Me-Ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things 45

Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti Also by Bertolt Brecht PLAYS Brecht Collected Plays: One (Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, The Life of Edward II of England, A Respectable Wedding, The Beggar or the Dead Dog, Driving Out a Devil, Lux in Tenebris, The Catch) Brecht Collected Plays: Two (Man Equals Man, The Elephant Calf, The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins) Brecht Collected Plays: Three (Lindbergh’s Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said Yes/He Said No, The Decision, The Mother, The Exception and the Rule, The Horatians and the Curiatians, St Joan of the Stockyards) Brecht Collected Plays: Four (Round Heads and Pointed Heads, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Señora Carrar’s Rifles, Dansen, How Much Is Your Iron?, The Trial of Lucullus) Brecht Collected Plays: Five (Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children) Brecht Collected Plays: Six (The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Mr Puntila and His Man Matti) Brecht Collected Plays: Seven (The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweyk in the Second World War, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Duchess of Malfi) Brecht Collected Plays: Eight (The Days of the Commune, The Antigone of Sophocles, Turandot or the Whitewashers’ Congress) Berliner Ensemble Adaptations (The Tutor, Coriolanus, The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen, 1431, Trumpets and Drums, Don Juan) PROSE Brecht on Art and Politics Brecht on Film and Radio Brecht on Theatre Brecht on Performance Collected Short Stories of Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht Journals 1934–1955 The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things Bertolt Brecht Edited and translated by Antony Tatlow Series Editor: Tom Kuhn Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Methuen Drama 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Original work entitled Me-ti. Buch der Wendungen Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988-2000 Copyright © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag English translation © Antony Tatlow 2016 First published 2016 Bloomsbury Methuen Drama Series Editor for Bertolt Brecht: Tom Kuhn Antony Tatlow has asserted his moral rights to be identified as the editor and translator of this edition. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-7917-1 PB: 978-1-4725-7916-4 ePDF: 978-1-4725-7919-5 ePub: 978-1-4725-7918-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Contents Introduction 1 Attributable names 41 [Prefatory note] 43 Me-ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things 45 Bibliography 175 Appendix A: Sequential listing of texts 177 Appendix B: Alphabetical listing of texts 185 Introduction During his visit to Moscow in March 1935 Brecht wrote to his wife, Helene Weigel, that he had seen the ‘really splendid’ Chinese actor Mei Lanfang. In a postscript, he asked: ‘Have you already picked up Me-Ti? Does it look good now?’ His copy of this remarkable book, published in 1922 – the first full translation into any European language, by Alfred Forke, of an ancient Chinese text – was being rebound in Svendborg. Forke entitled it Mê Ti – the philosophical works of the social moralist and his followers.1 Even given Brecht’s shrewd but sporadic responses to Chinese culture, this 638-page example of detailed forensic sinological scholarship, otherwise of interest only to specialists, was an unusual acquisition, and it had surprising consequences. The text is a unique combination of tersely formulated, often witty aphorisms on human behaviour, of advice offered in the course of conversations on how best to conduct human affairs, of systematic, critical descriptions of cultural values and related social dangers, and of obscure, sometimes incomprehensible arguments over logical problems formulated over two millennia ago. Brecht found it a stimulating treasure trove. This is not to say that his own Me-ti is an interpretative engagement with the Chinese work. Brecht’s is primarily occupied with the unfolding European crises, with the political theory and practice of Communism in the Soviet Union, as well as with personal affairs. But he could not have shaped his own text without this stimulus, and there are passages in the Chinese work, some of which he 1 Mê Ti, des Sozialethikers und seiner Schüler philosophische Werke zum ersten Mal vollständig übersetzt, mit ausführlicher Einleitung, erläuternden und textkritischen Erklärungen versehen von Professor Alfred Forke (Berlin: Kommissionsverlag der Vereinigung wissenschaftlicher Verleger, 1922) in the seriesMitteilungen des Seminars für orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich-Wilhlems-Universität zu Berlin. Given the many systems of transliteration and different European orthographic conventions, the transcription of Chinese names, which may themselves vary, can prove confusing. In order to distinguish between Brecht’s Me-ti, as text and fictional person or persona, and Forke’s translation of the Chinese text, I refer to the latter and its ‘author’ as Mo Di, which is another version of the author’s name. In his text, Forke also uses the common honorific for Chinese philosophical teachers, Mê-tse, meaning Master Mê (墨子, in the pinyin transcription, Mozi), which explains why Brecht refers to ‘Master Me-ti’ and to ‘Master Ka-meh’ for Karl Marx. Quotations are my own translations. The Letters are quoted, where possible, from the English edition, London: Methuen, 1990 (here, with slight emendations, pp. 201–2). Other Brecht quotations are either from the Methuen/Bloomsbury edition or else, if not available, my own translations from the thirty-volume Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (BFA). 2 Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti noted but did not directly use, that seem to echo his own thoughts. To cite one example: ‘Generosity does not exclude the self.’ Elisabeth Hauptmann, his close collaborator over many years, told me he was reading this Chinese ‘philosophical’ work from 1929. ***** Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933. Two weeks later the police started proceedings for high treason against those involved in a production of Brecht’s ‘learning play’, The Measures Taken. After another two weeks, the Reichstag burnt down. That night Brecht slept at his publisher Peter Suhrkamp’s house, and the next morning fled Germany for Prague and Vienna. In May, his books were burnt in Berlin, with about half a million kilograms of other ‘un-German’ works. He came to Paris in early June, for the première of The Seven Deadly Sins, his last collaboration with Kurt Weill, and on the morning of a performance on 20 June of The Little Mahagonny by Lotte Lenya he left to join Helene Weigel, who was already in Denmark with their children. In August they bought a house in Svendborg on the island of Fyn, about thirty kilometres from German territorial waters, from where he would later hear the firing practice of the German navy just over the horizon. Ruth Berlau, another key collaborator, first visited them at the end of the month. Though Brecht was continuously engaged in projects and plans, and travelled to London, Paris, Moscow and New York, in rural Denmark the character and pace of life changed drastically after the intensity of Berlin, the dramatic flight from Germany, and the recent success of performances before discerning audiences in Paris. Contact with collaborators and publishers became much more difficult. Weigel lost all chance of performing fully for fifteen years, until Antigone in Switzerland, and Brecht, with very occasional exceptions, also lost his audiences. With his works largely untranslated, he lost most of his readers as well. He continued to work on theatre scripts, but with no chance of performances in Germany and little real access to theatres elsewhere, let alone much influence over what they would do. The prospect of Danish and English productions appeared and receded, or, if actually realized, often disappointed, like The Mother in New York in 1935, where he and Eisler were ejected from rehearsals, and the uneven Round Heads and Pointed Heads in Copenhagen in 1936, taken off due to poor audiences. Brecht, therefore, turned to other projects: The Threepenny Novel, finished in August 1934, favourably reviewed in Prague and Paris but criticized in Introduction 3 Moscow as insufficiently realistic; critical essays, such asFive Difficulties in Writing the Truth (December 1934), or the programmatic but often misun- derstood Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting (1935), which appeared first as an English translation in 1936 with an unfortunate title – The Fourth Wall of China; An essay on the effect of disillusion in the Chinese theatre. He was also occupied with less structured or unfinished prose writings, many of which were anecdotal in character. TheStories of Mr Keuner were the only ones, though then not all of them, to appear during his lifetime; others, unpublished at the time, were the so-called Tui Novel, the Conversations of Refugees and Me-ti.

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