Fear and Misery of the Third Reich
Encyclopedia
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, , also known as The Private Life of the Master Race, is one of Bertolt Brecht
's most famous plays and the first of his openly anti-Nazi
works. It was first performed in 1938. The production employed Brecht's epic theatre
techniques to defamiliarize
the behaviour of the characters and to make explicit the play's underlying message.
The play consists of a series of vignettes, portraying National Socialist Germany of the 1930s as a land of poverty, violence, fear and pretence. Nazi antisemitism is depicted in several of the sketches, including "the Physicist", "Judicial Process", and "the Jewish Wife".
It was followed by many more plays that were openly anti-Nazi (Arturo Ui ...) and attempted a Marxist analysis. They were written while Brecht was in exile in Denmark
and were inspired by a visit to Moscow
, where he experienced the growing significance of the anti-Nazi movement there.
In 1974, the postmodern
East German
dramatist Heiner Müller
wrote an 'answer' to Brecht's play, entitled The Battle: Scenes from Germany (revised from a text first written in the early 1950s; first theatrical production opened on the 10th October, 1975 at the Volksbühne
). Tony Kushner
's 1985 play A Bright Room Called Day
was also based on this play.
A Case of Betrayal : A couple have "given away their neighbour" to the SS because they heard foreign broadcasts coming from his house. They are upset that in being arrested his coat has been ripped.
The Chalk Cross : An SA
man is talking to the cook and his girlfriend, the maidservant; they ask him about raids and he refuses to say. He shows them how he marks people with a white cross so other people know to arrest them. The SA man threatens to have the cook's brother arrested for not saying Heil Hitler fast enough.
Peat-bog soldiers : Prisoners mixing cement and talking, an SS man keeps guard. The prisoners are given solitary confinement.
Servants of the people : SS man complaining to the prisoner to stop saying he's a communist because he is tired of flogging him.
Judicial process : Judge asking an inspector to clarify a case against a Jew. The Jew is innocent but as both men "have a family" the justice system is perverse – the judge is forced to pass a verdict which suits the Third Reich but his panic is that he doesn't know which verdict will achieve that.
Occupational disease : An injured man comes to a hospital. The surgeon explains before doing treatment a doctor must ask questions concerning the patient’s private life to check if he deserves treatment.
The physicist : Two physicist
s secretly read about Einstein but when they are overheard they denounce it as being pointless and Jewish.
The Jewish wife : A Jewish wife agonises about how to tell her husband she is leaving him to save his career at a clinic. Eventually he assures her that it's only for 2 or 3 weeks as he hands her the fur coat she won't need till next winter.
The Spy : Two parents quarrel and then panic when they realise their son has gone missing. They are sure he is "handing them over". When he returns with sweets they are still very suspicious. This particular scene was used in Kenneth Johnson's "V" miniseries.
The black shoes : A mother finds money to buy her daughter new shoes but hasn't the money to send her to the Hitler youth.
Labour service : No class distinctions working in a Hitler labour camp.
Workers' playtime : An interview takes place at a factory where everyone has to be pro-German; the announcer edits what they are saying to be more acceptable. The SA watches on.
The box : A father's remains are brought home in a zinc coffin, he died of pneumonia. Hans wants to look inside but the dead man's wife refuses as "they might come for you too"
Release : A man has been released from a concentration camp
and his old friends are suspicious.
Charity begins at home : The SA delivers a charity parcel to an old lady, she thanks them and tells her daughter things are not as bad as she thought in the Third Reich. The SA arrests her daughter.
Two bakers : Two bakers have been arrested: the first two years ago for mixing bran in his bread; the second has just been arrested for refusing to mix bran in his bread.
The farmer feeds his sow : A farmer grows crops; he has to sell the grain for very little money and pay extravagantly for pig food. He is keeping some grain for his pig even though that is not allowed.
The old militant : A butcher whose son was in the SA has no meat and refuses to hang a fake ham in his window. He goes away for a weekend to get new stock and his son is arrested. He hangs himself in the shop window with a sign around his neck saying "I voted for Hitler"
The Sermon on the Mount : A pastor tries to comfort a dying man but cannot answer his questions without being at risk himself.
The motto : A Hitler Youth
meeting, one boy hasn't learnt the motto "beat stab shoot them till they fall…" He is accused of learning "something different at home."
News of the bombardment of Almeria gets to the barracks : two boys discuss food and German bombing of Republican areas of Spain
during the Spanish civil war
.
Job creation : A husband has a new job making bomber planes. The wife learns that her brother, a pilot, had an accident and died, and her neighbour tells her about the fighting in Spain. The wife goes into mourning and is told to stop in case the husband loses his job.
