4-12-2001
BERTOLT BRECHT
Erotische Gedichte
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Belehrungen in Sachen Sex
Bertolt Brecht: Über Verführung. Erotische Gedichte. Mit Radierungen von Pablo
Picasso.
Von Dorothea von
Törne
Pünktlich zum 100. Geburtstag Bertolt Brechts holte der
Suhrkamp Verlag zu einem Schlag unter die Gürtellinie der Brechtgemeinde aus und
editierte die mehr oder weniger pornographischen Gedichte des Jubilars in einem
Extraband. Wir wissen ja: Mit einem unnachahmlich zart fragenden "Hallo" soll
der notorische Frauenverbraucher die anvisierten weiblichen Objekte erobert
haben. So erzählte es seine Mitarbeiterin und Geliebte Ruth Berlau.
Welchen Wert haben diese mal locker tändelnden, mal didaktischen erotischen
Verse; sind sie als Texte eines Zynikers allesamt reine Pornographie oder doch
Dichtung? Lesen wir nicht die Voyeure und Rächer der Enterbten, sondern die
Verse selbst. "Über Verführung" ist ein gerafftes Kompendium mit Versen zu
Sexualität und Erotik, übrigens hervorragend ausgestattet mit Radierungen von
Pablo Picasso. Hier böte sich dem Leser lediglich eine Hitparade vulgärer Texte
zu banalen Tatsachen, wären sie nicht allesamt poetisch wohlgeformt: exakt
gebaute Sonette und fein ziselierte freie Rhythmen, wie beiläufig hingehauchte
Reime und zielsichere Laut-Attacken auf das buchwärts geneigte Ohr. Der
thematischen und sprachlichen Grenzüberschreitungen war sich der Dichter sehr
wohl bewußt, gehörten sie doch zu seiner Methode. Er selbst hat die in Versen
spielerisch erprobten Grenzverletzungen nur als Privatdrucke in Umlauf gebracht
oder in weniger delikaten Fassungen. Am Anfang, im Jahr 1918, singt Bertolt
Brecht "Baals Lied", die sexuellen Bekenntnisse eines wilden Bürgerschrecks, die
der Dramatiker allerdings aus seinem Baal-Stück später ausgegliedert hat.
Ungeniert wälzt sich Baal mit fetthüftigen Weibern im grünen Gras. Doch muß man
sich hüten, den im Lied agierenden bösen Buben mit dem Verfasser gleichzusetzen.
Zu demonstrativ ist die Ausstellung des Banalen und das Prahlen mit der
Maßlosigkeit. Der Verfasser setzt auf Provokation.
Anders als die scheinbar unbekümmerten Prahlereien des der Promiskuität
frönenden Sittenstrolches Baal liest sich das nur zwei Jahre später geschriebene
Dunkel im Weidengrund. Hier wird Sexualität nicht mehr provozierend offen
zur Schau gestellt, sondern eilig verhuscht im Dunkel betrieben. Hier beginnt
das von Shakespeare her kommende Ophelia-Motiv für Brecht wichtig zu werden, das
später im traurig-trostlosen Weltanschauungsgedicht Ballade vom ertrunkenen
Mädchen zu unterkühlter Hochform aufläuft.
Mit Bertolt Brecht zog Kühle in die Liebeslyrik ein. Er brach mit dem
traditionell verklärenden Grundton und ersetzte das hochgestimmte Minne-Pathos
durch die sachlich-nüchterne Feststellung. Solch Lakonismus wirkte stilbildend
auf nachfolgende Lyrikergenerationen.
Das Zurückführen der hohen Gestimmtheit auf das Maß des Kreatürlichen erforderte
ein Vokabular, das körperliche Vorgänge als solche benennt. Brecht fand es in
den unteren Stilebenen, im Wortbereich des Saloppen, Vulgären und Obszönen - und
er setzte es wohlkalkuliert ein. Sprachreflexiv denkt das Sonett Nr. 15
über den Gebrauch gemeiner Wörter nach und plädiert für sparsame und
funktionelle Verwendung. Das Auskosten der Wirkung ordinärer Worte aber muß ihm
Vergnügen bereitet haben. Davon zeugt Das dritte Sonett, das mit dem
Reimwort spielt, das durch Verschweigen reizt. Mit ihm - und mit zwölf anderen
Sonetten über Begierde und Lust - ließ er Margarete Steffin erröten. Ein Filou
war er sicherlich - aber auch ein Revolutionär der erotischen Dichtung?
