The Ark, Day Eight: Reich

The bulk of our day today in The Ark was spent looking at the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, and culminated with a reading of Brecht’s “Fear and Misery of the Third Reich“, which was first produced in 1938.

What is fascinating to me is how a play that spoke so openly and clearly about the horror of what was coming (the play begins with Hitler becoming Chancellor and ends with the annexation of Austria in 1938) didn’t seem to serve as an effective call to action on the part of Europe or the world (the play was a terrific theatrical success).  But the complex and gradual progression of conditions that led to the rise of the Reich make it easy to understand how people could be blind or willfully ignorant of what was really happening.  It’s very easy to recognize ourselves (meaning, people living here and now) in “Fear and Misery”.  The play’s construction, exquisite use of subtext, and style are as contemporary and naturalistic as anything being written for the modern theatre, and that really says something about Brecht.

Really: who was this guy?  Everyone in the room at the NAC is being blindsided by the diverse range of styles and structures Brecht was able to employ in his work.  It’s funny to think that most students of the theatre have an impression of what is ‘Brechtian’ based, most likely, on the feel of “Threepenny Opera” or perhaps “Mother Courage”… but the poet who wrote “Baal” is not the satirist who wrote “Man Equals Man”, who is not the pedagogue who wrote “The Mother”, who is not the realist who wrote “Fear and Misery”, who is not the master of epic theatre who wrote “Good Person of Setzuan”.  I think that what I’m getting to here is that anyone who is curious about Brecht — or who thinks he knows him already — would be well-advised to read a wider sampling of his work.

Back to “Fear and Misery”, though:  the play is comprised of 24 scenes that do not have a narrative throughline, but depict diverse aspects of life from within the realm of the master race.  Many of them are horrific and unsettling; all require us to ask ‘why?’, but do not provide answers.  You could take any of the 24 scenes and use it as a separate short play or scene study (and, in fact, that might be a terrific way to explore the work in pieces).  The themes expressed in the play — how we are affected by living in a culture of fear and oppression — are as fresh today as ever.  That thought, alone, is terrifying.  Keep in mind that Germany is a country that went from being on the verge of a communist revolution to complete totalitarianism in the space of less than a decade.  It could (and will) happen again, and I really don’t think people would react much differently than they did at that time.

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