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  • La Vie Bohème

    The Birth of the Underground in 19th Century Paris and London.

    In 1854 self-proclaimed Bohemian George Augustus Sala introduced the readers of a widely circulated Victorian periodical to a clandestine network that had risen to prominence from its base in London, confessing his membership safe in the knowledge that his identity would be kept secret thanks to Charles Dickens’ editorial policy of anonymous signature in Household Words. “The Bohemians I tell of are the gipsies of civilization,” he continued, and though nomadic, predatory, dissipated, and improvident, they had exerted a powerful influence in the social, cultural, and political spheres of the nineteenth-century world.

    Sala’s description of a ‘Bohemian Republic’ evokes associations with the ‘Republic of Letters,’ the intellectual community that fostered long-distance communication between scholars in the Age of Enlightenment. Underpinned by the circulation of handwritten letters, the publishing of papers and pamphlets, and the development of institutional networks through universities and fraternal societies, the Republic of Letters constructed the identity of the universal intellectual and a transnational community in service to scholarship – a metaphysical Republic. Though vastly different in character, Sala’s Bohemian Republic of the nineteenth century functioned in strikingly similar ways. In its birthplace of Paris, writers and artists constructed and embodied a new narrative for the modern artistic life in the metropolis. True to the archetypal nomadism at the heart of the identity, the concept spread rapidly to inspire the foundation of satellite communities in London, New York, and even Melbourne, carried by its nomadic pioneers. With the mechanisms for its development built on the new communications, print, and commercial culture networks of the mid-nineteenth century, Bohemia became a metaphysical Republic.

    In Pascale Casanova’s seminal analysis of modern literary geopolitics, her description of the development of the ‘World Republic of Letters’ could equally be applied to a history of Bohemia, underlining the parallels between the metaphysical Republics. Casanova describes how Paris became

    the capital of a republic having neither borders nor boundaries, a universal homeland exempt from all professions of patriotism, a kingdom of literature set up in opposition to the ordinary laws of states, a transnational realm whose sole imperatives are those of art and literature: the universal republic of letters.

    This article charts a corresponding realm, the Bohemian Republic.

    The story of Bohemia’s cross-Channel, transatlantic, and trans-Pacific migrations remains untold and contradicts the conventional narrative about the birth of Bohemia. Elisabeth Jay’s assertion that Bohemianism was “a mid-century French literary construct finally incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon system of values” echoes almost two centuries of commentary confining Bohemia’s borders to the Latin Quarter. In his lauded preface to the 1851 volume of Scènes de la vie de Bohème, Henry Murger, one of Bohemia’s original and most influential chroniclers, declared: “Bohemia neither exists nor could exist anywhere but in Paris.” But not only were successive and interacting Bohemias proclaimed in London, New York, and Melbourne, exerting a major socio-cultural influence in their respective cities, but Paris Bohemia was never exclusively Parisian. It was a cosmopolitan milieu encompassing nomads from many countries, converging in the ‘City of Light.’ In addition, Murger’s Parisian Bohemians were engaged in the dissemination of Bohemia in new territories, as visitors and settlers in the Anglophone satellites of the Bohemian Republic.

    Avowals of Bohemia’s incompatibility with Anglo-Saxon values were made as soon as it emerged. The first Bohemian in English literature, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, was denounced as “diabolically French” by Quarterly Review critic Elizabeth Rigby. Such impressions have endured. In 1943 V. S. Pritchett pronounced the Englishman constitutionally unbohemian, lacking the romantic and impractical nature intrinsic to the identity. In 1969, Joanna Richardson observed that while nineteenth-century England produced eccentric artists and socially unorthodox writers, “there was no sense of a Bohemian movement; and there was no Bohemian colony.”

