Test and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin

Brigid Doherty

MLN, Volume 115, Number 3, April 2000 (German Issue), pp. 442-481(Article)

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Test and Gestus inBrecht and Benjamin

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Brigid Doherty

On 29 December 1930 Walter Benjamin began a radio broadcastcalled “Karussell der Berufe” by asking this of his listeners: “Putyourselves, ladies and gentlemen, in the place of a fourteen-year-oldwho has just finished Volksschule and now must choose an occupation.Think of the mostly schematic, fleeting images of occupations thathover before his eyes. . . . Does this not call to mind a carousel, acarousel of occupations, which whizzes past the eager candidate soquickly that he is unable to study the several positions it offers?”1 Thejob candidate’s predicament, already dizzying, gets more intense inthe context of an unemployment crisis. Deciding what occupation topursue in a year like 1930, he must take into account not only hissuitability for this or that vocation, but also the risk, once hired andtrained, of being “phased out of the production process,” perhapsnever to enter it again. If at the time of the broadcast the slogan“‘the right man in the right place,’ der rechte Mann am rechten Platz”(Benjamin’s own bilingual adaptation of a Taylorist catchphrase)could still be heard in Germany, according to Benjamin its momentof “official recognition” had passed. That moment, he explains, wasthe period of demobilization following World War I, when newoccupations had to be found for young workers leaving the munitions

1 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols. in 14, eds. Rolf Tiedemann andHermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972–89), II.2,667–68, hereafter abbreviated GS. “Karussell der Berufe” was broadcast by theSüdwestdeutscher Rundfunk, Frankfurt. Unless otherwise noted, all translations aremy own.

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factories as they closed. “For that reason the commissioner ofdemobilization promoted occupational counseling [Berufsberatung].But the slogan used at that time [‘the right man in the right place’]has acquired an entirely different meaning today. Today the bestplace for each is that in which he stands a chance of holding his own”[sich behaupten zu können]. Indeed what matters under conditions ofeconomic crisis is not just finding one’s proper place in the workforce,but preparing oneself “to fit quickly into a new occupation” (GS II.2,668). That is where occupational counseling now steps in.

Benjamin assumes his audience knows something about Berufsbera-tung ; he mentions that the radio station’s recent transmissions haveincluded presentations by experts in the field. Moreover, Benjaminassumes that his listeners are familiar with the experimental testingmethods that play an important part in occupational counseling.Many of them, he is sure, “will already have had insight into the greatsystem of tests” [das große System der Tests] and “the colossal laboratoryof a new science that has quickly established itself in Germany: thescience of work” (GS II.2, 668–69). More specifically, Benjaminassumes his audience will be most familiar with what he calls “derGedanke der Leistungsprüfung,” a topic he addresses only briefly in“Karussell der Berufe,” but one which will play a crucial role in latertexts.2 The phrase der Gedanke der Leistungsprüfung suggests at least twomeanings in this context. First, we can understand it to indicatesimply that many in Benjamin’s audience would have “given thought

2 I refer here to Benjamin’s “Versuche über Brecht” (1930–39), as well as to his essay,“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (1935–36),discussed below. See also Benjamin’s analysis of montage in “Pariser Brief: Malerei undPhotographie” (1936; GS III, 195–507), which was written for but never appeared inDas Wort, a journal edited by Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Willi Bredel andpublished in Moscow; and his remarks on montage, film, and vocational aptitude testsin a fragment of a draft of “Malerei und Photographie” (GS VII.2, 815–23). In thepresent essay, I have limited myself to a discussion of a few key texts by Brecht andBenjamin. I address concepts and practices of test and Gestus in wider historical andtheoretical contexts in my book-in-progress, “Berlin Dada Montage.” Benjamin summedup his sense of the relation between Brechtian Gestus and montage when he assertedthat the epic theater’s “discovery and construction of the gestic is nothing but aretranslation of the methods of montage—so crucial in radio and film—from atechnological process to a human one” (Benjamin, “Theater and Radio” [1932],Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, andGary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1999], 584, translation modified, hereafter abbreviated SW; GS II.2, 775). While I donot deal with montage directly in this essay, the importance of that technique and itstheorization are implicit throughout. In my citations from SW I have frequentlymodified the translation, in which case an additional reference to GS appears.

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to the performance test,” since the “great system of tests” was a matterof widespread popular interest in the period. Second, we can recognizethe phrase as conveying Benjamin’s belief that at least some of hislisteners were preoccupied by “the thought of the performance test”as a technique to which they might be subjected. Hence Benjaminimagines an audience that has had insight into vocational aptitudeand performance tests not only through the attention paid to thosetechnologies in the mass media, but also through direct experiencein the laboratory or the workplace. Which is to say that Benjaminassumes that members of his audience have themselves been, ormight soon become, the subject of tests.

