Abstract
This article examines the relationship between the literary-theoretical topos of self-reflexivity and a politically efficacious theater in Bertolt Brecht’s Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe, with the objectives of reassessing the special position Johanna occupies within Brecht’s work and of responding to criticism questioning the usefulness of self-reflexivity as an analytical category. This article argues that the triad of self-reflexivity, crisis, and critique is instrumental in developing a theater suitable for the challenges of the early twentieth century. Self-reflexivity in Brecht’s play is established through a series of intertextual references and metatheatrical scenes. By confronting epic theater with tragic form, Johanna produces a structural crisis that makes possible a critique of both politics and theater. As a symptom of capitalism, crisis needs to be staged in order to be rendered comprehensible. Crisis as a formal element, by contrast, serves as a critique of the seemingly inescapable capitalist cooptation of Johanna. (LW)
I. Introduction
In a conversation with German theater critic Herbert Ihering, broadcast on German radio in 1929 and published as “Gespräch über Klassiker,” Bertolt Brecht announces the death of the German classics.1 “Richtig, die Klassiker wirken nicht mehr,” Brecht claims (Gespräch 177). Due to bourgeois practices of performance and reception, he argues, the works of Goethe and Schiller have lost their critical efficacy, and theater is experiencing a crisis so dire that it necessitates the search for a new type of drama. In Brecht’s conversation with Ihering, the classics serve as a reference point of critique and (self-) reflection alike. The concept of crisis, by contrast, reappears in the context of Brecht’s writings on dialectical critique: in order to critically examine an opinion, Brecht writes, it ought to be “in die Krise gebracht” (Dialektische Kritik 153). The triad of classics, crisis, and critique forms a basis upon which Brecht’s theoretical writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s rests.
Brecht’s Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe, on which he begins to work in 1929, continues this theoretical inquiry into the classics’ loss of critical efficacy by performing the gesture of in die Krise bringen Brecht envisions in his essay on dialectical critique. The play confronts Johanna Dark—Brecht’s rendering of the French heroine Jeanne d’Arc—with the stockyard workers’ miserable conditions in Chicago around 1900, which are aggravated as an economic crisis emerges. As Johanna, initially a lieutenant of The Black Straw Hats, a type of Salvation Army, gradually (yet never fully) gains insight into the social conditions engendering capitalist exploitation, she seeks to convince the factory owner Mauler to act on behalf of the workers. Her efforts remain unsuccessful. The operations of capitalist exploitation and the possibility of resistance and revolution constitute a central concern of the play. Its most salient formal quality, however, consists of the extensive use of citations from and intertextual references to canonical literary works, above all, the classics: Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans and Goethe’s Faust.2 This strategically exhibited intertextuality creates a genre-specific self-reflexivity (metatheatricality) that links the theatrical representation of sociopolitical processes to a reflection on theater itself.
The usefulness of the study of self-reflexivity in literature, however, is subject for debate. In their 2015 article “Was leistet Selbstreflexivität in Kunst, Literatur und ihren Wissenschaften?” Eva Geulen and Peter Greimer examine self-reflexivity as part of a modern “Wirklichkeitskritik” (533). By implicitly or explicitly addressing its own status as a work of art—the processes of its production, its mediality and textuality—a literary text simultaneously makes a statement about the reality in which it partakes, they argue. Conversely, self-reflexivity may function as a “Figur der Schließung,” excluding external references and establishing literature as a primarily self-referential discourse (528). While Geulen and Greimer concede critical potential to self-reflexivity so long as it reveals the constructed character of reality, they remain skeptical of its actual impact:
Dabei gibt es natürlich keine Garantien, […] dass die ästhetisch gewährte Einsicht in den „Konstrukt-Character“ der Wirklichkeit schon Kritik an dieser Wirklichkeit ist. Nur ein frommer Aufklärungsglaube könnte meinen, dass mit dieser Einsicht etwas geändert, gar getan sei. […] Es könnte sehr wohl sein, dass Selbstreflexivität noch in anderer Weise für die Literatur oder bildende Kunst fruchtbar zu machen ist, aber derzeit ist es nicht in Sicht. (528)
To reveal reality as constructed, Geulen and Greimer argue, does not mean to criticize, let alone change it; therein lies the insufficiency of self-reflexivity as a critical tool. In reference to Hans Blumenberg’s theory of the novel and his analysis of the relationship between “Wirklichkeit und Möglichkeit,” Geulen and Greimer propose to search for alternative categories in order to describe phenomena frequently subsumed under the term self-reflexivity (533). This turn to Blumenberg and the novel, however, results in formal limitations of Geulen and Greimer’s argument. In order to understand the uses of self-reflexivity, we must cast the net wider by considering the essential nature of self-reflexivity in other genres: here, in the context of the theatrical crisis in the 1920s. Brecht’s Johanna provides the needed insight into the utility, even the necessity of self-reflexivity in politically engaged theater that disappears from view when zeroing in exclusively on the novel. Building on Brecht’s concept of critique and crisis, the self-reflexive elements of the play do not exist separately from its political agenda but rather constitute an essential part of it. Going beyond a heightened awareness of its own status as literature, self-reflexivity thus demonstrates how theater can have a revolutionary impetus—but also how it can be, and has been, co-opted by dominant political discourses and ideologies. Against this backdrop, Johanna occupies a special position within Brecht’s dramatic work, as it raises the question of whether theater can succeed in politicizing its audience, or if, on the contrary, theater qua theater inevitably makes its audience more docile.3
II. Tragic Structure and Economic Cycle: Crisis of Dramatic Form