    Patrick Brantlinger concurred in a 1983 article entitled ‘Bohemia versus Grub Street,’ comparing the “relentlessly dismal” world depicted in George Gissing’s New Grub Street with the cheerful portrayal of artistic life in George du Maurier’s Trilby, concluding that the contrast is emblematic of the difference between the relative responses to social rationalization and the commercialization of the cultural trades in nineteenth-century Paris and London. The Parisian response, grounded in the romantic tradition, produced Bohemia, “an anarchic association of artists, writers, and students opposed to bourgeois commercialism.” London’s response mounted no such opposition and failed to envisage a new order. Instead, Grub Street “represents the capitulation of writers to commerce.” According to Brantlinger, Paris afforded writers and artists “opportunities for self-expression and for communal association” unavailable in London, fostering an environment in which an enlightened and politically radical Bohemia could flourish. He contrasts the “heady atmosphere of moral experimentation and freedom in Paris” with the reactionary “neoclassical conservatism” of London, concluding that “there was no equivalent for the Bohemia of the Latin Quarter in London, or for that matter anywhere else before the modern era.”

    The texts selected by Brantlinger to support his argument are unsuited to a study of mid-nineteenth-century Bohemia. Both du Maurier’s Trilby and Gissing’s New Grub Street are retrospective reimaginings written in the 1890s. While du Maurier was present at the dawn of the original Parisian and London Bohemias in the 1840s and 1850s, Gissing was not born until 1857. Though du Maurier’s portrayal of Bohemia is derived from experience, Gissing’s portrayal of a “new Grub Street” is drawn from imagination. By mid-century, Grub Street was no longer the physical and symbolic locus of literary production in London that it had been in the Augustan era. Fleet Street and the West End had emerged as the focal points of the press and the theatre, and the “adventurers” who plied their trade in these spaces subscribed to a new identity. While Bohemia inherited important characteristics from the Grub Street tradition, most notably as a site of literary and artistic poverty, much was changed. The Bohemians self-identified, attaching themselves to an identity invested with a transcendental potential. In their satirical representations of Grub Street – in Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem The Dunciad, or William Hogarth’s painting of The Distrest Poet – the Augustan satirists would never have identified themselves as Grubbeans. Rather, their satire was intended as a criticism of cultural commercialization, which had enabled and encouraged the dunces and hacks to degrade London’s press and theatrical trades.

    By contrast Bohemianism was a self-constructed identity collectively claimed by networks who passionately defended it from external criticism. The establishment of Bohemian institutions and publishing ventures in London challenges Brantlinger’s assertion that there were no opportunities for self-expression and communal association in the capital; in his words,

    Grub street authors did not think of banding together to exert political or social pressure against their society or their partisan employers. They merely tried to overcome poverty by selling their skills, thereby becoming objects of contempt to their betters, to each other, to themselves.

    London’s original Bohemian generations do not match Brantlinger’s model: they banded together in clubs like the Tumbler and the Savage and in joint publishing ventures like The Train magazine, cooperative enterprises replicated in the Bohemias of New York and Melbourne.

    Contradicting notions of Parisian exclusivity, the period between the birth and zenith of Paris Bohemia witnessed numerous declarations and representations of a London Bohemia. A host of late-century memoirists identified a Bohemian network active in London in the 1840s and 1850s, from Pre-Raphaelite William Michael Rossetti to Chartist Thomas Frost. Fleet Street printer John Farlow Wilson maintained that “Bohemianism had a definite meaning in London,” while journalist Thomas Escott believed London Bohemia had “as distinct a local existence as Leicester, and as much a population of its own.” Irish author Justin McCarthy described the London Bohemia he knew as “made up of young newspaper writers, young painters and actors,” united by “late hours of conviviality, much beer… unlimited tobacco… temporary poverty… debt… and… the bond of poor devilship.” This Bohemian network extending across the press, art, and the theatre refutes another of Brantlinger’s criticisms—that London’s cultural trades engendered no unity across the arts. “The Grub Street tradition views writers in isolation from other artists.” On the contrary, London Bohemia was an interdisciplinary enterprise underpinned by professional and social collaboration.

