than me but I don’t maintain contacts with the other members. Though I don’t feel solidarity with it, I admit membership and I don’t like establishment people who play at the false role of rebels. Then the establishment needs people like me— however I’m a member only because I have money, otherwise they wouldn’t even talk to me.”

At the appearance of his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952, in the same year that Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea and Steinbeck brought out East of Eden, Kurt Vonnegut was thirty and still widely considered an underground writer, despite Graham Greene’s labeling him “one of the best living American writers.”

Kurt Vonnegut (born 1922 in Indianapolis, died in New York, April 11, 2007 from the consequences of a fall two weeks earlier) was a very humorous man, so entertaining that he was deceptive, marked by broad grins, soft delivery and false modesty. I wondered, as his co-establishment members must have wondered, too, where the creative artist ends and the performer begins. Or vice-versa. Was he a real social critic or simply a cynic?

“No one is more in its center than me but I don’t maintain contacts with the other members. Though I don’t feel solidarity with it, I admit membership and I don’t like establishment people who play at the false role of rebels. Then the establishment needs people like me— however I’m a member only because I have money, otherwise they wouldn’t even talk to me.”

After he became widely known in the sixties Vonnegut was identified with the revolt against realism and traditional forms of writing. Though he most certainly was a “social writer” from beginning to end, he was also more experimental than his contemporaries like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and John Barth, more fascinated by the absurd and the ridiculous. His science fiction and short stories that had appeared in the best magazines in the post-war years, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Playboy, Colliers, Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post, were marked by parody and experimental ridicule. A cult grew around him, especially among youth, so that he remained “mysterious” even after he no longer belonged to the underground. The appearance of each of his subsequent books was an event and he remained a fresh writer.

Things got underway in earnest already in that first novel. Vonnegut’s admiration for the marvels of technology had resulted in his early bent for science fiction, which he wrote a lot of. In Player Piano he was “fascinated by the wonderfully sane engineers who could process anything … do anything on their own horizontal level. Miraculous what the engineers could do. They were brilliant but didn’t seem to do anything brilliant. ” Drawn on Huxley’s Brave New World and science fiction in general, Vonnegut’s concern was that these specialists, each working in his own field, would soon produce their own leaders, a caste created by a technocracy barren of leaders capable of working on a vertical level and devoid of fresh humanistic ideas.

“Precisely this scientific system created our leaders. The problem is they brought little ideology into the factories. In general there is so little ideology left … if we ever had any at all. It’s good that we at least appeal to justice. On the other hand, I have found that one can behave ideologically within a small group related by profession or interests. I’m fascinated by the Paris Commune for example, especially its branch of anarchism. People tend to hang onto natural anarchy. The life of Bakunin is useful. Seen as useful people, anarchists offer a fascinating alternative to big government today. When I was a prisoner of war in Germany my small labor unit was left to fend for itself in destroyed Dresden. (One of his most famous novels, Slaughterhouse Five.) We dealt effectively with the thieves among us without being ferocious. We did that intuitively.”

That was Vonnegut.

One of his contorted Americas is controlled by one enormous corporation-state under the guidance of an ugly old girl whose weighty signature is her fingerprints (Jailbird). In this society the poor spend their time squirting chemicals into their bodies for the simple reason that “on this planet they don’t have doodley-squat.” That was the society that concerned the writer, Kurt Vonnegut, searching for a place for the individual. Like himself his characters are amusing, entertaining and sympathetic … and rebels all.

Yet his conclusions are seldom humorous.

“Big government is like the weather, you can’t do anything about it. People are moving away from central authority and its ineffective bureaucracy, which has created too many artificial jobs in Washington to accommodate our children. Then, let’s face it, leadership is so poor.”

In fact, Vonnegut spent his later years attacking that bureaucracy, especially the George W. Bush administration.

His artistic family background—his father and grandfather were architects, his daughters painters—and his association with painters and musicians engendered yearnings in him for the image of the Renaissance man. The day I spent the afternoon and early evening with him he invited me along to check in at the Greenwich Village gallery that was showing fifty of his book illustrations that he called “doodles with a felt-tip pen.” At the vernissage the vain writer-illustrator was as nervous as a Broadway musical star on opening night.

But not to worry! His fans snapped them up at one thousand dollars each.

He must have chuckled all the time to himself. That exhibit was the stuff of a typical Vonnegut literary vignette as in Breakfast of Champions in which he pokes fun at the art world, phony artists and gullible consumers in a mixture of ambivalence and pity. His fictional artist Karabekian has been paid $50,000 by the town for sticking a yellow strip of tape vertically on a piece of canvas. The whole town hates him for the swindle until he explains that it was an unwavering band of light, like each of them, like Saint Anthony.

“All you had to do was explain,” say the relieved people to their cultural hero, now convinced they have acquired one of the world’s masterpieces. “If artists would explain more people would like art more.”

Though Vonnegut repeats that workers simply want an explanation, the cynic suspects cynicism in him too.

“Sometimes I think the people of the world are begging to understand. And to be understood by the United States. They want to be understood more than they want to be ‘freed’ by America. Actually the US encourages not seeing other peoples. Disregard for other peoples is a matter of education. Making money is the point. Don’t waste your time. Conserve your resources. Withhold your time from people who can’t reward you. This started when Reagan came along and did away with social help using tax monies that Roosevelt’s New Deal had introduced. So the poor are now up the creek! (This was 1985, remember, before Iraq and Afghanistan and Iraq and East Africa and the war on terrorism.)