The question regarding the political efficacy of theater is raised, first and foremost, through a tension between what Brecht refers to as matter and form. Transferring the Jeanne d’Arc myth into the context of the Chicago stockyards around 1900 results in a fundamental structural tension, which manifests itself as a strategically produced crisis of dramatic form.4 Johanna confronts the logic and temporality of an economic crisis with the status quo of drama vis-à-vis modern capitalism. In his 1929 essay “Über Stoffe und Form,” Brecht reflects on the suitability of dramatic form for contemporary matters (Stoffe): “Können wir in der Form des Jambus über Geld sprechen?” he asks (Brecht, Stoffe 197). Contemporary matters, Brecht argues, resist the tragic five act structure: “die Katastrophen von heute verlaufen nicht geradlinig, sondern in der Form von Krisenzyklen, […] die Kurve der Handlungen wird durch Fehlhandlungen kompliziert …” (Ibid.). The challenge for theater, then, is to find a dramatic form that can accommodate today’s crises and catastrophes. Instead of choosing one structure over the other, Brecht’s Johanna realizes both: the five acts, reminiscent of Schiller’s Jungfrau, and the cycles of economic crises. Correspondingly, Johanna consists of two central plotlines, one following Johanna Dark and her development from a lieutenant of The Black Straw Hats to an agent of political resistance. The other one shows the unfolding of an economic crisis at the stockyards and the owner Mauler’s strategy of profiting from this crisis. Johanna’s learning process, however, does not follow the rise, climax, and fall of the economic crisis. Although she encounters Mauler repeatedly, her interventions, intent on supporting the workers, ultimately prove to have no significant impact on the financial processes he oversees. Lindner remarks: “Die Handlungsstränge sind also keineswegs synthetisch verknüpft, sondern eher bruchstückhaft ineinander montiert” (269). This fragmentary mode of assembling the two plotlines highlights the discrepancy between matter and form.
The significance of this discrepancy becomes apparent when comparing two different published versions of the play and their respective paratextual framing: the Bühnenfassung (1931) and the Versuche version; the latter served as the basis for the critical edition (GBA).5 The text of the Bühnenfassung is divided into five acts with eleven scenes and several sub-scenes, “die jeweils eine Überschrift tragen und den epischen Grundgestus vorwegnehmen” (Linder 280).6 This creates a striking contrast between tragic and epic form, sometimes bordering on incommensurability. Brecht’s Johanna does not merely modernize or rework a historical, literary, and legendary figure, as scholarship has argued frequently (see e.g. Breuer; Shaman; Stephan). Instead, the play questions the very possibility of such a modernization by preserving an older form and confronting it with a newer one. But how?
The Bühnenfassung begins with practical considerations regarding the stage decoration: “Auf einer Tafel des Hintergrunds können Angaben gemacht werden, welche den Verlauf der Geschäfte verdeutlichen” (9). These instructions are followed by a summary and simply worded explanation of the events constituting the economic plotline, which reveals the resolution to the economic crisis. Although this paratext includes some obvious theatrical reference points (such as the use of explanatory tables as part of the stage decoration, the idea of a chorus embodying public opinion, or the abandonment of suspense by anticipating the ending), its ultimate purpose is the clear communication of the action of the play. And this paratext consists exclusively of the economic plotline: Johanna is mentioned not even once. The Versuche version, by contrast, begins with a brief preface outlining the genesis and intentions of Johanna.
Der dreizehnte Versuch: ‚Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe‘, soll die heutige Entwicklungsstufe des faustischen Menschen zeigen. Das Stück ist entstanden aus dem Stück ‚Happy End‘ von Elisabeth Hauptmann. Es wurden außerdem einige klassische Vorbilder und Stilelemente verwendet: die Darstellung bestimmter Vorgänge erhielt die ihr historisch zugeordnete Form. So sollen nicht nur die Vorgänge, sondern auch die Art ihrer literarisch-theatralischen Bewältigung ausgestellt werden. (GBA III, 128)
The preface creates an interpretative framework that draws attention to a problem of dramatic form by historicizing theatrical representation and attributing a particular notion of appropriateness to its respective actualizations. While the stage directions of the Bühnenfassung highlight the subject matter of the play, the preface here asks us to look at theater as theater. In lieu of the economic action, we find the “faustischen Menschen” presented as the central problem. As a product of the theater, the Faustian figure can be read as a metonymy of German theater and its classics.7 What we will observe in Johanna, the preface suggests, is a case study of the current developmental stage of theater. It is to be understood as a decidedly metatheatrical play. The differences between the two paratexts are symptomatic of a shift from the economic to the theatrical, from the course of a temporary financial crisis to the historical development of its appropriate literary form, from the represented processes to the processes of representation.
The preface to the Bühnenfassung prominently stages the idea of crisis. Rather than understanding “die Marx’sche Krisentheorie als Schlüsselquelle der Heiligen Johanna,” let us consider the connection between critique and in die Krise bringen that Brecht establishes in his theoretical writings (Lindner 271). The concept of crisis connects the realm of economics with the realm of dramatic form by introducing a particular temporal and semantic structure.8 The Greek word krisis implies two central components: it refers to the necessity of decision making, and, due to the urgency of this act of judgment, it also implies a temporal component, which Reinhard Koselleck calls “Zeitnot” (205). “Immer handelte es sich,” Koselleck argues, “um endgültige Alternativen, über die ein angemessenes Urteil gefällt werden mußte, deren alternativer Vollzug aber auch in der jeweiligen Sache selbst, um die es ging, angelegt war” (204). Put another way, the concept of crisis inheres the imperative to choose between two alternatives. The anticipation of the ending of the play in the introductory stage directions, however, robs the economic crisis of its truly critical features due to the resulting lack of alternatives. But if this is true, can we locate the crisis elsewhere? When the play introduces “Krise,” it uses the term to refer to a problem of supply and demand, price regulation, and overproduction.9 As a result of this crisis, Mauler succeeds in gaining economic power and influence: “Mauler hat also im Verlauf der Krise die Fleischfabriken in seiner Hand vereinigt und Löhne und Viehpreise herabgedrückt” (Brecht, Bühnenfassung 10). What makes the “Krise” critical to the full extent, then, cannot be reduced to an economic crisis. Instead, the alternatives necessitating a decision are to be found in the structure of the play itself: in the tension between the Johanna material with its literary history, on the one hand, and the economic action, on the other. While tragedy is structured according to the logic of rise, climax, and fall, the economic crisis follows its own temporal logic. The crux of Brecht’s play is that these two plotlines with their respective temporal logic are not aligned with each other. Crisis as an economic subject matter has contaminated its theatrical adaptation. What is in die Krise gebracht and therefore subjected to critique in Johanna is both economics and theater.