In Germany in the 1920s, the kind of experimental vocationalaptitude testing to which Benjamin alludes was commonly called“psychotechnics.” Indeed the postwar moment he singles out has beendescribed by historians as “the era of psychotechnics,” when occupa-tional counseling and vocational aptitude testing “became a virtualcraze in Germany.”3 Psychotechnical aptitude tests were first employedextensively in Germany during World War I, both within the militaryand as part of the occupational counseling of women and youngworkers in the context of the war economy. In 1919, a Prussian state lawwas enacted that called for the establishment of vocational counselingagencies, among the duties of which was to perform psychotechnicaltesting on job candidates and trainees. By 1920 a wide range ofpsychophysical vocational aptitude and performance tests was beingconducted in the “colossal laboratories” of experimental testing sta-tions, including those of the Institut für Psychotechnik at the TechnischeHochschule in Berlin, as well as in factories and private firms acrossGermany. Programs were designed to introduce the techniques oftesting to the general public, and training courses for representatives ofgovernment agencies and private industry aimed to teach participantsthe principles and methods of psychotechnics in less than a week.4

3 See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity(1990; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 278. On psychotechnics in theGerman context, 1914–33, see Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 259–80; Charles Maier,“Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of IndustrialProductivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 5:2 (1970), 27–61; and MaryNolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford andNew York: Oxford University Press, 1994). On the relation of psychophysical researchand experimental testing to the emergence of modernist literature, see Friedrich Kittler,Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens, foreword DavidE. Wellbery (1985; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. 206–65.

4 The course was offered by the Institut für Psychotechnik’s Laboratorium fürIndustrielle Psychotechnik, under the directorship of Walther Moede. See Georg

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Such was the “official recognition” and “promotion” of BerufsberatungBenjamin mentions. A decade before the radio broadcasts of Benjaminand the experts who preceded him, the German press paid closeattention to the experimental testing methods of psychotechnics witharticles ranging from a critical analysis by Otto Neurath to numerousfeatures in the illustrated weeklies, many accompanied by photographsof tests in progress (figures 1 and 2).5

Benjamin sums up his interest in Berufsberatung, and in the contem-porary notion of Beruf more broadly conceived, by asking his audience,“How does an occupation form and transform a human being? . . . Howdoes an occupation influence human beings and by what means?” [Wiewirkt der Beruf auf den Menschen ein und wodurch?] (GS II.2, 669). Havingput those questions to his listeners, Benjamin declares his intention toprovide them with a means of responding. He asks not only for theirattention, but for their collaboration: the radio station will collectindividual accounts of how a listener’s own occupation has influencedhis or her mood, opinions, and relations with colleagues, as well as howeach would compare the person she or he was at the time of taking upan occupation to the person she or he has become in performing thatoccupation. Benjamin also offers his listeners the option of substitutingtheir observations of co-workers for self-observation. The assembledmaterial and the conclusions to be drawn from it were to be presentedin a subsequent broadcast, which seems never to have taken place.6

Chaym, “Psychotechnik,” Sozialistische Monatshefte (20 December 1920), 1107. Moedewas one of Germany’s foremost psychotechnical experts during and after World War I.His work performing psychophysical tests for the German military began as early as1915, and he invented a number of experimental apparatuses to test physical andmental aptitudes, including the one represented in figure 2, discussed below. Forbackground information on Moede, see Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 264–66, 273–80.

5 Otto Neurath, “Das umgekehrte Taylorsystem: Auch etwas zur Auslese derTüchtigen,” Deutscher Wille des Kunstwarts 31 (October–December 1917), 19–24; AlbertNeuburger, “Das Taylor System: Das vielumstrittene Verfahren zur Erhöhung undPrüfung der Arbeitsleistung,” Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung 28:21 (25 May 1919), 182–84;Alfred Gradenwitz, “Experimentelle Berufsauslese (Zu unseren Bildern aus der neuenpsychotechnischen Forschungsanstalt,” Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 41:28 (12 October1919), 410–12; and Richard Seidel, “Im psychotechnischen Laboratorium,” Die FreieWelt 2:42 (1920), 5. Neurath’s subsequent work in logical empiricism, and especially hiswritings in the journal Erkenntnis from 1930–32, were important to Brecht in thatperiod. See Steve Giles, Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory: Marxism, Modernity and theThreepenny Lawsuit (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 63–79, esp. 77n5.

6 This despite the interest of Ernst Schoen, the general director of the SüdwestdeutscherRundfunk and an old friend of Benjamin’s, in promoting innovative and politicallyengaged radio projects. See the Benjamin-Schoen correspondence, as well as thefragments “Situation im Rundfunk” and “Reflexion zum Rundfunk,” GS II,3, 1497–1507.

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Figure 1. Psychotechnical aptitude testing of trainees. Die Freie Welt 2:42 (1920), 5.

