Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (46 page)

Over the last half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Paris, Vienna, and briefly Zurich dominated the intellectual and cultural life of Europe. Now it was Berlin’s turn. Viscount D’Abernon, the British ambassador to Berlin, described in his memoirs the period after 1925 as an ‘epoch of splendour’ in the city’s cultural life.
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Bertolt Brecht moved there; so did Heinrich Mann and Erich Kästner, after he had been fired from the Leipzig newspaper where he worked. Painters, journalists, and architects flocked to the city, but it was above all a place for performers. Alongside the city’s 120 newspapers, there were forty theatres providing, according to one observer, ‘unparalleled mental alertness.’
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But it was also a golden age for political cabaret, art films, satirical songs, Erwin Piscator’s experimental theatre, Franz Léhar operettas.

Among this concatenation of talent, this unparalleled mental alertness, three figures from the performing arts stand out: Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Bertolt Brecht. Between 1915 and 1923 Schoenberg composed very little, but in 1923 he gave the world what one critic called ‘a new way of musical organisation.’
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Two years before, in 1921, Schoenberg, embittered by years of hardship, had announced that he had ‘discovered something which will assure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.’
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This was what
became known as ‘serial music.’ Schoenberg himself gave rise to the phrase when he wrote, ‘I called this procedure “Method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another.” ‘
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‘Procedure’ was an apt word for it, since serialism is not so much a style as a ‘new grammar’ for music. Atonalism, Schoenberg’s earlier invention, was partly designed to eliminate the individual intellect from musical composition; serialism took that process further, minimalising the tendency of any note to prevail. Under this system a composition is made up of a series from the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, arranged in an order that is chosen for the purpose and varies from work to work. Normally, no note in the row or series is repeated, so that no single note is given more importance than any other, lest the music take on the feeling of a tonal centre, as in traditional music with a key. Schoenberg’s tone series could be played in its original version, upside down (inversion), backward (retrograde) or even backward upside down (retrograde inversion). The point of this new music was that it was horizontal, or contrapuntal, rather than vertical, or harmonic.
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Its melodic line was often jerky, with huge leaps in tone and gaps in rhythm. Instead of themes grouped harmonically and repeated, the music was divided into ‘cells.’ Repetition was by definition avoided. Huge variations were possible under the new system – including the use of voices and instruments in unusual registers. However, compositions always had a degree of harmonic coherence, ‘since the fundamental interval pattern is always the same.’
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The first completely serial work is generally held to be Schoenberg’s Piano Suite (op. 25), performed in 1923. Both Berg and Anton von Webern enthusiastically adopted Schoenberg’s new technique, and for many people Berg’s two operas
Wozzeck
and
Lulu
have become the most familiar examples of, first, atonality, and second, serialism. Berg began to work on
Wozzeck
in 1918, although it was not premiered until 1925, in Berlin. Based on a short unfinished play by Georg Büchner, the action revolves around an inadequate, simple soldier who is preyed upon and betrayed by his mistress, his doctor, his captain, and his drum major; in some ways it is a musical version of George Grosz’s savage pictures.
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The soldier ends up committing both murder and suicide. Berg, a large, handsome man, had shed the influence of romanticism less well than Schoenberg or Webern (which is perhaps why his works are more popular), and
Wozzeck
is very rich in moods and forms – rhapsody, lullaby, a military march, rondo, each character vividly drawn.
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The first night, with Erich Kleiber conducting, took place only after ‘an unprecedented series of rehearsals,’ but even so the opera created a furore.
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It was labelled ‘degenerate,’ and the critic for
Deutsche Zeitung
wrote, ‘As I was leaving the State Opera, I had the sensation of having been not in a public theatre but in an insane asylum. On the stage, in the orchestra, in the stalls – plain madness…. We deal here, from a musical viewpoint, with a composer dangerous to the public welfare.’
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But not everyone was affronted; some critics praised Berg’s ‘instinctive perception,’ and other European opera houses clamoured to stage it.
Lulu
is in some ways the reverse of
Wozzeck.
Whereas the soldier was prey to those around him, Lulu is a predator, an amoral temptress ‘who ruins all she touches.’
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Based on two dramas by Frank Wedekind, this serial opera also verges on atonality. Unfinished at Berg’s death in 1935, it is full of bravura patches, elaborate coloratura, and confrontations between a heroine-turned-prostitute and her murderer. Lulu is the ‘evangelist of a new century,’ killed by the man who fears her.
