THE GERMANIC REVIEW

Copyright

C 2009 Heldref Publications

Theater of Revolution and the Law

of Genre—Bertolt Brecht’s The
Measures Taken (Die
Maßnahme)
OLIVER SIMONS

ABSTRACT: It has been emphasized frequently that Bertolt Brecht’s

political theater, Die Maßnahme in particular, has been influenced by
Carl Schmitt’s theory of the sovereign and the state of exception. Al-
though it is indeed remarkable that his learning play seems to record
some of the concepts that, in Schmitt, belong to the categories of po-
litical theory, this article will return to the role and discourse of the
theater in Brecht. The drama of revolution is a political text through
and through, but it cannot separate the political from the theater; the
drama of revolution is in search of a form, a metatheater, in which the
overcoming of an order is first and foremost the attempt to suspend the
law of genre. Strikingly, Brecht’s learning play brings to the stage all
the characteristics that have, since Aristotle, marked tragedy: the pity,
the error of a hero, the hero’s comprehension of the error, the guilt of
an innocent man, the hero’s death, the sacrifice, and catharsis. Brecht
reproduces the law of the genre he wishes to supersede and entangles
his figures in inescapable aporias that have dominated the metadis-
course on drama in revolutionary theater from Büchner’s Danton’s Tod
to Heiner Müller’s Mauser .
Keywords: Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Büchner, Dantons
Tod, genre, Thomas Hobbes, Die Maßnahme, Mauser, Heiner Müller,
revolution, Carl Schmitt

I n political philosophy, images for the beginning of a new system of

law abound. Among the most prominent is Thomas Hobbes’s de-
scription of the founding of a state as an act of theater (Vogl 32). In

327
328 SIMONS

Leviathan (1651) he writes that the citizen of the state must learn to
transfer his power and his will to a substitute, provided of course, his
fellow citizens do the same: “[. . .] the multitude is united in one person
that is called a commonwealth—in Latin, civitas. This is the generation
of the great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mor-
tal god, to which we owe our peace and defense under the immortal
God” (Hobbes 116). This scenario is possible only because Hobbes
defines person in its Latin sense, namely as persona, with a concept
hailing from the “stage” that the “tribunals” had also adopted: the “dis-
guise”; the “mask” is defined as persona, a kind of doubling of natural
man, but to which is transferred all his rights and volition, thus simulta-
neously concealing its masklike nature (Hobbes 108). Literary studies
cite Hobbes mostly because he seems to demonstrate so immediately
that literature and law, theater and political philosophy are occasionally
inextricable. Like the dramatic persona, the juridical persona is defined
as a substitute.
Carl Schmitt’s political theory is no less frequently cited to relate
literature and law, even if Schmitt very consciously distanced himself
from literary metaphors. In Schmitt’s writings, not theater but theology
provides the foundation for his theoretical concepts and definitions.
The “sovereign,” for example, the pivotal figure of his Politische The-
ologie (Political Theology), first published in 1922, is a successor to the
monarch by divine right. His power becomes apparent in the so-called
state of exception, in a crisis of state, in which he alone may abrogate
applicable law to secure the continuity of the nation and found a new
order. Like the foundational theater described by Hobbes, the state of
exception stands at the beginning of a political norm. Both Hobbes and
Schmitt concern themselves with describing the preconditions of an
order with the conditions for its possibility. Notwithstanding Schmitt’s
lack of stage metaphors in his description of this threshold of a sys-
tem of law, it is noteworthy that one of the most important reactions
to Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty appears in a text on theater, Wal-
ter Benjamin’s “Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels” (“The Origin of
the German Mourning Play”) of 1928 or even, as recent research has
emphasized, in the theater pieces of Bertolt Brecht. In the title of The
Measures Taken (Die Maßnahme), for example, Brecht’s play obvi-
ously alludes to Schmitt’s state of exception; it even mentions a “Karl
Schmitt” from Berlin.1
As obvious as the connections between political theory and litera-
ture in such passages may be and as adequately as they have been
THEATER OF REVOLUTION 329

discussed, the methodological challenge to which analyses of this kind

must surrender is no less topical: how exactly might the contempo-
raneity of literature and law be determined? How is it possible that such
politically dissimilar intellectuals of the Weimar Republic, that a con-
servative theory and a revolutionary piece, seemingly employ the same
concepts concordantly? Where do literature and law merge, and where
do they diverge? Direct allusions in common citations and concepts
employed in both are just as insufficient as answers to this catalog
of questions as biographical points of contact. Rather, I submit that
Schmitt’s political theory and Brecht’s theater invoke one another be-
cause of structural commonalities; for just as legal philosophy depends
on “fabricating” and depicting its object, Brecht’s learning plays like-
wise involve a kind of foundational theater: a theater that attempts to
constitute itself and stage the conditions of its own possibility. Assur-
ing itself of its own origins like legal philosophy, this theater describes
the threshold and transition to a new dramatic form, charting attempts
that are for both—law and literature—precarious acts. With the state of
exception Schmitt outlines an unlegislated space seemingly necessary
for the establishment of a system of law. For Schmitt it is the formal
condition of possibility, the establishment of an order not already part
of the extant order, a thoroughly paradoxical starting position where
one also encounters Brecht’s theater. The Measures Taken is a the-
ater of revolution in which a political revolution disguises itself as an
aesthetic revolution, specifically as a revolution of theater. It, too, is
foundational theater. Consequently, this learning play displays a para-
doxical structure similar to that in Schmitt’s state of exception: a kind
of interstice from which a new theater arises and that must yet si-
multaneously arrange itself as stage space. In other words, in creating
a new revolutionary genre with the learning play, even Brecht must
stage a theater and resort to traditional forms—and that makes The
Measures Taken so susceptible to paradoxes; it concerns the bound-
ary of its own genre and the overcoming of it, but within the form of
theater.
Both Schmitt’s political theory and Brecht’s The Measures Taken deal
with variations on reconnoitering thresholds, inquiring as they do after
the provenance and origins of an order.2 As the following demonstrates,
the differences between legal philosophy and learning play emerge
at this threshold. Whereas Schmitt’s investigation of the conditions of
possibility makes for a paradoxical figure of thought, Brecht’s paradox
infects the genre in which he articulates it. The law of legal philosophy
330 SIMONS

in Schmitt’s treatment is of a different nature than the law of genre

(Derrida) in Brecht—than the rule and order of a dramatic form. In the
following, I will unfold this series of thoughts in three steps: after a short
exposition of Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception and Benjamin’s
response to it there follows a close reading of Brecht’s learning play
to test the comparability of structural aporias in law and literature.
Finally, a historical allusion becomes the focus; which literary history
does the law of genre entail? To which dramas does Brecht provide an
answer with his The Measures Taken, and which counterreactions does
his revolutionary piece provoke? The foundational acts of the theater
of revolution, I will conclude, may be found in the theater after 1789,
in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death in particular.