By relocating Jeanne d’Arc to the Chicago stockyards, Brecht thus positions his play at the crossroads of a theater prone to crisis and a subject matter marked by crisis.10 Rather than following one crisis structure or the other, the play produces a crisis itself in the form of crisis. Neither the economic crisis nor the theatrical crisis leads to a resolution of the tensions in the play as a whole. Johanna remains purposefully indecisive, producing and maintaining its own crisis rather than solving it.11 The central question Johanna raises, then, is this: can theater move an audience to find responses to modern societal, political, and economic challenges? Or is it doomed to play into the hands of the profiteers of financial crises and exploitation?
III. Metatheatricality as Problem
Evaluating the relationship between metatheatricality and ideological critique appears as a central problem in Brecht’s dramatic work as a whole. In Brecht and Method, Fredric Jameson asks with regard to Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper: “Does autoreferentiality rule out references of other kinds? Is there some allegorical link between the theory of estrangement (as work on aesthetic ideology) and the theory of capitalism […]?” (96) Johanna radicalizes these questions by problematizing the status quo of Brecht’s drama in general. If a central concern of Johanna is the status quo of political theater in the contemporary world—in other words, if this is theater thinking about theater thinking about capitalism—, then this, in turn, raises the question how self-reflexivity can function theatrically as politics. This echoes Geulen and Greimer’s critique of self-reflexivity and their question, “was denn qua Selbstreflexivität eigentlich an Erkenntnis oder ästhetischer Komplexität gewonnen wird” (521). Because modernity is marked by a heterogeneous concept of reality—a plurality of realities—, the novel, Geulen and Greimer argue, draws attention to the relativistic character of reality by means of self-reflexivity. “Wirklichkeitskritik” in this sense is primarily a “Wirklichkeitsbezug,” establishing the realm of fiction as a point of reflection on our notion of reality (Geulen and Greimer 533, emphasis added). Brecht’s notion of critique, however, goes beyond this “Wirklichkeitsbezug,” as it seeks to criticize the conditions of a Wirklichkeit characterized by capitalist power structures in the mode of theater. Johanna thus demonstrates that “Wirklichkeitskritik” without self-reflexivity is as problematic as self-reflexivity without a reference to reality.
The play performs this search for an aesthetic politics via self-reflexivity by working through concepts crucial to the theatrical experience: emotion, spectatorship, and performance. The first and most prominent instance of this strategy coincides with Johanna’s first intervention in the looming economic crisis. At the end of the third scene, when Johanna asks Mauler to assume responsibility for the workers’ hardship and urges him to help the workers, he responds:
The last two lines of his reply reference Schiller’s letters on Die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, whereas the first half focuses on the problem of emotion.12 The reference to Schillerian aesthetics as well as to the term pity (“Mitleid”) in Mauler’s utterance reveals how theatrical concepts can be co-opted and turned into instruments of power.13 As a result of this cooptation, the language of theater becomes part of a particular rhetoric. This creates a stark contrast between question and response. Whereas Mauler’s answer originates in the aesthetic realm, Johanna’s inquiry is an economical and ethical one: “Warum haben Sie die Schlachthöfe zugemacht? / Das muß ich wissen.” (GBA III, 145) With this exchange, the play’s pivotal problem surfaces and becomes part of the action: while Johanna is poised to turn to the political, Mauler utilizes the theatrical so as to prevent a political discussion. He accomplishes this by addressing Johanna not primarily as a dramatic character, but rather as an intertextual cipher, as a reference to Schiller’s Jungfrau von Orleans, in order to evade the political. In other words, Johanna’s appearance in Brecht’s text is overdetermined because she always also signifies the history of German theater since Schiller. As a result of this ambiguity, the problematic relationship between theater and politics that underlies Johanna structurally can be staged as a struggle between two dramatic characters, that is, between the broker Slift and Johanna.Mit Ochsen hab ich Mitleid, der Mensch ist schlecht.
Die Menschen sind für deinen Plan nicht reif.
