Fall 2010 Guide: Bertolt Brecht’s Drums in the Night

Few Americans have any consciousness of the German Revolution of 1918-19. It played a crucial role in the volatile transition from the defeated Kaiser’s German Empire to the formation of the so-called “Weimar Republic,” which is at its moment of inception in Bertolt Brecht’s first produced play, Drums in the Night. Brecht started writing Drums in the spring of 1919, when he was twenty-one years old. The premiere of the play took place at the Munich Kammerspiele in September of 1922—almost exactly one year before Adolf Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” a few blocks away in the same city. This was, for a young poet and fledgling playwright, being in the midst of it—and with a vengeance.

Drums in the Night was written with incredible bravado by a very young man while shattering events were unfolding in the streets. Germany’s political collapse at the close of World War I triggered a mimetic echo of the Russian revolution of 1917, which ushered in the Communist era for the twentieth century. The young Brecht’s starkly original scenes in Drums are set during a single decisive night—the night of January 15, 1919 when the so-called “Sparticist” uprising was crushed, and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the founders of the Communist Party of Germany, were captured and tortured to death by right- wing vigilantes. But the astonishing thing about Drums in the Night is that it does not depict these events. It depicts what happened instead in the lives of severely war-stressed ordinary bourgeois civilians at the end of World War I.  Drums in the Night is what is known in German as a Heimkehrer drama, a play about a returning soldier, and it depicts one man’s impossible attempt to resume a pre-war life in a shattered world. That story in itself is timeless and recurring, as we witness in our own returning war veterans to this day.

Drums in the Night decisively launched the playwriting career of the man now universally acknowledged as Germany’s greatest dramatist of the twentieth century. The play was awarded in 1922 the prestigious Kleist Prize (equivalent at the time to winning the Pulitzer Prize for its then twenty-four-year-old author). The enormous future influence of this precociously emerging Modernist master was destined to extend far beyond his native Germany. Theatergoers will be familiar with the titles of Brecht’s greatest masterpieces, starting with Mother Courage and Her Children and the ballad-opera The Threepenny Opera, but many have also likely heard of the great epic parable plays of Brecht’s maturity: The Good Woman of Setzuan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Life of Galileo. All but one of these influential masterpieces have been staged at the A.R.T.

Brecht’s theoretical writings also had (and continue to have) a widespread international influence. The American avant-garde of the 1960s took up Brecht’s twin ideas of an epic theater and of a deliberate verfremdenseffekt or “alienation effect” as cudgels against the psychological realism that seemed to predominate in American playwriting. Both terms were hard to define and harder yet to apply as intended in practice, but they inspired then and continue to inspire the young and the rebellious, and can be experienced (at slight remove) in such productions as last year’s Paradise Lost as staged by Daniel Fish.

Drums in the Night is a much earlier play than the signature Brecht plays enumerated above. Drums reveals conventional techniques and conventional dramatic tensions handled with raw, non- theorized histrionic genius; it is written directly out of feeling and instinct, and an uncanny grasp of the historical currents of the time. Brecht’s vocation as a dramatist was apparent from the start, and Drums in the Night provides a great opportunity to witness the genesis of all Brecht’s important dramaturgy to come.

Robert Scanlan is Professor of the Practice of Theater at Harvard University and is the director of the A.R.T. Institute production of Drums in the Night.

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