“And our intellectuals didn’t react at all to his re-election,” says the self-proclaimed Socialist-anarchist. “He ran unopposed.”

In Deadeye Dick a neutron bomb being transported along the Interstate goes off, killing 100,000 people of the town but leaving everything else intact. After the dead are buried under the parking lot for sanitary reasons, the question is what to do with the contaminated area. Someone proposes moving Haitian immigrants there. The point is that Vonnegut’s technological society needs the workers but it cares even less for non-Americans than for its own citizens.

“I’m convinced that slavery will come back, and Haitians were after all once slaves. With all the automation, society needs slaves. One will perhaps have the option of selling one’s services for long periods, thirty years, or for life. There will be many takers. Like the Asians and Mexicans who work here now for less than minimum wages.”

Americans who make their lives abroad see this generalized blindness to other peoples in their fellow Americans quite clearly, though they themselves are apparently unconscious of the neglect. I think Vonnegut must be right: it’s education … and some brainwash, too. Tourism and travels to Europe and Asia and South America to photograph the natives don’t really correct the blindness; sometimes it reinforces it.

We’re drinking scotch and black coffee and chain smoking in the kitchen of his unpretentious but large and expensive townhouse—four stories, with garden—in a swanky pretentious area of Manhattan. A cold wind is blowing down from among new high-rise buildings. Long Vonnegut in baggy pants and wool shirt is sprawled on an iron garden chair, drawling out his witticisms, descriptions and pronouncements, candid and down-to-earth, having fun at the expense of everyone—himself, me, us and them—the artist and social critic and performer, too. He runs his slim delicate fingers through long reddish hair and pulls nervously at his mustache. His talk has the quality of being quiet and breath-taking simultaneously. He seemed and acted younger than his years.

“I am successful,” he stresses, returning again and again to the money thing. “Privileged! When I was young and working for General Electric I was a hostage of society because I had six children. Now I’m free because I have money. I don’t like the privileged class, in the same way I will always resent the officer class. I was a private during the war and saw an infantry division wiped out its first time in combat because it was poorly led. Like America is poorly led today.” (Reading the write-ups of the two interviews I did with him in 1980 and again in 1985 is a curious experience; much of what he had to say then he could have said this year.)

Like many writers Vonnegut said that writing for him was a way to rebel against his parents’ life style. He claimed he chose writing because he wrote better than he painted, and because you have to do something to make your mark. He liked writing for newspapers because of the immediate feedback, which plays an enormous role among journalists I have known. Journalists are as vain as novelists and find it rewarding to write an article in the evening and see it in print the next day. I liked, appreciated and agreed with his social stance but he was his most entertaining and I believe most in earnest speaking of the arts.

“You can’t help but look back wistfully to the days of Cellini and Leonardo da Vinci who worked in many arts. But today there are so many things to do that we don’t have the time to dedicate ourselves wholly to the arts. Still, I believe in the arts. My children say I dance well. I can shag and that’s mysterious to the young. I can jitterbug and that impresses them. And I play the clarinette lovingly. In general the arts have held up well in catastrophic situations. Yet there are preferences. It’s true that painters like to paint and writers hate to write. Putting paint on a canvas is fun and is easy. You don’t even have to finish it. After six strokes you have a painting. At that point you can frame it and hang it. Maybe that’s why writers like to paint and draw. Norman Mailer is a good drawer. Tennessee Williams does good watercolors. Henry Miller is the best writer-painter I have known. Poetry too is fast. That’s why poets have so much time to sit around cafès and talk. But the novelist is always busy, sitting at a typewriter like a stenographer, which is boring and lonely.

“My book, Breakfast of Champions, is about art. I think art should be refreshing to everyone. But many artists are in league with the rich to make the poor feel dumb, like all the galleries downtown with walls covered in dots and blank whites. The rich organize art in such a way as to prove they have different souls from the poor, to give a biological justification to their status. Mystification is the secret. Ruling classes find it politically useful that workers can’t understand the pictures in the galleries. Inaccessible art grew out of industrialization. In the Renaissance art was of the people.”

Vonnegut’s heroes are outsiders, the rebels in big organizations who think the system is wrong and maybe want to change it. In a wacky and comical way he depicts the hopeless and sad human condition. His heroes care about involvement. Yet they are helpless. They have little power to decide anything.

“No man is in control,” he murmurs. “People are just born on this planet and are immediately hit over the head and yelled at. Ten per cent of the world’s children are abused. So what chance does man have? My own success is like an American dream. My growth graph is perfect. I’m prosperous. I can see clearly how it worked for me. I’m convinced we’re all programmed in a certain way. Still, big bureaucracy appalls me. Gore Vidal was right that this is the only country in the world that does nothing for its citizens. Jobs don’t go around. The auto industry is laying people off (that was twenty-two years ago and it still is!). Still, I have to say that working on the assembly line is better than doing nothing at all. But the problem is we’re just not useful anymore. We need to find new uses for man, find a simpler way of life.”

The backdrop of Vonnegut’s stage is this: While the people lament gasoline prices and call for small cars, Detroit turns out bigger cars and lays off workers. The people eat macrobiotic foods and squirt chemicals up their assholes and swallow exotic anti-hemorrhoid salves. It’s the people! But not people in his beloved New York! His settings are the wide expanses of America. Where the really funny, mad things happen. A world so far from Europe as to be incredible. A world that baffles Europeans.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t a certain point, still in the kitchen, and after his wife had glanced in a couple times, I think to check on the scotch level, and after he told me he never gave interviews to the American press, only to Europeans, and pouring more scotch said that interviews were hard work, and after he admitted he neglected his German heritage and the Vonnegut family tree in Münster, I asked him about his statement in a recent book—I don’t remember which—that people and nations have their story that ends, after which it’s all epilogue, and he intimated that the US story ended after World War II.

