The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar

211 Pages·2016·2.34 MB·English

by  Bertolt Brecht

The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar
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
Translated by Charles Osborne
Edited by Anthony Phelan and Tom Kuhn
with assistance from Charlotte Ryland
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Original work entitled Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar, published in the
Bertolt Brecht Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (vol. 17),
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988-2000
Copyright © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag
Introduction copyright © 2016 Anthony Phelan
English language translation © Charles Osborne, 2016
Anthony Phelan and Tom Kuhn have asserted their moral rights to be
identified as the editors of this edition. Charles Osborne has asserted his
moral right to be identified as the translator of this edition.
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transmitted 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.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting
on 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: 978-1-4725-8273-7
PB: 978-1-4725-8272-0
ePDF: 978-1-4725-8275-1
ePub: 978-1-4725-8274-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Introduction 1
The Novel
Book One: The Career of a Distinguished Young Man 19
Book Two: Our Mr C. 51
Book Three: Classic Administration of a Province 137
Book Four: The Three-Headed Monster 167
Proposed Contents of the Rest of the Novel 193
Historical Events and Personages 199
Map of the Roman Empire 201
Temporal Structure of the Novel 202

Introduction
Bertolt Brecht and Julius Caesar
Brecht’s sustained interest in the figure of Julius Caesar, particu-
larly in this unfinished novel, might at first sight seem frankly
eccentric. Plans for The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar only
became clear towards the very end of 1937. In November that year
Brecht was still writing to friends sketching out a play dealing with
Caesar’s rise to power, which he hoped to put on in Paris. Perhaps
plans for that production fell through, or the dramatization of a
significant chunk of Roman history, from Brecht’s political point
of view, presented insuperable problems. Whatever it was that led
him to rethink the project as a prose narrative, Brecht set about
his novel with a will, using material he had been collecting over a
number of years, and it became one of the works he was specially
committed to during his exile from Nazi Germany.
Brecht’s interest in the life of Julius Caesar went back much
further, however. He learnt Latin at school and had read parts of
Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic War and Civil Wars; later he
studied Plutarch’s life of Caesar, and seems to have been particu-
larly interested in the story of Caesar and the pirates that is one
of the first legends about him to be debunked in Book One of
the novel. But Brecht’s historical research on Caesar took him
far beyond Plutarch. He made notes on Suetonius and Sallust as
sources for the political psychology of his central character; as
well as pursuing these Roman authors, with the help of Margarete
Steffin Brecht he gathered critical material for his fictionalized life
and read many of the most well known modern and contemporary
Roman historians. Brecht’s exile in Denmark made his study of
such material difficult, and he pressed his friend, the Berlin lawyer
1
THE BUSINESS AFFAIRS OF MR JULIUS CAESAR
Martin Domke, who was based in Paris, to provide summaries of
works he couldn’t access himself; in one case Domke sent a volume
that Brecht needed to the family’s new home near Svendborg. Chief
among the sources he consulted is Theodor Mommsen’s History of
Rome, but he also made use of more recent and sometimes contro-
versial authors such as Jérôme Carcopino (César) and Eduard
Meyer (Caesar’s Monarchy and Pompey’s Principate. An Interior
History of Rome 66–44 BC).
Brecht’s own copies of some of these books, kept in his library
at the Bertolt Brecht Archive, Berlin, allow us a glimpse of things
that had caught his attention because they are highlighted by a
pencil mark or marginal comment. It is clear from many of these
remarks that Brecht’s use of the ancient historians he read is
partisan, heavily influenced by his own perspective on Caesar and
his contemporaries. One passage that attracted Brecht’s pencil,
for instance, is a good example of how Mommsen attempts to
reimagine Rome as a modern city:
If we try to conceive to ourselves a London with the slave-
population of New Orleans, with the police of Constantinople,
with the non-industrial character of the modern Rome, and
agitated by politics after the fashion of the Paris in 1848, we
shall acquire an approximate idea of the republican glory, the
departure of which Cicero and his associates in their sulky
letters deplore. Caesar did not deplore, but he sought to help so
far as help was possible.1
The passage that Brecht noticed echoes Mommsen’s earlier
description of Rome as ‘this city – which in every respect might
be compared to the Paris of the nineteenth century’. Mommsen
is perfectly willing to rethink the ancient world and the political
conditions of the Late Republic in contemporary terms: Paris
and London, New Orleans and even Istanbul can be drawn into
the comparison. In this respect Brecht’s novel follows a line
already established in such traditional historiography. The effect
1 Theodor Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, 4 vols (Berlin: Weidmann, 1856–85),
493.
2
INTRODUCTION
of modernizing Roman history in this way matches Brecht’s
own instincts, however – so that when he reads in Carcopino
that Cicero ‘didn’t have the guts’ to deal with the Catilinarian
conspiracy, he jots in the margin: ‘Perfect! That is Herr Cicero’s
weakness’. His obvious pleasure as he turns up material that
confirms his own view is patent: this research remains oppor-
tunistic as he hunts both for material and for a style that can be
used for his presentation of the Late Republic in contemporary
economic and political terms.
In the years after 1933, the historical novel provided a genre
that many German writers living in exile from Nazi Germany were
able to adopt, to provide an alternative view of political dilemmas
in relation to humane values in their own times; or to offer some
personal account of recent history and the emergence of the Third
Reich. Heinrich Mann’s trilogy of novels on the French renais-
sance king, Henri IV, is perhaps the most distinguished of these
works, and in some respects, like Brecht’s The Business Affairs of Mr
Julius Caesar, it allows the reader to understand the contemporary
world at the time of its writing through the prism of an historical
narrative.
Brecht’s reimagining of the first century BC seems more focused,
and from an early stage in the development of the material he is
clear that the emphasis has to be economic – to present a Caesar
driven by venal financial motives as well as political ambition.
This clear-eyed and contemporary analysis of the figure could only
be managed by simultaneously undermining the image of Caesar
as one of the great men who according to the German historian
Treitschke famously ‘make history’. In one sense, the Caesar novel
asks the same questions of history as those that appear in the exile
poem ‘Questions of a worker who reads’
[…] The great city of Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who set them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Did Byzantium, so much praised in
song
Have only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
That night when the ocean engulfed it, the drowning
Roared out for their slaves.
3