The Proverbialism of Bertolt Brecht by Wolfgang Mieder

In January 1956, six months before his death, Bertolt Brecht spoke to then IV German Writers Convention in Berlin about the construction of a new world, in which the socialist and realist style of writing had to participate “through the study of material dialectic and the wisdom of the people. Already in the late thirties he had pointed out in reference to his “non-Aristotelian drama,” that “not that all that comes from the people or goes to the people is popular. Those are truisms, but there are also falsisms, which cannot be opposed.” This seemingly simple remark by Brecht is also applicable to proverbial folk wisdom that is particularly marked by contradictions. After all, it is well known that an anti-proverb can be found for every proverb, because this type of wisdom only stems from experience and does not contain a logical system.

As early as 1920 Brecht declared in his notebooks his “enjoyment of dialectics,” and his essay “Looking At My First Plays” (1954) he refers to his general “spirit of opposition.” Brecht characterized his contradictory work style proverbially by saying that “it was not just […] ‘swimming against the stream’  from a formal perspective […] but always the attempt to show interaction between people as contradictory, tumultuous and violent.” With another proverbial statement Brecht reduces all this to a common denominator in his play Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945): “It may be wrong to mix different wines, but old and new wisdom blend very well.”

Brecht’s preoccupation with proverbial language begins at the age of 15, when he uses his first proverb in a letter written in verse to the Reitter family in July of 1913, which exemplifies his linguistically playful humor:

We really did find an apartment right away

Mama did not like it all THAT much

But we could not get any other.

But when in need, even if that is too bad,

Beggars can’t be choosers.

About 20 years later, Brecht combines in another letter of January 1934 to Kurt Klaber as many as three proverbs into an innovative statement. Reacting to the news that friends in Germany would follow him into Danish exile, he writes with linguistic playfulness and yet meaningfully: “Help yourselves, pioneers, still the best pastures are here for the taking, gold mines lie directly underground, the land awaits your initiative. He who comes first, grinds terribly small and the dogs devour the hindermost.” The first part of the statement combines the first half of the proverb “First come, first served” with the second part of the proverb “The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small,” and the word “exceedingly”: has been replaced by “terribly.” In the additional proverb “the dogs bite the hindermost” the change of the verb to “devour” considerably coarsens the metaphorical implication. Taking into account Hitler’s takeover of power and Brecht’s flight into exile, this manipulation of proverbs can be interpreted ass Brecht’s warnings for his friends of the lurking danger in Nazi Germany. Only too quickly does such language play turn serious, as is also evident in the proverbial alienations  of his literary works.

In spite of their literal or alluded citing, proverbs in Brecht’s works are constantly subject to change, so that interesting parallel contradictions can be observes in the oeuvre. In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, for example, Azdak asks a doctor whether he can name a mitigating cause for his crime. The doctor replies: “At most that to err is human.” In the fragment Downfall of the Egoist Johann Fatzer, the chorus changes the proverb considerably

Injustice is human,

But more human it is

To fight against it!

But even here spare

man, leave him, unharmed

The dead cannot be

Taught!

Repeatedly Brecht deals with proverbs by adding aphoristically to them. In the short play He Who Said No (1930), intended for schoolchildren, a boy reacts to the proverb “Whoever says ‘a’, must also say ‘b’” by adding a contradiction: “whoever says ‘a’, doesn’t have to say ‘b’. You can also recognize that ‘a’ was wrong.’ At the same time Brecht uses the identical proverb in an essay On the Necessity of Art in Our Time (1930) to argue that the price of art cannot keep rising while children go hungry all over the world: “Art should not regarded as the ‘expression of great and unique personalities in the sense of exceptional manifestations. In that case, we have said ‘A’ and then must say ‘B’. Then exceptional personalities dictate their prices to the world, prices so high that there can be no more thought of feeding numerous insignificant children.” Here it becomes obvious that Brecht knew  how to make use of the multiple functionality of proverbs, although it has to be said that alienation and literal quotation do not have to be a contradiction.


In the play Life of Galileo (1939), the metaphorical proverb “No rose without a thorn” is rephrased by way of a structurally identical addition to comment on Galileo’s realistic conflict: “What good would it do to have as much free time for research as you like, if any uneducated monk of the inquisition could simply forbid your thoughts? No rose without a thorn, no nobleman without a monk, Master Galileo. However, it should be pointed out that such additions are not uncommon in colloquial language, as for example in “:No rose without a thorn, no love without a competitor.” Such double expressions, of course, show Brecht’s interest in contradictory phrases. The following two instances illuminate this interest further: “It is bitter that children turn into people, but still bitterer that people turn into children!” and “There is not much knowledge that provides power, but there is a lot of knowledge that is provided by power. Beginning with a proverb, Brecht in each case forms an opposing expression which lets a bit of folk wisdom appear in a completely different light.