Betrachtet man die in den Versen agierenden Iyrischen Figuren Mann und Frau, so
ist deren Verhältnis zueinander eher konservativ. Der Mann als Subjekt und
Lehrer, die Frau ein Objekt, bestenfalls eine Lernende, ganz nach dem Muster
traditionellen Rollenverhaltens.
Bei seinen Belehrungen in Sachen Sex schreckte Brecht auch nicht vor
pseudowissenschaftlichen Argumenten zurück wie im13. Sonett. Frei erfunden wird
die sprachliche Herkunft eines Wortes, wenn's denn nur wirkt. Er argumentiert
mit Dante und den griechischen Mythen, ist auf das Erkennen gesellschaftlicher
Kausalitäten aus. Vor allem aber nimmt er gerade im erotischen Bereich eine
Umwertung bürgerlicher Werte vor. Keuschheit, Jungfernschaft und eheliche Treue
sind die Postulate, gegen die er in drastischen Worten löckt. Das Ausprobieren
neuer Sprechstrategien, das Ausprobieren von Gesten und Fragehaltungen zieht
sich wie ein roter Faden durch alle Liebesgedichte. Körpersprache wird
konsequent in Körpertext übersetzt. Wer sich nun ob dieser Sammlung rüder Verse
empört, dem sei die Lektüre des ganzen Brecht empfohlen. Er war ja auch ein
Dichter der nuancierten Empfindung, der die Mythen der Antike ebenso für seine
Zwecke zu gebrauchen wußte wie die Chiffren der Moderne.
(Aus "Radio Kultur" Nr. 72 3/98)
Erotische Gedichte
Sie soll auch was davon haben
Männerverse: Ein bibliophiler Band versammelt Bertolt Brechts erotische Lyrik
Caroline Fetscher
Es nimmt kein Ende mit Brecht und den Frauen, und mit dieser Frage ob er sie nun benutzt und beschmutzt hat, sie als Plagiator ausgebeutet oder inspiriert hat. Wahrscheinlich beides, und beides immer. Eigentlich braucht man nur bei Brecht selbst nachzulesen, um seine politische Empathie und die persönliche Ambivalenz Frauen gegenüber zu finden. Steht alles da.
Dem obszönen Dichter Brecht, dem Macho und Frauenanwender, widmet der Insel-Verlag jetzt eines seiner kleinen, bibliophilen Bändchen. Außen verziert mit japanischen Tuschestreifen, innen dekoriert mit erotischen Picasso-Vignetten, erhält die Anthologie erotischer Gedichte "Bertolt Brecht. Über Verführung" einen ästhetischen Kragen, den sich Baal nicht umgebunden hätte. Es handelt sich um eine Sammlung gereimter Brecht-Männerfantasien. Viele der Gedichte, die heute unter dem Label "Explicit Lyrics" laufen würden, wurden zu Lebzeiten Brechts nicht publiziert.
Auf ihre Weise sind solche Verse inzwischen vor allem Zeitzeugnisse, deren "Tabubrüche" die Grenzen der Geschlechtergeographie einer vergangenen Epoche zeigen. Besonders sympathische Verse sind die meisten dennoch nicht. Aber man soll auch das Bessere sehen, etwa in den Strophen " Über die Verführung von Engeln". Da rät und verrät Brecht: "Engel verführt man gar nicht oder schnell. / Verzieh ihn einfach in den Hauseingang/ (... ) Und fick ihn. Stöhnt er irgendwie beklommen / dann halt ihn fest und laß ihn zwei Mal kommen / Sonst hat er Dir am Ende einen Schock", um mit einem Hinweis auf Schonung zu enden: "Doch schau ihm nicht beim Ficken ins Gesicht. Und seine Flügel, Mensch, zerdrück sie nicht." Immerhin.
Irgendwie rührend ist es auch, wenn dem Autor der Männerverse nicht ganz entgeht, dass das Objekt auch seine Freude haben kann und soll. Ein Ich sagt zum Du in "Das neunte Sonett": "Als du das Vögeln lerntest, lehrt ich dich / So vögeln, daß du mich dabei vergaßest / und deine Lust von meinem Teller aßest / Als liebtest du die Liebe und nicht mich." Eine pantheistische Megafantasie schließt sich an, in der das Mann-Ich für das Frau-Du alle Männer verkörpern will, - ungefähr die netteste Art den eigenen Narzissmus zum Wohl des Andern umzuwenden. Das Ganze endet mit der Bekräftigung der didaktischen Absicht: "Ich wollte, daß du nicht viel Männer brauchst / Um einzusehen, was dir vom Mann bestimmt." Bisschen viel Bestimmung und Vorsehung und Einsichtserwartung, aber in einem bibliophilen Bändchen und dann noch von Brecht geht sich das schon aus, old boys.