For our purposes, the interest of “Karussell der Berufe” is twofold.First, it provides an historical frame of reference for the place that derGedanke der Leistungsprüfung will occupy in Benjamin’s “Versuche überBrecht” and “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reprodu-zierbarkeit,” texts about which I shall have more to say in whatfollows. Second, Benjamin’s radio broadcast is a Brechtian experiment.About a 1929 radio production of one of his Lehrstücke [learningplays], Brecht said that it “was not intended to be of use to thepresent-day radio but to alter it,”7 an assertion that also describes theaims of Benjamin’s broadcast. And given Benjamin’s topic and thetechnique of audience response he proposes, “Karussell der Berufe”can be said to share Brecht’s belief that “the increasing concentration

7 Bertolt Brecht, “An Example of Pedagogics (Notes to Der Flug der Lindberghs),” inBrecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York:Hill and Wang, 1964), 32, translation modified, hereafter abbreviated BT. In mycitations from BT I have frequently modified the translation, in which case thereappears an additional reference Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und FrankfurterAusgabe, 30 vols. (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag; Frankfurt am Main: SuhrkampVerlag, 1988–1996), hereafter abbreviated BFA. In this case see “Erläuterungen zu DerFlug der Lindberghs,” BFA 24, 88.

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of mechanical means and the increasing specialization of training . . .call for a kind of resistance by the listener, and for his mobilization andreengagement as a producer” (BT 32; BFA 24, 88). Brecht expandsupon those remarks in his 1932 essay, “Der Rundfunk als Kommuni-kationsapparat,” where he maintains that as a “natural consequenceof technical development,” the radio should be made to “receive aswell as transmit . . . let the listener speak as well as hear . . . bring himinto a relationship instead of isolating him” (BT 52; BFA 21, 557). Hewould thereby effect the medium’s Umfunktionierung, its conversionfrom an “apparatus of distribution” into an “apparatus of communi-cation.” Benjamin makes essentially the same point in a 1931 frag-ment, where he argues that the “crucial failing” of the radio is itsperpetuation of “the fundamental separation between practitionersand the public, a separation that is at odds with [the radio’s]technological basis.” Whereas the radio ought to have created in itslisteners “a new form of expertise,” it has instead rendered itsaudience “helpless, quite inexpert in its critical reactions.” “Sabotage

Figure 2. Test of the steadiness of nerves using an instrument that shows how long ittakes for the nerves to return to a state of calm following a shock. Berliner IllustrirteZeitung 41:28 (12 October 1919), 410.

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(switching off)” is the mode of resistance to which the radio publichas been “reduced.” Benjamin would see this altered on the model ofhis broadcast of “Karussell der Berufe,” wherein the radio would “winlisteners over to its side by appealing to them as experts” (SW 543).

Related as it was to his experimental Lehrstücke of the precedingyears, Brecht’s conception of the Umfunktionierung of the radiocannot be separated from his efforts toward the Umfunktionierung ofthe theater, both in the Lehrstücke themselves and in the theory andpractice of epic theater more generally. Of his proposal that the radioshould become “a communications apparatus of public life,” Brechtwrites, “this is an innovation that seems utopian and that I myselfadmit to be utopian” (BT 52). Benjamin’s wish to have his listenersrespond to the question posed by his radio broadcast—Wie wirkt derBeruf auf den Menschen ein und wodurch?—is similarly utopian. Observ-ing themselves and their colleagues at work, then conveying theirobservations to the radio station for public broadcast, Benjamin’slisteners would transform themselves from actual or potential sub-jects of the performance tests of occupational science [Berufswissen-schaft] into willing participants in a “sociological experiment,” toborrow a term from Brecht (BFA 21, 448). In the proposed experi-ment, listeners would become participants—or, in Brechtian terms,producers, in this case producers of information—capable of takingup the position of test administrator as well as test subject. As we shallsee, that potential shift or doubling of the subject’s position withinthe situation of the test will serve as a model for the transformation ofthe audience as well as the work of art in Benjamin’s aesthetic theoryof the mid-1930s.

“Karussell der Berufe” finds its contemporary counterpart inBrecht’s practical and theoretical experiments in epic theater. Theradio broadcast relates most closely to Brecht’s writings in thecollections called Versuche [Experiments], which were publishedbetween 1930 and 1932, and to the comedy Mann ist Mann (1926),which had a tumultuous run of six performances directed by Brechthimself at Berlin’s Staatliches Schauspielhaus in February 1931,where it was presented as a parable rather than a comedy, a change ofgenre that indicates Brecht’s wish to transform Mann ist Mann into akind of Lehrstück and an exemplary production of epic theater.8

8 See Herbert Ihering’s review of the 1931 production of Mann ist Mann, originallypublished in the Berliner Börsen-Courier (7 February 1931), reprinted in Günther Rühle,Theater für die Republik, 1917–1933, im Spiegel der Kritik (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,

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Attempts to transform the audience from “a mass of hypnotized testsubjects” [eine Masse hypnotisierte Versuchpersonen] into “a theater full ofexperts” [ein Theater voll von Fachleuten] were central to Brecht’s epictheater as it emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s.9 Especially inits 1931 parable form, Mann ist Mann incorporates those attempts onthe level of both theme and technique.

