Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things

200 Pages·2016·1.72 MB·English

by  Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti
Also by Bertolt Brecht
PLAYS
Brecht Collected Plays: One
(Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, The Life of Edward II of
England, A Respectable Wedding, The Beggar or the Dead Dog,
Driving Out a Devil, Lux in Tenebris, The Catch)
Brecht Collected Plays: Two
(Man Equals Man, The Elephant Calf, The Threepenny Opera,
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins)
Brecht Collected Plays: Three
(Lindbergh’s Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said
Yes/He Said No, The Decision, The Mother, The Exception and
the Rule, The Horatians and the Curiatians, St Joan of the Stockyards)
Brecht Collected Plays: Four
(Round Heads and Pointed Heads, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich,
Señora Carrar’s Rifles, Dansen, How Much Is Your Iron?,
The Trial of Lucullus)
Brecht Collected Plays: Five
(Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children)
Brecht Collected Plays: Six
(The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,
Mr Puntila and His Man Matti)
Brecht Collected Plays: Seven
(The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweyk in the Second World War,
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Duchess of Malfi)
Brecht Collected Plays: Eight
(The Days of the Commune, The Antigone of Sophocles,
Turandot or the Whitewashers’ Congress)
Berliner Ensemble Adaptations
(The Tutor, Coriolanus, The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen, 1431,
Trumpets and Drums, Don Juan)
PROSE
Brecht on Art and Politics
Brecht on Film and Radio
Brecht on Theatre
Brecht on Performance
Collected Short Stories of Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht Journals 1934–1955
The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar
Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti
Book of Interventions in
the Flow of Things
Bertolt Brecht
Edited and translated by Antony Tatlow
Series Editor: Tom Kuhn
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
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BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Diana logo are trademarks of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Original work entitled Me-ti. Buch der Wendungen
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988-2000
Copyright © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag
English translation © Antony Tatlow 2016
First published 2016
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama Series Editor for Bertolt Brecht: Tom Kuhn
Antony Tatlow has asserted his moral rights to be identified as the editor and
translator of this edition.
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in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
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or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-7917-1
PB: 978-1-4725-7916-4
ePDF: 978-1-4725-7919-5
ePub: 978-1-4725-7918-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Cover design: Louise Dugdale
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Introduction 1
Attributable names 41
[Prefatory note] 43
Me-ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things 45
Bibliography 175
Appendix A: Sequential listing of texts 177
Appendix B: Alphabetical listing of texts 185