“That was only a joke,” he said wryly, smiling sheepishly.

“It didn’t sound like a joke. It sounded quite serious.”

“Well” (reluctantly, perhaps not wanting to appear too critical of the USA to the European public), “the United States story will become epilogue unless it succeeds in renewing itself. Like a play peters out if it slows down and has nothing else to say. One must invent new themes for development. Economic justice is one such theme that would make our first two hundred years seem like only Act I. That would become Act II. If that theme is not developed, then our story peters out. Our legal justice would then become mere mockery. Remember the old quip: ‘It’s no disgrace to be poor but it might as well be.’

“In the Constitution there is nothing about economic justice, only the legal utopia. The Bill of Rights is a utopia. We have laws that violate the Constitution. It’s now time to start thinking about social fairness. Our superstar government leaders deal with billions of dollars and we have individuals richer than the whole state of Wyoming. The military-industrial complex is robbing us blind, building their bizarre weapons that costs $40,000 a shot to use. Sensitive weapons that don’t work in the dark or under 50°. We can’t possibly understand all that crap. Compare the arms manufacturers to the salesmen of snake eye in the frontier days. The miracle medicine. In the 1930s we had Eugene Debs who labeled arms manufacturers ‘merchants of death.’ Then the crooks took over the labor unions and we have nothing left today so that I don’t have a banner to which I can adhere. And the same type of people are on top in our society today, selling their quack remedies, to protect us against the dread disease of Communism. (I’m certain he said the same about terrorism in later years!) And that’s what I say in my annual lectures at ten universities. I would like to see that change.

“Yet people don’t give a damn about anything. Few care what we pour into the world everyday. Few care if we go to war. People are embarrassed about life and don’t care if it all ends. Humans have decided that the experiment of life is a failure.”

One of his characters speaks of being born like a disease: “I have caught life. I have come down with life.” Speaking about experiencing the destruction of Dresden, a city of beauty like Paris, Vonnegut said he was the only there who found it remarkable that it all went up in smoke. “Not even the Germans seemed to care.”

The scotch flowed. The kitchen was blue with smoke. Thank God I was recording our talk or little would have remained. At some point one of us said “doodley-squat.” He loved those sounds, spicing his novels liberally with skeedee wah, skeedee wo. At critical moments his heroes mumble in skat talk of the jazz era, skeedee beep, zang reepa dop, singing a few bars to chase the blues away. Then, yump-yump, tiddle-taddle, ra-a-a-a, yump-yump-boom. And abbreviations Ramjac, epicac and euphic. Onomatopeic or symbolic nonsense. Doodley-squat for the nothing at all the poor don’t have.

It all sounded OK in the smoky blue kitchen over scotch but what do those sounds mean? Futuristic concepts? Or sounds of joy or despair? The voice of truth? Or just social chatter? Escape or mere foolishness? Is he writer or entertainer?

“Any agreement on the basis of friendliness obliterates ideas and thinking. What about that?”

“Yes, I wrote that. The stupid performance of man and his degeneration are possible because no one is thinking. There has been a warm brotherhood of stupidity. What do words mean anyway? The old Hollywood joke is expressive:

Question: How do you say, ‘fuck yourself?’

Answer: ‘Trust me.’”

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] took the following information from various websites, Dutch, German and Italian, of countries where Vonnegut was immensely popular, simply in order to round out his life story. After his last novel in 1997 he left fiction writing and became a senior editor for In These Times. The magazine is dedicated to informing and analyzing popular movements for social, environmental and economic justice; to providing a forum for discussing the politics that shape our lives; and to producing a magazine that is read by the broadest and most diverse audience possible. Vonnegut wrote that if the magazine didn’t exist he would be a man without a country.

In his columns there he began a blistering attack on the administration of President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.  "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."

In “A Man without a Country” he wrote that "George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography." He did not regard the 2004 election with much optimism; speaking of Bush and John Kerry, he said that "no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."

In 2005, Vonnegut was interviewed by David Nason for The Australian. During the course of the interview Vonnegut was asked his opinion of modern terrorists, to which he replied "I regard them as very brave people." When pressed further Vonnegut also said that "They [suicide bombers] are dying for their own self-respect. It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you're nothing ... It is sweet and noble — sweet and honorable I guess it is — to die for what you believe in."

Vonnegut’s Novels

• Player Piano (1952)
• The Sirens of Titan (1959)
• Mother Night (1961)
• Cat's Cradle (1963)
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, of Pearls Before Swine (1965)
• Slaughterhouse-Five, of The Children's Crusade (1969)
• Breakfast of Champions, of Goodbye, Blue Monday (1973)
• Slapstick, of Lonesome No More (1976)
• Jailbird (1979)
• Deadeye Dick (1982)
• Galápagos (1985)
• Bluebeard (1987)
• Hocus Pocus (1990)
• Timequake (1997)

Short Story Collections

• Canary in a Cathouse (1961)
• Welcome to the Monkey House (1968)
• Bagombo Snuff Box (1999)

Essays

• Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974)
• Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut, An Autobiographical Collage (1981)
• Fates Worse than Death (1991)
• God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)
• A Man Without a Country (2005)