I. STATES OF EXCEPTION—BENJAMIN VS. SCHMITT

Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy defines the state of exception as

a moment of upheaval: in an emergency the sovereign retains the right
to suspend the effective norm, but only to vouchsafe the continuity of
the state.3 While preserving the nation, the state of exception grants
an unlegislated space in which the sovereign alone determines which
system of law henceforth obtains: “Sovereign is he who decides on the
exception” (Schmitt, Politische Theologie 13).4 Decisive in multiple re-
gards, the sovereign is consequently the key figure in Schmitt’s theory,
his task not merely to identify the extreme case of emergency but to de-
termine which norm shall hold after overcoming the state of exception.
In other words, his decision is the overcoming of the state of exception;
it is the constitution of law, very literally legislative.5 Systems of law,
it follows, depend on decisions and as norms cannot be derived from
other norms (Schmitt, Politische Theologie 16).
Even this abridged recapitulation of Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty
suggests why Benjamin was able to formulate his response to this the-
ory in a text about theater. Bound to an authoritarian determination,
the theory of the state of exception practically demands to be supple-
mented by a theory of the sovereign subject. Only when recognized as
sovereign may he act effectually. He must, thus, be represented in a
commensurate way, as he owes his authority not to the content of his
decrees but solely to his status. Implicitly at least, Schmitt’s political
model is an aesthetic one, for although he concerns himself with veri-
fying that norms do not derive from other norms, the precondition for
THEATER OF REVOLUTION 331

this is an acknowledged sovereign.6 The outcome of the decisive act is

dependant on whether it is carried out by a sovereign who himself is not
subject to the system over which he disposes. Outside the norm, the
sovereign is for precisely this reason its guarantor. To a certain extent
he embodies the condition for the possibility that the state can exercise
its right to self-preservation.
To have recognized this is perhaps the most important point in Ben-
jamin’s “Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels,” a text that confronts
Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty with the history of representations of
the sovereign in theatrical texts. Benjamin examines the theoretical
circumstances as aesthetic ones, intending thereby not to supplement
Schmitt’s model but to undercut and invalidate it. To Schmitt’s theory
of action and the decisive act he issues a rejoinder with his analyses of
baroque mourning plays wherein sovereigns appear thoroughly certain
of their power despite being in no position to make decisions at all. Ben-
jamin relativizes the seemingly ahistorical theory of the sovereign with
a view to the history of the mourning play, whose sovereign comes
across mostly as ditheringly, dolefully, and fickly subject to his af-
fects. The sovereign becomes an unfortunate wretch among unfor-
tunate wretches (Benjamin, “Ursprung” 265; Agamben 69), and for
these very qualities, according to Benjamin, a “representative” of his-
tory. In contradistinction to ancient tragedy, which draws on myths, the
baroque mourning play chronicles its own contemporary history with
the figure of the sovereign at its center. Mourning plays thus possess
a fundamentally different range of action since history, a product of
human agency, is alterable. Indeed, Benjamin’s reading aims at the
“representation” of history by a sovereign incapable of bringing him-
self to arbitrate: “The prince with whom the decision rests regarding
the state of exception demonstrates in the very best of situations that
a decision for him is almost impossible” (Benjamin, “Ursprung” 250).7
The focus in his criticism of Schmitt lies not only in the incapacity of
the sovereign to wrangle himself to a decision but also in his refer-
ence to the sovereign’s representative capacity of history (Weber). The
theory of representation, as alluded to earlier, is of great significance
for Schmitt; a sovereign requires representation befitting his rank lest
his actions be ineffective. In Benjamin’s tract, however, the concept of
representation has a dual meaning; not only does the sovereign mir-
ror his own era (from which he is displaced according to Schmitt)
but Benjamin also declares him a representative, that is to say a
332 SIMONS

substitute, which in the theater he very literally is. From the juridical
persona of the sovereign described by Schmitt develops the persona of
the actor in Benjamin—a displacement of the sovereign into a cache
of images that Schmitt attempts to avoid in his political theory. In his
model Schmitt did not invoke the theater to insist on a kind of authen-
ticity seemingly robbed from the representatives of theatrical action
of yore. Stage characters represent but are not what they seem as
substitutes. Because representation has a different, more immediate
meaning in theology than in theater, Schmitt derives his own politi-
cal concepts from the former: All incisive concepts of modern political
science are secularized theological concepts. Not only according to
their historical development, because they were transferred from the-
ology to political science, for example by the almighty God’s becom-
ing an omnipotent lawmaker, but also in their systematic structure,
the knowledge of which is necessary for a sociological examination of
these concepts. The state of exception has, for jurisprudence, a mean-
ing analogous to the miracle for theology (Schmitt, Politische Theologie
43).8
Consequently, Schmitt’s sovereign is to be understood more as a
symbolic figure, one that coheres more tightly in its meaning than was
the case in the representation model. The significance of a symbol de-
rives from its connection to the sign with what is signified by it while in
representation the sign is arbitrary and can be replaced by other signs.
As the persona of the stage adopts its role as a substitute, so, too,
does the sign of representation—with a purely arbitrary link to what
is meant by it. Benjamin borrows Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty in
a text on the mourning play, thus making it a question of literature.9
Benjamin’s sovereign is no longer one who acts on his own authority
but is rather a figure of the drama, which has its own history and laws.
The baroque mourning play not only distinguishes itself from ancient
tragedy but also supersedes classical theater—a symbolic theater, as
Benjamin writes, that was always intent on corresponding to an artis-
tic ideal with its form, of creating a unity of form and meaning. The
baroque mourning play, however, possesses an allegorical character
because its form is broken open, because it no longer embodies an
ideal, exposing instead a hitherto unknown void. In the baroque period,
Benjamin claims, the worldview has separated from its eschatolog-
ical determination, knowing no predetermined aim, no determination
around which it might orient itself. With no hope of eschatological fulfill-
ment, the mourning play also loses its theology. The course of action is
THEATER OF REVOLUTION 333