    Depictions of ‘London Bohemianism’ as an oxymoron were derived from the historical enmity between France and England and the subsequent tendency of writers on both sides of the Channel to exaggerate their cultural difference into a polarity for their mutual gratification, defining themselves as opposites and associating disreputable habits with the other. As Linda Colley established, Victorian vilification of France served to consolidate notions of national identity. As a result, in the eyes of many, Bohemia’s Parisian origins precluded its existence in London. When Bohemia migrated across the Channel in the 1840s it was received by a nation at once suspicious of, and seduced by, the idea of France and French culture.

    Failure to fully recognize London Bohemia has produced an incomplete picture of popular culture in Victorian Britain and has distorted impressions of the New York and Melbourne satellites. Bohemia migrated from Paris to London and from there it diffused out to the Anglophone satellites, its migrations underpinned by colonial networks and processes of cultural transfer. London Bohemia shaped the development of these satellites to a greater extent than Paris, and its absence from the conventional narrative has resulted in an incomplete picture of American and Australian Bohemianism.

    Bohemia was endowed with an especial power in its new contexts, where the emergence of the Bohemian Republic coincided with the explosive growth of the “Anglo-World.” The “settler revolution” that fueled the expansion of English-speaking societies across the world in the nineteenth century brought Bohemia within its transit. At a time when Malthusian concepts of migration as a population control pressure valve and ideas about revitalization overseas were prevalent, the Bohemians were part of an “Anglo exodus.” But Bohemia maintained a complex relationship with ideas about ‘Greater Britain.’ As well as products and agents of imperialism, the Bohemians frequently played the role of dissident, registering opposition to the colonial project and the emergent ideologies of Social Darwinism alongside its more familiar critiques of the prevailing orthodoxies of bourgeois society. While Darwin regarded emigrants as conduits of the best of British civilization, the Bohemians were carriers of dissent toward Victorian cultural and ideological forms, in particular the hegemonic notions of respectability and Universal Progress.

    Bohemia’s insurgent relationship to the dominant culture has often been viewed in relation to sexuality. It forms a prominent theme in Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, where it serves a corresponding and at times intersecting function to the eponymous ‘closet’ – “that curious space both internal and marginal to the culture: centrally representative of its motivating passions and contradictions, even while marginalized by its orthodoxies.” From a position simultaneously despised and tolerated, a small and shadowy group showed the prevailing culture hidden truths about itself, much like the ideal Socratic philosopher. For Sedgwick, Bohemia derived its power from its marginality, and was an inherently sexualized realm. Accepting this premise, Bohemia held its greatest power amidst the anxious climate of the mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-World, where a Puritan revival flourished. Bohemia formed its mirror image, the transgressive other, creating a powerful spectacle of transgression and dissidence.

    The London, New York, and Melbourne Bohemias articulated their corporate identities in strikingly similar ways. Each group established formal and informal social institutions: the Savage Club and the Tumbler Club in London; Pfaff’s in New York; and the Yorick Club in Melbourne. Each group collectively published a Bohemian periodical emanating from these social clubs to serve as the organ of the respective communities, platforms to capitalize on Bohemian sociability through published metanarratives. In each of the cities Bohemia was a collective enterprise, fostering distinctive styles and aesthetics across a range of media and platforms. And in each satellite the Bohemians reached the public chiefly through new genres of journalism and theatre.

    Today the term Bohemian is usually employed as a clichéd adjective, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was a proper noun loaded with meaning, defining particular people, places, lifestyles, genres, and aesthetics. Bohemia denoted a network of creatives who proclaimed their self-exile from and collective resistance to dominant codes of modern morality, and who identified with Bohemianism, a new cultural construct born in Paris. Bohemianism was a creation of its own adherents. They had no established model to draw from: they were fashioning their own identity and constructing their own world creating and promoting a new phenomenon.