Theater works

• Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970)
• Between Time and Timbuktu, of Prometheus Five (introduction by Vonnegut) (1972)
• Make Up Your Mind (1993)
• Miss Temptation (1993)

© Gaither Stewart

This is a crosspost with Southern Cross Review 

Eugen Bertold Friedrich Brecht was born on February 10, 1898 in Augsburg in Bavaria near Munich and died in East Berlin on August 14, 1956. It was a surprise to me to learn only in these days that he was not a native Berliner at all, as I had long assumed. He studied medicine at Munich University (1917-21), where I too did part of my studies in the 1960s. Brecht’s Munich was a revolutionary Munich, a dynamic city, part of Germany’s November Revolution (1918-19), which led to the weak Weimar Republic. Munich was also the birth place of the Nazi movement led by Adolf Hitler and his Brown Shirts. The explosion of the arts in Brecht’s Munich of the immediate post-WWI resembled pre-war Munich when it was widely said that “everyone was painting, writing or composing” and the artistic movement, Der Blauer Reiter, reigned supreme and, headed by painters Vasily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee and Gabriele Münster, swept through Germany.

Most people will also be surprised to learn that although Brecht’s collaboration with the progressive Viennese composer Kurt Weill was important in his creative life, his major work was not The Three Penny Opera and the song Mack the Knife. Instead his chief contribution was his dramaturgy, his poetry, his own theater ensemble influenced by Meyerhold and Piscator, and his theoretical works.

In his late twenties, Brecht became an ardent Marxist which he remained all his too short life. In those revolutionary times it seemed natural to him that he apply dialectical materialism to his theatrical work: his major targets in all his work were European post-WWI culture, the German bourgeoisie and war, reflecting his generation’s disillusionment with the civilization that had crashed in the Great War. Above all, the  better part of that generation, to which Brecht belonged, still aimed at the ultimate defeat of capitalism.

The editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica write extensively about Brecht’s creative work: “The essence of his theory of drama … is that a truly Marxian drama must avoid the Aristotelian premise that the audience should be made to believe that what they are witnessing is happening here and now. For he saw that if the audience really felt that the emotions of heroes of the past—Oedipus, or Lear, or Hamlet—could equally have been their own reactions, then the Marxist idea that human nature is NOT (emphasis added by the author) constant but a result of changing historical conditions would automatically be invalidated. Brecht therefore argued that the theatre should not seek to make its audience believe in the presence of the characters on the stage—should not make it identify with them. But should rather follow the epic poet’s art, which is to make the audience realize that what it sees on the stage is merely an account of past events that it should watch with critical detachment. Hence, the “epic” (narrative, nondramatic) theatre is based on detachment, on the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect, or the more precise translation, defamiliarization, GS), achieved through a number of devices that remind the spectator that he is being presented with a demonstration of human behavior in (a) scientific spirit rather than with an illusion of reality, in short, that the theatre is only theatre and not the world itself.”

A reborn Brecht could have written that readers of my account here should not be made to identify with Brecht of the 1920s and 30s—and his generation’s disappointment. We today however can see him as an “epic hero” of his times who faced a set of historical conditions much different from ours today. For a different set of reasons, we too are a disillusioned generation as was his. Some of us also aim at the end of capitalism as a solution of our problems: e.g. threats of nuclear war and man’s path toward destruction of planet Earth. However, we must appreciate Brecht for his accomplishments in his own era as a result of his application of the dialectical process at work—the conditions we face are vastly different, though the underlying evil—capitalism—marked his times as it does ours. Although we see similarities between the conditions facing the Brechtian generation and ours today, there are major differences of degree: his generation had witnessed the destruction of a civilization and searched optimistically, feverishly for the  regeneration of society; instead we are a demoralized generation, a placid generation, facing an Armageddon we perceive but since it is yet to arrive in full force many of us ignore. While his generation emerging from the abyss was filled with energy and hope, we in the West see all around us a largely hopeless and/or disinterested generation, the majority of which, to the dismay of a tiny minority, is largely ignorant of the reality of the dire situation the existence of which only few even recognize. We have in our face the super power USA led by psychopaths of the Dr. Strangelove genre, of “take it all” and “après moi le déluge”. Brecht’s generation faced traditional old regional power blocs; we face the rise of immense almost unimaginable geopolitical blocs covering the globe, by their very nature hostile one to the other, the Western one of which threatens daily to destroy not only the others but human life itself.

That wonderful Berlin writer, Walter Benjamin, noted that his friend Brecht considered the task of the epic theater less the development of actions than the representation of conditions. Brecht aimed at depriving the stage of sensations derived from the subject matter. Brecht recommended dwelling on “historical incidents and purging them of the sensational”. Pure Marxism: Brecht’s theater was conceived to speak didactically to the masses. For that he wanted a relaxed and receptive audience who could better follow familiar, easy to grasp situations. That concept is simple to receive and digest. The class struggle, always present in Marxist writing, “is a fight for the crude and materials things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist.” (Walter Benjamin)

MAHAGONNY PRELUDE

In 1922 while still living in Munich, Brecht had already made his mark in German culture. “At age 24 Bert Brecht has changed Germany’s literary complexion overnight,” wrote the Berlin critic Herbert Ihering in his review of Brecht’s first produced play, Drums in the Night (Trommeln in der Nacht). “He has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision … a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column.” That same year Brecht won the prestigious Kleist Prize for his first three plays (Baal; Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle). The Kleist Prize was probably Germany’s most significant literary award until abolished in 1932 as the Nazi rise to power became inexorable.

