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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 symbolically 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 revolution 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 “revolutionary impatience.”** His impulsive action contradicts the long-term strategy of the agitators, who want the ranks of the workers in the struggle for the communist 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 questioning 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. Jahrhunderts. 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 + Al +