As a Brighton Festival tribute to the great German poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht, born in Augsburg a hundred years ago, seven poets were each invited to take one of the Seven Mortal Sins of the Church Fathers as a subject. Brecht’s ballet and song cycle The Seven Deadly Sins, put together with Kurt Weil in a few weeks between April and May 1933, drew a fashionable audience to the first performance in June of the same year in Paris. It was that occasion the Festival wished to celebrate.
The seven poets were assured that our names would be drawn out of a hat to be paired with each particular sin, and that nothing in our characters had seemed particularly apposite to the Sin we had been given. After that, we could deal with them in any way we liked.
First thoughts suggested the sins themselves no longer excite much condemnation in the present world. We fail to articulate Anger at our peril. Pride, too, labelled high self-esteem, has become something very like a virtue. And there’s more suspicion of celibacy than lust.
However, Brecht had even less respect than we do for traditional morality. His whole generation was impatient with words like “duty” and “honour”, under whose banner older men had sent their sons to death in the trenches. Comfortable burghers continued to mouth moral advice in Germany after defeat in the Great War, while the burden of reparations meant that most citizens had to endure ruinous inflation, beggary, and starvation. The Seven Deadly Sins was a savage indictment of the society around him.
In Brecht’s play, a rural family in Lousiana sent their daughter Anna to the Big City so that she could earn some money and post it back home like a good girl. Goodness, however, as Mae West once growled, had little to do with it. To cope with the jungle of the city, Anna has to split into two sisters. One has a warmth and tenderness which make it unlikely she will survive. The other is a practical girl who manages her sister’s career with worldly commonsense. In the process, the meaning of each sin is radically re-interpreted. In the scene called ‘Pride’, for instance, Anna is reluctant to strip off her clothes for a sleazy cabaret owner, but her sensible sister persuades her to abandon such vanity.
The idea that goodness has to compromise with evil in order to survive is one of Brecht’s central insights, though he usually blamed this on the capitalist society in which he lived. In The Threepenny Opera, Brecht, like John Gay before him, saw respectable bourgeois society resting on the very vices it condemned in the criminal world. For Brecht, the bourgeois notion of virtue and vice was irrelevant to the evils inherent in the structure of society itself.
It must be confessed that the underworld of pimp and whore is unconscionably glamorous in the hands of Brecht and Weill, even though the central message of The Threepenny Opera is a condemnation of the hypocritical rich. In Brecht’s criticism of society, the vices listed by the Church fathers were altogether venal in comparison with the evils of cruelty and exploitation of the weak. No-one could live innocently in a set up where the only real choice was between “kicking and being kicked”. One of the songs from The Threepenny Opera makes the point with characteristic glee:
What keeps a man alive? The
fact that millions
Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, oppressed.
A man can stay alive thanks to his brilliance
In keeping his humanity repressed.
And all of you must learn to face the facts
Mankind is kept alive by evil acts.
Brecht had ample opportunity to study the misery of the exploited in the Germany of the Depressed twenties, and watch as a desperate German people turned to Hitler for rescue. Brecht was an outspoken opponent of Hitler, even at a time when to be so was dangerous. He made fun of him in Arturo Ui. He wrote
They won’t say the times were
dark
Rather: why were their poets silent?
And Brecht was not silent about Hitler. He wrote about those who were forced to flee the country, the brutality of the Storm troopers, and times of such terror that “the man who laughs is the one who has not yet been told the terrible news”.
The only force that seemed strong enough to oppose Hitler’s Terror was the Marxist Left, to which Brecht with his passion for collective, didactic theatre was drawn in any case. Unfortunately, as we all know with hindsight, the brutalities of Capitalism were soon to be matched by the brutalities of new societies set up on a Socialist model.
It is entirely understandable that Brecht only wanted to see what was good in the New World of Communism. Many visitors to Russia were deceived by what they were shown, including Malraux, André Gide, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Russia is a huge country, and there were genuine improvements to see. Yet when Brecht visited Moscow he was closer to the centres of power, and far from stupid. As the “terrible Twentieth century” wore on, it is hard to acquit him of some complicity in the ruthlessness of Stalin’s regime. He was too ready to accept that good ends justify any means, as his savage play Die Massnahme (The Decision) makes painfully clear. And Stalin had his own agenda in relation to Germany. Brecht knew German Communists had been given instructions not to co-operate with Social Democrats and other opponents of Nazism. Brecht did not approve that willingness to collude with Hitler’s rise as a necesary prelude to Communism, but he did not modify his own support for Stalin.Worse, he even found it possible to accept that friends put into prison at the time of the purges in Russia had done something to deserve their fate. Take Carola Neher, a lovely actress who had been one of Brecht’s lovers before she left for Russia as a committed communist. When he heard of Carola’s imprisonment – she subsequently died in prison – he did not question the morality of it, only why it had been thought necessary. In a letter to Feuchtwanger, he wrote:
She is said to have been jailed in Moscow, I don’t know why, but I really can’t think of her as a danger to the survival of the Soviet Union. Maybe some sort of love trouble.