    Bohemia attracted the attention of the most celebrated writers of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Baudelaire, Sand, and Flaubert in Paris; Dickens, Thackeray, and Mary Braddon in London; Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte in New York; Marcus Clarke, Henry Kendall, and Rosa Praed in Melbourne. Each contribution shaped the legend in new ways. Conceptual discourse on Bohemianism has engaged critics, sociologists, and cultural historians ever since its emergence, with theories of Bohemia proposed by some of the most renowned thinkers of the modern era, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin, and from Pierre Bourdieu to Raymond Williams. Their contested and contradictory interpretations have produced a farrago of images and meanings, leaving Bohemia a quintessentially indeterminate, amorphous construct.

    -G.S.

  • Manners of Thinking

    by Yvette Ribemont

    What’s in a name? Everything, if that name is Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade. Most people would not be able to reel off those forenames but mention the Marquis de Sade in almost any country that provides a reasonably broad education and the associations will be immediate: brutality, perversion, male dominance; the worst excesses, in fact, of sexual depravity. There are very few examples of writers whose names have entered language as concepts. It is possible of course to make adjectival forms of the names of many writers, but rarely have they entered common parlance. Notable exceptions are, in the world of drama, ‘Shakespearean,’ ‘Brechtian,’ and ‘Pinteresque,’ and, in that of the novel, ‘Dickensian’ and ‘Kafkaesque.’ There are not many more. ‘Sade’ has been given the additional honour of becoming an ‘-ism’. Sadism is a way not only of looking at the world but of interacting with it and philosophizing about it.

    Despite there being general agreement on what constitutes sadism, there is less agreement on what form of the family name one should use. When referring to the Marquis by his family name only, should one call him ‘de Sade’ or just ‘Sade?’ French dictionaries and other authorities provide a bewildering array of options for the use of the de, and ordinary native French speakers also disagree, except on one point: that it depends on the circumstances. Simone de Beauvoir and Pierre Klossowski preferred ‘Sade’, and many American writers have followed their examples. Biographers have varied. I have opted to refer to the family name always as de Sade’, partly to maintain continuity with usage in works by him that have already been published by Hesperus Press, and partly out of the conviction that this form is more acceptable in British English—one talks after all of ‘de Gaulle and not ‘Gaulle, and indeed of ‘de Beauvoir’ herself!

    Before it became notorious, the name had an interesting and illustrious history. Its origins are shrouded in legends, one even claiming derivation from one of the three Magi. The first known representative of the family was Louis de Sade, provost of Avignon in 1177, who paid for the construction of the famous bridge there. His descendants maintained and restored the bridge, and the de Sade coat of arms can still be seen on the first arch of the bridge. It seems likely that the family came originally from Italy. The name is spelt variously in ancient documents as ‘Sado’ or ‘Sadone’, and sometimes ‘Sauze’ or ‘Saze’. It may therefore be that the family took its name from a small town in Languedoc called Saze, on the banks of the Rhône, not far from Avignon. Over the centuries the family developed many prestigious connections, through marriage, with other local noble families, and with the papacy. It was also renowned for its military exploits.

    Another legend, for which there is stronger (though disputed) evidence, is that Laura, the woman immortalized as a symbol of spiritual perfection in the work of the early-fourteenth-century poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), was related by marriage to the de Sade family. According to the Abbé de Sade, the Marquis’ uncle, who researched the family archives thoroughly, she was the wife of Hugues de Sade. Argument has raged ever since, and the matter has never been satisfactorily settled. Many other distinguished figures, however, can be attributed to the family without doubt; these figures include magistrates, governors, papal chamberlains, diplomats, abbés, abbesses and nuns. It is against the background of this distinguished lineage that reactions to the Marquis’ notorious behaviour must be seen.

    The notion of corrupt nobility has always been associated with de Sade. Hence, he is often referred to, in one breath, as the ‘Marquis de Sade’. It is interesting to note that after his father’s death he was eligible to use the title of ‘Count’, but he had little fondness for it, and only used it when it benefited him in some way. Already in his own lifetime the ‘Marquis de Sade’ was becoming the stuff of legend. He was happy to use pseudonyms however as it suited him: “Comte de Mazan’ when pursued by the police, and ‘Louis Sade’ or ‘Citizen Sade out of political expediency at the time of the French Revolution. In his own epitaph, never put on his grave, but found in manuscript form in the family archives, he refers to himself simply as ‘D.A.F. Sade, Prisoner under Every Regime. Exactly why he had to spend so much of his life in prison must be the central focus of any biography of a man who, despite circumstances that would have destroyed most other mortals, managed to produce some of the most original and imaginative writing of his age.

