Okay, I cheated. I read an English translation. I always meant to go back and read the German version as well, I just wanted to have the story in my head first. Now, of course, I'm in the middle of reading the next book and I just haven't bothered re-reading the last. I'm trying to avoid making the same mistake with The Reader, by making sure I read the German version of the last chapter before I let myself continue with the English.
Anyway, this ramble is about Brecht's Gute Mensch, and serves towards being part of my "reading diary" to be reworked and reproduced for assessment purposes later.
First, a bit of intertextuality. When reading Der Gute Mensch I couldn't help thinking about Louis Nowra's The Precious Woman, a play I used for a number of assessment pieces a few years ago (and, by "a few", I meant probably ten or twelve - my, how time flies).
Nowra's play was published in 1981, so it's entirely possible that it was influenced by Brecht's play. It was set in China, featured a woman who thought well of the world until given an unavoidable wake-up call and ended miserably. So, some strong similarities there.
It wasn't Epic in nature, although it's form owed a lot to Brecht and his ilk, who broke the old three-act structure and had plays run simply scene by scene. The dialogue, though, was more naturalistic.
Was it communist? Bourgeois? Well, it wasn't saying anything about capitalism, or encouraging us to change the world for the better, but it was saying "warlords aren't the way to go" - if that counts towards anything. I think it was closer to a feminist text than a communist one, as there was an undertone of women gaining strength by shaking off the illusions weaved around them by husbands and sons.
After reading Gute Mensch I realised it had a lot in common with Sugar Heaven - the novel by Jean Devanny. Now, it's highly unlikely that Brecht would have read that novel (it was first published in 1936, two years after Brecht's ur version of Gute Mensch and before it developed into the play we know today), or that Devanny would have read Brecht's ur version (given that it was just a manuscript in Germany [and in German]), but the works have a similar sensibility.
Hard to explain that, really. On the one hand we have a spot of reportage and on the other a bit of Epic Theatre. The stories aren't similar, and there aren't even any calls for action that seem to echo the same thoughts.
So why would I think they were similar? Well, it's that reportage and epic theatre both came out of Communism. Those styles exist to be a kind of didactic literature - there's a message, it's always the same message, and that message is rammed home at every given opportunity: "This world sucks and needs to be changed: The working man must rise up and have his say/day."
In Gute Mensch we are reminded over and over again that poor people can't afford to be "good" people - that the current world simply won't let them survive without ruthlessness, so goodness cannot be asked or expected. Cheerful stuff.
In Sugar Heaven its this sense that a bright and shining future is waiting for us, we just don't have enough courage or enough power to get it. The strike is for our own good, and it will make things better - but the bosses won't hear of it, and the official unions are in cahoots with the bosses. We'll have to wait for a Communist Australia before we can expect anything better.
I have a theory, and I'm waiting for someone to disprove it, that Communist/Marxist literature is depressing. There's never a happy ending, because it's all designed to make us unsatisfied with our lot. It's all a sales pitch chanting "change the world, for we are all miserable".
I wonder if Soviet literature is like that, or if it tries to "hold the line", as it were - "nothing to see here, everyone's happy, but those poor fools in the West need to be saved from their miserable lives..."
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