A PUBLIC PERFORMANCE OF “THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE MASTER RACE”
The Alchemical idea was to take Brecht’s collection of scenes documenting the everyday horrors of life in the Third Reich and create a new context for them, juxtaposing them against Walsh’s own material about the present-day reunification of East and West Germany. Current events and the catastrophe behind those events would thus share the same stage: history and hope would knock up against each other; undermine, accuse, and expose each other; and ultimately impart a sense, between them, of the dialectics (not to mention the desperate characters) playing themselves out now in the so-called new Germany. The whole thing was very Brechtian, and potentially very neat.
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And like I say, it seemed to be working. In order to set up his confrontation, Walsh introduced two groups of clown-dignitaries–one from each side of the Berlin Wall–to watch and comment on Brecht’s 50-year-old scenes. The bigwigs show up in heavy greasepaint, wearing latex noses and Kim Fencl Rak’s psychedelic costumes. They talk in doggerel. They guzzle beer and swap intrigues. A pair of Eastern bloc opportunists pant after Western capital, while their free-world counterparts drool over cheap Eastern labor; a socialist true believer warns darkly against diluting the collectivist dream, while an old-line Prussian imperialist waxes apoplectic over the Treaty of Versailles. Between the ten of them, the dignitaries hit most of the vital interests, issues, and punch lines associated with reunification.
Walsh’s interpolations are equally dismissable. After an initial burst of creativity, his rhymes take on a plodding dullness (“I can’t explain / Just why that train / Is in my brain”), his clowns a plodding correctness. The capitalists resolve into unmitigated bad guys; the socialists and various other outsiders are apotheosized. The schematism of it all is especially embarrassing next to Brecht’s subtlety. No one can claim that Brecht wasn’t a ruthless propagandist; nobody would want to. But he was also an agile and penetrating thinker–a wised-up provocateur who sniffed out the incoherence between ideology and life and riffed on it. I expect he’d laugh himself silly at the earnest reductiveness that finally overwhelms Walsh’s commentary.