Erst muß, bevor die Welt sich ändern kann,
Der Mensch sich ändern. (GBA III, 146)
The alternation between political and theatrical language establishes a basic ambiguity affecting the fourth scene, corresponding to the doubled function of Johanna as a dramatic character and as a proxy for literary history. In this scene, “Der Makler Sullivan Slift Zeigt Johanna die Schlechtigkeit der Armen: Johannas zweiter Gang in die Tiefe,” Mauler’s right-hand man Slift shows Johanna “[i]hre armen Leute, wie schlecht sie sind und tierisch” (GBA III, 147). He takes up the position of a stage director, while the workers and later Johanna herself alternately occupy the positions of actors and spectators. The scene stages not only the workers’ poverty and alleged moral depravity, but the mechanisms of performance and spectatorship. The doubled focus reinforces the contrast previously established for the paratexts of the two versions. Slift’s opening lines reintroduce the concept of pity:
Slift’s utterance determines not only the subject matter of what is to be seen; it also defines the structure of showing and witnessing, as it puts Johanna in the spectator’s position by means of the personal pronoun “dir.” By explaining to Johanna when pity is the appropriate reaction to what is presented on stage, Slift initiates a scene of theatrical pedagogy. His showing of Mitleid aestheticizes the evaluation of the workers’ situation, turning it into a problem of a moral and aesthetic response rather than a moral and political one. The metatheatrical structure of the fourth scene explicates the problem that the theatrical spectator—in this case, Johanna—is not necessarily a sociopolitical agent. The spectator counts among the essential semiotic elements of the theater.14 But as this scene demonstrates, this precondition of the theatrical experience already includes the potential of turning theater into a hermetically sealed space: aside from her remark “Mir ist übel” and a brief, incorrect prediction of the course of the events, Johanna remains silent for as long as she is in the spectator’s position (GBA III, 150). Johanna, in other words, is a beholder rather than an agent. Rather than considering the metatheatrical exhibition of these fundamental theatrical positions—their staging as being theatrical—as sufficient means to create distance and initiate a process of critical thinking on the part of the audience, Johanna suggests that even metatheatricality might be co-opted.Jetzt, Johanna, will ich dir zeigen
Wie schlecht die sind
Mit denen du Mitleid hast, und
Daß es nicht am Platz ist. (GBA III, 148)
Slift orchestrates a series of scenes in which some of the workers, forced to choose between what is ethical and what is necessary to secure their food and employment for the next days or weeks, display morally reprehensible behavior. A young boy steals the hat and coat of a worker who is “in den Sudkessel gefallen” (GBA III, 148). The widow of the deceased is willing to keep silence in exchange for “zwanzig Mittagessen” (GBA III 150). The prospect of being promoted is enough for another worker to downplay the risks of an extremely dangerous job when offering it to Johanna. Slift and Johanna walk from scene to scene, sometimes commenting on or even participating in them. The positions of the actor, epic narrator, and spectator are exposed as elements of the theatrical illusion that are not unalterably fixed, but rather mutable. But what are the effects of this exposure on the constitution and semiotics of the theatrical illusion? Surely, one could read the scene according to what Geulen and Greimer summarize as the common assumption regarding the nexus of self-reflexivity and ideological critique: “Wie das Werk sich als ‘konstruiert’ zu erkennen gibt, so wird durch es und in ihm auch die werkexterne Wirklichkeit als ‘Konstrukt’ entlarvt” (528). But what the play accomplishes here is not a simple inference from theater to Wirklichkeit. The suggestibility of the theatrical positions of actor and spectator—between which the struggle between Johanna and Slift oscillates—does not equal an actual change of the theatrical world or of theater as such if the basic constellation remains the same. The play does not only utilize theater in order to criticize the real world it depicts and is part of; it also uses theater to scrutinize theater and its limitations as a tool of social and political critique—including Brecht’s own theater.
Johanna herself verbalizes the lesson learned from the metatheatrical exercise: “Wie aber beherrschest du / Ihre Schlechtigkeit!” (GBA III, 153) Slift’s mastery of the workers’ “Schlechtigkeit” is above all a theatrical one. By making the workers part of his pedagogical project of teaching Johanna not to feel pity for them, Slift assumes the prerogative of interpretation over their actions: “Das ist die Welt, wie sie ist,” he claims (GBA III, 148). By means of performance and emotion, Slift establishes the world as an unalterable Wirklichkeit. The self-reflexivity of the scene, that is its metatheatrical construction, discloses this gesture as inherently theatrical. It is Slift’s mastery over the theatrical representation that enables him to make the workers’ deeds perceivable as morally reprehensible. Conversely, Johanna questions in her last lines Slift’s interpretation of what she has seen:
Significantly, Johanna, like Slift, relies on the instrumentalization of the act of showing, as she now puts Slift in the spectator’s position: “Zeigtet ihr mir […] / So zeig ich euch.” Her attempt to counteract Slift’s establishment of “die Welt, wie sie ist,” consists in a reversal of the theatrical positions—however without questioning the effectiveness of these means per se. The use of tautology—“[d]er Armen Armut”—constitutes a critique of Slift’s use of poverty as a signifier of a moral condition and thus a critique of the reality he presented. But her response also ultimately imitates Slift’s metatheatrical exercise.Nicht der Armen Schlechtigkeit
Hast du mir gezeigt, sondern
Der Armen Armut.
Zeigtet ihr mir der Armen Schlechtigkeit
So zeig ich euch der schlechten Armen Leid.
Verkommenheit, voreiliges Gerücht!