no longer inevitable; its end is open (Benjamin, “Ursprung” 259; Deiters

76). Sovereigns face this evacuated worldview, confounded. Whereas
Schmitt’s sovereign is somewhat displaced from history, Benjamin’s is
moved by it and consigned to it.
It is not surprising, then, that years later Schmitt will respond to
Benjamin with an essay on tragedy that, against the backdrop of the
mourning play, differentiates itself as a timeless form unchanged by
history. In Benjamin, Hamlet is one of the examples for the melan-
choly prince (“Ursprung” 334) whereas in Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba
(Hamlet oder Hekuba) he is of a very different nature. Although Schmitt
maintains that tragedy is shaped by history, he, unlike Benjamin, ob-
serves history as a form of reality independent of its discourse and
representation. For Benjamin history is not separate from its represen-
tation but is rather a construct; Schmitt describes history as an exter-
nality, a reality independent from the text of its representation. Hamlet
is a “yet still living myth” (Schmitt, Hamlet 10) whose tragedy displays
itself precisely in its facticity (Twellmann 53). In contrast to history,
which is ambiguous and open to interpretation and consequently be-
fuddles and saddens its observers, myth and tragedy are determined
unequivocally; while Benjamin chooses the open allegory as his textual
model to demonstrate the mourning play, Schmitt rails against the “in-
finitely” many interpretations of Hamlet (Schmitt, Hamlet 9). Although
Benjamin views representation as an ambiguous form with its own his-
tory, Schmitt’s myth is immutable; it seems to be just as unambiguous
and certain as the symbol whose meaning is substantively incorporated
into an unmistakable sign.
Proceeding from these antithetical conceptions of history, one may
imagine to what extent Benjamin contradicts Schmitt’s theory of the
state of exception. With his model, the latter attempts to justify the
preservation of the state, defining the state of exception as a necessary
threshold to stabilize a new order; on the other hand, a different notion
of history underlies Benjamin’s description of the state of exception. He
insists on the possibility of upheaval and the interruption of historical
progression. Although in his essay on the Concept of History (Begriff
der Geschichte) he concedes that the state of exception has become
“the rule” and that one must come to an understanding of history that
makes allowances for that (Benjamin, Begriff 697), his intention is to
facilitate an actual state of exception, to interrupt the course of his-
tory, to make history cognizable in a different way. Benjamin questions
sovereign rule—by his understanding, true sovereignty would not lead
334 SIMONS

to a sovereign and authoritarian decision. Rather, the real state of ex-

ception would serve to annul the right of the sovereign.

II. THE LAW OF GENRE—BRECHT’S MAßNAHME

Schmitt and Benjamin stand for two opposing interpretations of the

state of exception: measures for securing the state concern Schmitt,
whereas for Benjamin the objective is the toppling of an order. Schmitt
strengthens the law, Benjamin the revolution. Common to both is the
interstice from which one may even begin to question the given norm
and without which the state of exception is unthinkable. Whether a
sovereign or revolutionaries occupy this space, it is in any case an ex-
terior that is subject to laws other than those of the ruling order. As the
following will show, Brecht’s learning play The Measures Taken trans-
forms this interstitial space into the site of theatrical action. The play
is beset by the same ambivalence outlined by Schmitt and Benjamin:
is it a drama in which the laws are only annulled to justify a new order,
or is it a theater of revolution in a literal sense, a piece insisting on the
moment of upheaval? And how does Brecht relate to the other oppo-
sition outlined here? Is his learning play symbolic, the attempt to give
form to a political idea, to overcome ambiguity with a decision? Or is
it an allegorical piece, open to interpretation, that stages the sovereign
decision solely to put it into question? Finally, how does the learning
play as a genre distinguish itself from Schmitt’s legal philosophy and
Benjamin’s genre history, and which displacements appear when the
theory of the sovereign decision is no longer disputed in a tract or text
on theater but in the medium of a stage piece?
The play inspired the most controversy when it was read as evidence
of Brecht’s political partisanship and his justification of violence in the
state of exception. Brecht’s The Measures Taken deals not only with
the “ABC of Communism” (Brecht 107) but also and primarily with the
inescapable means of its dissemination. Brecht summarizes the action
as follows:

Four communist agitators stand before a party court played by the chorus.
While disseminating communist propaganda in China they had to shoot
their youngest comrade. To prove to the court the necessity of this mea-
sure taken to shoot a comrade, they now demonstrate how the comrades
behaved in various political situations. They show that the young comrade
was emotionally a revolutionary, but possessed insufficient discipline and
THEATER OF REVOLUTION 335

did not allow his intellect to speak often enough, thereby becoming a great
danger for the movement without his wanting to (Brecht 237).10

That the political message and its propaganda are not the focal point
of the play one can recognize already from the formulaic “ABC of
Communism.” Rather, the subversion of circumstances in Brecht’s
piece refers primarily to the law of its own genre, to a revolution of
theater. As Schmitt inquires after the conditions for the possibility of a
system of law in his political theory, as Benjamin would like to invoke a
state of exception that assists in overcoming the system of law, so, too,
is Brecht’s Measures Taken a piece that attempts to justify itself. For
Brecht it is not simply a drama of revolution with a political intent but,
instead, foremost a revolution of drama and a state of exception in the
law of its own genre, a learning play that stages and negotiates its own
lesson as theatrical action and yet also still exacerbates the dichotomy
delineated here in the debate between Schmitt and Benjamin. Although
one may occupy a theoretical position in legal philosophy, from which
one might observe an order from without or from a metaperspective,
the staging of a metatheater in the medium of a theatrical text seems
disproportionately more difficult. It is peculiar that with his political
actions the central figure of the play, the young comrade, exclusively
brings into play concepts that have a long history in theater: his “error,”
his lack of discipline, is more precisely defined as having “a heart for the
revolution” and “pity” for the oppressed: “The sight of injustice drove
me to the ranks of the fighters. Man must help man” (Brecht 106).11
Even after the agitators prompt him, he is unsuccessful in overcoming
his pity (Brecht 111). Yet, it becomes clear that political agitation in
Brecht’s learning play cannot be differentiated from aesthetic concepts,
as “error” and “pity” are two seminal categories of drama according to
Aristotle. As “error” or hamartia Brecht designated the decisive cause
of the dramatic action, misconduct on the part of the hero, that sets the
plot in motion that ought to elicit fear and pity in the viewer. Brecht’s
young comrade is himself a viewer of tragic conditions—a spectator,
however, who does not want to resign himself to his role and would
rather intervene in the action. The consequence of his engagement is,
of course, that he threatens to betray the revolutionary idea. His error
is, in other words, becoming an active agent to interfere in the theatrical
action. And now at the center of the action, he obviously fares no dif-
ferently than a tragic hero, for because of an all-too-human error—his
pity for the oppressed—the agitators must sacrifice him, which is to
336 SIMONS

say, accord him an end that is no less essential for the law of genre
in which the story occurs. It is precisely here that the ambivalence in
Brecht’s theater of revolution reveals itself. If the young comrade is
sacrificed, his termination corresponds with the model of a tragedy,
with a dramatic form, that is, that the learning play tries to depose. In
the early versions of the piece, Brecht actually provided the pertinent
scene with the biblical allusion “The Entombment,” only replacing it in
his revision with “The Measures Taken” (Brecht 131).
A displacement, which could not be more fundamental, seems to ac-
company the renaming. Although the “entombment” recalls the drama
of a martyr, a sobering extermination takes places in the later ver-
sion, on the one hand with the concept of legal philosophy and on the
other hand in Brecht’s application of this to the play itself. This is the
drama of the metatheater: the measures taken in Die Maßnahme, one
could say, are most decisively employed where the end of the play is
at stake. Since Brecht’s learning play brings to the stage an action that
has long since occurred—the death of the young comrade precedes the
performance—it may be read as an interpretation and analysis of the
end receiving its decisive turn here; if the young comrade is a victim
in the traditional sense, then one may interpret Brecht’s The Measures
Taken as a tragedy that finds the law of genre beyond the state of excep-
tion. If the young comrade is utterly annihilated, then the play not only
ends in a way the law of genre would prescribe it, to a certain extent,
it would also insist on the revolutionary moment insofar as it assails
the status of the victim itself. The opposition previously described be-
tween Schmitt and Benjamin—between the measures taken to preserve
an order and the measures taken to bring about revolution—returns
here.
This discrepancy looms even larger if one factors in the last words
of the young comrade. Before the agitators cast him into the lime pit,
they first ask him to acquiesce to their measure:

Yes, I see, I always acted wrongly. [. . .] I who so very much wanted to be of

use caused only harm. [. . .] He added to this: in the interest of communism
/ In agreement with the advance of the proletarian masses / Of all nations
/ Affirming the revolutionizing of the world. (Brecht 133)12

The young comrade’s last sentences are noteworthy because they do

not simply appear to promulgate a political message. If his actions had
always been wrong or, put differently, if it was wrong that he ever took
action, then his doings were tragic, an innocent form of making oneself
THEATER OF REVOLUTION 337

blameworthy. But also his acquiescence is primarily in accordance

with tragedy because it is proper to the behavioral scheme of tragic
heroes to recognize the culpability of their actions before exiting the
stage. In his play, Brecht seems to bring concepts of the Aristotelian
drama into play against one another; the comrade errs because he is
compassionate. With his acquiescence to his elimination, he ultimately
remains up to the bitter end a tragic hero who thereby also resisted The
Measures Taken as a learning play wanting to overcome traditional
theatrical forms.
Brecht embroils his characters in indissoluble paradoxes. His play
puts the formal idiosyncrasies of a tragic text on stage, on the one hand,
to overcome them there performatively and, on the other hand, to let
his characters fall into traditional role schemata. An interstitial space
for a state of exception seems impossible on stage except according to
laws and classification patterns inherited from the history of the stage.
In the theater of revolution that has the revolution of theater as its aim, a
play is still performed;13 theater shows resistance to its own revolution.
One might, with Benjamin Bennett, describe this inconsistency as the
conservative essence of genre:

Genres cannot be invented; they operate as genres, as basic guides or

how to read texts, only by already being there, prior to the text in question.
Genres cannot be overturned or destroyed; if I deliberately flout the rules
of a particular genre, then I am still invoking precisely that genre as a
guide to understanding me. Genres evolve over time, of course, but not in
ways we can predict or control. Genre thus has the character of tradition,
but only in the sense that we experience that tradition as confining; and
the more we think about genre, the more we are worried by the prospect
of having to admit that literature itself, as a whole, is nothing but tradition
in just this sense. (Bennett 30)

Seen in this way, the violence so central to The Measures Taken would
be far less coercive and powerful than the violence of the genre that is
palpable in the insuperability of its structures. The figures are caught
up in a battle against the genre, which dictates their own doings and
limits their freedom of action.
One must not conclude from this, however, that Brecht’s The Mea-
sures Taken may be described as a tragedy or an incomplete learning
play. It is also not a matter of a decision between the two aforemen-
tioned variants, the state of exception as a means of preserving an
order or the state of exception as a figure of upheaval. Brecht’s learn-
ing play stages the aporia of these two possibilities as well to probe the
338 SIMONS

boundaries of its own genre. Consequently, the comparison between

learning play and legal philosophy confronts the methodological task of
not simply leaping over the boundary of the genre. That it is so obvious
to rediscover concepts and models of contemporaneous legal philos-
ophy in Brecht’s learning play stems primarily from the conflation in
Brecht of the legal model with an aesthetic one. In Schmitt this is not
the case. The learning play supplements and undercuts the discourse
of legal philosophy by continually representing political concepts as
aesthetic ones, nevertheless making clear that there can be no political
action in theater that does not remain beholden to the history of theater.
Brecht attempts not to abrogate the law of genre, but rather to exhibit
its efficacy. It is about theater revolution in a literal sense, a return of
form instead of its overcoming.
The boundary of one’s own medium is reflected in different ways in
The Measures Taken. It is peculiar, for example, that the “movement”
is one of the preferred metaphors in the play. Once again the con-
cept has a political meaning, but beyond this, “movement” refers to
the drama and its language. At the very beginning the “marching rev-
olution” is mentioned, after which ensues the chorus’s summoning of
the agitators: “Step forward!” (Brecht 105). Even after this prelude, the
movement remains a theme in various ways. In one of the episodes,
for example, the young comrade tries to help laborers drag heavy rice
barges; without footwear they continually slide and fall on the slippery
ground. While the agitators want no pity and accept the slipping of the
laborers to stoke protest among them, the young comrade ultimately
lays stones under their feet. This measure is perhaps indicative of the
difference between the comrade and the agitators; the latter witness the
plight of the laborers with indifference because a short-term easement
of their situation could endanger the actual movement of the political
revolution. The young comrade, conversely, seeks out traction; for him,
anchoring the revolution, visible progress with concrete means, is the
primary concern. Whereas the agitators prefer the abstract movement,
the comrade intervenes in the action to demonstrate the movement
to himself. To cite another example helpful in expounding on the dif-
ference between the agitators and the comrade: when the agitators
cross the country’s border with the comrade to propagate the teach-
ings of communism in Mukden (Shenyang), the characters disguise
themselves: “But the work in Mukden was illegal, so we had to erase
our faces before crossing the border” (Brecht 108).14 “You must not be
seen,” it reads further,
THEATER OF REVOLUTION 339

then you will no longer be yourselves: you no longer Karl Schmitt from
Berlin, you no longer Anna Kjersk from Kasan, and you no longer Peter
Sawitsch from Moskau, but all of you nameless and motherless, blank
sheets of paper onto which the revolution will inscribe its instructions. [. . .]
Then you will be, from this moment on, no longer Nobody, but rather from
this moment on and probably until your disappearance unknown workers,
fighters, Chinese, born of Chinese mothers, with yellow skin, speaking
Chinese while sleeping and fevered. (Brecht 109)15

There is a border crossing, consequently, in more than one regard.