It is often enough to change a single word to give a proverb an entirely new meaning. The following examples can be understood without context, but it must be remembered that alienations may well be intended as humor or joke. Not every alienation is necessarily designed to uncover social wrongs dialectically, although bitter satire often plays a part: “War [Christmas] comes but once a year,” “Sweaty feet [misfortunes] never come singly,” “Laziness [idleness][ is the root of all evil,” “Diligence is the mother of knockout [good luck,” and “Hunger is a bad [the best] sauce.”


Brecht, as a Marxist, of course also presents the reversal; of the proverb “Money doesn’t stink” in to “Money stinks,” but that is only uttered by Puntila in a drunken stupor in the play Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti (1940). The strongest statement by Brecht against profiteering capitalism and in favor of the poor can be found in the four-line epigram O, the Poor Man’s Morning Hour (1932) In this context, he varies what has proven to be the most popular German proverb the closest English equivalent being “The early bird catches the worm” and adds as a double accusation an alienation of the biblical proverb “He that will not work shall not eat.”

O, the poor man’s morning hour

Gold for the rich man in its mouth

One thing almost I had forgotten:

He who works shall not eat, either.

Occasionally, Brecht goes so far in his alienations that the original proverb can only be recognized with difficulty. Surely the following statement is rooted in the proverb “The unexpected always happens,” and it even gives a reasonable explanation for this bit of folk wisdom: “To be sure: Unexpected/ often comes expectedly, often we expect/ something unexpected, that’s life.” But for the most part, things aren’t as complicated as that, as is pointed in Brecht’s adaptation of Moliere’s Don Juan (1953). There, Don Juan’s servant Sganarelle resorts to six proverbs to argue ironically against his master’s ridiculous death wish: “And honesty is the worst policy and lies have long legs and he laughs best who laughs first and last come first served, and rotten fish, good fish, and forgive us our innocence and the camel goes through the eyes of the needle. This alienated proverbial tirade shows with great clarity how much “proverbial humor” Brecht employed in his proverbial dialectics.


Often, proverbs are taken directly from the Bible, but their wisdom and applicability in modern times is questioned. In the Conversations Among Exiles (1941) there is the following comment about Hitler’s war plans: “To retaliate, the enemy will throw its population into our territory, because war stand and falls with the phrase ‘An eye for an eyes and a tooth for a tooth’. One thing is for sure: if total war is not supposed to remain an idea of the future, a solution has to be found. The question is simply: either the population is done away with, or war becomes impossible. Sometime, and soon, a decision has to be made.” Justifiably, Brecht argues against the proverb of retaliation from the Old Testament, particularly because he knew that this proverb was used for war propaganda and the persecution of the Jews. A horrifying example of such usage can be found in Hitler’s speech of January 30, 1942: “We are aware that the war can only end in two ways: either the Aryan people are exterminated of Judaism disappears from Europe […] the result of this war will be the annihilation of Judaism. For the first time, the real ancient Jewish law will be applied: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.”


The most drastic description of human misery, however, can be found in the Threepenny Opera (1928) in the form of the alienated biblical proverb “Man does not live by bread alone”, used in the second finale with the title “What does man live by?” About six years later, Brecht used the chorus of that song also as a motto for the third cha[per of the Threepenny Novel (1934):

What does man live by? He lives by hourly

Tormenting, stripping, attacking, strangling and devouring others.

Man only lives by thoroughly forgetting

That indeed he is still human.
Chorus: Gentlemen, no more illusions:

Man lives by misdeed alone!


While the biblical proverb wants to express that besides nutrition people need spiritual values to survive, this pessimistic anti-proverb claims that they are primarily bad. And still, at the end of the great novel, Peachum, ever the businessman, expresses precisely the opposite in his speech to the newlywed couple Macheath and Polly, even if it is just with an eye on commercial success:

I would like to start with a practical suggestion. You, gentlemen, and you, my dear son-in-law, sell razor blades and watches, and household goods and who knows what else, but man does not live by that alone. It is not enough that he is clean shaven and knows what time it is. You have to go further. You have to sell him education, too. I mean books and I am thinking of cheap novels which don’t paint life in shades of gray, but in lighter colors which give the everyday person and idea of higher worlds […] I am not talking about the business opportunities in this –which may be significant - I am talking of the service offered to mankind.

But this speech to mankind is again full of ironies, because the mankind it talks about and for which it pretends to look out can be bought. People here are classified as consumer of goods and one is strongly reminded of one of the songs in Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), where people turn into commodities for the war machinery:

From Ulm to Metz, from Metz to Moravia

Mother Courage is coming along!

