Bertolt Brecht's Refugee Conversations

Bertolt Brecht, Tom Kuhn, Romy Fursland

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350045019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teatro

Published in English for the first time, Refugee Conversations is a delightful work that reveals Brecht as a master of comic satire. Written swiftly in the opening years of the Second World War, the dialogues have an urgent contemporary relevance to a Europe once again witnessing populations on the move. The premise is simple: two refugees from Nazi Germany meet in a railway cafe and discuss the current state of the world. They are a bourgeois Jewish physicist and a left-leaning worker. Their world views, their voices and their social experience clash horribly, but they find they have unexpected common ground – especially in their more recent experience of the surreal twists and turns of life in exile, the bureaucracy, and the pathetic failings of the societies that are their unwilling hosts. Their conversations are light and swift moving, the subjects under discussion extremely various: beer, cigars, the Germans' love of order, their education and experience of life, art, pornography, politics, 'great men', morality, seriousness, Switzerland, America... despite the circumstances of both characters there is a wonderfully whimsical serendipity about their dialogue, the logic and the connections often delightfully absurd. This edition features a full introduction and notes by Professor Tom Kuhn (St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, UK).

Refugee Conversations

He knew that he was still alive.

More he could not say.

(Wodehouse)

1. On passports / on the parity of beer and cigars / on orderliness

The fury of war had reduced half of Europe to a wasteland, but she was still a young and pretty fury and was wondering how she might make a little detour over to America, when it came to pass that, about this time, two men were sitting opposite each other in a railway cafe in Helsingfors, and, throwing occasional cautious glances over their shoulders, they began to talk … about politics. The one was big and fat and had white hands; the other was a little thickset man with the hands of a metalworker. The fat one held up his beer glass and peered through it.

The Fat Man

This beer isn’t proper beer, although that is perhaps compensated for by the fact that these cigars are not real cigars either – but your passport, that has to be a passport. Otherwise they won’t let you in.

The Stocky Man

The passport is the noblest part of a human being. Nor does it come into the world in such a simple way as a human being. A human being can come about anywhere, in the most irresponsible manner and with no proper reason at all, but not a passport. That’s why a passport will always be honoured, if it’s a good one, whereas a person can be as good as you like, and still no one takes any notice.

The Fat Man

So one might say: the human being is just the mechanical holder for the passport. He gets his passport stuffed into his breast pocket rather as a share certificate is stuffed in a safe. The safe itself is of no value, it’s just a container for valuables.

The Stocky Man

And yet, one might contend that a human being is, in a certain sense, necessary for the passport. The passport is the main thing, all due respect, but without the attendant person it couldn’t really be, or at least it wouldn’t be complete. It’s like with a surgeon – he needs a patient, otherwise he can’t operate, and to that extent he is not an autonomous being, just half a thing, notwithstanding all his qualifications; in a modern nation state it’s the same again: the main thing is the great leader, the Führer, the Duce, or whatever, but even they have to have people to lead. They may well be great, but someone has to bear the damage of it, otherwise it’ll all come to nothing.

The Fat Man

Those two names you’ve just mentioned, they remind me of this beer and these cigars. I’d like to think of them as leading brands, the best there is to be had here, and I see it as a fortunate state of affairs that the beer isn’t proper beer and the cigar isn’t a proper cigar, because if they didn’t happen to be on an equal footing, this café would be almost impossible to run. The coffee probably isn’t proper coffee either.

The Stocky Man

What do you mean, a fortunate state of affairs?

The Fat Man

I mean it restores the balance. They have nothing to fear from comparison with each other and, shoulder to shoulder, they can take on the world: neither of them will ever find a better friend, and when they meet, their encounters are always harmonious. It would be different if, for example, the coffee was proper coffee and only the beer wasn’t proper beer – then people might well complain that the beer was inferior, and what then? But I’m distracting you from your subject – you were talking about passports.

The Stocky Man

It’s not such a pleasant subject that I mind being distracted from it. I just find it strange that they’re so keen on counting and registering people, especially at a time like this. It’s as if they’re afraid of mislaying somebody. They’re not usually so solicitous. But they want to be absolutely sure that you are this particular person and not that one: as if it made any difference who they allow to starve to death.

The tall, fat man stood up, bowed and said: My name is Ziffel, physicist. The stocky man seemed to be wondering whether he should stand up too, but then took courage and stayed where he was. He muttered: You can call me Kalle, that’s fine.

The fat man sat back down and took a sulky drag on his cigar, the one he had already complained about several times, before he spoke again.

Ziffel

Concern for human beings has increased a great deal in recent years, particularly in the new states. It’s not like it was before; nowadays, the state cares. The great men who have come to the fore in various parts of Europe take a keen interest in people; they can’t get enough of them. They need lots of them. At first none of us could fathom why the Führer was gathering up so many people from around the borders of Germany and transporting them into the middle. Since the war started it’s all become clear. He gets through them so quickly, he needs a plentiful supply. But the reason everyone has to have passports is mainly to do with keeping order. Order is essential at times like this. Suppose you and I were allowed to wander around without any proof of who we were: nobody would be able to find us when it was our turn to be deported, and order would go out of the window. You were talking about a surgeon earlier. Surgery only works because the surgeon knows whereabouts in the body the appendix, for example, is to be found. If the appendix could move about at will, without the surgeon’s knowledge – into the head, say, or into the knee – he’d have a hard time removing it. Any advocate of order will tell you the same.

