Dhe First World War had produced new people. People who had lost their traditions, who found themselves overwhelmed and consumed by the machines, who had encountered every conceivable kind of meanness, including their own. Time was running over their heads, all the concepts with which they had previously happily defined the world, the military as well as the economic, political or moral ones, were no longer worth anything, an enormous dizziness gripped most of them. A tremendous willingness to give in to a swindle.
The young Bertolt Brecht put this on the stage. A hundred years ago today, a play by him was performed for the first time, “Drums in the Night” at the Munich Kammerspiele. He had started writing the comedy three years earlier in Augsburg under the working title “Spartacus”, he himself was twenty-four when it premiered under the direction of Otto Falckenberg in Otto Reigbert’s crooked sets, which seemed to have been taken from the films of the time. In the same year “Nosferatu” came to the cinemas, the actor of the vampire, Max Schreck, played the communist liquor dealer Glubb in Munich. Brecht wanted Blandine Ebinger, also a silent film star, to play the female lead.
Nothing is good
The generic term “comedy” written on the theater poster was odd. Because a comedy can only be called “drums in the night” if it includes desperate lust. In the end, right, they get married. But nothing is good. In Berlin, the Spartacus associations are fighting for the newspaper district. It is the time of the murders of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Eisner and Rathenau. A soldier believed lost in the World War in Africa returns home and finds his fiancé pregnant by another, shortly before marriage. He fights for her, or rather: grabs her back as a former possession.
Her father, a manufacturer who is in the process of converting his production from bullet baskets to baby carriages, wants things to be different. The new fiancé is only half decided – “Jealousy, I don’t have that” – mostly drunk and after other skirts. He has nothing to oppose the attraction of the hollow suffering man from the Algerian front, the girl turns around. But the revolutionary forces, who do not want to let any fighter lose out on his private happiness, are also pulling at the suffering man. The returnee, however, decides after a desperate aria – “It’s all deception of the people”, “Don’t stare so romantically”, “Kiss my ass now. I am the lover” – against revolt and for the bed.
In his day, Bertolt Brecht was dissatisfied with this outcome. “The piece ‘Drums in the Night’ was very successful and I’m sorry that I wrote it,” he notes later. In the usual theatrical manner, he wrote a human conflict into a factual context, the revolution. The soldier lets go of the barricade fight when he regains his old position. So the interests of the subversives were not homogeneous enough to make the revolution independent of the losses suffered by people like the war veteran.
Hints of obscenity
Brecht also had a bad conscience about having been successful in the wrong company. The fact that the “Drums” were performed on fifty German stages made him suspicious. He had wanted to shock the citizens, now they ran to him and enjoyed the folksy and expressionist diction of the drama, short sentences without verbs, body images, hints of obscenity.