Sei widerlegt durch ihr elend Gesicht! (GBA III, 154)
Brecht’s play confronts Johanna’s revolutionary potential with the capitalist ideology Mauler and Slift represent, but contrary to what one might expect, Johanna—in her metatheatrical, Schillerian function—is the primary subject of criticism.15 What at first looks like an affirmation of the political power of theater and the act of showing turns out to be radically critical of these same means. Similarly, during her third “Gang in die Tiefe,” it is a sensation of fear (“Furcht”) that generates an irreconcilable difference between Johanna and the workers at the stockyards:
Fear as a tragic response is paralyzing and restrains Johanna from speaking up. The insight that she is indeed watching “fast ein Schauspiel” does not result in critique or action.Ja, fast ein Schauspiel scheint’s mir, also
Unwürdig, wenn ich hierbliebe
Ohne dringendste Not. […]
Ich sag es offen, Furcht schnürt mir den Hals
Vor diesem Nichtessen, Nichtschlafen, Nichtausnocheinwissen (GBA III, 199)
Johanna stages the search for a contemporary dramatic form without providing definite answers or solutions. This search includes structural aspects of the dramatic text as well as central elements of the theatrical performance. The play presents itself as a harsh critique of Schillerian idealist aesthetics, the classical tradition, and its “emphasis on individual moral development as an expression of personal freedom” as obstructing societal change (Sharman 20). But as this critique is performed in a self-reflexive mode, it goes beyond challenging only Schiller’s theater: criticizing the intertexts becomes a steppingstone to challenging the possibility of an alternative dramaturgy. Johanna confronts the “belief in the didactic function of theater” that is frequently attested to Schiller and Brecht alike with the difficulty of reconfiguring the fundamental conditions of theater in a way that is immune to cooptation (Sharman 20). Accordingly, critique in the Brechtian sense, as we can observe it in this play, is not only a function of theater, but rather something that needs to be applied to theater itself; and self-reflexivity is both the instrument and target of this critique.
IV. Staged Canonization
The final scene, Tod und Kanonisierung der Heiligen Johanna der Schlachthöfe, intertwines the play’s most radical proclamation of political resistance with the most excessive use of metrical, topical, and literal references to German classical theater. The tension between self-reflexivity and Wirklichkeitskritik, between dramatic and political intervention, culminates in Johanna’s plea for violence that is drowned by the capitalists’ chorus, the overwhelming noises of the stock market (caused by the onset of yet another financial crisis), and Mauler’s Faustian (of course highly self-aware) sentiment on his “[u]nbewußt” divisiveness between altruism and business:
It is hardly surprising that this “höchst eindrucksvolle[] Schlußszene” has received extensive scholarly attention, indicative of its key character for any understanding of the play (Adorno 417). Previous research falls into two main camps: some scholars have interrogated primarily conceptual problems, such as the notion of violence, the idea of human sacrifice, or the status of the individual.16 Other studies, by contrast, address questions of intertextuality, comparing Brecht’s play to the Goethean and Schillerian works referenced in the scene and often presenting synoptic readings of Die Jungfrau von Orleans and Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe.17 Both trends in scholarship tend to pay little attention to the profound connection between the intertextual and the conceptual dimension. An exception to these readings presents Revermann’s take on Brecht’s complex relationship with Schiller’s work in Brecht and Tragedy. While Revermann points out Brecht’s pivotal interventions on the level of content, such as “the shifts of class […]; money and capital functioning as means of violence; and his cynical presentation of Johanna’s canonization by the forces of the status quo,” he also highlights the importance of Brecht’s formal strategies of responding to Schiller and the classics (248). Johanna, he claims, “is not less but in fact more tragic in the formal terms of classical Greek theatre than Schiller’s ‘romantic tragedy’” (Revermann 249). The formal response to Schiller, in other words, bears political meaning. Offering an in-depth analysis of the relationship between these two levels of intervention in the final scene is the objective of this final section, intent on closing the circle of crisis, critique, and self-reflexivity.Ach, in meine arme Brust
Ist ein Zwiefaches gestoßen
Wie ein Messer bis zum Heft.
Denn es zieht mich zu dem Großen
Selbst- und Nutz- und Vorteilslosen
Und es zieht mich zum Geschäft
Unbewußt! (GBA III, 227)
Many commentaries on the intertextual dimension of the final scene confine themselves to calling the use of Goethe and Schiller a “Klassikerparodie” and are limited to the notion that the intertextual component serves merely as a metric guise to the play’s themes (Rector 47).18 By contrast, Patty Lee Parmalee offers one of the most persuasive propositions in this regard. The literary references, she writes, are intended “to show how once progressive forms become an ideological cover for reaction and to show the importance of economic laws, which Brecht considers equivalent to older conceptions of providence and fate” (162). What Parmalee addresses here is the ‘disguising’ function of classical drama and its reduction to hollow forms to be filled with ideological claims.19 This touches on a problem that is already addressed in the “Gespräch über Klassiker” and that we find at the heart of the final scene: If the classics have undergone the change from being progressive to reactionary, is there a way for Johanna to escape this development? Is Brecht doomed to become a second Schiller?20 Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare do not only represent a literary past co-opted by the bourgeoisie; rather, they also portend an ominous future for Johanna. Therefore, in the final scene, self-reflexivity becomes the indispensable companion to ideological critique that the play puts forward.
Curiously enough, the final scene in many ways appears to be a belated if not superfluous ending: the preceding tenth scene resolves the economic crisis to the benefit of Mauler; the Black Straw Hats have established their collaboration with the capitalists; the workers’ general strike has been prevented; and Johanna, realizing that she has failed to submit a letter that was critical to the success of the strike, simply “fällt um” (GBA III, 219). Consequently, the first lines of the Straw Hats’ leader in scene eleven sound like an ending rather than an opening: “Endlich ist es uns gelungen / Endlich hat das Ding geklappt” (Ibid.). If Johanna were indeed a play exclusively about the economic principles of capitalism, even a dramatization of Marx’s Capital, the curtain could drop now. But the scene of triumph is interrupted by the sudden entrance of Johanna and a group of poor people. Holding up the undelivered letter “als wollte sie ihn noch abgeben,” Johanna begins lamenting her failure (GBA III, 220).21 With this silent proclamation of an impossible act of communication, the principle of structural incongruency reaches its climax: a confrontation of theater’s potential for resistance with the danger of its absorption by the same system it seeks to criticize and overthrow. The ultimate conjuncture of theatrical and political power is transferred outside the economic plotline.
