100 years ago, on September 29, 1922, Bertolt Brecht’s play “Drums in the Night” was premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele.
“Glotz not so romantic,” I would like to wake myself up and stretch out a saying across the desk, as Brecht demanded for the premiere of his “Drums in the Night” at the Munich Kammerspiele a hundred years ago. In front of me is a black, tight-lipped program booklet with a picture of young Brecht, who gawks at me cheekily from the title: pale to smug, absurdly completely – as later with Werner Herzog and “Fitzcarraldo” – in white, with a flat cap and tie, which of course not sits correctly, loosely tied, it doesn’t let itself be tied up, just as if it had just come off the swing boat and was still immersed in its cloud, into which it swung itself up to the sky, to overturn like its words. Suddenly it would be tremendously high overnight, only to then strike like lightning with theatrical thunder on the stages of the unloved republic, where naturalism had naturally long been boring, but expressionism still twitched epileptically and spat out sentences that stretched out on the rack: more and more Screams as screams, tragedies of the bourgeoisie, for whom the revolution was only a farce and, as Brecht called it in his play: comedy. To die for. It was much more important to study the behavior of the cold and to believe that smoking makes you cold-blooded.