The agitators exercise their political role as actors, becoming in an ac-
tual sense personae of the theater. Moreover, their doubling seems to
have a linguistic meaning as well, for beyond the border it becomes
entirely clear that the agitators differ from the comrade even in their
manner of speaking. That they stand for the general political move-
ment shapes even their expressions—they speak formulaically and in
repetitions while the young comrade cannot conceal his intentions,
clinging instead to a speech that couples expression and action back
onto a subject. “I can’t go any further” (Brecht 112)16 says one of the
laborers, and the young comrade responds shortly thereafter, “I can’t
do this anymore. You have to demand new shoes” (Brecht 115).17
His speech, concrete and insistent on immediate action, is bound to a
subject: unlike the agitators who speak of the revolution as a generic
movement without placing themselves in the position of the subject.
A “speech without speaker” (Brecht 110), one of the inserted songs
reads, is the ideal of the movement (Horn, “Regel” 690). They actually
make themselves invisible because they also insist on making them-
selves anonymous. In vanishing, however, they show the theater its
boundary. As invisible characters they withhold themselves somewhat
from the stage, refraining from movement and action, which consti-
tutes drama on a purely etymological level: unlike the young comrade
who can do nothing but play along.18 When he says, “I can’t do this
anymore,” this also means that the subject “I” surrenders. But the “I”
is likewise what insinuates time and again that it will not, in fact, dis-
appear. What Brecht dramatizes as theatrical action is the difference
between a political text and a play, the difference between a text without
subject and a genre that always requires a subject of the action. Were
The Measures Taken to destroy the young comrade in the extreme, it
would not only infringe on the law of its genre, it would also no longer
resemble a play.
340 SIMONS

The paradox of the young comrade, however, is that he desires to act

in a play whose rules he clearly does not yet know because they are
different than those possible in theater. In this impossibility of his action
he is pulverized. He may don the mask, becoming on one hand a stage
actor, but in contrast to the agitators he cannot distinguish himself from
his role. This constitution casts him ultimately in a tragic role; he fails
on his own dichotomy between his persona and his naked ego.
How, then, do the agitators fare when they restage the fate of the
young comrade for the control chorus? Previous studies have all con-
centrated on the embedded narrative, on the occurrence with the com-
rade, but one must differentiate at least two strata in the play be-
cause The Measures Taken performs theater within theater in several
regards. In a kind of court proceeding, the agitators reenact the indi-
vidual episodes, each of them adopting the role of the comrade once.
Now their guilt or innocence is at stake. It is noteworthy that while they
distance themselves from the compassionate comrade on the level of
the embedded narrative, by becoming actors themselves they are no
less susceptible to the role paradigms of traditional theater. The killing
of their companion they describe to the control chorus as an act of
catharsis on one’s own body: “So we decided: to cut off our own body’s
foot. It is terrible to kill. But not only others: we will even kill ourselves
if necessary” (Brecht 132).19
The metaphor of the severed foot is striking. The movement’s
progress seems to be possible only when one forms a communal
body that is more than the individual—with the foot, the agitators also
seem to separate a part of a natural body from themselves, precisely
that part to which the young comrade had directed his attentions in his
pity for the barefoot laborers.20 But if this transformation itself is noth-
ing more than a cathartic cleansing, the agitators act exactly in accor-
dance with theater. Although they only want to eliminate the comrade,
not sacrifice him, thereby refusing him a tragic exaltation, they de-
scribe their own catharsis as a sacrifice. At first they appear successful
at the endeavor that was always beyond the comrade’s grasp—they
overcome their pity—but they nevertheless obey the law of genre. Be-
fore the spectators in the control chorus, they redeem their catharsis
as a scheme that ultimately converts Brecht’s learning play back into
a dramatic form against which it had wanted to rebel.
The repetition of the murder scene for the control chorus demon-
strates yet again that in Brecht’s theater the political is not to be
THEATER OF REVOLUTION 341

separated from the aesthetic.21 The agitators conjure a body of the

collective, which is assembled in a way similar to that of Hobbes’
Leviathan—from the bodies of its members. The catharsis at the end
of the play is a kind of foundational scene, a theatrical act in which
they attempt to liberate themselves from the natural body that the all-
too-sensitive comrade did not want to relinquish: “I cannot be silent
because I’m right,” he exclaimed before ripping the mask from his face
and showing the agitators “his naked face / human, open, and inno-
cent” (Brecht 129f.).22 Brecht’s learning play is the drama of a political
founding theater to the extent that it hinders this foundational scenario.
A founding theater cannot be reenacted because the evidence provid-
ing its condition is lost. By bringing the distinction between bare man
and his persona onto the stage, Brecht also tears asunder the persona
of political man and the persona of the actor because the figures ob-
serve themselves while performing their political actions as theatrical
acts. In Hobbes, the stage metaphors are evident because they manage
to conceal their metaphoricity: The political act is a theatrical act. In
Brecht this is no longer possible because The Measures Taken deals
only with the ambivalence and fallibility of a foundational act.
One might object that with the metaphor of a collective body Brecht
does indeed seize on a symbolic form insofar as this body composes
itself quite substantially from the collective of everyone. And even the
catharsis might be interpreted as a moment in which the utopia of a
collective shines forth. Simultaneously, however, one must ascertain
that this scene likewise tells of an injury, which maims not only the
political body but also the symbolic in general. The agitators do not
only reenact the death of the comrade; their cathartic cleansing seems
also to be the mere repetition of a past form, a melancholy act. Un-
palatable because it is too sentimental, the spectacle of the comrade
has ultimately infected the agitators who reenact him. Even they have
not found another form of theater. Even the control chorus seems in
the end to have transformed into an audience against which Brecht’s
learning play had actually competed—he still assures the agitators of
his “empathy” (Brecht 132; Rasch 339).23 By alternating in the repre-
sentation of the comrade, acceding to the role of an actor who no longer
wanted to cooperate but through this very lack of cooperation became
a tragic hero, the agitators demonstrate what distinguishes the stage
in the theater per se; in representation, theater has a limit it cannot
overcome.
342 SIMONS

III. THEATER OF REVOLUTION

As metatheater, Brecht’s The Measures Taken deals with the play

and reenactment of an occurrence. It is a play within a play that ex-
hibits the persona as a substitute. The comrade seems to want to divest
himself of his role as an actor, ripping the mask off and representing
with his sentimentality the type of actor so widely known in theater his-
tory. Diderot himself had railed polemically against all-too-sentimental
actors who do not master their roles with distance and calculation. The
agitators scarcely master their roles any better; with their measures
taken they may keep clear of pity, but in the frame story, their perfor-
mance and the reenactment of the occurrence itself, they are actors
and fall prey to the role archetypes of theater. If they had distanced
themselves in the embedded narrative, they now slide back into the
center of the action before the audience of the control chorus. Brecht’s
learning play demonstrates that the actors are hardly capable of disso-
ciating themselves from old performance archetypes. They do attempt
to play against the theater but cannot completely suppress the law of
genre. Even in their play within a play, the agitators do not succeed
in taking up a metaperspective. On the contrary, as actors they adopt
roles from which they attempt to distance themselves. While acting
they entangle themselves in an insurmountable paradox. In its own
theatricality, Brecht’s The Measures Taken seems to encounter a limit,
unable to overcome the law of its genre. Whenever the figures begin to
act, they impede the progress of the political movement.
The “play” had also been a key concept in the previously outlined
debate between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. In his history of the
mourning play, Benjamin retraces a gradual intensification of the con-
cept of “play.” From the baroque to the classical to the romantic peri-
ods, play becomes an evermore self-sufficient, reflexive form in drama.
But Benjamin already observed playful properties in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet (Benjamin, “Ursprung” 163), whereas for Schmitt even the fa-
mous play within a play in the third act is no artificial doubling of the
play itself, no pure stage spectacle, but still an expression of the text’s
strong reference to reality; the tragic, Schmitt contends, is not gambled
away (Hamlet 45ff.). It is no poetic fantasy or invention. Although Ben-
jamin shares this estimation of the tragic, he does not view mourning
plays as tragedies because play occurs in them. The play within a play
is significant for the mourning play for the very reason that, in it, a
distance to reality becomes noticeable that, if nothing else, crops up in
THEATER OF REVOLUTION 343