    -Y.R.

  • Conversations With Brecht

    by Walter Benjamin

    1934—27 September at Dragor: In a conversation a few evenings ago, Brecht spoke of the curious indecision which at the moment prevents him from making any definite plans. As he is the first to point out, the main reason for this indecision is that his situation is so much more privileged than that of most other refugees. Therefore, since in general he scarcely admits that emigration can be a proper basis for plans and projects, he refuses all the more radically to admit it as such in his own case. His plans reach out to the period beyond emigration. There, he is faced with two alternatives. On the one hand there are some prose projects waiting to be done: the shorter of the two—a satire on Hitler in the style of the Renaissance biographers—and the longer of the two a novel. This is to be an encyclopedic survey of the follies of the intellectual; it seems that it will be set, in part at least, in China. A small model for this work is already completed. But besides these prose projects he is also preoccupied by others, dating back to very old studies and ideas. Whereas he was able, at a pinch, to set down in his notes and introductions to the Versuche the thoughts which occurred to him within the scope of epic theatre, other thoughts, although originating in the same interests, have become combined with his study of Leninism and of the scientific tendencies of the empiricists, and have therefore outgrown that rather limited framework. For several years they have been subsumed, now under one key concept, now under another, so that non-Aristotelian logic, behaviorist theory, the new encyclopedia and the critique of ideas have, in turn, stood at the center of his preoccupations. At present these various pursuits are converging upon the idea of a philosophical didactic poem. But he has doubts about the matter. He wonders, in the first instance, whether, in view of his output to date and especially of its satirical elements, particularly the Ibreepenny Novel, the public would accept such a work. This doubt is made up of two distinct strands of thought.

    Whilst becoming more closely concerned with the problems and methods of the proletarian class struggle, he has increasingly doubted the satirical and especially the ironic attitude as such. But to confuse these doubts, which are mostly of a practical nature, with other, more profound ones would be to misunderstand them. The doubts at a deeper level concern the artistic and playful element in art, and above all those elements which, partially and occasionally, make art refractory to reason. Brecht’s heroic efforts to legitimize art vis-à-vis reason have again and again referred him to the parable in which artistic mastery is proved by the fact that, in the end, all the artistic elements of a work cancel each other out. And it is precisely these efforts, connected with this parable, which are at present coming out in a more radical form in the idea of the didactic poem. In the course of our conversation I tried to explain to Brecht that such a poem would not have to seek approval from a bourgeois public but from a proletarian one, which, presumably, would find its criteria less in Brecht’s earlier, partly bourgeois-oriented work than in the dogmatic and theoretical content of the didactic poem itself. ‘If this didactic poem succeeds in enlisting the authority of Marxism on its behalf,’ I told him, ‘Then your earlier work is not likely to weaken that authority.’

    4 October Yesterday Brecht left for London. Whether it is that my presence offers peculiar temptations in this respect, or whether Brecht is now generally more this way inclined than before, at all events his aggressiveness (which he himself calls ‘baiting’) is now much more pronounced in conversation than it used to be. Indeed, I am struck by a special vocabulary engendered by this aggressiveness. In particular, he is fond of using the term Würstchen (little sausage). In Dragor I was reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. To start with he blamed this choice of reading for my being unwell. As confirmation he told how, in his youth, a prolonged illness (which had doubtless been latent for a long time) had begun when a schoolfellow had played Chopin to him on the piano and he had not had the strength to protest. Brecht thinks that Chopin and Dostoyevsky have a particularly adverse effect on people’s health. In other ways, too, he missed no opportunity of needling me about my reading matter, and as he himself was reading Schweyk at the time he insisted on making comparative value judgements of the two authors. It became evident that Dostoyevsky simply could not measure up to Hasek, and Brecht to him without further ado among the Würstchen; only a little more and he would have extended to Dostoyevsky the description he keeps ready, these days, for any work which lacks an enlightening character, or is denied such character by him: he calls such a work a Klump (lump, or clot).