Consulting the people : Protesters try to produce an anti-war leaflet, they read a letter from a man who has been executed and still believes in the fight against Hitler. "Best thing would be just one word, NO!"
There are six other scenes, which Brecht eventually cut out:
The whole lot come to a standstill –
Beaten, bogged-down elite.
We'd laugh till we were crying
If it weren't for our brothers dying
To bring about his defeat.
(Brecht, 1957, Methuen Drama)
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
's most famous plays and the first of his openly anti-Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
works. It was first performed in 1938. The production employed Brecht's epic theatre
Epic theater
Epic theatre was a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners, including Erwin Piscator, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and, most famously, Bertolt Brecht...
techniques to defamiliarize
Alienation effect
The distancing effect, commonly mistranslated as the alienation effect , is a performing arts concept coined by playwright Bertolt Brecht "which prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a...
the behaviour of the characters and to make explicit the play's underlying message.
The play consists of a series of vignettes, portraying National Socialist Germany of the 1930s as a land of poverty, violence, fear and pretence. Nazi antisemitism is depicted in several of the sketches, including "the Physicist", "Judicial Process", and "the Jewish Wife".
It was followed by many more plays that were openly anti-Nazi (Arturo Ui ...) and attempted a Marxist analysis. They were written while Brecht was in exile in Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
and were inspired by a visit to Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, where he experienced the growing significance of the anti-Nazi movement there.
In 1974, the postmodern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
East German
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...
dramatist Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. Described as "the theatre's greatest living poet" since Samuel Beckett, Müller is arguably the most important German dramatist of the 20th century after Bertolt Brecht...
wrote an 'answer' to Brecht's play, entitled The Battle: Scenes from Germany (revised from a text first written in the early 1950s; first theatrical production opened on the 10th October, 1975 at the Volksbühne
Volksbühne
The Volksbühne is a theater in Berlin, Germany. Located in Berlin's city center Mitte on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in what was the GDR's capital....
). Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner
Anthony Robert "Tony" Kushner is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and co-authored with Eric Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film, Munich.-Life and career:Kushner was born...
's 1985 play A Bright Room Called Day
A Bright Room Called Day
A Bright Room Called Day is a play by American playwright Tony Kushner, author of the better-known Angels in America.-Synopsis:The play is set in Germany in 1932 and 1933, and concerns a group of friends caught up in the events of the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of Adolf...
was also based on this play.
Scenes
One Big Family : Two SS Officers talk about "United Nation" and then start shooting.A Case of Betrayal : A couple have "given away their neighbour" to the SS because they heard foreign broadcasts coming from his house. They are upset that in being arrested his coat has been ripped.
The Chalk Cross : An SA
Sturmabteilung
The Sturmabteilung functioned as a paramilitary organization of the National Socialist German Workers' Party . It played a key role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s...
man is talking to the cook and his girlfriend, the maidservant; they ask him about raids and he refuses to say. He shows them how he marks people with a white cross so other people know to arrest them. The SA man threatens to have the cook's brother arrested for not saying Heil Hitler fast enough.
Peat-bog soldiers : Prisoners mixing cement and talking, an SS man keeps guard. The prisoners are given solitary confinement.
Servants of the people : SS man complaining to the prisoner to stop saying he's a communist because he is tired of flogging him.
Judicial process : Judge asking an inspector to clarify a case against a Jew. The Jew is innocent but as both men "have a family" the justice system is perverse – the judge is forced to pass a verdict which suits the Third Reich but his panic is that he doesn't know which verdict will achieve that.
Occupational disease : An injured man comes to a hospital. The surgeon explains before doing treatment a doctor must ask questions concerning the patient’s private life to check if he deserves treatment.
The physicist : Two physicist
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
s secretly read about Einstein but when they are overheard they denounce it as being pointless and Jewish.
The Jewish wife : A Jewish wife agonises about how to tell her husband she is leaving him to save his career at a clinic. Eventually he assures her that it's only for 2 or 3 weeks as he hands her the fur coat she won't need till next winter.
The Spy : Two parents quarrel and then panic when they realise their son has gone missing. They are sure he is "handing them over". When he returns with sweets they are still very suspicious. This particular scene was used in Kenneth Johnson's "V" miniseries.
The black shoes : A mother finds money to buy her daughter new shoes but hasn't the money to send her to the Hitler youth.
Labour service : No class distinctions working in a Hitler labour camp.
Workers' playtime : An interview takes place at a factory where everyone has to be pro-German; the announcer edits what they are saying to be more acceptable. The SA watches on.
