3 - Fear and Misery in Brecht's Depiction of Third Reich Germany

Summary

THE CHOICE OF TITLE SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN particularly important to Brecht in the case of the Furcht und Elend project, more so than with any of his previous plays. “I sometimes wonder,” Eric Bentley, himself responsible for calling the American version The Private Life of the Master Race, once confessed, “if the French title of Brecht's work is not the best. It is, simply: Scènes de la Vie Hitlérienne” (The Private Life, 136). Yet despite the work's changing titles and Bentley's retrospective misgivings, Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches, as the play eventually came to be known, remains the most challenging of all the various possibilities mooted.

During the early stages of the play's genesis, a number of possibilities were considered for Brecht's work in progress: “Die Angst: Seelischer Aufschwung des deutschen Volkes unter der Naziherrschaft” (Fear: Spiritual Revival of the German People under Nazi Rule); “99%: Bilder aus dem Dritten Reich” (99%: Pictures from the Third Reich), or with the alternate subtitle: “Ein Zyklus aus der Gegenwart” (A Present-day Cycle); “Deutschland — Ein Greuelmärchen” (Germany — An Atrocity Story), a title combining a respectful nod in the direction of Heinrich Heine's Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (Germany: A Winter's Tale) of 1844 with a dig at Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels's disingenuous complaints that National Socialism's enemies were always peddling malicious “atrocity stories” about dreadful goings-on in the Third Reich; The Devil's Opera and The Devil's Sunday; and the figurative title “Deutsche Heerschau” (German March-Past) with its implication that the whole of Germany was now one huge ragbag of an army just begging for a rigorous troop review that would reveal its true nature: a spineless nation cowering under totalitarian rule.