    1938—28 June: I was in a labyrinth of stairs. This labyrinth was not entirely roofed over. I climbed; other stairways led downwards. On a landing I realized that I had arrived at a summit. A wide view of many lands opened before me. I saw other men standing on other peaks. One of these men was suddenly seized by dizziness and fell. The dizziness spread; others were now falling from other peaks into the depths below. When I too became dizzy, I woke up.

    On 22 June I arrived at Brecht’s.

    Brecht speaks of the elegance and nonchalance of Virgil’s and Dante’s basic attitude, which, he says, forms the backdrop to Virgil’s majestic gestus. He calls both Virgil and Dante promeneurs. Emphasizing the classic rank of the Inferno, he says: ‘You can read it out of doors.’ He speaks of his deep-rooted hatred of priests, a hatred he inherited from his grandmother. He hints that those who have appropriated the theoretical doctrines of Marx and taken over their management will always form a clerical camarilla. Marxism lends itself all too easily to ‘interpretation’. Today it is a hundred years old and what do we find? (At this point the conversation was interrupted). “The State must wither away.” Who says that? The State.’ (Here he can only mean the Soviet Union). He assumes a cunning, furtive expression, puts himself in front of the chair in which I am sitting-he is impersonating ‘the State’ and says, with a sly, side-long glance at an imaginary inter-locutor: ‘I know I ought to wither away?

    A conversation about new Soviet novels. We no longer read them. The talk then turns to poetry and to the translations of poems from various languages in the USSR with which Das Wort is flooded. He says the poets over there are having a hard time. If Stalin’s name doesn’t crop up in a poem, that’s interpreted as a sign of ill intent.’

    29 June: Brecht talks about epic theatre, and mentions plays acted by children in which faults of performance, operating as alienation effects, impart epic characteristics to the production. Something similar may occur in third-rate provincial theatre. I mention the Geneva production of Le Cid where the sight of the king’s crown worn crookedly on his head gave me the first inkling of the ideas I eventually developed in the Trauerspiel book nine years later. Brecht in turn quoted the moment at which the idea of epic theatre first came into his head. It happened at a rehearsal for the Munich production of Edward II. The battle in the play is supposed to occupy the stage for three-quarters of an hour. Brecht couldn’t stage-manage the soldiers, and neither could Asya (Lacis), his production assistant. Finally, he turned in despair to Karl Valentin, at that time one of his closest friends, who was attending the rehearsal, and asked him: ‘Well, what is it? What’s the truth about these soldiers? What about them?’ Valentin: ‘They’re pale, they’re scared, that’s what!’ The remark settled the issue, Brecht adding: ‘They’re tired.’ Whereupon the soldiers’ faces were thickly made up with chalk, and that was the day the production’s style was determined.

    Later the old subject of ‘logical positivism’ came up. I adopted a somewhat intransigent attitude and the conversation threatened to take a disagreeable turn. This was avoided by Brecht admitting for the first time that his arguments were superficial. This he did with the delightful formula: ‘A deep need makes for a superficial grasp? Later, when we were walking to his house the conversation had taken place in my room): It’s a good thing when someone who has taken up an extreme position then goes into a period of reaction. That way he arrives at a half-way house.’ That, he explained, was what had happened to him: he had become mellow.

    I July: Whenever I refer to conditions in Russia, Brecht’s comments are highly skeptical. When I inquired the other day whether Ottwald was still in gaol (in colloquial German: whether he was ‘still sitting), the answer was: If he can still sit, he’s sitting? Yesterday Gretl Steffin expressed the opinion that Tretyakov was no longer alive.

