MICHAEL WITTE

“Who’s afraid of the multitude?”: Brecht’s Vision for Hangmen also die!

(FALL 2013)

Bertolt Brecht in exile, having fled Scandinavia after the Nazi invasion of Denmark, sought residence in Los Angeles at the invitation of Hollywood’s German and Austrian émigré community, namely Fritz Lang and former collaborator Hanns Eisler.  With these men, Brecht would eventually begin work on an untitled film project about the 1942 assassination of the Nazi Reichsprotektor Reinhard “the Hangman” Heydrich by the Czech underground in Prague.  The film, eventually released in 1943 under the title Hangmen Also Die!, would be the second in an unofficial trilogy of anti-fascist/anti-Nazi films directed by Lang between 1941 and 1944. 

Having recently left 20th Century Fox, Lang proposed the idea of the Heydrich story to the independent producer Arnold Pressburger, promoting the film for its premise of “intrigue and violence,” while also making publicly known his intention to collaborate with the recently arrived Threepenny Opera playwright Brecht. 

By this early date, however, Brecht indicates some hesitation.  In his journals, he remarks that the prospects of working on a Hollywood film, as well as alongside Lang, would be a gamble.  In his words, the project was “pure monte carlo [sic].”[1]  Although Lang had earlier and quite frequently publicly praised Brecht, citing the playwright as a stylistic influence on a number of his earlier German films, the political framework operative in these works and the works of Brecht share more difference than they do a similarity—a difference intensified further by the time Lang begins working in Hollywood, producing genre films for the studio system.[2]

Brecht’s work with Lang, however, would be far from his first encounter with film, both as a medium and as a commercial product.  Nearly a decade earlier, Brecht had witnessed his Threepenny Opera adapted into film by G.W. Pabst.  The final product, containing several rewritten scenes against Brecht’s recommendations, caused Brecht to file a lawsuit against the production company Nero.  More of a symbolic gesture than anything, Brecht referred to his lawsuit as a sociological experiment, pitting, as he called it, the bourgeois value of intellectual property (i.e., Nero refused Brecht’s re-writes) against the sibling capitalist priority of making the most commercially viable product. 

This experiment served as the basis for Brecht’s essay “The Threepenny Lawsuit,” in which he outlined the theoretical hypocrisy that lies between bourgeois ideological definitions of art and ownership (the idea of the author and his object) and the terms of that object’s commercial production.[3]  Hence Brecht’s thesis works along the familiar Marxist premise that capitalism contradictorily operates on an incomplete realization of its project.  In other words, for Brecht, the author and the producer are two separate entities in the capitalist production of art.

Brecht’s direct answer to these problems was his version of a “socialist realist” film the following year, Kuhle Wampe (1932).  Attempting a ‘genuinely Marxist’ film production, the organization of the shoot was explicitly non-hierarchical.  As Brecht remarks, the effort of production was to “capture the apparatus” by alternative channels rather than to conform or to come to terms with it.  Hence, the product, consisting of vignettes in the form of what Brecht called “gests” (“an attitude or single aspect of an attitude”[4] as communicated through a set of symbolic actions), was both primitive in its aesthetic and disjointed in plot.  The film shows a scene depicting an unemployed man’s suicide, then the eviction of a worker family and finally documentary footage of workers singing the Communist anthem “Solidarity Song.” 

The film’s explicit critique of Weimar leftist politics earned it an official ban in 1932.  The censor’s accusation of Communist propaganda, as Brecht would later explain, meant that only a film with an implicit liberal or humanist message could be considered “neutral” or “non-propagandistic” entertainment.  The censor banned the film, officially, for “not being sufficiently human […] not depict[ing] a person but […] a type […].”[5]  However, Brecht’s argument was that the qualities that affirm the “false” depiction of the typified scenario, for his censor, are by definition the very aim of a “socialist realist art.”  For Brecht, a proletarian art can be such only through an explicitly class-conscious enunciation of its message, by acknowledgment that the product, and the message, is always inherently political.

Forming thus the backbone for Brecht’s theory on film, by his arrival in Los Angeles the following decade, Brecht’s notion of “capturing the apparatus” would remain just as solid a conviction within his mind, one which he soon looked to put to the test in the Hollywood setting.  His journal during this period shows a renewed interest in the political potential of the medium, most notably in the conversations he records with T.W. Adorno concerning the special relationship of the Lehrstücke to the moving image as regards the technical apparatus of film and its inherent limitations:

[T]here is the fixed perspective.  [T]he actors have to play to a single eye so that all events become unilinear etc.  [A] more subtle weakness: mechanical reproduction makes everything appear final, unfree, inalterable.  [T]his brings us back to the basic objection: the public no longer has a chance to adjust the actor’s performance, is not faced with a production but with an end product that has been produced in its absence. [sic][6]

Brecht’s reference to the medium’s potentially revolutionary significance mimics his colleague Walter Benjamin’s argument in his famous “Artwork” essay, that if the technological means of production were to be fully exploited by the masses, the illusion of ‘reality’ created through the film’s exhibition would be destroyed: that is, the film’s “test runs” and the camera’s fixed perspective would work in such a way as to reveal the nature of any given filmed content as created, or, beyond that, as inherently ideological. 