Brecht’s central dramaturgical technique in this scene consists of adding a third level of ambiguity to his Johanna figure. This ambiguity is first made explicit when Slift attempts to mitigate the disruptive character of Johanna’s entrance:
Das ist unsere Johanna. Sie kommt wie gerufen. Wir wollen sie groß herausbringen, denn sie hat uns durch ihr menschenfreundliches Wirken auf den Schlachthöfen, ihre Fürsprache für die Armen, auch durch ihre Reden gegen uns über schwierige Wochen hinweggeholfen. Sie soll unsere heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe sein. Wir wollen sie als eine Heilige aufziehen und ihr keine Achtung versagen. Im Gegenteil soll gerade, daß sie bei uns gezeigt wird, dafür zum Beweis dienen, daß die Menschlichkeit bei uns einen hohen Platz einnimmt. (GBA III, 220)
Once again, Slift acts as director and performs a verbally marked act of showing paired with the appropriate interpretation of what is shown. But in contrast to the previous scenes, the constellation of showing has changed significantly: Johanna is neither spectator nor agent of the performative act—she is its object, that which is being shown. Thus, in addition to her doubled function as a dramatic character (diegetic) and as a cipher of the literary history of Jeanne d’Arc figures (intertextual), which we have already seen in the fourth scene, Johanna also comes to represent Brecht’s Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe itself.22 By virtue of Slift’s speech act referencing the play title—“Sie soll unsere heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe sein”—, the eponymous heroine comes to denote the play itself, and as a result, the play anticipates and reflects on its own performance, ideological (ab)use, and reception. In other words, the play stages its own canonization.
Corresponding to this collapse of dramatic character and play, the process of canonization operates on both an individual level (religious canon) and on an institutional level (literary canon). While the former points to the historical role model, the focus is here on the literary notion of canonization, emphasized by terms such as “groß herausbringen,” “aufziehen,” or “Reden.”23 Since the play establishes a rather unambiguous connection between capitalism and organized religion—Mauler gives a grand speech Über die Unentbehrlichkeit des Kapitalismus und der Religion—, the concept of canonization implies both an ideological and a literary component. Canonization as an institutionalization of literature is an appropriation of Johanna into a well-functioning power system voicing its beliefs in Goethean style:
The final line summarizes the attempted cooptation of Johanna. Staging canonization, however, directs the attention to the literary and performative means effectuating this institutionalization. The act of staging canonization, that is the self-reflexive method, therefore provides a moment of subversion, the critique from within that simultaneously generates an outside point of observation for the spectator in the theater—although self-reflexivity, again, is part of the same institutionalized literature promoting canonization.Auch in unsrer Mitte fehle
Nicht die kindlich reine Seele
Auch in unserm Chor erschalle
Ihre herrlich lautre Stimme
Sie verdamme alles Schlimme
Und sie spreche für uns alle. (GBA III, 220)
Because Slift’s and Mauler’s rhetorical strategy of canonizing Johanna draws on the performativity of theatrical speech acts, the final scene unfolds as a struggle for this performative power.24 Consequently, one of the scene’s distinguishing characteristics is the breakdown of dramatic dialogue. What is anticipated in Johanna’s undelivered letter becomes one of the formal principles of the entire scene. While there is an alternation of characters or groups of characters speaking, their respective remarks do not directly respond to each other. Johanna’s discourse and the butchers’ chorus reference each other only metonymically or through the continuation of certain motifs, such as their divergent notions of societal topology:
This euphoric affirmation of the capitalist class system is immediately followed by Johanna’s reinterpretation of this order in free verse:Unten ist der Untere wichtig
Oben ist der Richtige richtig
Wehe dem, der je sie riefe
Die unentbehrlichen
Aber begehrlichen
Die nicht zu missenden
Aber es wissenden
Elemente der untersten Tiefe! (GBA III, 223)
Rather than joining Mauler’s chorus, Johanna’s voice disturbs their singing both with regards to its content and by virtue of its rhythm, deviating from the Goethean model. As a result, the scene stages the failure of the most distinctive means of the dramatic genre; and yet this failure coincides with the citation of the text arguably representing its most elaborate form—Goethe’s Faust. Against the backdrop of a staging of canonization, this is significant in two ways: on the one hand, Johanna gives in to the idea of canonization, even provokes it, by aligning itself with the German classical canon through metrical citation; on the other hand, it resists canonization by disturbing these citations and leading drama itself to the point of its exhaustion: silence and noise.Die aber unten sind, werden unten gehalten
Damit die oben sind, oben bleiben.
Und der oberen Niedrigkeit ist ohne Maß […] (Ibid.)
The rare moments in which Mauler, Slift, and the capitalists’ chorus address Johanna directly are attempts to silence her: “Du mußt gut sein! Du mußt schweigen!” (GBA III, 223) This call for Johanna’s silence is repeated throughout the scene. “Man muß dafür sorgen, daß ihre Reden nur durchgelassen werden, wenn sie vernünftig sind. Wir dürfen nicht vergessen, daß sie auf den Schlachthöfen gewesen ist,” factory owner Graham demands, once again referencing the setting of the play and its resituating of the Jeanne d’Arc character at the stockyards (GBA III, 222). Graham’s statement could just as well read: “we dare not forget that she, the intertextual figure, has been to the stockyards.” But as Johanna continues her non-compliant speech, Slift reiterates and reinforces the call for censorship: “Hört ihr, ihr müßt etwas sagen, womit ihr diesem Mädchen das Wort abschneidet. Ihr müßt reden, irgend etwas, aber laut!” (GBA III, 224) At the center of Slift’s remark is the theatrical word—“das Wort”—and the attempt to control it. The seriousness of the performative power of this word becomes clear when Snyder, in an effort to execute Slift’s order, announces Johanna’s fatal illness: “Johanna Dark, 25 Jahre alt, erkrankt an Lungenentzündung auf den Schlachthöfen Chicagos, im Dienste Gottes, Streiterin und Opfer!” (Ibid.) Silencing Johanna deprives her of much of her dramatic and political agency and thus functions as a form of violence to which Johanna responds with her own call to violence.