    4 July: Brecht during a conversation on Baudelaire last night: I’m not against the asocial, you know; I’m against the non-social?

    2I July: The publications of Lukács, Kurella et al are giving Brecht a good deal of trouble. He thinks, however, that one ought not to oppose them at the theoretical level. I then put the question on the political level. Here he does not hold his punches. ‘Socialist economy doesn’t need war, and that is why it is opposed to war. The “peace-loving nature of the Russian people” is an expression of this and nothing else.

    There can’t be a socialist economy in one country. Rearmament has inevitably set the Russian proletariat a long way back in history, back to stages of historical development which have long since been overtaken among others, the monarchic stage. Russia is now under personal rule. Only blockheads can deny this, of course.’ This was a short conversation which was soon interrupted-I should add that in this context Brecht emphasized that because of the dissolution of the First International, Marx and Engels lost active contact with the working-class movement and thereafter gave only advice-of a private nature, not intended for publication-to individual leaders. Nor was it an accident although regrettable that Engels at the end of his life turned to the natural sciences.

    Béla Kun, he said, was his greatest admirer in Russia. Brecht and Heine were the only German poets Kun studied [sic]. (Occasionally Brecht hints at the existence of a certain person on the Central Committee who supports him.)

    25 July: Yesterday morning Brecht came over to my place to read me his Stalin poem, which is entitled ‘The Peasant to his Ox’. At first I did not get its meaning completely, and when a moment later the thought of Stalin passed through my head, I did not dare entertain it. This was the effect Brecht intended, and he explained what he meant in the conversation which followed. In this conversation he emphasized, among other things, the positive aspects of the poem. It was in fact a poem in honour of Stalin, who in his opinion has immense merit. But Stalin is not yet dead. Besides, a different, more enthusiastic manner of honoring Stalin is not incumbent upon Brecht, who is sitting in exile and waiting for the Red Army to march in. He is following the developments in Russia and the writings of Trotsky. These prove that there exists a suspicion justifiable one demanding a skeptical appraisal of Russian affairs. Such skepticism is in the spirit of the Marxist classics. Should the suspicion prove correct one day, then it will become necessary to fight the regime, and publicly. But ‘unfortunately or God be praised, whichever you prefer’, the suspicion is at present not yet a certainty. There is no justification for constructing upon it a policy such as Trotsky’s. ‘And then there’s no doubt that certain criminal cliques really are at work on Russia itself. One can see it, from time to time, by the harm they do. Finally, Brecht pointed out that we Germans have been especially affected by the setbacks we have suffered in our own country. We have had to pay for the stand we took, we’re covered with scars. It’s only natural that we should be especially sensitive.?

    Towards evening Brecht found me in the garden reading Capital. Brecht: I think it’s very good that you’re studying Marx just now, at a time when one comes across him less and less, especially among our people.’ I replied that I prefer studying the most talked-about authors when they are out of fashion. We went on to discuss Russian literary policy. I said, referring to Lukács, Gábor and Kurella: ‘These people just aren’t anything to write home about’ (literally: with these people you can’t make state). Brecht: ‘Or rather, a State is all you can make with them, but not a community. They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable. You never know where you are with production; production is the unforeseeable. You never know what’s going to come out. And they themselves don’t want to produce. They want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat.’ We then got on to Goethe’s novels, I don’t remember how; Brecht knows only the Elective Affinities. He said that what he admired about it was the author’s youthful elegance. When I told him Goethe wrote this novel at the age of sixty, he was very much surprised. The book, he said, had nothing philistine about it. That was a tremendous achievement. He knew a thing or two about philistinism; all German drama, including the most significant works, was stamped with it. I remarked that Elective Affinities had been very badly received when it came out. Brecht: I’m pleased to hear it-The Germans are a lousy nation (ein Scheissvolk). It isn’t true that one must not draw conclusions from Hitler about Germans in general. In me, too, everything that is German is bad. The intolerable thing about us Germans is our narrow-minded independence. Nowhere was there such a thing as the free cities of the German Reich, like that lousy Augsburg. Lyons was never a free city; the independent cities of the Renaissance were city states-Lukács is a German by choice. He’s got no stuffing left in him, none whatsoever?

