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POETIC RITUALITY AND TRANSCULTURALITY
Four communist agitators stand before a party court. In China, they have been
carrying out communist propaganda and have had to shoot their youngest comrade.
In order to prove to the court the necessity of shooting a comrade, they show how
the young comrade behaves in various political situations.**
With these few sentences, Brecht himself describes the core of the play. Since
the agitators are only able to carry out their mission unrecognized, they hide
their faces behind masks — accordingly incorporating the aesthetics of Noh
and Greek theater. This process is stylized as an initiation rite that symboli¬
cally completes the integration of one’s own identity into the collective. The
agitators become, as it is said in the play, “empty sheets on which the revolu¬
tion writes its instructions.”** But in the course of the play, the young comrade
increasingly questions these “instructions.” He fails in the eyes of the agitators
by allowing himself to be guided by spontaneous compassion and “revolution¬
ary impatience.”** His impulsive action contradicts the long-term strategy of
the agitators, who want the ranks of the workers in the struggle for the com¬
munist idea to be united behind them before actually intervening and before
they ease the suffering of the people. The individual’s needs and sorrows are
thereby of no importance for this overall goal. The young comrade is ques¬
tioning the group’s path to revolution and the lack of collective compassion.
In his rage, he not only tears apart the “Lehren der Klassiker” [Lessons of the
Classics] — which could be the writings of Marx and Engels or Mao or even
ancient or Japanese texts which emphasize devotion to a higher value — but
also reveals his “naked face” by taking off his mask.** This is a highly symbolic
scene. The unprotected (naked) individual is completely thrown back onto
himself, just like Job in the Old Testament — naked and mourning before
God. Such an allusion is characteristic of Brecht, who repeatedly refers to the
Bible in his works.’
31 Brecht: Das Lehrstück Die Maßnahme, in GBA 24, 96. Alltranslations from Die Maßnahme
and Brecht’s work are my own.
32 Brecht: Die Maßnahme, in GBA 3, 78.
33 "This is how Klaus-Detlef Müller describes it in Bertolt Brecht. Epoche - Werk - Wirkung,
München, Beck, 2009, 90.
3* Brecht: Ibid., in GBA 3, 90-94.
The importance of the Bible and religious references are fundamental to Brecht’s work as
a whole, and especially to his poetry, as his essay Über reimlose Lyrik mit unregelmäßigen
Rhythmen emphasizes (see GBA, 22.1, 357-364) and in which he develops his concept of a
‘gestische Ästhetik’ from Luther’s translation of the Bible. This was recognized early on in
research on his poetry from the 1920s. See Reinhold Grimm: Die Lutherbibel in Brechts
Lyrik, in E. Beutner (ed.): Dialog der Epochen. Studien zur Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhun¬
derts. Walter Weiss zum 60. Geburtstag, Wien, Osterreichischer Bundesverlag, 1987, 101-110;
Gotthard Lerchner: Traditionsbezug zur Lutherbibel im Werk Brechts, in I. Barz — U. Fix
— M. Schröder (eds.): Gotthard Lerchner - Schriften zum Stil. Vorträge zur Ehrung Gotthard
Lerchners anlässlich seines 65. Geburtstags und Aufsätze des Jubilars, Leipzig, Leipziger
Uni-Verlag, 2002, 146-164; Eberhard Rohse: Der frühe Brecht und die Bibel. Studien zum
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