Due to their radicality, brutal imagery, as well as their isolated character in the context of Johanna’s discourse, these lines have received controversial scholarly attention.25 Johanna’s remark is certainly to be read as a statement on political violence for the sake of societal change. But is this strong claim met with an equally powerful theatrical intervention? The first three lines reference Johanna’s own earlier words, spoken as an agent of the Black Straw Hats and their palliative function within capitalist society: “Nicht weil ihr nicht mit irdischen Gütern gesegnet seid – das kann nicht jeder sein –, sondern weil ihr keinen Sinn für das Höhere habt. Darum seid ihr arm” (GBA III, 135). With her call for violence, Johanna thus advocates her own obliteration, and this proposal should be read both in terms of its political and self-reflexive meanings: the resistance against religious sermons as the opiate of the masses manifests itself as the play silencing itself. “Gewalt” refers to political resistance and simultaneously to the power (or powerlessness) of the theatrical word and is thus operative on both a diegetic and a metatheatrical level.Und auch die, welche ihnen sagen, sie könnten sich erheben im Geiste
Und steckenbleiben im Schlamm, die soll man auch mit den Köpfen auf das
Pflaster schlagen. Sondern
Es hilft nur Gewalt, wo Gewalt herrscht, und
Es helfen nur Menschen, wo Menschen sind. (Ibid.)
Johanna dies in no less than three ways. She calls, as we have seen, for the elimination of her own utterances in the earlier scenes. Secondly, her death is achieved performatively by silencing Johanna, as Slift had demanded: “Alle singen die erste Strophe des Chorals, damit Johanna nicht mehr gehört wird.” This includes the literal citation of stage directions in Schiller’s Jungfrau: “Alle stehen in langer sprachloser Rührung. Auf einen Wink Snyders werden alle Fahnen sanft auf sie niedergelassen, bis sie ganz davon bedeckt wird. Die Szene ist von einem rosigen Schein beleuchtet” (GBA III, 226). The flags cover Johanna in the scene just as the intertextual references cover the Brechtian play, drowning its own words in borrowed ones. At the same time, though, this usage degrades the classics to sheer noise: “irgend etwas, aber laut!” Thirdly, Johanna dies of pneumonia, a disease that references both the material conditions at the stockyards and the performative power of those who diagnose the illness only then to pronounce her dead. Ultimately, Johanna escapes its own canonization by falling silent and by turning the powerful theatrical models into noise, thus disclosing their silencing function. By the same token, only a silent Johanna can be canonized: what seems to be the way out is simultaneously the precondition of canonization. While the self-reflexivity of the final scene therefore exposes how theater and its institutions can be overtaken by forces of domination, it does not yet offer a new place where the theatrical word can unfold its power without being co-opted.
V. Conclusion
The preceding analysis of Brecht’s Johanna started with a diagnosis of crisis in the work’s structural incongruency that called into question the suitability of drama and theater for the challenges of the early twentieth century. By confronting epic theater with tragic form, Johanna stages the search for a new drama by working through the history of German theater and, in particular, its classics, thus establishing intertextuality as the site of both political and genre-specific critique. Reading Johanna through the lens of self-reflexivity therefore proves to be fruitful in three ways: first, with regards to Brecht’s examination of crisis as a formal principle; secondly, with respect to his notion of critique in the mode of theater; and finally, in illuminating the ambivalent function of canonization within literary discourse. Crisis assumes a double meaning in the play: as a basic principle of capitalist economy, crisis represents a problem that needs to be staged in order to be rendered comprehensible and resolvable. But as crisis affects the play’s formal organization itself, it becomes an instrument of critique—of the seemingly inescapable depletion, cooptation, and canonization of Johanna as well as of the capitalist world the play depicts. Crisis, in other words, simultaneously seeks to be resolved and—as critique—maintained. Consequently, critique appears as a method operative on the level of both politics and theater in the mode of self-reflexivity. However, the play renders visible the fact that self-reflexivity alone cannot protect theater from ideological cooptation. Due to this insight into the inevitable intertwining of the political and the theatrical, Johanna serves as a response to Geulen and Greimer’s open-ended question regarding the uses of self-reflexivity: if the realm of Wirklichkeit is already interwoven with theatrical means, and theater with reality, then a critique of Wirklichkeit necessitates a critique of theater and vice versa. The self-reflexive elements in Brecht’s play target theater in the moment of its cooptation and instrumentalization by ideology.
Footnotes
↵1 Brecht documented and edited his conversation with Ihering after it was broadcast by Kölner Rundfunk. “Es handelt sich folglich um eine Schrift B.s mit geringerem Authentizitätsgrad, die freilich von Ihering autorisiert ist” (Knopf, “Gespräche,” 459).
↵2 A comprehensive overview of Brecht’s literary sources can be found in Lindner (267–8).
↵3 It is worth noting that Johanna was never performed during the Weimar Republic. While a shortened radio version aired in 1932, the plan to stage the play at Hessisches Landestheater Darmstadt in 1933 failed due to the immense political pressure in early Nazi-Germany, as did various other attempts to organize performances of the play in different countries of Brecht’s exile. It was not until 1949 that Brecht gave Gustaf Gründgens his permission to stage Johanna, and it would take another ten years for the play to premier, directed by Gründgens in 1959 at Schauspielhaus Hamburg (Lindner 266, 285).