Brecht’s mention of “mechanical reproduction” evokes this concept, and further, in terms of the Hollywood classical narrative, the problematic of the genre film as the emblem of seriality in the Hollywood machine.  Antithetical to the production model of Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe is the specialized and thus hierarchical classical Hollywood model of production, relevant for Hangmen in the studio’s formulaic pre-production method, causing Brecht’s input to become highly segmented and regulated (into idea, treatment, scenario, script, shooting script) and/or scrapped by the will of future writers, co-writer John Wexley, or eventually by the director himself. 

Doubly antithetical to the Brecht model is the classical Hollywood narrative in general.  Narrative “unilinearity” is the illusion with which Brecht is most apprehensive—wherein ideological impetus is concealed in the seemingly intuitive “fact relay” of plot, involving, in itself, little need for interpretation.  To the assumption, as Brecht remarks, “that the actors can’t act and the public can’t think,”[7] the notion manifests most fully in Lang’s alleged motto to Brecht whenever there came a question as to the logic of the story: Lang’s motto, as Brecht recalls: “The public will accept that.”[8]

By the end of the first month of Lang’s meetings with Brecht, which the two spent working over rough outlines of the film, Lang hires a leftist, German-speaking writer named John Wexley to work with (and eventually replace) Brecht.  Initially, Wexley looks to be a good fit: a veteran screenwriter who could work with Brecht’s ideas as well as appease, on some level, Brecht’s politics.  As such, Wexley worked simultaneously between the “Lang script” and what Brecht referred to as the “Ideal script,” which, following the tradition of Brecht’s filmic experimentation with representing the collective mass over the individual, would naturally focus on “the people” in lieu of a traditional protagonist. 

The working title for the ideal script was, aptly, Trust the People.  This script, as Brecht writes in his journal, was eventually abandoned after roughly 70 pages were completed, at which point, Brecht describes, Wexley, by the strong-arm of the studio, was forced to realize the project’s unviability.  Brecht writes, “Lang hauled poor Wexley into his office and screamed at him behind closed doors that he wants to make a hollywoodpicture [sic], and shits on scenes that show the people etc.”[9] 

Wexley’s eventual submission to Lang earned Brecht’s scorn—based also on the fact that Wexley had been evidently working on two versions of the script.  He begins, within a month and a half before production begins, referring to Wexley as a “hack.”  Brecht here alludes to earlier conversations in his correspondence with Benjamin, wherein they discuss the definition of the “hack” in the context of a proletarian art, as that man who “abstains in principle from alienating the productive apparatus from the ruling class by improving it in ways serving the interests of socialism,” and thereby merely “wrings from the political situation a stream of novel effects for the entertainment of the public.”[10]  The term “novel effect” here sums up what Brecht felt was to become of his input following the revisions of Wexley and Lang, culminating in the fear that his work was actually, materially, turning into what the censor a decade earlier had recommended: a bourgeois assimilation of revolutionary themes.

That the bourgeois apparatus of production, writes Benjamin, can assimilate revolutionary themes, can “indeed propagate them without calling its own existence, and the existence of the class that owns it, seriously into question,” forms the basis on which Brecht deems his work on Hangmen a failure.[11]  However, whether or not he views his failure as failure in this context is another question.  At the very least, Brecht’s contributions to the final product distinguish the film most fully and most articulately from any other Hollywood film of the era, and particularly of any war film, namely in these “scenes of the people” (vis-à-vis the interactions within the hostage camp and in the personified collective of Czech society versus the Nazi regime).  The impossible predicament of the scenario, with the theme of negotiating individual sacrifice with collective responsibility, becomes together paired with the nihilism of Lang to a memorable effect.  If the Czech people turn over Heydrich’s assassin, they give in to the SS demand (the SS who, in the film, execute Czech civilians every day the assassin remains at large).  Giving up the identity of the assassin so as to end the daily executions would thus reinforce the Nazi’s power.  If, on the other hand, the people continue to conceal the identity of the assassin, more and more Czech hostages will die, thus putting the cause, and in another sense the Nazi death machine, above individual lives.  The viewer of the film, as in Brecht’s theater, is implicated in this debate between the rationale of the common Czech on the one hand, as put forth in the secret meeting of the underground and illustrated further in the actions of one grocer-woman who refuses to inform despite the threat of torture, and on the other hand the compulsion of the assassin’s love interest to inform when her own father is taken hostage. Once her conflict becomes subject to public knowledge, her attempt to inform is then obstructed by the mob. 

In this context does Hangmen naturally, albeit only partially, stray from the protagonist-oriented framework of the classical Hollywood film (despite Lang’s reframing of the collective through a given perspective, i.e. the assassin, or his love interest, or through a particular underground leader or surrogate spokesperson of the hostage group)? 