Mann ist Mann was a touchstone for Benjamin’s meditations onBrecht and epic theater, which were first made public in the form ofa radio broadcast called “Bert Brecht” in June 1930. “Bit by bit,” saysBenjamin of the play’s protagonist, Galy Gay, “he assumes posses-sions, thoughts, posture, and habits of the kind needed by a soldier ina war; he is completely reassembled” [Zug um Zug nimmt er Stücke,Gedanken, Haltung, Gewohnheiten, wie ein Mann im Krieg sie haben muß; erwird vollständig ummontiert] (SW 369; GS II.2, 666).10 The vocabularyof Benjamin’s account of the Ummontierung of Galy Gay anticipatesthat of “Karussell der Berufe,” where the assumption of postures andhabits is understood to play a primary role in a person’s adaptation toa particular occupation: “In what realm of life are habits [Gewohnheiten]more easily formed, where are they more vigorous, where do theymore fully encompass entire groups of people, than at work?” Ifhabits are best developed and expressed on the job, then an occupa-tion must influence a person by fostering or requiring the acquisitionof habits. It thus makes sense, as Benjamin explains, that theexperiments of occupational science should “assess and test theHaltung [posture, stance, disposition] of specific occupations entirelyapart from the content of the work itself, and focusing instead onGebärde [gesture], Neigung [aptitude, proclivity], Fähigkeit [capabil-ity].” Because they assess the disposition or posture of occupations interms of the gestures and aptitudes of their subjects, psychotechnical

1967), 1072–74; J. W. Onderdelinden, “Brecht’s Mann ist Mann: Lustspiel oderLehrstück?,” Neophilologus 2 (1970), 149–66; and Peter Mayer, “Die Wahrheit istKonkret: Notizen zu Brecht and Benjamin,” in Bertolt Brecht I, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold(Munich: edition text � kritik, 1972), 5–13.

9 Benjamin, “What is Epic Theater [First Version]” (1931), Understanding Brecht,intro. Stanley Mitchell, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1983), 2, 4, translationmodified, hereafter abbreviated UB; “Was ist das epische Theater? Eine Studie zuBrecht,” GS II.2, 520, 522. The second phrase is quoted by Benjamin from Brecht, “TheLiterarization of the Theater (Notes to the Threepenny Opera)” (1930), BT, 44;“Anmerkungen zur Dreigroschenoper,” BFA 24, 59. In my citations from UB I havefrequently modified the translation, in which case an additional reference to GSappears.

10 “Bert Brecht” was broadcast by the Frankfurter Rundfunk on 30 June 1930.

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experiments “represent human types who would have to inventcertain occupations for themselves if those occupations did notalready exist” (GS II.2, 670–71). They represent persons composed ofbodily gestures in which a set of habits and a particular occupationalposture can be recognized and tested. Hence an occupation wouldnot necessarily have to exist in order for it to be defined experimen-tally; it could simply be invented after the fact, in order to give the testsubject an appropriate job to do.11 Mann ist Mann proceeds from thesame understanding of persons, occupations, experiments, tests,habits, posture, and gestures, and it reveals that understandingthrough a kind of crude reverse-engineering of Galy Gay: a humanbeing is made insofar as he is made to demonstrate, through a seriesof experiments and tests, the posture and gestures of the occupationhe is made to take up.

A few remarks on the development of Mann ist Mann are necessaryhere.12 Brecht’s work on the earliest versions of the play began in1918, while he was serving as a military medical orderly in Augsburg.Conceived at that time as the “Galgei project,” it was an idea to whichBrecht returned during the spring and summer of 1920. His 1920notes indicate that Galgei was to be set in the context of postwarcivilian life in Augsburg: whereas in Mann ist Mann the benign Irishpacker Galy Gay gets diverted from his goal of buying a fish to bringhome for dinner and instead is transformed into a ruthless Britishsoldier in a colonial machine-gun regiment, the earlier Galgei was afat Bavarian carpenter, “a reliable worker” compelled to take over theidentity and the business of a profiteering local butter merchantnamed Pick. It was around the time of his move to Berlin in 1924 thatBrecht and his collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann reworked the play

11 Neurath makes a related point when he proposes an “inverted Taylor system”(“Das umgekehrte Taylorsystem,” 22).

12 See Brecht, BFA 2, 406–10; Brecht, Collected Plays, vol. 2 of 8 to date, ed. and intro.John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1970– ), vii–xiv, 257–302;Onderdelinden, “Brecht’s Mann ist Mann;” Marianne Kesting, “Die Groteske vomVerlust der Identität: Bertolt Brecht’s Mann ist Mann,” in Das Deutsche Lustspiel 2 (1969),180–99; Klaus-Detlef Müller, “Mann ist Mann,” in Brechts Dramen: Neue Interpretationen,ed. Walter Hinderer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 89–105; and Wolf Wucherpfennig,“Überwindung des Individuums? Überlegungen zu Brechts Mann ist Mann,” in BertoltBrecht: die Widersprüche sind die Hoffnungen (Copenhagen: W. Fink, 1988), 161–91. TheBertolt-Brecht-Archiv, Berlin, contains extensive materials pertaining to the develop-ment of the several versions of Mann ist Mann; for a list of those materials, see Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv, Bestandsverzeichnis des literarischen Nachlasses, vol. 1, ed. Herta Ramthun(Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1969), 10–15. My account of the development ofMann ist Mann in what follows is based upon those published and archival sources.

