The Decision (play)

Plot

Four agitators from Moscow return from a successful mission in China and are congratulated for their efforts by a central committee (called The Control Chorus.) The four agitators, however, inform the committee that during their mission they were forced to kill a young comrade for their mission to succeed. They ask for judgment from the committee on their actions. The committee holds their verdict until after the four agitators re-enact the events that lead to the young comrade's death.

The four agitators tell of how they were sent on a mission to educate and help organize the workers in China. At a party house (the last before they reach the frontiers of China) they meet an enthusiastic young comrade, who offers to join them as their guide. The agitators must hide their identities because educating and organizing the workers in China is illegal. The director of the party house (the last before the frontier) helps the four agitators and the young comrade in the obliteration of their true identities. They all put on masks in order to appear as Chinese. They are told to keep concealed that they are communist. Their mission must remain a secret. Should they be discovered, the authorities will attack the organization and the entire movement; not merely the lives of the four agitators and the young comrade will be put in danger. The agitators and the young comrade all agree to these conditions.

However, once in China, the sights of injustice and oppression enrages the young comrade and he is not able to contain his passion, immediately acting to correct the wrongs he sees around him. He shows no discretion in teaching the oppressed how to help themselves and has no tact when dealing with small-time oppressors to help the greater good of the revolution. As a result, he eventually exposes himself and the four agitators by ripping off his mask and proclaiming the teachings of the party. When he does this, he puts the entire mission and movement in danger. He is identified, unmasked, just as riots break out and a revolutionary uprising among the workers is beginning. The authorities are now in pursuit of the young comrade and his friends. Still shouting out against the party, the young comrade is struck in the head by one of the agitators and they carry him as far away as they could, to the nearby lime pits. There, the agitators debate on what to do with him.

If they help him to escape they will be unable to help the uprising, and escape is near impossible from their current position anyway. If he is left behind and caught, his mere identity will unwittingly betray the movement. The four agitators realize that "he must vanish, and vanish completely/ For we can neither take him with us nor leave him." To save the movement, they conclude that their only solution is for the young comrade to die and be thrown in the lime pits where he will be burned and become unrecognizable. They ask him for his consent to this. The young comrade agrees to his fate in the interest of revolutionizing the world and in the interest of communism. He asks the four agitators to help him with his death. They shoot him and throw his body into the lime pit.

The central committee (The Control Chorus), to whom the four agitators have been telling their story, agree with their actions and reassures them that they have made the correct decision. "You've helped to disseminate / Marxism's teachings and the / ABC of Communism," they assure the four agitators. They also mark the sacrifice and cost that the wider success entailed: "At the same time your report shows how much / Is needed if our world is to be altered."

Note: The "ABC of Communism" is a reference to the popular book by Nikolai Bukharin.

Translations

The most common translation for the title, Die Maßnahme, in English is The Measures Taken. The only translation titled The Decision is by John Willett.

The first known published English-language translation of Die Maßnahme is the inaccurate and libelous version of the cantata, titled The Rule [or Doctrine]. This version of the text was made specifically for the House Un-American Activities Committee for use when interrogating both Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler. The text is derived from the Eisler score published by Universal Edition and was made by Elizabeth Hanunian on September 18, 1947. The full translation is available in the Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books book: Thirty Years of Treason (New York, 2002) edited by Eric Bentley. [Note: First published by The Viking Press, Inc. in 1971.]

Eric Bentley himself made two published translations of Die Maßnahme, both as The Measures Taken. The two different translations corresponded to two different German versions of the text. The first appeared in the Bentley edited collection of plays The Modern Theatre volume 6 (New York, 1960.) The second was published in a Grove Press collection of Brecht plays The Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays (New York, 1967.) Bentley also made verse translations to be sung for selected pieces from Die Maßnahme as sheet music to directly correspond to the Eisler score in The Brecht-Eisler Songbook, published by Oak Publications (New York, 1967.)

Carl R. Mueller translated Die Maßnahme as The Measures Taken in the Brecht collection The Measures Taken and Other Lehrstücke edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, first published by Methuen (London, 1977) and later by Arcade Publishing (New York, 2001.)

John Willett translated Die Maßnahme as The Decision specifically to fit the Eisler score. This translation was published by Methuen Drama in Brecht's Collected Plays: Three (London, 1998.)

Score

Hanns Eisler's score for Die Maßnahme calls for a tenor soloist, three speakers/actors, a mixed choir (SATB) and a small orchestra. The score involves choral pieces, speaking choir, recitatives and songs.

Production history

The cantata, Die Maßnahme, was scheduled to be performed at the Neue Musik Festival in Berlin in the summer of 1930. The festival directorate (consisting of Paul Hindemith, Heinrich Burkard and Gerhard Schuenemann) asked Brecht to submit the text for inspection, concerned with its radically political subject matter. Brecht refused and suggested that Hindemith resign, protesting the implication of censorship. The piece was rejected by the festival directors sighting the "artistic mediocrity of the text."