A fundamental key to Brecht’s approach to Marxism was his enthusiastic emphasis on the collective while downplaying the individual. At the same time his poetry and his written plays seemed insufficient for his insatiable artistic thirst. His association with a new, post-Expressionist movement in German arts, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) prompted him to develop his Man Equals Man (Mann ist Mann) project, a kind of Brecht collective—varying groups of collaborators with whom he henceforth worked—an approach mirroring the artistic climate of the middle 1920s and typical of Munich arts since Der Blauer Reiter movement in the early part of the century. Following the idea of the collective vs. the individual, two films, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, introduced Brecht to dialectical materialism and apparently prompted him to closer studies of Marxism and socialism. In 1964 he himself revealed in  (BRECHT, pp 23-24): “When I read Marx’s Capital I understood my own plays….Marx was the only spectator for my plays I’d ever come across:” He then praised Bolshevik collectivism (the replaceability of each member of the collective in his play Man Equals Man produced in Darmstadt) and the red terror in The Decision (Die Massnahme.)   

The collective adaptation of John Gray’s The Beggar’s Opera with lyrics by Brecht and music by Kurt Weill, The Three Penny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), was the big hit in 1920s Berlin, influencing music worldwide. Hildegard Knef sang Mackie Messer after WWII. Popular singers such as Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong made hit recordings of the song called in English, Mack the Knife. A famous line from the work underscored the hypocrisy of the conventional morality of the Church and the establishment in the face of working-class hunger and deprivation. Erst kommt das Fressen, Dann kommt die Moral. First the Grub, (literally: eating like animals). Then morality.

Both Brecht and Weill were keen to revolutionize the tired and bourgeois opera tradition. From that desire emerged the 1927 Mahagonny Songspiel, an operetta that took Brecht’s Mahagonny poems which Weill set to music. It was a statement of radical theater, set in a boxing ring, a story relating the greed in the fictional godless pleasure seeking city of Mahagonny.

MAHAGONNY

The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Der Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny)  is widely considered the masterpiece of the Brecht/Weill semi-collective. Its premier in Leipzig in 1930 caused an uproar by Nazis in the audience but its Berlin premier in Berlin in 1931 was a triumphant sensation. The story of the operatic play is that three criminals create the city of Mahagonny. Drinking, gambling,, prize-fights and such activities are the sole occupation of the inhabitants. Money rules. Mahagonny is threatened by a hurricane which after causing much distress simply bypasses the city. Following the hurricane nothing is forbidden and scenes of debauchery occur. Jenny and Jim want to leave but Jim cannot pay his debts and is arrested. Another character arraigned for murder, bribes his way out of it, but Jim has no money and is condemned to death for not paying for his whisky. The opera ends with discontent destroying the city, which burns as the inhabitants march away.

As background, see these excerpts from the article “The Opera Hitler Hated” by an apparent right-wing Rupert Christiansen published on March 10, 2015 in the conservative London Telegraph, which literally bombs Mahagonny on the eve of its surprising performance at Covent Garden.

“Does it belong in an opera house? And if not, where should it go? These are the twinned questions confronted by anyone addressing Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill’s vituperative musical satire Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, to which no clear answer to the conundrum has ever been provided. The text is barbed, ironic and challenging, the score richly textured and glitteringly seductive. But the great majority of attempts to give it theatrical life have fallen flat – in recent memory, it has bombed at both ENO (English National Opera) and the Salzburg Festival – and neither pukka opera singers nor actors with Broadway voices find it easy to inhabit both Weill’s smokey sophistication and Brecht’s bitter disillusion. The episodic plot doesn’t build coherent momentum, and the finger-wagging sermonising seems irrelevant and patronising. So can a forthcoming production at Covent Garden lift the curse? Mahagonny’s back history is complicated. Its origins lie in a half-hour concert cantata Mahagonny Songspiel (“sung play”), in which Weill set a selection of Brecht’s poems about Mahagonny, a fictitious city in North America presented as a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by its worship of graft and fraud, whisky and dollars.

The first performance at the genteel Baden-Baden Festival in 1927 caused a booing-and-cheering sensation that inspired Brecht and Weill to develop the cantata into something full-blown. The field was wide open, as the Weimar Republic offered an ambience in which avant-garde experiment with operatic convention was rife....

Yet even if the Zeitgeist was favourable, the personal chemistry between Brecht and Weill was combustible. Both of them may have deplored the enveloping romanticism of the Wagnerian tradition and sought subject-matter relevant to 20th-century life, presented through demotic songs rather than high-falutin’ arias – a style honed after Mahagonny Songspiel, when they shamelessly adapted The Beggar’s Opera into their 1928 smash hit The Three Penny Opera. But they also tugged in different directions.

Brecht was a cynical opportunist, fascinated by moral corruption and enraged by the ruling classes and their crooked dealings. His hostile attitude to theatre that merely pleased or pandered gradually hardened, and he ended up disparaging Mahagonny as something “cooked up through and through”, in which the sensuality of Weill’s music dominated his urgent message of resistance to a social order rapidly descending from gangsterism into Nazism.

Weill was a liberal, and altogether less aggressive. He was happy with the idea that Mahagonny should be classified as an opera, albeit one that addressed audiences in a fresh, crisp and accessible style – as exemplified in the gravel voice of his wife Lotte Lenya. He wanted success, in other words, while Brecht wanted revolution.

