In the Stockyards of Finance: Brecht’s Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Fleischhacker

Summary

In retrospect in 1935, Bertolt Brecht described his attempt to write a play about Chicago's wheat exchange as an “industrial accident” (“Betriebsunfall”) in his working methods as a professional playwright. Brecht had started the work on Fleischhacker in 1924 and abandoned it around 1929, yet he emphasized that his literary accident resulted in fact in a productive crisis: “The drama I had planned was not written, instead I began reading Marx, and it was only then that I read Marx.” Despite Brecht's hyperbolic claims, the project had been prolific, comprising 270 documents that were later collated in the Fleischhacker files at the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin. Indeed, these documents are so fragmented they conjure up the vivid scene of an accident, a collision, or explosion perhaps, leaving behind a pile of debris and shards. Moreover, the Fleischhacker materials include two separate play fragments: Jae Fleischhacker in Chikago and A Family from the Savannah: A History in Eleven Tableaus. Both complexes draw on a major turn-of-the century literary work that explored the sociology of the wheat trade in America: Frank Norris's Epic of the Wheat, an incomplete trilogy of novels in the vein of Emile Zola's naturalism. Jae Fleischhacker borrowed substantially from Norris's second part of the trilogy, The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1903). A Family from the Savannah adopted several themes from The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), the first part of Norris's trilogy.

What is astounding in the overall collection of materials is that it denies any attempt to reconstruct a coherent organization that would show how the disparate components belong together. The archive is internally fragmented to an extreme degree, consisting of incomplete dialogues, group scenes, monologues, poetic narrations, dramaturgical reflections, research notes, character lists, plotlines, newspaper cuttings on finance, hand-drawn sketches, and other visual materials. If there are plotlines, these can hardly be matched up with the actual scenes that were written. Moreover, much of the material remains ambiguous as to its textual status, raising the question whether texts were intended for performance or simply as dramaturgical notes. In short, the main impression instilled by the collection is that the Fleischhacker working process was never driven by any interest in constructing a coherent play governed by the laws of durational performance.