Brecht and Eisler wrote an open letter to the festival directors. In it they propose an alternative venue for their new work. "We render these important activities wholly independent, and let them be managed by those for whom they are intended and who alone have use for them: the workers' choirs, amateur theater groups, school choirs and school orchestras – in short, the people who do not want to pay for art, who do not want to be paid for art, but who want to create art."

Die Maßnahme, thus, received its first theatrical production at the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin on the 10 December 1930. The performers who appeared as The Four Agitators in the premier were: A. M. Topitz (as the tenor soloist), Ernst Busch, Alexander Granach, and Helene Weigel (who took on the role of The Young Comrade.) Karl Rankl conducted and the Arbeiterchor of Groß-Berlin (Worker's choir of Greater Berlin) served as The Control Chorus. The performance was directed by the Bulgarian filmmaker, Slatan Dudow.

The play was also produced in Moscow around 1934.

Heiner Müller, a postmodern dramatist from the former East Germany who ran Brecht's Berliner Ensemble for a short time, used the Lehrstück style and storytelling of The Decision as a model when writing his plays Mauser (1970) and The Mission: Memory of a Revolution (1979).

The Decision/The Measures Taken influenced South African playwright, Maishe Maponya, when writing his play, The Hungry Earth, about labor and apartheid in 1978.

Brecht and his critics

Brecht wrote the play in 1930. Since then, some critics have seen the play as an apologia for totalitarianism and mass murder while others have pointed out that it is a play about the tactics and techniques of clandestine agitation.

Brecht was not attracted by the workers' movement—with which he was never acquainted—but by a profound need of total authority, of total submission to a total power, the immutable, hierarchical Church of the new Byzantine state, based on the infallibility of its chief

They have also pointed out that it is thematically similar to his 1926 poem, "Verwisch die Spuren", ("Cover Your Tracks"), that his friend Walter Benjamin saw as "an instruction for the illegal agent." Elisabeth Hauptmann told controversial Brecht biographer John Fuegi that "she had written a substantial portion of it," but had forgotten to list herself as co-author. Ruth Fischer, the sister of Hanns Eisler, denounced Brecht, as "The minstrel of the G.P.U.". She also viewed the play as a foreshadowing of the Stalinist purges and was among its harshest critics. Katerina Clark wrote that the play "is a contender for being more Stalinist in this respect than Stalinist literature itself where writers deftly avoided explicit mention of the brutality of a purge."

In his journals, Brecht, however, relates how he had rejected explicitly that interpretation, referring the accusers to a closer scrutiny of the actual text; "[I] reject the interpretation that the subject is disciplinary murder by pointing out that it is a question of self-extinction", he writes, continuing: "I admit that the basis of my plays is marxist and state that plays, especially with an historical content, cannot be written intelligently in any other framework."

Banning the play

Brecht and his family banned the play from public performance, but, in fact, the Soviet government did not like the play and other governments banned it as well. Performances resumed in 1997 with Klaus Emmerich's historically rigorous staging at the Berliner Ensemble.

The Decision and the F.B.I.

The F.B.I. translated the play in the 1940s, and titled it The Disciplinary Measure. The report described it as promoting "Communist World Revolution by violent means."

The Decision and the House Committee on Un-American Activities

Brecht appeared before the Committee on October 30, 1947. Only three members of the Committee and Robert E. Stripling, the committee's chief investigator were present. Brecht wanted no attorney, and unlike the previous ten witnesses, was charming, friendly and seemingly cooperative.

The committee tried to trick him by reading some of his more revolutionary plays and poems, but he was able to dismiss those questions by saying they were bad translations. Some of his answers were cleverly evasive, such as when he was asked about Comintern agent Grigory Kheifetz. At one point, he stated that he had never joined the Communist party. Despite Brecht's extensive support for Communism, most authors agree that he really hadn't officially joined the party, nor did he ever do that in his life, although it has also been claimed in the literature that he had joined in 1930.

Brecht was asked specific questions about The Decision. He said it was an adaption of an old Japanese religious play. When asked if the play was about the murder of a Communist party member by his comrades "because it was in the best interest of the Communist party", he said that that was "not quite" right, pointing out that the member's death is voluntary, so it is basically an assisted suicide rather than a murder. He compared that to the tradition of hara-kiri in the Japanese play.

The interrogators suggested that the title of the play (German Die Maßnahme) could be translated as "The Disciplinary Measure". During his testimony, Brecht objected to this title, and argued that a more correct translation of the title would have been "Steps to Be Taken".

The committee went lightly on him despite frequently interrupting his answers. At the end, Committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas said, "Thank you very much. You are a good example ..." The next day, Brecht left the United States for good and returned to Europe, eventually taking up residence in East Germany.

Brecht was embarrassed by Parnell's compliment but said the committee was not as bad as the Nazis. The committee let him smoke. The Nazis would never have let him do this. Brecht smoked a cigar during the hearings. He told Eric Bentley that this let him "manufacture pauses" between their questions and his answers.

Examples of Brecht's testimony about The Decision

The interrogators ask explicitly about the death of the young comrade:

Works and articles cited