Baal

Abstract

Brecht’s first full-length play, Baal, was written in the closing months of the First World War. The destruction in the war of countless lives and of a whole way of life elicited a great variety of responses. For some it was a cause of utter despair, for others a chance for civilisation to make a brave new beginning. As a civilian for most of the war Brecht had direct experience only of the privations it caused, but the deaths of so many of his contemporaries at school kept him constantly alive to the terrible waste of young lives “out there”. For him the central question arising from this experience was: how should the individual respond to a world that will eventually, inevitably destroy him? After his disillusionment with nationalist ideals at the beginning of the war he had come to distrust all idealism as a guide to life. He now insisted that ideals were merely ridiculous attempts to erect defences against the harsh realities of life; in the hands of the strong ideals were a means of exploiting the weak, a task which was ironically made easier by the need felt by the weak for ideals to prop up their crumbling lives:

If one only had the courage, it would be as easy as pie to ascribe nearly every ideal and institution … to the human race’s desperate need to conceal its true situation. Respect for the family, glorification of work, the lure of fame, likewise religion, philosophy, art, smoking, intoxication, aren’t just isolated, clearly calculated and generally recognized means (moyens) of combating mankind’s sense of isolation, abandonment and moral outlawry; but visible guarantees of an immense stockpile of values and securities. It is from this seductive cosiness that man’s enslavement springs. (Diaries, 158)