the sovereigns’ lacking strength of purpose. Their theater is a space of

possibility that confounds them because of its openness.
Schmitt disagrees. More clearly than in Hamlet or Hecuba, where
he mentions Benjamin (Hamlet 64), he distinguishes himself in his
Political Romanticism from the purely playful as the epitome of an
epoch that has lost the ability to think any form of causality.24 Here,
too, is a question of a previously marked semiotic boundary. As a
doubling, the play within a play is a performance of representation.
It shows the substitutes as substitutes, the actors in their roles. The
play is emblematic substitute action that has relinquished contact with
reality.
The relationship of Brecht’s The Measures Taken and Schmitt’s
model of sovereignty and decision can be completely measured only
when one takes into account the whole dramaturgy of the play within
a play. A signal that an actor, having broken character, is revealing
himself to the audience as an actor is the tearing of the mask on stage.
In The Measures Taken the young comrade sets into a motion a play
within a play at the moment he reveals his bare face, showing himself
as an actor who no longer wishes to play along. To reenact this figure is
the task of the agitators. In their paradoxical starting position of playing
out an actor who himself gave up acting, they only find their way out of
this infinite regress of mutual doublings—and one might interpret this
as a gesture in the sense of Carl Schmitt—by freeing themselves from
his parasitic role and returning to a theater of catharsis. As varied as the
agitators and comrade may be, Brecht’s learning play leads them into
a hall of mirrors in which one thing above all others becomes visible:
that the figures define themselves not by their political ideology but by
their disposition toward the persona.
The dramatic nature of this play within a play exhibits itself not only in
the comparison between Brecht’s learning play and contemporaneous
political philosophy. Since the founding fiction of the state in the theatri-
cal act, the play within a play has had a literary history that, especially
in revolutionary pieces, has experienced newer inflections—inflections,
of course, that only bring to bear an accentuation in the sense of the
described doubling, an increasing reflection of the mirror scenes. For
the beginnings of a literary history of the play within a play, one would
have to cite with Jean-Jacques Rousseau writings that anticipate and
attempt to avert the regress of a model of representation; by the same
token, there are those attempts to found a new nation in the theater:
the history of national theater (Vogl 32). “If we were to experience
344 SIMONS

a national stage, we would also become one nation,” as Friedrich

Schiller wrote in 1784 about the playhouse (830).25 With the French
Revolution, whose events were often perceived by contemporary ob-
servers as theatrical occurrences (Vogel 57ff.), one would have to mark
an incision whose ramifications are still felt today in Brecht.26 The
execution in 1793 of Louis XVI as Louis Capet was a caesura in the
history of political metaphor—not only was the king disempowered, but
his beheading under a bourgeois name made clear that the metaphor
of the king’s two bodies had lost its obviousness: the disempowerment
of the symbolic body was followed by the beheading of the natural one
(Schneider 132). Like perhaps no other text of German literary his-
tory, Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death (Dantons Tod) translated this
primordial scene of the French Revolution drastically and immediately
into its own poetics. In this drama of revolution after the revolution, the
rift between the symbolic and the concrete, the ideal and the body, is
present in nearly every scene—as a rift after which there are only signs
that, as representative entities, have the functions of substitutes. In the
programmatic prelude to the play, the first scene reads that the new
form of the nation must be like a “transparent gown that clings closely
to the body of the people. Every pulsing vein, flexing muscle, twitching
sinew must leave its inprint. Its appearance may be beautiful or ugly—it
has the right to be as it is. We don’t have the right to cut a dress for
it as we see fit” (Büchner, Danton’s Death 61).27 Here, too, founda-
tional theater is the focus, a substitute for the corporeal metaphors of
the Leviathan as Hobbes had described it, namely, as the body of an
artificial god that forms the members of his nation into a higher en-
tity. Büchner’s metaphor of the garment is not coincidentally related
to the theater. The challenge of his characters is to perform a play so
that it appears evident, although they have long since seen through the
theatricality and artificiality of the act. Danton’s Death is, from the be-
ginning, a play within a play in which the characters view one another
like the spectators of a play. “Look at the pretty lady—how neatly she
plays her cards. She knows how, all right—they say she always gives
her husband a heart and others a diamond. You women could even
make us fall in love with a lie” (Büchner, Danton’s Death 59).28 Foun-
dational acts are only obvious when one is capable of devoting one-
self so entirely to the play that one forgets one’s metaphoricity, when
the persona in the legal sense can no longer be separated from the
persona in the dramatic sense. The continual beheadings in the play
recall that this unity is lost, separating heads from bodies, the ideal
THEATER OF REVOLUTION 345

from the body, the imagination from the action, and thereby justifying
a logic of signs according to which there is no longer an anchoring
of meaning in the bearer of the symbol. After the guillotine, signs are
only exchangeable signifiers and signifieds whose connections are ar-
bitrary and purely coincidental. Büchner’s revolutionary drama is, thus,
also a revolutionizing of drama, a metatheater that attempts to stage
its own legality but must, however, become ensnarled in indissoluble
paradoxes.
One must consider this theater history when in The Measures Taken
Brecht puts into play the relationship between action and ideology,
between political action and its artistic representation. His revolution-
ary characters are no less paradoxical than Büchner’s. At the end of
the play, the moment of political utopia admittedly appears—the ideal
of the theater as a reformatory—when the agitators experience their
catharsis. And yet, for a symbolic and unifying act, this gesture seems
insufficient because it employs a form it was to obviate. Perhaps, how-
ever, catharsis was the only possibility to curb the infinite regress of
doublings for a moment.
Brecht’s The Measures Taken is, of course, not a terminal point in the
history of the drama of revolution. A detailed historical reconstruction
of the genre would at least have to progress up to Heiner Müller and his
1970 play Mauser , a kind of dramatic commentary on The Measures
Taken (Steinmayr, “Souveränitätstheater,” “Bilder”). This play deals
with the revolution of drama, copying the court scene from Brecht
and condemning a revolutionary to death. The figure A was to have
killed enemies of the revolution on behalf of the party, among others
his predecessor B who, like Brecht’s young comrade, succumbed to his
compassion and began to doubt the meaning of killing. B’s mistake was
seeing humans, not enemies, and his successor A fares no differently.
“Not humans are you ordered to kill, but / Enemies. For the human
is unknown” (Müller, Mauser 138f.)29—neither A nor B is capable of
following this differentiation of the chorus.
Unlike Brecht’s young comrade, neither A nor B agree to their deaths.
They do not expire with the acquiescence to the party, insisting to the
very end on their humanity. They do not give up the play within the
play, referring instead to their distance from their allotted roles. With-
out acquiescence in their own deaths, Müller’s revolutionaries defend
themselves against their own revolution but also thereby become tragic
victims. In Müller, there can no longer be a catharsis for the party and
its collective body. While Brecht cannot entirely dissociate himself from
346 SIMONS