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It was the very embodiment of the Berlin that Bertolt Brecht, among others, was at home in.

Like Berg, Kurt Weill, and Paul Hindemith, Brecht was a member of the Novembergruppe, founded in 1918 and dedicated to disseminating a new art appropriate to a new age. Though the group broke up after 1924, when the second phase of life in the Weimar Republic began, the revolutionary spirit, as we have seen, survived. And it survived in style in Brecht. Born in Augsburg in 1898, though he liked to say he came from the Black Forest, Brecht was one of the first artists/writers/poets to grow up under the influence of film (and Chaplin, in particular). From an early age, he was always fascinated by America and American ideas – jazz and the work of Upton Sinclair were to be other influences later. Augsburg was about forty miles from Munich, and it was there that Brecht spent his formative years. Somewhat protected by his parents, Bertolt (christened Eugen, a name he later dropped) grew up as a self-confident and even ‘ruthless’ child, with the ‘watchful eyes of a raccoon.’
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Initially a poet, he was also an accomplished guitarist, with which talent, according to some (like Lion Feuchtwanger) he used to ‘impose himself’ on others, smelling ‘unmistakably of revolution’.
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He collaborated and formed friendships with Karl Kraus, Carl Zuckmayer, Erwin Piscator, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Gerhart and Elisabeth Hauptmann, and an actor who ‘looked like a tadpole.’ The latter’s name was Peter Lorre. In his twenties, Brecht gravitated toward theatre, Marxism, and Berlin.
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Brecht’s early works, like
Baal,
earned him a reputation among the avantgarde, but it was with
The Threepenny Opera
(tided
Die Dreigroschenoper
in German) that he first found real fame. This work was based on a 1728 ballad opera by John Gay,
The Beggar’s Opera,
which had been revived in 1920 by Sir Nigel Playfair at the Lyric Theatre in London, where it ran for four years. Realising that it could be equally successful in Germany, Elisabeth Hauptmann translated it for Brecht.
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He liked it, found a producer and a theatre, and removed himself to Le Lavandou, in the south of France near Saint Tropez, with the composer Kurt Weill to work on the show. John Gay’s main aim had been to ridicule the pretensions of Italian grand opera, though he did also take the odd swipe at the prime minister of the day, Sir Robert Walpole, who was suspected of taking bribes and having a mistress. But Brecht’s aim was more serious. He moved the action to Victorian times – nearer home – and made the show an attack on bourgeois respectability and its self-satisfied self-image. Here too the beggars masquerade as disabled, like the war cripples so vividly portrayed in George Grosz’s paintings. Rehearsals were disastrous. Actresses walked out or suffered inexplicable illness. The stars objected to changes in the script and even to some of the moves they were directed to make. Songs about sex had to be removed because the actresses refused to sing them. And this was not the only way
Dreigroschenoper
resembled
Salomé:
rumours about the back-stage
dramas circulated in Berlin, together with the belief that the theatre owner was desperately searching for another show to stage as soon as Brecht’s and Weill’s had failed.
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The first night did not start well. For the first two songs the audience sat in unresponsive silence. There was a near-disaster when the barrel organ designed to accompany the first song refused to function and the actor was forced to sing the first stanza unaided (the orchestra rallied for the second verse). But the third song, the duet between Macheath and the Police Chief, Tiger Brown, reminiscing about their early days in India, was rapturously received.
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The manager had specified that no encores would be sung that night, but the audience wouldn’t let the show proceed without repeats and so he had to overrule himself. The opera’s success was due in part to the fact that its avowed Marxism was muted. As Brecht’s biographer Ronald Hayman put it, ‘It was not wholly insulting to the bourgeoisie to expatiate on what it had in common with ruthless criminals; the arson and the throat-cutting are mentioned only casually and melodically, while the well-dressed entrepreneurs in the stalls could feel comfortably superior to the robber gang that aped the social pretensions of the
nouveaux-riches.’
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Another reason for the success was the fashion in Germany at the time for
Zeitoper,
opera with a contemporary relevance. Other examples in 1929–30 were Hindemith’s
Neues von Tage
(Daily News), a story of newspaper rivalry;
Jonny spielt auf,
by Ernst Kreutz; Max Brandt’s
Maschinist Hopkins;
and Schoenberg’s
Von Heute auf Morgen.