This concept of the “multitude-as-character” is evident in the film’s opening sequence, penned by Brecht in the original, unaltered German, for which both Heydrich and the basic scenario are introduced.  As Brecht writes, “the terror is set in motion because Czech workers are sabotaging production designed for [H]itler’s war in the East.”[12]  Here, the protagonist—for Brecht, the workers’ collective—is introduced against their antagonist Heydrich. This storyline is so embedded in the film that, despite Lang’s insistence on a true “hollywoodpicture [sic],” and his use of the protagonist and supporting characters to drive the narrative, the ground of a “collective protagonist” becomes inextricable, though, as it happens, often reduced to a chorus, but a powerful moral source in the film’s narrative nonetheless.

Hangmen must be viewed as, as Brecht urges, a composite production in which varying intentions and ideologies collide, and, as consequence of the hierarchy of capitalist film production, Brecht’s views were forced ultimately to yield.[13]  Hence, we read Brecht’s distaste in witnessing certain extracts of his work compiled within what he considered the film’s “trite” expression of cinematic suspense.  A prime example is the brief scene featuring the “Freedom Song” composed by Brecht and Eisler, which in the final film serves no purpose other than a thematic emphasis.  If Brecht’s intention were followed, emphasizing in detail the writing of the song between what Lang considered background extras, the resultant scene would be ‘non-cinematic’, or at least irrelevant to the protagonist’s storyline.  Such was the case for the motivation behind cutting Brecht’s narratives involving the hostages.  Brecht’s intent was thus inclined to further complicate or historicize the characterization, whereas Lang sought to centralize his protagonist and re-function Brecht’s “masses” to comment specifically on his actions.  For Brecht, more didacticism was to be had on problems related to the collective and the individual, as opposed to the filmed version’s less-complex, humanist storyline about individuals striving to help one another within the larger group.

In this context must Brecht’s failure to realize his “ideal script” be viewed, in what became, as mentioned, a mere assimilation of revolutionary themes into the bourgeois apparatus of production.  I posit that Brecht understood the impossibility of the task.  Despite his best efforts to resist Lang and United Artists, he never actually considered the production of a revolutionary film, and likewise a film antithetical to UA’s own production model, a practical intention of his work.  Rather, Brecht understood his place in German literary culture and sought instead to preserve the substance of his ideological struggle in the form of his memoirs.  His “Threepenny Lawsuit”, as a theoretical redemption for his failed struggles with Nero and the court, as well as his Kriefsfibel, an anti-war photo-book that existed for decades only in the pages of his work journals, attest to the validity of such an interpretation of his intentions.

Primarily, my argument for this is juxtaposed with another mainstream conception, argued in Elizabeth Wright’s Postmodern Brecht and furthered especially in the secondary literature on Brecht’s Kriefsfibel: that Brecht’s work took a ‘postmodern’ turn after the war.  Brecht, who took much inspiration from his tutor Karl Korsch, would have been sensitive to the notion of reification, a concept that within Brecht’s theatre is impossible to divorce from Verfremdung.[14] 

The idea that Brecht would posit his journal as the ideal redemption of the effects of reification upon his published work would then make sense in this context (and could thus be considered in such a way patterned after Vladimir Lenin’s journals, with its preservation of Lenin’s philosophical insights before such theories become naturally reified into systematic philosophy).  In the sense that Brecht’s script could remain ‘ideal’ in the context of his journal, in the form of its writing, along with an account for its struggle towards existence, is itself constitutive of a reality informed by the dialectic.  In this sense is the theoretical grounding for Brecht’s project laid, wherein it becomes impossible to speak of the knowledge linked to any apparatus as being in any way external to or innocent of its functioning.  The emphasis rather is on the effect of the apparatus in terms of this functioning or in terms of its manipulation.  Brecht’s film work, as he describes it, was meant to remain an unfinished composite, and for good reason—a proletarian art as the revolutionary alternative to realist cinema.

[1] Bertolt Brecht, Journals 1935-1955, ed. J.Willett, trans. H.Rorrison (New York: Routledge, 1993), 238.

[2] For a more detailed account of Brecht and Lang’s ‘pre-exile’ political differences, see the passage on Brecht in Gavin Lambert, “Fritz Lang’s America” in Sight and Sound (Summer, 1955), 16; and Bruce Cook, “Brecht and Fritz Lang” in Brecht in Exile (New York: New Republic, 1982), 83.

[3] Bertolt Brecht, “The Threepenny Lawsuit” in Brecht in Film and Radio, trans. and ed. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), 195.

[4] Bertolt Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. and ed. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), 179.

[5] Bertolt Brecht, “Short Contribution on the Theme of Realism,” in Brecht in Film and Radio, trans. and ed. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), 208.

[6] Brecht, Journals, 214.

[7] Ibid., 254.

[8] Ibid., 243.

[9] Ibid., 259.

[10] Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 229.

[11] Ibid., 229.

[12] Brecht, Journals, 260.

[13] Ibid., 261.

[14] Karl Korsch. Karl Marx (London: Chapman and Hall, 1938).

Michael Newell Witte (UCSD) is an art historian, theorist, and translator. His research lies at the intersection of literature and the visual arts, juxtaposing the histories of aesthetic theory with the development of late 19th and 20th century modernisms.