BRECHT: "THE SCIENTISM OF THE DIALECTIC"
BARDIN, JOHN FRANKLIN
BRIGHT: "The Scientism of the Dialectic" Reviewed By JOHN FRANCLIN BARDIN PARABLES FUR THE THEATER. By Bertoit Brecht. Translated, Edited and with a Note by Eric and Majo Bentley. Minneapolis:...
...Since the steady development of Axis aggression is more or less the chief theme of the work, the Russian story was somewhat overlooked and is the weakest part of the whole...
...His theory is that plays that report not the loathsome details, but the significant essence, of crimes against humanity, can do so by combining the scientism of the dialectic with the art of the epic poet and the music of the ballad singer...
...THE whole truth of Belsen and Buchenwald, of the "revolution* in Czechoslovakia, of the consequences of the bomb in Hiroshima and Oak Ridge, has not been reported Yet our age differs from all others in thatvwe are confronted with more unassembled pieces of the truth than seems credible...
...AVALUABLE, bulky manual of non-secret diplomacy from an era that threatens to become mysterious by too many memoirs and revelations...
...An art that sets out with the Communist assumption that the truth can be found in the , form of a single conclusion compacted' out of an Hegelian synthesis, becomes a reaction against the flux of reality...
...A theme, such as the one in The Good Woman of Setzuan—how can man be good to others and to himself?—is worked upon by a large cast of characters that include even the gods...
...Darrow hat managed to writev a concise narrative of the basic facts essential for an understanding of!the problems involved in man's use of nuclear energy in peace and war...
...This playwright has intended to reduce his characters to types who mime and sing the total dilemma of mankind...
...For the rest, the discussion is a synthesis of a multitude of details...
...The author finds time, too, in his general discussion to explode two popular fallacies...
...The author is an official of the State Department, and despite his assertion to the contrary his book has obviously gathered what the department considers the outstanding landmarks and milestones of the decade of unresisted aggression from Manchuria, 1931, to Pearl Harbor, 1941...
...In my opinion, if these two plays are representative, he has failed badly...
...WOHL ATOMIC ENERGY...
...New York: John Wiley & Sons...
...But Soviet intentions, plans, methods are actually not more secret than those of the Nazis were—the self-revealing1 power of propaganda will always take care of that...
...This book is satisfactory for popular purposes, yet the more expert reader • will encounter in the book a sizable problem...
...to be that in world affairs the so-called big secrets are puny compared to the open facts-everybody knows or should know...
...In attempting to communicate mass evils—whose details have been broadcast and have acted on our minds like a serum of truth that prevents us frdm being infected with the truth itself—the playwright has subordinated the individual to the population...
...No hitherto secret material is revealed...
...3.50...
...Eric and Maja Bentley deserve praise for publishing these unknown plays by an important, living dramatist...
...THE VEIL that is lifted in this ease is merely that of forgottenness...
...Darrow, "to wonder whether these atom* and these nuclei and these gyrations are real or only figments of the physicist's imagination...
...although they contain the precious documentary proof of how Molotov in 1940 was willing to join the Axis...
...That there would be sups was unavoidable...
...There can be little doubt today that Soviet aggression has been the most misunderstood and misinterpreted part of the history of the last decade, just as Nazi aggression was sadly misunderstood by the Robert Cecils and Stanley Baldwins a few years before...
...Humanity lies with an infinity of choices between two poles...
...The Dossier of Our Time Reviewed by KOHRAD HEIDEN DOCUMENTARY BACKGROUND OF WORLD WAR 11,1931 to 1941...
...a mass of about 450 documents, somewhat turbulently arranged, but in this reviewers opinion made more palatable by the fact that the modest author or compilator chose to drop not one single line of comment between them...
...These characters are deliberately limited to types...
...By Karl K. Darrow...
...He has reduced poetry, in a time that is the end-point of a rich and multi-level tradition, to the primitive content of the ballad...
...Unfortunately, only a few of these were worth the time and trouble that it took to read them...
...Many gems like this will be found by the reader who has the patience to Plow through the many pages of the book...
...Happily this situation is now corrected by the appearance of Dr...
...and books can be forced to give away an inside story was shown by William H. Chamberlin's brilliantly documented history of the Comintern...
...80 pages...
...The theory seem...
...In plays like The Good Woman of Setzuan and The Caucasian Cnalk Circle he has tried to revive the epic in terms of the modern theater...
...In earlier'' days the crucifixion of a martyr or the burning of a witch humanized the evil of the man murders these events apotheosized...
...The brutality of our times is implemented by the machinery of restriction of choice, by the media that disseminate an overwhelming flood of details—the significant with the insignificant, • the mostly true with the mostly untrue-—bewildering each of us with a variety of aspects while driving every one of us to impale ourselves on the cithers or the or...
...This is a reference book—and a good one, if one does not expect the impossible best...
...distinguished antiNasi historian ef Hitler's Germany, ii the author of "Dor Fuhrer" and other books...
...even that part of the book that deals with confidential documents, taken from captured German files and already published elsewhere, is small...
...J2 00...
...The result is not epic, it is not even poetic drama, it is only enacted propaganda...
