Despite the jubilant scenes captured on television, not everyone is popping champagne and dancing in the streets to celebrate the new united Germany. Old fears die hard, and the prospect of a powerful, confident Deutschland inevitably stirs second thoughts.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Originally entitled Fear and Misery in the Third Reich and first done in Paris in 1938, The Private Life of the Master Race is a series of short scenes Brecht took from daily life—and death—in Nazi Germany. Intentionally ordinary in their depictions of evil, these searing vignettes range from short “blackout scenes”—dealing with such issues as the Nazis’ manipulation of the media and subversion of scientists—to the best-known section, “The Jewish Wife.” Here the title character discovers that her Gentile husband would not mind if she left him forever, with the excuse that she’ll be taking a temporary vacation in Holland; his small talk about it is the quintessence of Nazism. In “The Informer,” two frightened parents are torn apart by fears that their son will expose them to the gestapo. In “The Chalk Cross,” an inquisitive worker has a cross scrawled on his back and is later arrested.
The Chicago Shakespeare Company’s three-hour variation on Brecht owes much to the framing device in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade: there the inmates in an asylum perform a play that, instead of demonstrating enlightened progress under Napoleon, turns anarchic as the crazed actors re-create the French Revolution and its ongoing iniquities. The delegations’ polished platitudes on Brecht’s 52-year-old play, their belief in a progressive and equitable Germany, similarly suggest history repeating itself.
That’s where playwright Walsh comes in. He wrote not only the cabaret scenes but several songs. “I wanted the music to fill a middle ground between the contemporary cabaret scenes and the “memory’ scenes Brecht provides,” he says. “I love to provide an inner dialectic for the work I do, with several levels to the language and the stylization so that people don’t get caught on one level and let that become the reality of the work.
But A Public Performance will not indulge in German bashing. Says Freedman, “I think the universality in the stories and the reactions of the delegates prevent this from being Germanophobic.” To Walsh it’s a matter of artistic open-endedness: “I don’t believe in didactic theater. Theater doesn’t answer questions; it raises them with a clarifying complexity. I’ve tried to make half the characters as sympathetic as I could: Germans have been victims of their society; their intellectuals, like Gunter Grass, are among the most rigorous in the world in moral matters.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jon Randolph.