Kalle

The most orderly person I ever met was a man called Schiefinger, in Dachau concentration camp – an SS man. They used to say he wouldn’t allow his mistress to wiggle her bottom on any day but a Saturday, or at any time of day but the evening – not even unintentionally. In the pub, she wasn’t allowed to put the lemonade bottle down on the table if the bottom of the bottle was wet. When he beat us with his leather whip, he did it in such a conscientious manner that the weals on our skin formed a pattern you could have measured with a protractor. His sense of order was so deeply ingrained that he would have preferred not to beat us at all than beat us untidily.

Ziffel

That’s a very important point. Nobody sets as much store by order as prisons and the military. They’re renowned for it, always have been. It’s like the French general who told Emperor Napoleon, at the start of the Franco-Prussian War, that the army was ready down to the last gaiter button: that really would have been a great boon, if it had been true. It all comes down to the last button. You need all the buttons. The last button is what wins you the war. The last drop of blood is important too, but not as important as the last button. It’s order that wins wars. And you can’t impose order on blood the way you can on buttons. The top brass are never so well informed about whether the last drop of blood has been spilled as they are about the buttons.

Kalle

‘Last’ is one of their favourite words. Out on the moors, the SS man always told us to go at it with our last ounce of strength. I often wondered why we weren’t allowed to use the first ounce. But it had to be the last, otherwise it wouldn’t have been any fun for him. And they want to win the war with the last ounce of strength too; they positively insist upon it.

Ziffel

They want to show it’s a serious matter.

Kalle

Deadly serious. If seriousness isn’t deadly, it doesn’t count.

Ziffel

That brings us back to the buttons. Nowhere else is order so highly prized as it is in the military, not even in business – despite the fact that you can make profits in business by keeping things in meticulous order, whereas war only ever leads to losses. You’d think it would be much more important to look after the pennies in business than to look after the buttons in war.

Kalle

It’s not about the buttons per se: there’s nothing as wasteful as a war, everyone knows that. They don’t stint on material when it comes to fighting a war. Have you ever heard of a military administration conserving resources? Orderliness is not the same as a sense of economy.

Ziffel

Of course not. It’s about wasting resources in a systematic way. Everything that’s thrown away or spoiled or destroyed has to be written down and numbered: that’s order. But the main reason for instilling order is a pedagogical one. There are certain tasks people can’t perform at all if they don’t perform them in an orderly way. And that’s pointless ones. Get a prisoner to dig a trench and then fill it in again and then dig it out again, and let him do it as sloppily as he likes, and he’ll go mad, or rebel – which is the same thing. But if he is instructed to hold the spade in such-and-such a place and not a centimetre lower down, and if there’s a line drawn on the ground to show him where to dig so that the trench will be perfectly straight, and if he is told that once he’s filled in the trench the ground must be as smooth as if there had never been a hole there at all, then the work gets done and everything runs like clockwork, as they say. On the other hand, humanity is almost impossible to come by these days without corruption, which is also a kind of disorderliness. You’ll find humanity wherever there’s an official who’s on the take. With a little bribery you can sometimes even get justice. I gave an official a tip to let me jump the queue at the passport office in Austria; I saw in his face that he was compassionate and open to bribery. Fascist regimes clamp down on corruption precisely because they are inhumane.

Kalle

Somebody once said muck is just stuff in the wrong place. We don’t call it muck when it’s in a flowerpot. In principle I think orderliness is a good thing. But I once saw a Charlie Chaplin film where he was packing a suitcase – or rather, chucking his stuff into a suitcase – and once he’d shut the lid he decided it was too messy because there were too many bits of cloth poking out. So he took a pair of scissors and just cut off the sleeves and trouser legs and everything else that was hanging loose. It astonished me. I can see you don’t think much of orderliness either.

Ziffel

I’m just conscious of the enormous advantages of sloppiness. Sloppiness has saved thousands of lives. Often, in war, a man need only deviate very slightly from the course of action he’s been ordered to take and he’ll escape with his life.

Kalle

That’s true. My uncle was in the Argonne Forest. They were sitting in a trench, and the order came through on the telephone for them to go back immediately. But they didn’t follow the order to the letter – they wanted to finish off the fried potatoes they were eating first – and they ended up being taken prisoner and so they were saved.

Ziffel

Or take a pilot, for instance. He’s tired, and he reads the flight instruments slightly wrong. He drops his bombs next to a large tenement building instead of on top of it. Fifty people’s lives are saved. What I mean is that people are not ready for a virtue like orderliness. Their thinking is not sufficiently developed. Their undertakings are idiotic, and only a sloppy and disorderly execution of their plans can save them from even greater harm.

I had a lab assistant, Herr Zeisig, who kept everything in order – it was very hard for him. He was constantly tidying up. You’d have some apparatus all set out ready for an experiment and get called away to answer the telephone, and by the time you got back he’d have tidied everything up again. And every morning the tables were spotless – meaning that the bits of paper with all your notes on had disappeared forever into the bin. But he did work hard, so you couldn’t really say anything. Of course, you did end up saying something, but by doing so you just put yourself in the wrong. Every time something disappeared – or rather, was tidied up – he’d look at you with his pale eyes, in which there was not even the faintest glimmer of intelligence, and you’d find yourself feeling sorry for him. I c...