In Germany, Mahagonny caused an even bigger scandal as an opera than it had as a Songspiel, and the fact that Hitler’s insurgent Brownshirts often disrupted performances chanting the hideous Nazi Horst Wessel anthem only added to its notoriety. The catchy Alabama Song became a popular hit, but Brecht was probably right in thinking that his insistence that capitalism rots the soul and screws us all was being swamped by the éclat of mere showbiz….”

After Mahagonny, Weill and Brecht’s drifted apart. The Austrian Jew, Weill, and his wife Lenya emigrated to the USA where he found a place in the Broadway musical comedy. Brecht instead spent the last years of the Weimar era (1930-33) in Berlin working with his collective on plays driven by morals, music and his epic theater aimed at educating workers on Socialist issues, and in general illuminating the last years of German democracy prior to the Nazi takeover.

Both writer and composer were keen to revolutionise what they saw as a tired and bourgeois tradition of opera. Their first collaboration in 1927 was Mahagonny Songspiel, an operetta ….Staged in a boxing ring, it was a statement of radical theatre, a story of greed set in a money-mad fictional city of pleasure seekers, immigrants and the godless. A mostly favourable reception encouraged them to develop it into a full-blown opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which was meant to premiere in 1928 – but a new project stopped Weill and Brecht in their tracks. That project was The Threepenny Opera, based on a ballad opera called The Beggar’s Opera, written by John Gay in 1728. One of the earliest-known satirical “anti-operas”, The Beggar’s Opera lampooned the serious Italian opera style and thumbed its nose at the English public’s fascination with it. Socialists Weill and Brecht saw the source material as a way to smuggle their polemic to the masses. They kept much of the original plot and characters but added a new libretto and mostly new music and, in doing so, created a soundtrack for a disgruntled generation. With its expressionistic satirising of capitalism, prostitution, militarism and the middle classes, The Threepenny Opera turned traditional opera on its head, serving not only as a sharp political critique of capitalism but as a showcase for Brecht and Weill’s avant-garde approach to theatre.”

CONCLUSION

Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History VII, quotes again his friend, Bertold Brecht, from The Threepenny Opera:

Consider the darkness and the great cold

In this vale which resounds with mystery.

Although such words are not exactly Socialist Realism, I believe Bertold Brecht who visited the Soviet Union was partial to the Soviet form of Socialist Realism. Even if he earlier recommended familiar old themes, historical themes, for his epic theater, he did not mean that the “good old days” of bourgeois culture were good. “Better to start with bad new ones,” he wrote, “rather than those good old ones.” Even though he included Kafka (despite the latter’s mystification) among the documents of despair, he believed Socialist writers may learn from them because of their innovating techniques. Brechtian theater as a rule was clearly representative of his theory, also I think because of his remarkable unbounded imagination for creating unusual and intriguing situations for holding the attention of his audiences and for educating them … as in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

Here are two songs from the Brecht-Weill creation which reflect the style of their era as well as the commercial appeal of their productions. For me personally Lotte Lenya’s grating voice and staccato delivery is representative of the1920-30s Berlin.

Lotte Lenya in Alabama Song by Kurt Weill recording 1930 - YouTube

▶ 3:04

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGUjGPrfA6U

KURT WEILL Alabama Song (aus Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny) singt/sings/canta : Lotte ...

Mack the Knife Sung by Lotte Lenya - YouTube

The song "Mack the Knife" was written by Kurt Weill for his wife Lotte Lenya. Here Ms Lenya sings. 

wsws.org

On October 19, WSWS journalist David Walsh spoke to Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist whose 24-year-old son, Casey, was killed during the Iraq War in early April 2004.

A little over a year after this tragedy, in August 2005, Sheehan came to prominence when she set up an antiwar camp, Camp Casey, outside George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. The month-long protest focused the attention of large numbers of people, in the US and around the world, on the human cost of the neocolonial invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Cindy was fortunate to meet the legendary Hugo Chavez.

When, in May 2007, the Democrats in Congress facilitated the authorization of an additional $100 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sheehan was outraged. In an open letter May 26 to the congressional Democrats announcing her departure from that party, she wrote, “You think giving him [Bush] more money is politically expedient, but it is a moral abomination and every second the occupation of Iraq endures, you all have more blood on your hands.”

Recently on her blog, Sheehan denounced actor/director Rob Reiner and actor Morgan Freeman for their video, announcing the formation of the “Committee to Investigate Russia.” This organization, which includes extreme right-wingers and assorted warmongers, was formed, according to the foul video, to help “Americans understand the gravity of Russia’s continuing attacks on democracy.” Freeman intones, “We have been attacked. We are… at war,” and proceeds from there.

In her comment, Sheehan recounted her experience with Reiner and his wife, Michele, who approached her in 2005 and attempted to bring her into the Hillary Clinton for president camp. As she noted on her blog and below, when she rejected that attempt, they ultimately reneged on their promises of assistance.

Sheehan concluded her piece, “Reiner et al, are enemies of truth; they are enemies of peace; they are enemies of true democracy; they should be exposed and shamed.”

* * *

David Walsh: Could you explain for the benefit of our readers your experience with Rob and Michele Reiner in 2005?

Cindy Sheehan: In August 2005 when I was in Crawford, Texas, Rob Reiner sent his wife Michele and a couple of people from his production team to Camp Casey to film a television commercial. It had me speaking about my son Casey, the war and how Bush lied. I demanded that Bush speak with me.