...In the case of one, a woman whose role is central to the entire parable and would be, if developed traditionally, complex enough to transcend type and become an individual, the personality has been mercilessly split into a double, transverse character...
...For while I can not praise his statement, 1 can admire the ingenuity with which it is stated—and I am aware that there may be a poetic content in the plays that remains unparaphraiable...
...Whoever wishes to conclude that dictums like this must have given the green light to Japanese aggression !¦ free to do so...
...The problem is not being good for others or being good for yourself—It is to function as well as you can in terms of each unique situation...
...Bertoit Brecht deserves an audience, even if when the curtain is rung down it neither praises nor hisses but chooses to &it on its hands...
...Karl K. Darrow's Atomic Enery...
...We lack a avnthesii of these are even deprived of the hero-villain -who was once made to represent all human suffering...
...NOBODY EXPECTS a book like this to drop even a hint about the State Department's confidential knowledge of things Russian—especially since such information is not always as good as the layman would like to believe...
...It would have been a fitting part of a book which, in its otherwise exhaustive and useful presentation of the pre-War decade's diplomatic window-dressing, is based on the sound principle that if you only listen carefully to enough lies you have a fair chance of guessing the truth...
...Of course, it can be maintained that the dividing line between sentimentality and revolt is inscrutable—certainly the writings ef Odets and Steinbeck, Cantwell and Brecht exploit a nostalgia for the old-fashioned symbolic conventions by which authors and playwrights used to convince us of the fact of human suffering...
...10.00...
...It is one of the ironies of our time mat the so-called proletarian tradition in literature and theater has suffered as greatly from the triumph of communication, the ubiquitousness of news, as has the sentimental tradition...
...Of course, nobody is expected to do that...
...This chapter would have deserved larger space and a more detailed treatment...
...Neither thjp abortive European Four-Power-Pto^ nor the more important exchange of notes by which Ihe U. S. in November 1933 recognized - the Soviet Union will be found...
...The originals exist only in manuscript and could not be compared with this version...
...Within the confines of this slim voir ume, Dr...
...The Big Bang By SONIAS...
...It will occur to Mime," remarks Dr...
...He has faced the problem of discovering meaningful artistic experience in the, mass brutality we all have learned about, and which, to continue to function, we attempt to ignore...
...How an immense mats of published literature, of speeches, article...
...AfTER the nuclear bomb exploded ^ver Japan in August, 1945, the American public found itself deluged by books expounding the mysteries of modern physics...
...In this the Existentialists reiterate what I think most of us have done since adolescence: the choosing of oneself, the continual decision to be someone in between one idealized type and another...
...A few documents from the State Departments volume about JVazt-Sotriet Relations, thrown in as an appendix, don't make up for this...
...All I claim is that by making these postulates (they) . . . have been able to discover atomic energy and^atomic bombs . . . and they are still going strong...
...KTonrad Helden...
...1122 pages...
...Its intent is didacticism, its enactment is ritual and our response is prescribed...
...In hit effort to avoid confusing the reader with the evolution of the concept* of modern phytict, .or of the myriad theories and demonstrations, only three of tbe demonstrations mentioned art attributed to their discoverer...
...Some facts and words even gain in freshnes...
...A HUMAN BEING who sees his life as an either / or proposition is already in the process of being dehumanized...
...This does not so much involve the thorny subject matter as the author's simplifying technique...
...The label has sunk deeply into the popular imagination and probably will stick...
...New York: Columbia University Press...
...The emphasis remains Ion the plight of the whole snd the people who make up the whole are only segments of a great, tormented body...
...Formal documentation it absent from the book...
...The facts that many of its facets are fantastic, that it is written by a sensitive mind equipped by inventive talent, does not belie the over-simplification, the hypostatized false choice, of the dialectic...
...Hit other aim: to draw a distinction between the labels "atomic energy" and "nuclear energy" will likely be lets successful, slthough it is more precise...
...Of the very few that present a lucid, documented history of the theories and experiments that led to the construction of the atomic pile and eventually of the bomb itself, most are either too expensive or too technical for the layman...
...Compiled and edited by James W. Gantenbein...
...BERTOLT BRECHT has realized the implications of the decline of tragedy in our times...
...Newspapers and newsreels, picture magazines and radio, bombard us with exactly lifelike fragments of the- total monstrosities of our time...
...The present - volume is chiefly a collection of international agreements, notes from chancellery to chancellery, public addresses by leading statesmen — threads from that fabric of official documents that was and is woven around the earth with the purpose of concealing the present causes of things to come...
...This is a concept of art that, even though it professes to deal with the search for truth In freedom, is acceptable to those who promulgate an authoritarian aesthetic...
...192 pages...
...Viscount Cecil, Britain's kind-hearted chief delegate at the League of Nations, looked flround in the League's big council chamber and declared nobody in this loom would contradict him when he fcaid: "There has scarcely ever been a period in the world's history when war seemed less likely than it does at present...
...Minneapolis: The Univer$ity of Minnesota Press...
...the older they grow...
...THE TRANSLATION of these plays is, as far as I can tell excellent...
...He discusses the "reality'' of atoms, a great puzzle to the average .man who cannot associate easily a violent explosion with invisible atomic particles...
...Eight days before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September, 1931...
Vol. 32 • January 1949 • No. 3