↵4 In contrast to Peter Szondi’s “Krise des Dramas,” I work with a narrower concept of crisis.
↵5 For a comprehensive overview of the different versions see Bahr, Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe. Bühnenfassung, Fragmente, Varianten.
↵6 As Lindner points out, the five-act scheme can be applied to the Versuche version as well, even though the act numbers have been removed from this version.
↵7 While there are, of course, a variety of possible readings of the “faustischen Menschen,” I will focus on its function as a pars pro toto of theatrical representation.
↵8 As Orth points out, the concept of crisis shares certain aspects with the tragic peripeteia (“Krise,” 150).
↵9 In consequence the play has been read through the lens of economic crisis, specifically the stock market crash of 1929. Rülicke-Weiler analyzes the play as a staging of the Marxian model of the Krisenzyklus (293–302) or an “Allegorie des Kapitalismus” (Braungart 2009), an interpretation that has been contradicted by Knopf (Brechts Heilige Johanna, 87–111). Parmalee understands the play as an “attempt to dramatize Capital” (247). While her reading is for the most part compelling, I follow Knopf in his critique of a strictly Marxian reading.
↵10 In Brecht and Method, Jameson examines the problem of what he calls the “Representability of Capitalism” in Brecht: “No doubt the complexity of the theory also poses representational problems, and nowhere so intensely as the ‘science of society’: indeed later on we will examine the problems Brecht faced in attempting to stage economics—or in other words, as he at first thought, to find a ‘Technik, die es ermöglichte, große finanzielle Geschäfte wahrhaft auf der Bühne darzustellen’” (91).
↵11 Jonsson diagnoses a broader “crisis of representation” for the entire Weimar period, arguing that Die heilige Johanna addresses this crisis dramatically (294–6).
↵12 Braungart reads the Mitleid discourse in Die heilige Johanna primarily in an anthropological context, ascribing to Johanna a “naive Anthropologie” (202). While he points out that in Brecht’s poetics aesthetic and anthropological questions are intertwined, he focuses on Mitleiden as an ethical response rather than on the tragic notion of Mitleid.
↵13 “Das klassische Drama diente zur Bestätigung einer Welt, gegen die es entstanden war,” Ihering argues in the “Gespräch über Klassiker” (GW 15.177).
↵14 “Theater, reduziert auf seine minimalen Voraussetzungen, bedarf also einer Person A, welche X verkörpert, während S zuschaut” (Fischer-Lichte 16).
↵15 This critical focus on theater itself may serve as a response to the ostensible vagueness or even implausibility of the political and economic content which some scholars criticize: “Überhaupt bleibt die Kapitalismus- und Ideologiekritik vage, die Religionskritik erreicht nicht ganz das Niveau von Karl Marx’ Religionskritik […]” (Breuer 37).
↵16 See for instance Peters, who examines Brecht’s notion of the law, arguing that the play shows how the law is no longer a “tool of justice” as it has been replaced with the “law of international trade” (365).
↵17 For a detailed comparison of Brecht and Schiller, see Friedrichs, “Eine Jungfrau und zwei Dichter,” as well as Breuer, “Historie und Metahistorizität,” and Sharman, Reworkings, 16–44.
↵18 See for instance Rülicke-Weiler: “Die Versformen Shakespeares, Schillers und Goethes geraten in Widerspruch zum Inhalt […]. Es wird deutlich, daß den Geschäften des Monokapitalismus das Gewand des klassischen Humanismus nicht paßt” (“Fabelbau,” 303).
↵19 For an analysis of the “geschichtsdynamisches Moment” in the play, see Ketelsen “Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe,” 120.
↵20 For an overview of Brecht’s own canonization, see Mews, “Die Wende und ihre Folgen.”
↵21 Adorno criticizes Johanna’s complicity in the failing strike as “undenkbar,” “auch bei größter Weitherzigkeit in der Interpretation des poetisch Glaubwürdigen” (Adorno, Engagement, 417.).
↵22 This ambiguity is a result of the self-reflexive structure of the play, whereas the “Ambivalenz der Figur” that Lindner identifies refers to Johanna’s oscillation between Schillerian heroine and “ein Partikel im anonymen Zug der Massen” (278). Lindner’s analysis thus remains on the same diegetic level. Reading Johanna as a self-reflexive signifier of the play itself contrasts with interpretations that understand the final scene as a radical individualization of Johanna (Braungart 215), as a drama on the limits “of the individual’s freedom” (Peters 366), or as “a violent antagonism between the anonymous masses and a group of capitalist individuals” with Johanna as a “mediatory figure in this struggle” (Jonsson 294–6). While these readings certainly find their legitimization in Johanna’s self-characterization as “ich kleiner Mensch” (GBA III, 221), understanding Johanna as a personification or an allegory, as Jonsson does, fails to factor in the self-reflexive component: the objective of the final scene is a critique of such poetic and theatrical means.
↵23 The historical Jeanne d’Arc was canonized in 1920 (Stephan 48).
↵24 “Fortschreitend wird in einem Akt der Selbstreflexion der ideologische Charakter des literarischen Redens selbst thematisiert […]” (Ketelsen 114).
↵25 For the greater part of the play, Johanna speaks as a decided opponent of violence, a feature that fundamentally distinguishes her from the workers: “Es kann nicht gut sein, was mit Gewalt gemacht wird. Ich gehör nicht zu ihnen. Hätte mir als Kind der Tritt des Elends und der Hunger Gewalt gelehrt, würde ich zu ihnen gehören und nichts fragen” (GBA III, 201).
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