Of course, I thought it was because the Reiners cared about the wars. But it was actually because they wanted to further their anti-George Bush agenda, to benefit the Democrats. I didn’t know that at that time. They also filmed a couple of other Gold Star families and then the commercial was aired.

After Camp Casey was over, I was invited to Rob and Michele Reiner’s house. I had never met Rob before, I’d only met Michele. So we went, and Stephen Bing was also there. I didn’t know him. He is a movie producer, a businessman and a multi-, multi-millionaire—and a big funder of the Democratic Party. The meeting wasn’t so much about the Iraq War; it was about how I should support Hillary Clinton for president in 2008.

DW: Because you had a considerable following …

CS: I said, “I can’t support Hillary Clinton, she’s pro-war. I’ve given my promise that I’m not going to support any more pro-war politicians.” She not only voted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she was actually one of the chief promoters of the wars. She provided Democratic Party cover and credibility, so to speak, for the lies justifying the wars. But they were lies no matter who told them.

Hillary Clinton: an arch typical warmongering corporatist Democrat.

Bing then looked at me and said, “Cindy, she’s our only hope.” I said, “I don’t know who you’re talking about when you say, she’s our only hope, but I cannot support her, and if she’s the only hope, we’re in very serious trouble. So are people all over the world.” He said to me, “She’s really against the wars, and she’s going to come out against them when it’s politically expedient.”

At that point, I started to cry. I said, “I can’t believe you just said that to me. She thought it was politically expedient to support the wars in 2001, 2002, 2003, and now my son has been killed. You’re saying that political expediency is more important than human life.”

We ended the meeting at the Reiners more or less like that. They were still supportive of me and my organization at the time, Gold Star Families for Peace. Our main office was in Los Angeles. My sister, Dede, was working there and she worked with Reiner and his team. They were helping us get our 501(c)3, our nonprofit status, they were paying for it, they were doing the legal work.

I was in Brooklyn to give a speech not too long after that, which of course was part of Clinton’s constituency, because she was one of the senators from New York. I told an anti-war rally what Bing had told me. He didn’t say it was a secret. And if he had, I probably would have reported it anyway. I said, we have to pressure her, because she’s not going to come out against the wars until it’s expedient. I knew my audience, I knew they didn’t like her.

Then, shortly afterward, I took part in a meeting with Hillary Clinton. She was really cold and callous. I was with another Gold Star mother, and my sister. The three of us poured our hearts out, we were crying. After the meeting, Clinton spoke to a reporter from the Village Voice and said, “Yes, I heard what they had to say, but I met with other Gold Star families before they came, and they want us to continue the mission to make sure that their loved ones’ sacrifices are honored.” She added, “I agree with them, the other families.”

In November 2005, there was a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in Los Angeles, and I was going to go down and protest at it. Michele Reiner called me that morning, and said, “Cindy, please don’t go and protest.” I had planned to get on a plane and go down there, from Northern California. Michele begged me not to go. I said, “Out of respect for the help you’ve given Gold Star Families for Peace, I won’t go.”

However, my sister and other antiwar activists still went. Rob and Michele Reiner saw them and actually gave them a middle finger. That was a Saturday. On Monday, Reiner’s assistant called my sister and told her, “We’re not supporting Gold Star Families for Peace anymore.”

Rob Reiner: the stuff that big phonies are made of. Or simply mainstream liberals. (Rob Reiner (Photo by Neil Grabowsky/Montclair Film Festival))

DW: They pulled the funding, and the support?

CS: Yes. We were right in the middle of getting our 501c3. After Rob and Michele treated my sister and my comrades so rudely, I wrote an article about how the antiwar movement shouldn’t support Hillary Clinton. It was posted at the Huffington Post. That’s the last contact I’ve had with the Reiners or Bing.

That was one of my early eye-opening experiences.

When my son was killed, I wasn’t an activist, a political person. I didn’t know who were true opponents of the war and who were just against the Republicans, or simply against Bush. Because it doesn’t seem as though many of these people are against the wars now that Trump is president. Or they’re not protesting, in any case.

I didn’t know. I thought that if people came to help, they were there because they had the same goals we did, and that would be ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of those people were just there to end Republican rule.

DW: Basically, they packed up the antiwar movement in 2006 when the Democrats retook Congress. There hasn’t been a major demonstration since that time. And the election of Barack Obama completed the process.

CS: Exactly. Of course, I was told by all the Democrats in 2005, Nancy Pelosi included, that if the antiwar movement helped them get back in power, in the elections of ’06, they would help us end the wars. Then, in ’07, they were sworn in and it wasn’t even on their agenda. They had their top 10 items they were going to work on, and ending the wars wasn’t there at all. Howard Dean told me, “Cindy, the wars are so hard.” Screw you. My son is dead, and so are many others.

In 2008, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, several “antiwar” organizations said that we shouldn’t have any protests in D.C. because it would embarrass the Democrats. One of them, United for Peace and Justice, was significantly supported by the Communist Party, and we know they have long been in the back pocket of the Democratic Party. I would normally say, up the butts of the Democrats, but I’ll try and be a little more dignified in this interview. The so-called left … !

This anti-Russian campaign is horrible. Would you really rather have a nuclear war than admit that your candidate, Clinton, lost because she’s a terrible person and ran a terrible campaign, and many people hate her?

DW: Let’s talk about the anti-Russian campaign. In our view, it’s both a matter of divisions over foreign policy within the ruling elite, and an effort to channel social anger in a reactionary direction. The Democrats have not challenged Trump on his extreme right-wing program, but primarily accused him of being “soft” on Russia, or a Russian puppet.