In letter a month later he wrote:
Perhaps by calling attention to her great talents as an artist, one might get them to speed up proceedings... (my italics).
Both these letters were written in 1937, the year when, under Yezhov, the most terrible of purges was taking place in Russia, and millions of innocent men and women went to their deaths in the Gulag. Was it wicked of Brecht to be less than willing to see the evils of the Soviet system? Is turning a blind eye O.K.? The Church fathers certainly did not include it among the sins.
In 1992 I wrote a novel about Brecht which raised a number of questions about his own moral standing. In writing the book, I was much influenced by John Fuegi’s biography, The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, put into my hands by the BBC, at the time I was commissioned to write an eight-part TV series on the man, alongside Michael Hastings and Jorge Semprun.I soon discovered there were areas in which Brecht himself was exploitative; particularly in his dealings with women. For all his tobacco-stained teeth, tin glasses, and dirty clothes, Brecht had an extraordinary entourage of beautiful women obsessively in love with him all his life. They were willing to type for him, cook for him, mend his clothes, and welcome him into their beds. He sometimes shared his favours among as many as seven of them at the same time, including the unfortunate Carola Neher, who was then one of the most glamorous stars on the German stage. Now the pattern of the great creative artist surrounded by adoring women is hardly uncommon. What is unusual in Brecht’s case was how much he took from the women’s own work. My novel explored what led a beautiful woman to accept her subservience so willingly. Many of the women who joined Brecht’s Theatre Group were talented writers themselves. Indeed, the most dedicated admirers of Brecht’s plays recognise that some of his most characteristic work was done in collaboration with those talented women. The elegant Elizabeth Hauptmann, for example, translated John Gay for Brecht, and wrote a good deal of The Threepenny Opera, as well as the famous ‘Alabama’ song from Mahoganny. She received neither credit nor royalties for her contribution.
Another of his lovers, the pert and beautiful Grete Steffin, was a talented poet in her own right. She was not only an important collaborator on The Caucasian Chalk Circle, but also wrote first drafts of The Good Woman of Szhechuan.
Both women, as dedicated Communists and believers in the value of group work, accepted their subsidiary role. Nor was it Hauptmann or Steffin Brecht thought to marry, but Helene Weigel, the best actress on the German stage, and a shrewd woman who knew better than to complain over his many love affairs.Even when the rise of Hitler turned Brecht into a refugee, none of his women abandoned him. Hauptman remained in Berlin, loyally safeguarding his papers, while Brecht travelled to Denmark , with a caravan of support, which included Grete Steffin as well as his wife Helene Weigel. In Denmark, he added a new lover to his entourage: Ruth Berlau, a Danish actress. All three of these women moved with Brecht when he had to flee to Sweden, though Grete Steffin had finally to be left behind in Moscow, dying of tuberculosis. Exile in the United States proved a disaster for both Ruth Berlau and Helene Weigel as actresses.
Brecht’s pragmatism usually ensured that he himself landed on his own feet, whatever happened to his associates, but the period in the States was a miserable time for him also. Only Kurt Weil, once bamboozled by Brecht into accepting less than his due in royalties, made the successful transition from the European stage to Broadway.
Self-interest was not thought of as one of the mortal sins by the Church Fathers, who do not single out for condemnation either opportunism or the naked desire to survive. There may be a reason for this. Their belief in original sin made it easier for them to see human beings as naturally flawed creatures. As we begin to understand the biology of the human animal, we may find ourselves coming uncomfortably closer to their position. How much can be expected of a creature evolved from forebears whose survival was ensured by aggression and unbridled fornication?Perhaps what is really remarkable about humanity is that animals with such an inheritance nevertheless evolved many thousands of years ago with enough subtlety to draw bison on caves and make songs that outlast their own brief lives. Brecht was one of those makers of genius. The observations in his poetry and in his songs continue to have an awkward pertinence in our own age, even as the gap between prosperous and starving nations has never been wider.
So people who believe they have a mission
To cure us of the Seven Deadly Sins
Should look into the basic food position,
And understand where moral life begins.
Those who declare what should be done as well
Must learn to see the way the world is run.
For all you may prefer the lies you tell,
Food must come first. Then morals follow on.
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