Messianism in Bertolt Brecht's Der gute Mensch von Sezuan and Der kaukasische Kreidekreis

Abstract

It is well known that Christianity plays, if not a major role, then at least a role of considerable thematic significance throughout Brecht's work. His first dramatic work, the one-act play Die Bibel, written probably in 1913 or early 1914 when he was fifteen years old, contains a critical portrait in the character of the grandfather of that kind of Christian who adheres severely to an absolute ethic based on a literal reading of the biblical Word and who attempts to convince others to adhere to such an ethic as well. The social inadequacy of institutionalized Christianity is one of the principal thematic concerns of his first commercially published collection of poetry, Bertolt Brechts Hauspostille (1927). Pierpont Mauler and other factory owners in Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthofe (1929-31) use Christianity as a political-economic opiate against their employees. Of the later plays the religious clash between Protestant and Catholic in Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1939) provides a public . relations cover for economic causes underlying the Thirty Years War; in Leben des Galilei (1938-9) the Catholic Church appears as an oppressive political-social-economic force in late Renaissance Italy; and in Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1938-40), returning to one of the sentiments expressed in Die Bibel, Christian principles appear as a humanly (i.e., politically, socially, and economically) untenable absolute morality dispensed by a trinity of bumbling elderly gods. To say that Brecht is without exception critical and most often condemnatory of Christianity as an institution, which he views as inadequate to provide either individual fulfilment or peaceful communal cohesion, is no revelation. It has not to my knowledge been noted, however, that messianism becomes a major concern on Brecht's part in two of his later plays, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan and Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, that the messianic theme in these two plays is contained partially in their biblical allusions, that the