CS: Right. They can’t attack for him continuing the wars either, because the Democrats are part and parcel of that. To me, it’s just so patently bullshit, the propaganda about Russia. People just want to cling onto it.

In the “Committee to Investigate Russia” video, Morgan Freeman said, “For 241 years, our democracy has been a shining example of what we can all aspire to.” Really? You’re a black man, how can you even say that? A descendant of slaves. What about the genocide of the indigenous population? An example of democracy to whom?

Morgan Freeman: Uncle Toms don't come any better than this, or more toxic. Money and adulation went to his head.

Freeman suggests some gravitas. Whether he actually has it or not, he can act like he has. People see that and say, he was the president of the United States, in a movie, so I believe him when he says that Russia and Trump are destroying American democracy. Blah, blah, blah …

DW: The propaganda campaign has reached the most preposterous levels. They’re now arguing that basically every sign of discontent in the United States has been instigated by Russian agents. I don’t frankly think most people believe it.

CS: I hope not. That would make me very sad. I’m very active on social media, and there are a lot of people who are buying this. Rachel Maddow is another pusher of this.

DW: That’s the whole pseudo-left and miserable liberal-left, all of these people have gone over to or become the pro-war camp.

CS: There are hundreds of people thanking her …

DW: Don’t be too impressed. There are empty-headed types and loudmouths, or people who don’t see things yet. It’s a big country. But the social conditions in America are devastating. I don’t think that many people believe that anger in America is Russian-made! They know where the anger comes from and what it’s about.

CS: Well, they’re trying their hardest to confuse people.

DW: Of course. Now, your “friend” Clinton has accused WikiLeaks of being a tool of Russian intelligence. They’re all demanding that the Internet be censored. The great “fake news” story they don’t want people to receive or hear is that American capitalism is a disaster.

You made another point in your article: “The [Reiner-Freeman] video obviously was made to sink us back into the lowest depths of the McCarthy witch hunts and HUAC hysteria and as a Cold War Kid, ‘I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore,’ (Paul Simon, Graceland).” Could you talk about that a bit, about being a “Cold War Kid”?

CS: I think post-9/11 America might be even more propagandized and intimidated by the government and the corporate media than during the Cold War. But, oh, my goodness, from the time I was in the first grade until I was in the sixth grade every Friday we had those nuclear bomb drills where a siren would blow and we had to climb under our desks. We were told how evil and violent the Soviet Union was, along with “Red China.” You couldn’t say “China,” you had to say, “Red China.”

When I was in the second grade, my teacher asked us—mind you, we were 7- and 8-year-old kids—what would we do if a “red Communist” came up to us and told us not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and if we did it anyway, he would blow our heads off? I raised my hand, she called on me, and I said, I wouldn’t say it! That was not the answer she was looking for.

DW: Better dead then red.

CS: She dragged me to the corner, and she was calling me a traitor and anti-American. I was standing in the corner, and thinking, I don’t care what you say, I still don’t want to get my head blown off. It was child abuse the way we were terrorized.

After my son was killed, I went to Venezuela and other places, I talked to people who had been harmed by the US government and its policies, and I had been digging into what this country does. But when I went to Cuba in January of ’07, I was still a little bit trepidatious because of all the propaganda we had been taught about Cuba. If you live one way for 45 years, you have it pounded into your head how evil Castro and the Cuban revolution are, it’s kind of hard to break free of that.

DW: You also mention that this is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and that you’re studying it. I’m curious what books you’re reading or what studying you’re doing.

CS: I just finished The Emancipation of Women by Lenin. I’ve read pamphlets by Lenin. And works by other people.

DW: You should read Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution.

CS: I have read some Trotsky. I love your analysis on the World Socialist Web Site.

I’ve been trying to dig into the background and the heroism of the Bolshevik Revolution, because I have been so propagandized my whole life about the Soviet Union. I was taught about how America saved the world from fascism, but it was mainly the sacrifices made by the Soviet population that defeated Hitler.

DW: So you read the WSWS?

CS: Oh, all the time. I share it on my Facebook page a lot too. I have learned a lot from the analysis.

DW: Glad to hear it.

Let me ask you one more, and difficult, question. It’s been 13 years since your son died. This is not something you ever get over. How has that pain changed over the years, if it has?

CS: I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because my sister passed away in January. That was another huge blow to our family.

Recently, some US special forces were killed in Niger, in West Africa. There’s a big controversy because the family said that Trump upset them. Trump said something like, he [the dead soldier] knew what he was signing up for.

It’s really hard because Casey and millions of others should still be alive. The liberals are mad at Trump for upsetting the family, but they’re not asking, what are US Special Forces doing in Niger? There’s been so much death and destruction, and so my pain has become global instead of just local.

As far as Casey’s death is concerned, you learn how to live with it, but we still get assaulted all the time, by current events, and the news, and the lies. As an activist, it’s just something that’s constant. Sometimes I have to pull back, “I’m going to binge on Netflix for the rest of the day, watch something funny.” I have to remove myself from it occasionally, because it never stops.

I also have to mention my five grandchildren, from nine years old down to two. They helped me go through my sister’s terrible situation. I was her caregiver for two years. They just live life. So they’ve given me back a lot of my joy in living. Then I feel bad, because I ask myself, what kind of world are we giving them? A pretty shitty one.

DW: We’ll change it.

CS: Well, we’re trying.

The author also recommends:

An interview with antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan
[5 September 2007]