War will provide for all

It only needs powder and lead.

It cannot live by lead alone,

Nor by powder, It needs people!


In these lines Brecht plays with two proverbs. Hidden beneath the sentence “War will provide for all” lies the proverb “The land provides for all,” and a convincing contrast is established between the devastation of war and the harvesting of the land. . . man turns into food for war, which means that war devours people as its innocent victims. Clearly the alienating language play turns deadly serious in this case.

And so in the end one is left with the question about the purpose of life and human existence. Does the moralist Brecht have an answer for that? It is even possible, in addition to the proverbial motto: “First comes the grub, then morality” used but once in the Threepenny Opera, to find a specific proverb that appears in the collected works and represents Brecht’s essential wisdom? In the scale of life, which part of Brecht’s philosophy carries more weight – ‘the grub’ or morality, the animalistic or the human?


 Hans Mayer has tried to find an answer to this question in a 1964 lecture with the provocative title “Brecht and Humanity.” In the introduction he says” “Brecht and humanity: a questionable combination. How can this author who, throughout hios woprk, and most notably in the parable play about the Good Person of Szechwan, has derided any sayings about huimanity and the general condition of man, be mentionmed in connection with the problem of humanity?” The answer is simply that Brecht, in spite of his derision, is always writing about human fate. In his well-known “Platywright’s SonG” (1935) he says [programmatically in the first stanza:

I am a playwright. I show

What I have seen. On the people-markets

I saw how people were traded. That

I show, I, the playwright.

In a variation of the proverb “Every man has his price” one finds the same human theme me as early as 1930 in the “Song of the Wares” that is part of the didactic play The Measure Taken:

What, after all, is man?
Do I know what man is?
Do I know who knows it?

I don’t know what man is

I only know his price.

Resigning before the seemingly predestined invariability of them human condition, the early Brecht resorts to tautological proverbs such as “Human is human” in Baal (1919 and “Man is man: in “Man-is-man-Song” (1925) as well as in the title of the comedy Man Equals Man (1926).

As was mentioned earlier, the proverbial alienation “Man lives by misdeed alone” symbolizes human misery per se, in which man, as in the animal world, struggles against others for the survival of the fittest. Helmut Koopmann has argued convincingly that “Brecht inevitably resorted to a counter-world: The animal side of man – hence, not what distinguished man from animal, but rather, what they had in common, only that one was aware of what the other lived unconsciously.” Franz Norbert Mennemerier talks even more directly of a “wolf society,” which Brecht uses as a metaphor for his “ negative didactics.” To picture this inhuman existence, Brecht has indeed used exceedingly drastic animal symbols, many of which center upon the notorious wolf proverbs and proverbial expressions. Proverbial instances such as “He is just a lamb between two wolves,” “We are holding an old wolf by the ear/ who, if he escapes, will attack us both,” and “Killing the wolf in a sheep skin” illustrate this very clearly. With five occurrences, the most frequently employed leitmotif for Brecht became the internationally known classic proverb “Homo homini lupus” ( Man is a wolf to man), which is a traditional proverb in most European languages. Brecht had expressed this already in 1932 in his discussion of the question “Is communism exclusive?” as part of his “Comments about the play Mother.” There, Brecht summarizes his thoughts with a proverbial formula that simply declares exploitive people to be wolves: “Our enemies are the enemies of humankind […] Those who are a a wolf to man aren’t human, but wolves.” And the short poem “ On a Japanese Drawing of a Puppet Show Played for Children by Children” (1934) begins by making the alarming statement of how fragile the establishment of a world is in which people act like wild animals:

Woe!

The immature stand on their tables.
In their play

They show what they have seen

How man treated man and was a wolf to him.

But then, in the first stanza of the poem “The Active Discontented” (1943), Brecht, in the middle of World War II, achieved a positive alienation of the proverb by adding just a single letter (from “ein” [a] top “kein” [no]):

The active discontented, your big teachers

Invented the construction of a community

In which man is no wolf to man.

And discovered the delight of man to eat his fill

And live in a dry place

And his wish to be in charge of his own affairs.


The human wish itself has found expression in Brecht’s most humane proverbial alienation, written in the fateful year of 1938 at the end of his well-known poem “To Posterity” in which he defines the purpose of his own writing as the fight to turn human wolves into helpful people:

But you, when at last it comes to pass

That man is a helper to man

Think of us

With mercy.

With this vision of the future, Brecht’s spirit of opposition would, of course, disintegrate. But since he found himself only in a transition period towards humanitarianism, he had to and could only portray what is happening among people. Never-the-less, Brecht has anthropomorphized the proverb in this statement in a hopeful manner, because in the new world of humanity, the wolf in man would have to reform himself to be a noble person.