#bertold brecht

To plan such a project at such a crucial period in European history and these authors’ personal histories points to the importance of the crime genre for Benja- min and Brecht. Both men shared a lifelong devotion to crime fiction and devoted numerous essays to discussions of the genre and reflections on their fascination with it.

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What, Brecht asks, does the modern detective novel offer the modern reader that might account for its incredible popularity? Brecht follows Benjamin closely in his first answer to this question, arguing that among the chief pleasures of the detective novel is its depiction of people as actors, whose actions have definite and identifiable consequences (34). People in modernity pass through life without leaving traces of their existence and their movements. The subjects of detective novels, on the other hand, leave behind concrete traces.

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According to Brecht, the popularity of the analytic detective novel can be attributed largely to the fact that it enables the reader to practice a certain intellectual operation: piecing together a causal chain of events that leads directly from the crime to the criminal. By limiting the field of possible outcomes of this causal chain, the detective novel presents us with the ability to fix causality to human actions. The crime has a motivation and that motivation is attributable to an individual. Actions beget other actions and lead toward a crime. A penetrating intelligence can piece together these actions to lead from a crime back to an individual criminal. … The detective novel presents us with the “inside story” (Brecht employs the English term) that is otherwise denied to us in our everyday experiences. We are suddenly confronted with a dramatic event (a murder, a war, a loss of employment). Something must have happened to produce this event. Someone must have done something. But who? The detective novel allows us to answer this question. It provides the “inside story,” the secret history that Lang insisted he presented in Dr. Mabuse and that Benjamin sought in the wanderings of the flâneur and behind the windows of the metropolis. Unlike in life, in the detective novel all actions have logical consequences and all actions have actors.

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German crime fiction of 1920s tells a different story. Rather than build on nineteenth-century detective literature traditions as English-language and French-language authors did, it abandons the centrality of the figure of detective and focuses instead on the criminal. These are not detective novels, but crime novels. This crossover from the detective novel to the crime novel is intricately related to the critical theories of detective fiction that I outlined above: if international detective fiction allowed readers to explore a fantasy world in which reason and causality function, individuals are connected to each other and their societies, and the law is clearly distinguishable from the violation of the law, then the German modernist crime novel represented an attempt to understand modernity by exploring a space in which such distinctions are not possible and reason no longer obtains. This accounts for the particular German inflection of the early twentieth-century crime novel, which unlike the English, French, and American versions, dispenses with the figure of the detective—the incarnation of reason—and crosses over to a focus on the figure of the criminal—the incarnation of illogic. These works are more interested in exploring the relationship between criminals and legitimate society than in identifying criminals and resurrecting boundaries between law and outlaw.

This blurring of boundaries between the legal order and the extra-legal order is nicely demonstrated in Brecht’s crime novels. Brecht did, indeed, apply his theories of detective fiction to his own writings, and crime maintained a central role in Brecht’s fictional works throughout his career. But the criminals and detectives in his crime novels function very differently from their counterparts in the classical detective fiction that Brecht discusses in his essay on the genre. As Benjamin notes in his astute reading of Der Dreigroschenroman (The Threepenny Novel, 1934), Brecht departs dramatically from the traditional conventions of detective fiction:

Bourgeois legality and crime—these are, by the rules of the crime novel, opposites. Brecht’s procedure consists in retaining the highly developed technique of the crime novel, but dispensing with its rules. In this crime novel the actual relation between bourgeois legality and crime is presented. The latter is shown to be a special case of exploitation sanctioned by the former.   

This was also the case in Brecht’s earlier crime drama, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928), in which the corrupt police chief Tiger Brown and the gangster Macheath are shown to be closely related on both a personal and a professional level. In the play, the happy end in which Macheath is rescued from execution satirizes and undermines the customary closure of the detective novel, which involves the removal of the criminal from bourgeois society and the subsequent restoration of bourgeois order and the rule of law.