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and shifted the setting, and with it the protagonist’s assumption ofoccupations, to a British-Indian military-colonial milieu derived fromBrecht’s reading of Rudyard Kipling. In 1925, the title was changedfrom Galgei to Galy Gay oder Mann � Mann. The play premieredsimultaneously in Darmstadt and Düsseldorf on 25 September 1926under the title Mann ist Mann: Die Verwandlung des Packers Galy Gay inden Militärbaracken von Kilkoa im Jahre Neunzehnhundertfünfundzwanzig.Published with that title in 1927, the play would retain it in subse-quent versions, although in preparing his 1929–31 revisions Brechtconsidered having the action take place in the year of the play’sproduction (e.g., 1931), and he occasionally returned to the con-densed title Mann � Mann.

For example, a 1929 notebook contains the following entry: “Mann� Mann / counterpart: the technician / . . . for the worker is noprince. he comes into being not by birth, but insofar as he is violentlyremade. therefore all human beings can be turned into workers”[Mann � Mann / gegenspieler: der techniker. . . . denn der arbeiter ist keinfürst. er entsteht nicht durch geburt, sondern indem er mit gewalt umgebautwird. darum kann man auch alle menschen in arbeiter verwandeln].13 Thenotes suggest that Brecht envisioned the technician or technicalworker as the counterpart specifically of the packer Galy Gay, who isviolently remade [ummontiert] in the course of the play. The short-hand Mann � Mann emblematizes the technical procedures—Umbau,Ummontierung—according to which human beings can be made totake up occupations. Functionally, the equal sign does not so muchreplace the verb ist as stand in for operations performed on persons,operations that proceed in the manner of experiments and tests, andthat involve above all the transformation of posture and gesture.14

The formulation Mann � Mann can also be read as a sign of theepic theater’s intention to foreclose spectatorial empathy and with it

13 Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv, Berlin, 151 BBA 827/22. Materials from the Brecht archivehereafter cited parenthetically by number.

14 See the review of the 1931 production by Bernhard Diebold, “Militärstück vonBrecht,” Frankfurter Zeitung 25 (11 February 1931), 10 (SB bba 1710), where the right-wing critic associates the play’s concept of Gleichheit with the contemporary dance troupethe Tiller Girls: “Tiller Girls, that would be the true egalité of Mann ist Mann.” Diebold’sreference to the Tiller Girls recalls, from a different perspective, Siegfried Kracauer’streatment of that topic in “Das Ornament der Masse,” which was published in theFrankfurter Zeitung in 1927. See Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed., trans.,and intro. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75–88. Onthe “mathematical” quality of the 1931 Mann ist Mann, see the review by Hermann W.Anders in Dresdner Volkszeitung 42:34 (10 February 1931), 10 (SB bba 1720).

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the audience’s mimetic identification with a play’s protagonist. InMann ist Mann, the transformation of Galy Gay is emphaticallyexternal, with changes, to repeat, represented in posture and gesture.For Brecht, the externality of the epic theater and its protagoniststand in opposition to the Aristotelian drama, in which “the plot leadsthe hero into situations where he reveals his innermost being.” Incontemporary versions of Aristotelian drama “the individual whoseinnermost being is driven into the open then of course comes tostand for Man with a capital M [‘den Menschen schlechthin’ ]. Everyone(including every spectator) is then carried away by the momentum ofthe events portrayed, so that in a performance of Oedipus one has forall practical purposes a theater full of little Oedipuses, an auditoriumfull of Emperor Joneses for a performance of The Emperor Jones” (BT87; BFA 22.1, 158–59).

In conversation with Benjamin in 1931, Brecht used the neologismmitahmend to describe a mode of living in which a dwelling takesshape in response to the ways of its inhabitant. When he recounts theconversation, Benjamin likens such a dwelling to a stage set.15

Recognizing that Brecht’s mitahmend brings together mitfühlen andnachahmen (to sympathize and to imitate), we might further associatemitahmendes Wohnen with the mode of viewing exemplified by a“theater full of little Oedipuses,” where sympathy does not so muchengender as amount to imitation, or, more precisely, mimeticspectatorial empathy, according to which “every spectator” as it wereadopts the identity of the character on stage, not because he or sheis in a position genuinely to empathize with that character, butbecause plot and performance effect a collapse of sympathy andimitation. The coincidence of sympathy and imitation [mitahmen]may look like spontaneous spectatorial empathy, a relation betweenaudience and character determined by an identity extant, if latent,before the performance. But it would be better to say that inBrechtian mitahmen, the spectator’s response to the character willalways be mimetic before it can be empathetic. The category ofspontaneous or original spectatorial empathy is thereby vitiated. In

15 Benjamin, diary entry of 8 June 1931, GS 6, 435–36. Benjamin notes that theconversation took place during “a truly strange afternoon with Brecht,” and hedescribes it as an “Untersuchung von Verhaltungswesen” [investigation of modes ofbehavior] whose object was “das Wohnen” [habitation], including the “Haltung” and“Gewohnheiten” of inhabitants practicing various modes of living. I have more to sayabout Benjamin’s diary entries of May and June 1931 and their pertinence to Brecht’sMann ist Mann in what follows.