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Brecht and Weill repeated their success with the
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny –
like
The Threepenny Opera,
a parable of modern society. As Weill put it, ‘Mahagonny, like Sodom and Gomorrah, falls on account of the crimes, the licentiousness and the general confusion of its inhabitants.’
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Musically, the opera was popular because the bitter, commercialised sounds of jazz symbolised not the freedom of Africa or America but the corruption of capitalism. The idea of degeneration wasn’t far away, either. Brecht’s version of Marxism had convinced him that works of art were conditioned, like everything else, by the commercial network of theatres, newspapers, advertisers, and so on.
Mahagonny,
therefore, was designed so that ‘some irrationality, unreality and frivolity should be introduced in the right places to assert a double meaning.’
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It was also epic theatre, which for Brecht was central: ‘The premise for dramatic theatre was that human nature could not be changed; epic theatre assumed not only that it could but that it was already changing.’
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Change there certainly was. Before the show opened, the Nazis demonstrated outside the theatre. The first night was disrupted by whistles from the balcony, then by fistfights in the aisles, with a riot soon spreading to the stage. For the second night police lined the walls, and the house lights were left on.
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The Nazis took more and more interest in Brecht, but when he sued the film producer who had bought the rights to
Die Dreigroschenoper
because the producer wanted to make changes against the spirit of the contract, the Brownshirts had a dilemma: How could they take sides between a Marxist and a Jew? The brownshirts would not always be so impotent. In October 1929, when Weill attended one of their rallies out of mere curiosity, he was appalled to hear
himself denounced ‘as a danger to the country,’ together with Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. He left hurriedly, unrecognised.
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One man who hated Berlin – he called it Babylon – who hated all cities, who in fact elevated his hatred of city life to an entire philosophy, was Martin Heidegger. Born in southern Germany in 1889, he studied under Edmund Husserl before becoming himself a professional teacher of philosophy.
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His deliberate provincialism, his traditional mode of dress – knickerbockers – and his hatred of city life all confirmed his philosophy for his impressionable students. In 1927, at the age of thirty-eight, he published his most important book,
Being and Time.
Despite the fame of Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Heidegger was – besides being earlier – a more profound existentialist.

Being and Time
is an impenetrable book, ‘barely decipherable,’ in the words of one critic. Yet it became immensely popular.
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For Heidegger the central fact of life is man’s existence in the world, and we can only confront this central fact by
describing
it as exactly as possible. Western science and philosophy have all developed in the last three or four centuries so that ‘the primary business of Western man has been the conquest of nature.’ As a result, man regards nature as though he is the subject and nature the object. Philosophically, the nature of knowledge is the central dilemma: ‘What do we know? How can we know that we know?’ Ever since Descartes these questions have been paramount. For Heidegger, however, reason and intellect are ‘hopelessly inadequate guides to the secret of being.’ Indeed, at one point he went so far as to say that ‘thinking is the mortal enemy of understanding.’
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Heidegger believed that we are thrust into the world willy-nilly, and by the time we have got used to being here, we are facing death. Death, for Heidegger, is the second central fact of life, after being.
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We can never experience our own death, he said, but we can fear it, and that fear is ad-important: it gives meaning to our being. We must spend our time on earth creating ourselves, ‘moving into an open, uncertain, as yet uncreated future.’ One other element of Heidegger’s thought is essential to understanding him. Heidegger saw science and technology as an expression of the will, a reflection of our determination to control nature. He thought, however, that there was a different side to man’s nature, which is revealed above all in poetry. The central aspect of a poem, said Heidegger, was that ‘it eludes the demands of our will’. ‘The poet cannot will to write a poem, it just comes.’
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This links him directly with Rilke. Furthermore, the same argument applies to readers: they must allow the poem to work its magic on them. This is a central factor in Heidegger’s ideas – the split between the will and those aspects of life, the interior life, that are beyond, outside, the will, where the appropriate way to understanding is not so much thinking as submission. At one level this sounds a little bit like Eastern philosophies. And Heidegger certainly believed that the Western approach needed sceptical scrutiny, that science was becoming intent on mastery rather than understanding.
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He argued, as the philosopher William Barrett has said, summing up Heidegger, that there may come a time ‘when we should stop asserting ourselves and just submit, let be.’ Heidegger quoted Friedrich Hölderlin: We are in the period
of darkness between the gods that have vanished and the god that has not yet come, between Matthew Arnold’s two worlds, ‘one dead, the other powerless to be born.’
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