    Speaking of The Most Beautiful Legends of Woynok the Brigand by Anna Seghers, Brecht praised the book because it shows that Seghers is no longer writing to order. ‘Seghers can’t produce to order, just as, without an order, I wouldn’t even know how to start writing.’ He also praised the stories for having a rebellious, solitary figure as their central character.

    26 July: Brecht, last night: ‘There can’t be any doubt about it any longer: the struggle against ideology has become a new ideology?

    29 July: Brecht read to me some polemical texts he has written as part of his controversy with Lukács, studies for an essay which is to be published in Das Wort. He asked my advice whether to publish them.

    As, at the same time, he told me that Lukács’s position ‘over there’ is at the moment very strong, I told him I could offer no advice. ‘There are questions of power involved. You ought to get the opinion of somebody from over there. You’ve got friends there, haven’t you?”.

    Brecht: ‘Actually, no, I haven’t. Neither have the Muscovites themselves—like the dead.’

    3 August: On 29 July in the evening, while we were in the garden, the conversation came round to the question whether a part of the Children’s Songs cycle should be included in the new volume of poems. I was not in favor because I thought that the contrast between the political and the private poems made the experience of exile particularly explicit, and this contrast would be diminished by the inclusion of a disparate sequence. In saying this I probably implied that the suggestion once again reflected the destructive aspect of Brecht’s character, which puts everything in danger almost before it has been achieved. Brecht: ‘I know; they’ll say of me that I was manic. If the history of our time is handed down to the future, the capacity to understand my mania will be handed down with it. The times we live in will make a backdrop to my mania. But what I should really like would be for people to say about me: he was a moderate manic.’ His discovery of moderation, Brecht said, should find expression in the poetry volume: the recognition that life goes on despite Hitler, that there will always be children.

    He was thinking of the ‘epoch without history’ of which he speaks in his poem addressed to artists. A few days later he told me he thought the coming of such an epoch more likely than victory over fascism. But then he added, with a vehemence he rarely shows, yet another argument in favor of including the Children’s Songs in the Poems from Exile: We must neglect nothing in our struggle against that lot. What they’re planning is nothing small, make no mistake about it. They’re planning for thirty thousand years ahead. Colossal things. Colossal crimes. They stop at nothing. They’re out to destroy everything. Every living cell contracts under their blows. That is why we too must think of every-thing. They cripple the baby in the mother’s womb. We must on no account leave out the children. While he was speaking like this I felt a power being exercised over me which was equal in strength to the power of fascism-I mean a power that sprang from the depths of history no less deep than the power of the fascists. It was a very curious feeling, and new to me. Then Brecht’s thoughts took another turn, which further intensified this feeling I had. ‘They’re planning devastations on an icy scale. That’s why they can’t reach agreement with the Church, which is also geared to thousands of years. And they’ve proletarianized me too. It isn’t just that they’ve taken my house, my fishpond and my car from me; they’ve also robbed me of my stage and my audience. From where I stand today I can’t, as a matter of principle, admit that Shakespeare’s talent was greater than mine. But Shakespeare couldn’t have written just for his desk drawer, any more than I can. Besides, he had his characters in front of him. The people he depicted were running around in the streets. He just observed their behavior and picked out a few traits; there were many others, just as important, that he left out.’

    Early August: ‘In Russia there is dictatorship over the proletariat. We should avoid dissociating ourselves from this dictatorship for as long as it still does useful work for the proletariat—i.e. so long as it contributes towards an agreement between the proletariat and the peasantry, with predominant recognition of proletarian interests.’ A few days later Brecht spoke of a ‘workers’ monarchy, and I compared this organism with certain grotesque sports of nature dredged up from the depths of the sea in the form of horned fish or other monsters.

    25 August: A Brechtian maxim: ‘Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones.’

    Translated by Anna Bostock