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writing Mann � Mann, Brecht inserts a mathematical sign of equiva-lence in place of the verb that might inaugurate a plot that might inturn invite spectators to identify with its hero. Even more than doesthe tautology Mann ist Mann, Mann � Mann stresses not one man’sinnermost likeness to another, but their interchangeability, a kind ofidentity the audience will be encouraged to observe critically ratherthan imitate sympathetically.

Although Brecht eventually abandoned the title Mann � Mann, inthe 1931 Berlin production he directed, projections indicating thebeginning of scenes displayed equations in which the scene’s actionwas reduced to arithmetical procedures, for example: “Projection 2:4 � 1 � 3” (one of four soldiers goes missing), “Projection 3: 3 �1 � 4” (the remaining three convince Galy Gay to stand in for theirmissing man), “Projection 4: 1 � 1” (Galy Gay takes the missingsoldier’s place at roll-call).16 For Brecht the language of mathematicswas a device to transform the spectator into an expert observer ratherthan a hypnotized test subject. As he describes it in the program tothe 1931 production, the use of projections was “a primitive attemptat literarizing the theater” in which “literarizing entails punctuating‘representation’ with ‘formulation.’” (What could more literally “punc-tuate ‘representation’ with ‘formulation’” than mathematical equa-tions interjected as graphic material between the episodes of aparable?) The projections also engage the audience in “complexseeing that must be practiced [geübt].” They compel the spectator toassess the various episodes in relation to one another by establishingnot the continuity but the interruption of action and character, andwith that the necessity of testing one scene against another, a mode ofviewing that Brecht likens to reading: “footnotes, and the habit ofturning back in order to check a point, need to be introduced intothe drama.” “Moreover,” he explains, “the use of screens imposes andfacilitates a new style of acting. This style is the epic style. As he readsthe projections on the screen the spectator adopts an attitude[Haltung] of smoking-and-watching. Such an attitude on his partcompels a better and clearer performance as it is hopeless to try torender spellbound [in den Bann ziehen] any man who is smoking andaccordingly pretty well occupied with himself. By these means onewould soon have a theater full of experts . . . Unfortunately it is to befeared that titles [i.e., projections] and permission to smoke are not

16 See Brecht, Mann ist Mann (Berlin: Arcadia Verlag, 1930) (BBA 2116).

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of themselves enough to lead the audience to a more fruitful use ofthe theater” (BT 43–44; BBA C1488; BFA 24, 59). The public’sresponse to the 1931 production confirmed Brecht’s fears. Thepresentation of the parable, and in particular the epic acting of PeterLorre as Galy Gay, were greeted with angry shouts and derisivewhistles rather than thoughtful, critical observation.17

It seems likely that in preparing “Bert Brecht” Benjamin wouldhave been working with the 1926–27 text of Mann ist Mann, althoughhe could have had access to the version published as a stage script in1929–30, which served as the basis for Brecht’s important revisionsincorporated into the 1931 production, the production that would inturn figure prominently in Benjamin’s first version of “Was ist dasepische Theater?,” which was written that same year but publishedonly posthumously. In “Bert Brecht,” Benjamin cites in full thefollowing passage, which appears in the 1926–27 and 1929–30 edi-tions of Mann ist Mann as a Zwischenspruch [interlude] spoken byWidow Leokadja Begbick, who addresses the audience as she standsnext to a portrait of the author:

Herr Bertolt Brecht behauptet: Mann ist Mann.Und das ist etwas, was jeder behaupten kann.Aber Herr Bertolt Brecht beweist auch dannDas man mit einem Menschen beliebig viel machen kann.Hier wird heute abend ein Mensch wie ein Auto ummontiertOhne daß er irgend etwas dabei verliert.Dem Mann wird menschlich nähergetretenEr wird mit Nachdruck, ohne Verdruß gebetenSich dem Laufe der Welt schon anzupassenUnd seinen Privatfisch schwimmen zu lassen.Herr Bertolt Brecht hofft, Sie werden den Boden, auf dem Sie stehenWie einen Schnee unter sich vergehen sehenUnd werden schon merken bei dem Packer Galy GayDaß das Leben auf Erden gefährlich sei.

[Herr Bertolt Brecht maintains: A man’s a manAnd this is something anyone can say.