the law of genre in his learning play, while the law appears to be an
aporia, blocking the movement again and again, in Müller the reverse
occurs; the law becomes the right of the characters to which they cling
to the very end. Müller responds to Brecht, one could conclude, with a
tragedy.
Even Heiner Müller’s revolutionaries are in a starting position, which
is rendered not only in political but also in aesthetic concepts. Their
abbreviation to the variables A and B (with the chorus, Müller’s variant
of an ABC) already makes this clear. In Müller, the characters are
robbed of their subjectivity; their drama plays out in precisely that abyss
that opens between natural man and his persona. B’s formulation of “I
withdraw my hand from the order” (Müller, Mauser 128f.)30 is only a
variation of this paradoxical initial position. This doubling inscribes itself
on the characters to such a degree that they are simultaneously subjects
and objects. Pointedly formulated, Mauser is about the shooting of its
own manpower and thereby attacks its own conditions. And even A
rejects his own action as in a theatrical piece. As executioner on behalf
of the party, he is so intoxicated by killing that he is driven by the
violence into a bloody frenzy—the chorus:

I take under my boot what I have killed

I dance on my dead with stamping dance rhythms
For me it is not enough to kill what has to die
so that the revolution triumphs and the killing ceases
But it shall be here no longer and not at all
And disappear from the face of the earth
A clean slate for those to come. (Müller, Mauser 140f.)31

Out of the revolutionary tribunal there develops a Dionysian fest, a mo-

ment of inebriation with whose description the play recalls the originals
of ancient tragedy. In Mauser , too, the focus is the search for a new
dramatic model; the play repeats a discourse about drama that Brecht
had conducted: the question of guilt and innocence, of hamartia as the
flaw of the hero, of acquiescence, the victim, and the tragic. The “I” has
severed itself from the characters—”I between hand and revolver, finger
and trigger / I gap in my consciousness, at our front” (Müller, Mauser
136f.)32—it stands unavoidably as a third party between the action and
the revolution, etymologically related to the revolver, in the center of
the action. When A confesses before the chorus that he has made an
error, the chorus replies: “You are the mistake. / A: I am human [. . .] I
THEATER OF REVOLUTION 347

don’t want to die” (Müller 124f.).33 A is the error, which is to say, the
hamartia that sets the drama in motion, the flaw to be overcome.
After completing Mauser , Müller writes that he cannot come up with
another learning play; its times have elapsed, the Christian “Endzeit” of
The Measures Taken has expired: “and I won’t twiddle my thumbs until
another revolutionary situation comes by” (Müller, “Material” 85).34 In
1977, he continues, political theater has no audience anymore: more
than ever it is written solely for the theater—”What’s left: lonely texts,
waiting for history” (85). But as the preceding considerations have
suggested, revolutionary theater never fared any differently. After its
foundational acts on the political stage of 1789, after Büchner’s Dan-
ton, political theater always refers to the theatrical itself. Precisely this
is the drama of revolution: that it cannot separate the political from the
theater, that its law of genre takes its actors captive and hinders their
escape from the stage. But if the political persona cannot distinguish
itself from the theatrical, one may conclude, then the theatrical perfor-
mance, the play within the play, stages political acts even if they are
acts of failure.

Harvard University

NOTES

1. On the discussion of this reference, see Lauermann 48. Recent research

has emphasized the similarities of political theory and Brecht (Pan, “Sacrifice”;
Horn, “Regel” and “Sterbt”).
2. On the imagery of Schmitt’s political theory, see Balke.
3. In his insightful introduction to Schmitt, Kalyvas compares Schmitt’s
theory of the sovereign and the state of exception with Max Weber and Han-
nah Arendt (Kalyvas). Most convincing is also Weineck’s approach; she reads
Schmitt’s analogy of the sovereign and God as a counternarrative to another
foundational narrative: the descriptions of fatherhood from Locke to Freud.
4. “Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet.”
5. On Schmitt’s theory of the decision and its recent discussion see Pan,
“Carl.”
6. In his depiction of Schmitt’s notion of representation, Adam reads
Schmitt’s Verfassungslehre from 1928 as “aesthetic theory.” Schmitt’s model
of representation, he claims, is a necessary supplement to his theory of deci-
sion; according to Schmitt, representations are not limited to the reproduction
of something already existing, they also fabricate and create what they present;
representations, thus, have a foundational function (85ff.).
348 SIMONS

7. “Der Fürst, bei dem die Entscheidung über den Ausnahmezustand ruht,
erweist in der erstbesten Situation, daß ein Entschluß ihm fast unmöglich
ist.”
8. “Alle prägnanten Begriffe der modernen Staatslehre sind säkularisierte
theologische Begriffe. Nicht nur ihrer historischen Entwicklung nach, weil
sie aus der Theologie auf die Staatslehre übertragen wurden, indem zum
Beispiel der allmächtige Gott zum omnipotenten Gesetzgeber wurde, son-
dern auch in ihrer systematischen Struktur, deren Erkenntnis notwendig ist
für eine soziologische Betrachtung dieser Begriffe. Der Ausnahmezustand
hat für die Jurisprudenz eine analoge Bedeutung wie das Wunder für die
Theologie.”
9. Agamben suggested that the dialogue between Benjamin and Schmitt
began much earlier: according to him, Schmitt’s notion of the sovereign is
already a response to Benjamin’s earlier essay Zur Kritik der Gewalt (64–67).
On Benjamin and Schmitt, see also Pan,”Carl.”
10. “Vier kommunistische Agitatoren stehen vor einem Parteigericht,
dargestellt durch den Maßchor. Sie haben in China kommunistische Propa-
ganda getrieben und dabei ihren jüngsten Genossen erschießen müssen. Um
nun dem Gericht die Notwendigkeit dieser Maßnahme der Erschießung eines
Genossen zu beweisen, zeigen sie, wie sich der junge Genosse in den ver-
schiedenen politischen Situationen verhalten hat. Sie zeigen, daß der junge
Genosse gefühlsmäßig ein Revolutionär war, aber nicht genügend Disziplin
hielt und zu wenig seinen Verstand sprechen ließ, so daß er ohne es zu wollen
zu einer schweren Gefahr für die Bewegung wurde.”
11. “Der Anblick des Unrechts trieb mich in die Reihen der Kämpfer. Der
Mensch muß dem Menschen helfen.”
12. “Ja, ich sehe, ich habe immer falsch gehandelt. [. . .] Ich, der ich so
sehr nützen wollte, habe nur geschadet. [. . .] Er sagte noch: im Interesse des
Kommunismus Einverstanden mit dem Vormarsch der proletarischen Massen
Aller Länder Ja sagend zur Revolutionierung der Welt.” On the concept of
“Einverständnis,” see Müller-Schöll 507.
13. On the aporetical structure of the play, see Lehmann and Lethen; Horn,
“Sterbt”; and Müller-Schöll.
14. “Aber die Arbeit in Mukden war illegal, darum mußten wir, vor wir die
Grenze überschritten, unsere Gesichter auslöschen.”
15. “Ihr dürft nicht gesehen werden. Dann seid ihr nicht mehr ihr selber,
du nicht mehr Karl Schmitt aus Berlin, du nicht mehr Anna Kjersk aus Kasan
und du nicht mehr Peter Sawitsch aus Moskau, sondern allesamt ohne Namen
und Mutter, leere Blätter, auf welche die Revolution ihre Anweisungen schreibt.
[. . .] Dann seid ihr von dieser Stunde an nicht mehr Niemand, sondern von
dieser Stunde an und wahrscheinlich bis zu eurem Verschwinden unbekannte
Arbeiter, Kämpfer, Chinesen, geboren von chinesischen Müttern, gelber Haut,
sprechend in Schlaf und Fieber chinesisch.”
16. “Ich kann nicht weiter.”
17. “Ich kann nicht mehr. Ihr müßt andere Schuhe fordern.”
18. According to Horn, the young comrade is not a good actor (“Sterbt”
334).
THEATER OF REVOLUTION 349