When he reworked his original material six years later in The Threepenny Novel, Brecht intensified his comparison of crime and bourgeois legality, completely eliding the distinction between the representatives of the legal order and those who would seek to challenge this order. The struggle between Macheath and Peachum is, as Benjamin notes, “the struggle between two gangs, and the happy end a gentleman’s agreement that gives legal sanction to the distribution of the spoils” (201). As Peachum himself eventually realizes, he and Macheath only seemed to be in combat, but the whole time “we were only doing business with each other” (201). There is in The Threepenny Novel no compelling representative of the legal order, as in the classical detective novel, because there is no place for such a figure in this reworking of the crime novel that suspends the conflict between crime and the law.

Detectives are seldom found in Brecht’s crime stories, appearing in only a few short stories and some abandoned fragments. When detectives do make an appearance in Brecht’s fiction, they are unlike their more traditional counterparts. Indeed, they are parodies of the methodical and rational literary detectives such as Dupin and Holmes, the classical detective figure …. For example, Samuel Kascher, the detective in Brecht’s short story “Der Javameier” (1921), has no interest in involving himself directly with witnesses and others who have a close connection to the crime, nor is he interested in inspecting the crime scene. His refusal to examine the crime scene and follow traditional clues, he claims, arises from his fear that such unmediated exposure might detract from his ability to analyze the case objectively. Kascher instead gets his information only from mediated sources that buffer him from a direct involvement with the crime: newspaper reports and distant witnesses. His sources of clues are thus those that are just as available to the general public as to him. This interestingly places Kascher in the same position as the reader of detective stories, whom you will recall Brecht described in his essay “On the Popularity of Detective Novels” as reading reports of catastrophes and suspecting that there is an “inside story” that will remain forever hidden from him. Kascher, a fishmonger by trade, is quite explicitly cast as a representative of the public, an outsider in his own story and, as Lorenz Jäger argues, “a distant, cool … observer.” There is no opportunity for the reader to experience the “inside story” vicariously through the literary detective. Brecht thus refuses his readers the very pleasures that he identifies as central to the popularity of the detective genre: the vicarious experience of connection with a detective and a criminal involved in leaving and following traces and the clear, causal chain leading from the catastrophe to the inside story.

The central figure of what was to be Brecht’s series of novels in collaboration with Benjamin, the retired judge Lexer, is a similar representative of pure ratio in a world in which reason and causal chains no longer have a place. Brecht’s sketch of the first novel of this series provides a textbook example of the appropriation of the genre of detective fiction for the service of what is ultimately an anti-detective novel. Brecht’s notes for the story ... sketch the story of Karl Seifert, a corrupt salesman who uses a loophole in the law to extract money from corporations. When he meets a secretary whose company’s existence he is threatening, he offers to save her job in exchange for sexual favors. They meet in a hotel, where she pushes him down an elevator shaft to his death. While the police search focuses on the most likely suspects, such as Seifert’s jealous wife, Lexer undertakes his own unconventional investigation, armed with a camera and a mania for documenting the smallest and seemingly unimportant details. He uncovers the secretary’s guilt, but does not deliver her to the police. He recognizes, as does the reader, that while she committed the crime, true guilt lies more directly with the victim and the corrupt system of economic and social relations that enables Seifert’s crimes and threatens the secretary’s livelihood. ... Brecht departs from the traditional crime novel in that crime is not localized in one place and attributable to one person, and thus cannot be solved or contained. Pure reason does, indeed, lead Lexer to uncover the offender, but it does not help him to solve the crime because the “inside story” is not the narrative of a guilty individual who is responsible for the crimes and misfortunes that occur; rather, it is the narrative of a flawed economic and moral system with no clear agents directing it. We are a long way from Agatha Christie here."

Four versions of Moritat (The Ballad of Mack the Knife)

Original German version

1959 version (sang by Jerry Orbach)

1976 Broadway revival version

1979 Samba version O Malandro (translated and adapted into brazilian portuguese by Chico Buarque)