The box : A father's remains are brought home in a zinc coffin, he died of pneumonia. Hans wants to look inside but the dead man's wife refuses as "they might come for you too"
Release : A man has been released from a concentration camp
Nazi concentration camps
Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps set up in Germany were greatly expanded after the Reichstag fire of 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime...
and his old friends are suspicious.
Charity begins at home : The SA delivers a charity parcel to an old lady, she thanks them and tells her daughter things are not as bad as she thought in the Third Reich. The SA arrests her daughter.
Two bakers : Two bakers have been arrested: the first two years ago for mixing bran in his bread; the second has just been arrested for refusing to mix bran in his bread.
The farmer feeds his sow : A farmer grows crops; he has to sell the grain for very little money and pay extravagantly for pig food. He is keeping some grain for his pig even though that is not allowed.
The old militant : A butcher whose son was in the SA has no meat and refuses to hang a fake ham in his window. He goes away for a weekend to get new stock and his son is arrested. He hangs himself in the shop window with a sign around his neck saying "I voted for Hitler"
The Sermon on the Mount : A pastor tries to comfort a dying man but cannot answer his questions without being at risk himself.
The motto : A Hitler Youth
Hitler Youth
The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung...
meeting, one boy hasn't learnt the motto "beat stab shoot them till they fall…" He is accused of learning "something different at home."
News of the bombardment of Almeria gets to the barracks : two boys discuss food and German bombing of Republican areas of Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
during the Spanish civil war
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
.
Job creation : A husband has a new job making bomber planes. The wife learns that her brother, a pilot, had an accident and died, and her neighbour tells her about the fighting in Spain. The wife goes into mourning and is told to stop in case the husband loses his job.
Consulting the people : Protesters try to produce an anti-war leaflet, they read a letter from a man who has been executed and still believes in the fight against Hitler. "Best thing would be just one word, NO!"
There are six other scenes, which Brecht eventually cut out:
- Ersatz feelings
- The international
- The vote
- The new dress
- Any good against gas
- A possible last scene for Basel.
Epilogue
We'll watch them follow the band tillThe whole lot come to a standstill –
Beaten, bogged-down elite.
We'd laugh till we were crying
If it weren't for our brothers dying
To bring about his defeat.
(Brecht, 1957, Methuen Drama)
Works cited
- Weber, Carl 1989. Introduction to The Battle. In The Battle: Plays, Prose, Poems by Heiner MüllerHeiner MüllerHeiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. Described as "the theatre's greatest living poet" since Samuel Beckett, Müller is arguably the most important German dramatist of the 20th century after Bertolt Brecht...
. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. ISBN 155554049X. p.136-137.
Adaptations
- A seminal BBC Radio production in 1965 starred Maurice Denholm, Celia JohnsonCelia JohnsonDame Celia Elizabeth Johnson DBE was an English actress.She began her stage acting career in 1928, and subsequently achieved success in West End and Broadway productions. She also appeared in several films, including the romantic drama Brief Encounter , for which she received a nomination for the...
and Timothy WestTimothy WestTimothy Lancaster West, CBE is an English film, stage and television actor.-Career:West's craggy looks ensured a career as a character actor rather than a leading man. He began his career as an Assistant Stage Manager at the Wimbledon Theatre in 1956, and followed this with several seasons of...
. The production featured some of the earliest radio work of renowned TV & Film composer Carl DavisCarl DavisCarl Davis CBE is an American born conductor and composer who has made his home in the UK since 1961. In 1970 he married the English actress Jean Boht....
; one of the pivotal songs in the production (The German Song) was sung by Dominic BehanDominic BehanDominic Behan was an Irish songwriter, short story writer, novelist and playwright who wrote in both Irish and English. He was also a committed socialist and Irish Republican...
the Irish folk singer/songwriter and playwright, accompanied by the BBC Radio orchestra, arranged and conducted by Carl Davis.
- In his 2007 work Ravenhill for Breakfast and its 2008 published edition Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, British playwright Mark RavenhillMark RavenhillMark Ravenhill is an English playwright, actor and journalist.His most famous plays include Shopping and Fucking , Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap's Molly House . He made his acting debut in his monologue Product, at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe...
reworks the themes of fear, suspicion, and the effect terror has on the mind from Brecht's play (especially from the vignette The Spy) into the fourth play of his own cycle, Fear and Misery. Ravenhill's play briefly tells the story of Harry's confrontation with his wife Olivia, over dinner, about moving to a safer, gated community for the psychological good of their son Alex, who has been having dreams about a headless soldier. The play, however, is a deeper discussion of the entrenchment of fear and insecurity in both Harry's and Olivia's lives, and in modern society as a whole.