19. “Also beschlossen wir: jetzt abzuschneiden den eigenen Fuß zum Körper.
Furchtbar ist es, zu töten. Aber nicht andere nur, auch uns töten wir, wenn es
nottut.”
20. The distinction of the bare life and the political is also at the center of
Horn’s attention (see “Regel” and “Sterbt”).
21. According to Benjamin, repetition is one of the characteristics
of the mourning play—and one of the reasons of their melancholy
(qtd. in Deiters 34).
22. “Ich kann nicht schweigen, weil ich recht habe. [. . .] sein nacktes Gesicht
/ menschlich, offen und arglos.”
23. Rasch underlines the transition of the chorus from the party court
to its disappearance; at the end, it no longer plays a juridical role
(339ff.).
24. For a recent and more detailed analysis of Schmitt’s notion of the play
within the play as a nonmimetic reflection of reality, see Türk: “[T]he tragic
is a zone where the situation of an existential conflict insists in the aesthetic
play itself in the form of an manifest absence. The playfulness contains and
excludes its opposite, the serious situation. This mutual inclusion of excluded
opposites—the interregnum insists in the play, and the play as a play has an
effect on the interregnum it avoids—is the origin of myth” (83). For a detailed
analysis of Schmitt’s Political Romanticism, the history of the play and the
contingent, see Schnyder.
25. “[. . .] wenn wir es erlebten, eine Nationalbühne zu haben, würden wir
auch eine Nation.”
26. A more thorough and extensive discussion of depictions of revolutions
as theater would have to respond to Marx’s preference for stage metaphors, his
famous opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—”Hegel be-
merkt irgendwo, daß alle großen weltgeschichtlichen Tatsachen und Personen
sich sozusagen zweimal ereignen. Er hat vergessen hinzuzufügen: das eine Mal
als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce” (115)—as well as Lenin’s writings. In
his letters, Lenin refers to the “stage” of the revolution and their “stage man-
agers”: “This eight-day revolution [of 1917] was ‘performed’, if we may use a
metaphorical expression, as though after a dozen major and minor rehearsals;
the ‘actors’ knew each other, their parts, their places and their setting in every
detail, through and through, down to every more or less important shade of
political trend and mode of action” (17). I would like to thank Julia Hell for this
reference.
27. “Die Staatsform muß ein durchsichtiges Gewand sein, das sich dicht an
den Leib des Volkes schmiegt. Jedes Schwellen der Adern, jedes Spannen der
Muskeln, jedes Zucken der Sehnen muß sich darin abdrücken. Die Gestalt mag
nun schön oder häßlich sein, sie hat einmal das Recht zu sein wie sie ist, wir
sind nicht berechtigt ihr ein Röcklein nach Belieben zuzuschneiden” (Büchner,
Dantons Tod 15).
28. “Sieh die hübsche Dame, wie artig sie die Karten dreht! a wahrhaftig
sie versteht’s, man sagt sie halte ihrem Manne immer das coeur und andern
Leuten das carreau hin. Ihr könntet einen noch in die Lüge verliebt machen”
(Büchner, Dantons Tod 13).
350 SIMONS

29. “Nicht Menschen zu töten ist dein Auftrag, sondern Feinde. Nämlich der
Mensch ist unbekannt.”
30. “Ich nehme meine Hand aus dem Auftrag.”
31. “Ich nehme unter den Stiefel was ich getötet habe / Ich tanze auf meinem
Toten mit stampfendem Tanzschritt / Mir nicht genügt es zu töten, was sterben
muß / Damit die Revolution siegt und aufhört das Töten / Sondern es soll nicht
mehr da sein und ganz nichts / Und verschwunden Vom Gesicht der Erde /Für
die Kommenden ein reiner Tisch.”
32. “Ich zwischen Hand und Revolver, Finger und Abzug / Ich Lücke in
meinem Bewusstsein, an unsrer Front.”
33. “Du bist der Fehler. / A: Ich bin ein Mensch. [. . .] Ich will nicht sterben.”
34. “[. . .] mir fällt zum LEHRSTÜCK nichts mehr ein. Eine Brechtadeptin
sagte 1957 gegen KORREKTUR: Die Erzählungen sind nicht adressiert. Was
nicht adressiert ist, kann man nicht inszenieren. Die kümmerliche Meinung
über Kunst, das vorindustrielle Bild von Gesellschaft beiseite: ich kenne 1977
meine Adressaten weniger als damals; Stücke werden, heute mehr als 1957,
für das Theater geschrieben statt für ein Publikum. Ich werde nicht die Daumen
drehen, bis eine (revolutionäre) Situation vorbeikommt. Aber Theorie ohne
Basis ist nicht mein Metier, ich bin kein Philosoph, der zum Denken keinen
Grund braucht, ein Archäologe bin ich auch nicht, und ich denke, daß wir uns
vom LEHRSTÜCK bis zum nächsten Erdbeben verabschieden müssen. Die
christliche Endzeit der MASSNAHME ist abgelaufen, die Geschichte hat den
Prozeß auf die Straße vertagt, auch die gelernten Chöre singen nicht mehr,
der Humanismus kommt nur noch als Terrorismus vor, der MolotowCocktail
ist das letzte bürgerliche Bildungserlebnis. Was bleibt: einsame Texte, die auf
Geschichte warten” (Müller, “Material” 85).

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