Introduction
During his visit to Moscow in March 1935 Brecht wrote to his wife, Helene
Weigel, that he had seen the ‘really splendid’ Chinese actor Mei Lanfang.
In a postscript, he asked: ‘Have you already picked up Me-Ti? Does it look
good now?’ His copy of this remarkable book, published in 1922 – the first
full translation into any European language, by Alfred Forke, of an ancient
Chinese text – was being rebound in Svendborg. Forke entitled it Mê Ti – the
philosophical works of the social moralist and his followers.1
Even given Brecht’s shrewd but sporadic responses to Chinese culture, this
638-page example of detailed forensic sinological scholarship, otherwise of
interest only to specialists, was an unusual acquisition, and it had surprising
consequences. The text is a unique combination of tersely formulated, often
witty aphorisms on human behaviour, of advice offered in the course of
conversations on how best to conduct human affairs, of systematic, critical
descriptions of cultural values and related social dangers, and of obscure,
sometimes incomprehensible arguments over logical problems formulated
over two millennia ago.
Brecht found it a stimulating treasure trove. This is not to say that his
own Me-ti is an interpretative engagement with the Chinese work. Brecht’s
is primarily occupied with the unfolding European crises, with the political
theory and practice of Communism in the Soviet Union, as well as with
personal affairs. But he could not have shaped his own text without this
stimulus, and there are passages in the Chinese work, some of which he
1 Mê Ti, des Sozialethikers und seiner Schüler philosophische Werke zum ersten Mal
vollständig übersetzt, mit ausführlicher Einleitung, erläuternden und textkritischen
Erklärungen versehen von Professor Alfred Forke (Berlin: Kommissionsverlag der
Vereinigung wissenschaftlicher Verleger, 1922) in the series Mitteilungen des Seminars
für orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich-Wilhlems-Universität zu Berlin.
Given the many systems of transliteration and different European orthographic
conventions, the transcription of Chinese names, which may themselves vary, can prove
confusing. In order to distinguish between Brecht’s Me-ti, as text and fictional person or
persona, and Forke’s translation of the Chinese text, I refer to the latter and its ‘author’
as Mo Di, which is another version of the author’s name. In his text, Forke also uses
the common honorific for Chinese philosophical teachers, Mê-tse, meaning Master Mê
(墨子, in the pinyin transcription, Mozi), which explains why Brecht refers to ‘Master
Me-ti’ and to ‘Master Ka-meh’ for Karl Marx. Quotations are my own translations. The
Letters are quoted, where possible, from the English edition, London: Methuen, 1990
(here, with slight emendations, pp. 201–2). Other Brecht quotations are either from the
Methuen/Bloomsbury edition or else, if not available, my own translations from the
thirty-volume Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (BFA).
2 Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti
noted but did not directly use, that seem to echo his own thoughts. To cite
one example: ‘Generosity does not exclude the self.’ Elisabeth Hauptmann,
his close collaborator over many years, told me he was reading this Chinese
‘philosophical’ work from 1929.
*****
Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933. Two weeks later the police
started proceedings for high treason against those involved in a production
of Brecht’s ‘learning play’, The Measures Taken. After another two weeks,
the Reichstag burnt down. That night Brecht slept at his publisher Peter
Suhrkamp’s house, and the next morning fled Germany for Prague and
Vienna. In May, his books were burnt in Berlin, with about half a million
kilograms of other ‘un-German’ works. He came to Paris in early June, for
the première of The Seven Deadly Sins, his last collaboration with Kurt Weill,
and on the morning of a performance on 20 June of The Little Mahagonny
by Lotte Lenya he left to join Helene Weigel, who was already in Denmark
with their children. In August they bought a house in Svendborg on the
island of Fyn, about thirty kilometres from German territorial waters, from
where he would later hear the firing practice of the German navy just over
the horizon. Ruth Berlau, another key collaborator, first visited them at the
end of the month.
Though Brecht was continuously engaged in projects and plans, and
travelled to London, Paris, Moscow and New York, in rural Denmark the
character and pace of life changed drastically after the intensity of Berlin, the
dramatic flight from Germany, and the recent success of performances before
discerning audiences in Paris. Contact with collaborators and publishers
became much more difficult. Weigel lost all chance of performing fully for
fifteen years, until Antigone in Switzerland, and Brecht, with very occasional
exceptions, also lost his audiences. With his works largely untranslated, he
lost most of his readers as well.
He continued to work on theatre scripts, but with no chance of perfor-
mances in Germany and little real access to theatres elsewhere, let alone
much influence over what they would do. The prospect of Danish and
English productions appeared and receded, or, if actually realized, often
disappointed, like The Mother in New York in 1935, where he and Eisler were
ejected from rehearsals, and the uneven Round Heads and Pointed Heads in
Copenhagen in 1936, taken off due to poor audiences.
Brecht, therefore, turned to other projects: The Threepenny Novel, finished
in August 1934, favourably reviewed in Prague and Paris but criticized in
Introduction 3
Moscow as insufficiently realistic; critical essays, such as Five Difficulties in
Writing the Truth (December 1934), or the programmatic but often misun-
derstood Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting (1935), which appeared first
as an English translation in 1936 with an unfortunate title – The Fourth Wall
of China; An essay on the effect of disillusion in the Chinese theatre. He was
also occupied with less structured or unfinished prose writings, many of
which were anecdotal in character. The Stories of Mr Keuner were the only
ones, though then not all of them, to appear during his lifetime; others,
unpublished at the time, were the so-called Tui Novel, the Conversations
of Refugees and Me-ti. The material and style of these texts sometimes
overlapped, the same names occasionally appearing in different contexts.
The Keuner stories, first published in 1930 and 1932, continued sporadi-
cally up to 1956. Some could well have appeared in Me-ti, like Apparatus and
Party (from 1954), given its characteristically ambiguous formulation of a
social and political problem:
When the Party, after Stalin’s death, began to develop a new produc-
tivity, many cried out: ‘We haven’t got a Party, only an apparatus!’ G.
Keuner said: ‘The apparatus is the bones of the administration and
exercises power. For too long you have only seen a skeleton. Don’t now
pull everything to bits. When you have furnished it with muscles, nerves
and organs, the skeleton will no longer be visible.’ (BFA 18/42)
Sketches for the Tui ‘novel’, a satire on intellectuals started around 1931 and
continued until 1943, never found a satisfactory form and remain archival
material. It is situated in a poetic fiction, ‘Chima, the Middle Country, found
on no map’, where the Taschi Lama, alias the living Buddha, or the Tibetan
pope or, among other soubriquets, Pander Lobsam Rhei (a pun on the saying
associated with Heraclitus, panta rhei, that everything flows, and on Brecht’s
central image of the flow of things), accompanied by 70,000 intellectuals,
lives off the land while travelling from Tibet to Peking and simultaneously
moving from northwest to southeast. Some of this elaborate Chimoiserie
later fed into his Turandot play, or The Whitewashers’ Congress, with the
1930s satire transferring to more local 1950s Stalinism.
In Conversations of Refugees, which did find a credible form, and is
prefaced by an English quotation from P. G. Wodehouse (‘He knew that
he was still alive. More he could not say’), a worker and a physicist discuss
topical events and problems over beers in the Helsinki station restaurant.
Some of this varies topics that surface in Me-ti. There is even a concluding
section proposing a new kind of writing in images ‘following the Chinese
example’, intended to overcome the ‘stupendous inexactness of certain
words’ (BFA 18/296), a problem Brecht knew also troubled Chinese thinkers.