17 See the reviews by Ihering and Diebold cited above, as well as those by Alfred Kerr,in Rühle, Theater für die Republik, 1074–76; Julius Bab, “Nachtrag zum Falle Brecht,” DieHilfe 37:8 (21 February 1931), 187–89; and Willy Haas, “Berliner Theaterwinter 1930/31,” Die literarische Welt 24 (1931), 3–4 (BBA C 1200). See also the secondary sourcescited in note 12, as well as Sergei Tretiakov’s memoir, “Bert Brecht” (1937), in Brecht: ACollection of Critical Essays, ed. Peter Demetz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962),16–29.

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But Herr Bertolt Brecht goes on to proveThat you can make as much of a man as you want.This evening you’ll see a man reassembled like a car,Without his losing anything by it.The man is humanly approached;He will be asked calmly, but with force,To adapt himself to the world and its waysAnd let his private fish go for a swim.Herr Bertolt Brecht hopes you will see the ground on which you standMelt beneath your feet like snowAnd that the case of the packer Galy Gay will make you awareThat life on this earth is a dangerous affair.]18

“The reassembling [Ummontierung] Brecht speaks of here—we havealready heard him proclaim it as a literary form,” observes Benjamin.“For Brecht, what is written is not a work but an apparatus, aninstrument. The higher it stands the more capable it is of reshaping,dismantling, and transforming” [Umformung, Demontierung und Ver-wandlung] (SW 369–70; GS II.2, 666).

I shall return to Benjamin’s comments on the Zwischenspruch below,but I want first to examine at some length the reassembling Brecht’stext means to introduce. The speech encapsulates two key episodes inGaly Gay’s transformation, establishing each episode in relation tothe techniques through which its goals are accomplished. As Brechtexplained in his defense of Lorre’s performance as Galy Gay, “theepic actor has to be able to show his character’s coherence despite, orrather by means of, interruptions and jumps . . . the various phases[of Galy Gay’s transformation] must be able to be clearly seen, andtherefore separated; and yet this must not be achieved mechanically”(BT 55; BFA 24, 49). The interruption and separation of episodes isenforced by the epic style of Lorre’s performance, and by theprojections described above, which transpose dramatic action intomathematical tables. That the transformation in Mann ist Mann is notachieved “mechanically” depends upon operations internal to thetext and its performance. Presented first, the technique of the mainepisode is entirely figurative, and its governing metaphor is this: a

18 Brecht, Mann ist Mann (1926), BFA 2, 123, hereafter abbreviated MM1, quoted inBenjamin, GS II. 2, 666. In modifying the translation of the Zwischenspruch as it appearsin Benjamin, “Bert Brecht,” SW 2, 369, I have consulted Brecht, Man Equals Man, trans.Gerhard Nellhaus, in Collected Plays 2, 38, translation modified, hereafter abbreviatedMEM. In my citations from MEM I have frequently modified the translation, in whichcase and additional reference to BFA appears.

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man gets reassembled [ummontiert], like a car on the production line.Galy Gay’s Ummontierung is not so much executed as induced. Histransformation is achieved by way of suggestion, the second tech-nique alluded to in the Zwischenspruch, where it is evoked in thecouplets “Dem Mann wird menschlich nähergetreten / Er wird mit Nachdruck,ohne Verdruß gebeten / Sich dem Laufe der Welt schon anzupassen / Undseinen Privatfisch schwimmen zu lassen.”

By the time Widow Begbick addresses those lines of theZwischenspruch to the audience, techniques of suggestion have beenshown several times in the play. First, Galy Gay’s aptitude for takingon new identities or occupations (in Mann ist Mann those twocategories are indistinguishable from one another) is revealed afterhe has put on a soldier’s uniform in preparation for standing in atroll-call as Jeraiah Jip, a machine-gunner who has gone missing.Repeating the words of the soldier who readies him for the drill, GalyGay demonstrates his ability to respond to his instructor’s suggestionand to imitate him by calling out his own new name, “as loudly andclearly as possible,” two times in rapid succession. To which hisinstructor responds: “it’s a pleasure to meet educated persons [gebildeteLeute] who know how to conduct themselves in any situation” (MEM18).19 Now it is worth noting that Brecht made minor but importantchanges to this exchange in the 1929–30 version. Whereas in the1926–27 text Galy Gay merely speaks the name Jeraiah Jip “politely,”in the 1929–30 script he repeats precisely what has been suggested tohim—“Jeraiah Jip! Jeraiah Jip!”—and thereby performs a miniatureversion of the army’s roll-call drill, imitating the aggressive, uprightHaltung of the machine-gunner he has been enlisted temporarily tobecome. Hence the adjective gebildet used to describe Galy Gay wouldin the first instance refer to his politeness, a sign of his being “well-bred,” but would point in the second instance to his ability to “adapthimself to the world and its ways,” a sign of his being “well-educated”or, better, “well-trained” [gut ausgebildet].

Galy Gay recognizes, repeats, and masters the saying of the soldier’sname at roll-call as an example of what Brecht calls “gestic language”

19 The relevant passage of the 1926–27 text appears in MM1, 107; the 1929–30revisions appear in Mann ist Mann (Berlin: Arcadia Verlag, 1930), 21 (BBA 2116),hereafter abbreviated MM2. The revisions in question are maintained in the 1938version, which also incorporates key changes Brecht made to the text at the time of the1931 production. See BFA 2, 185, hereafter abbreviated MM3. My thanks to FrauPfotenhauer of the Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv for her kindness in making copies of the1929–30 script and Brecht’s hand- and typewritten 1931 revisions to it accessible to me.

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[gestische Sprache]. He “pays attention to the Haltungen that are thefoundation of phrases.” He then “puts Haltungen into phrases,” suchthat “the Haltungen show through in the phrases” (BFA 18, 78–79).His repetition of “Jeraiah Jip! Jeraiah Jip!” captures the posture of thesoldier at roll-call by in effect making the emphatic “Jips!” stand erect.But the Haltung of the language of the military drill does not simplysimulate the soldier’s bodily posture (with all its connotations); itmanifests the social exchange between soldiers, an exchange thatbrings instruction and domination together in the name of training.“The realm of attitudes [Haltungen] adopted by the characterstowards one another is what we call the realm of the Gestus. Bodilyposture, tone of voice and facial expression are all determined by asocial ‘Gestus’: the characters are cursing, flattering, instructing oneanother, and so on” (BT 198; BFA 23, 89). In this essay, I followBrecht in distinguishing between Gestus and gesture by using the termGestus to indicate the embeddedness of a particular gestic element ofspeech or posture in a complex of social relations and processes.20

Hence Galy Gay’s repetition of the name Jeriah Jip represents aGrundgestus [basic Gestus] of the soldier’s Haltung: spoken at roll-call,it not only identifies a soldier, but shows a soldier showing himself byshowing a soldier identifying himself, loudly and clearly. As such, thesoldier’s self-presentation at roll-call demonstrates a key principle ofBrecht’s epic theater: “it emphasizes the general Gestus of showing[allgemeiner Gestus des Zeigens], which always accompanies that which isbeing shown” (BT 203; BFA 23, 95). The condensed repetition of thename underscores the several Gesten of the utterance; in everydayspeech, the first naming might suffice for identifying, the second forshowing, or vice-versa, but Galy Gay’s gestic speech offers both atonce, and a second time for emphasis.

Practicing the words outside the context of the military drill, GalyGay learns to speak the name Jeraiah Jip as if acquiring a habit: “allthat counts in this world is . . . to say ‘Jeraiah Jip’ the way another manwould say good evening” (MEM 21). At this point, Galy Gay hasadopted the Haltung of the soldier at roll-call by demonstrating an“ephemeral habit” [kurze Gewohnheit].21 While he has learned auto-matically to exclaim “Jeraiah Jip! Jeraiah Jip!,” he has not yet lost track

20 See Brecht, “Über gestische Musik,” BFA 22.1, 329; and Fredric Jameson Brecht andMethod (London and New York: Verso, 1998), esp. 99–118.

21 See Benjamin, diary entry of 8 June 1931, GS 6, 436, where he quotes FriedrichNietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, book 4, aphorism 295: “Ich liebe die kurzenGewohnheiten.”

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of his own name and occupation. As Benjamin invokes them inrecounting his conversation about das Wohnen with Brecht, ephem-eral habits belong to a mode of living Brecht described as antitheticalto mitahmendes Wohnen, namely “das Gastwohnen” [living as a guest].Once again we might take the language of the 1931 Brecht-Benjaminconversation as a point of departure: if, in its first manifestation, GalyGay’s adoption of the soldier’s Haltung is a matter of acquiring kurzeGewohnheiten, then he in effect occupies the machine-gunner’s posi-tion as a guest, hence in a manner opposed to that of sympatheticimitation, or what we might call Mitahmung, which Brecht andBenjamin associate with the theater audience as “a mass of hypno-tized test subjects.” Though unmotivated by sympathy, Galy Gay’sbehavior is nonetheless imitative, and it represents both a responseand a resistance to suggestion, a resistance he will soon relinquish. InMann ist Mann the conditions of possibility for unsympathetic imita-tion are best represented by the situation of the test, in this instancethe military drill.

Benjamin emphasizes the importance of Haltung in Brecht, whichhe sees as “something new, and what is new about it is that it can belearned.” Benjamin extends Brecht’s claim that his Geschichten vonHerr Keuner “represents an attempt to make gestures quotable” toinclude other works, such as Der Flug der Lindberghs and Fatzer. We arein a position to add Mann ist Mann to the list. As Benjamin says aboutBrechtian characters, “what is quotable about them is not just theirHaltung, but also the words that accompany it. These words likewiseneed to be practiced—that is to say, first noticed, later understood”(SW 366; GS II.2, 662). Galy Gay’s performance at roll-call follows thismodel wherein a Haltung is broken down into quotable gestures[zitierbare Gesten] and the words that accompany those bodily gesturesare practiced, all with the aim of making the Haltung learnable[erlernbar], in other words imitable. As with the assessment and testingof the Haltung of professions in “Karussell der Berufe,” here again themodel of erlernbare Haltung operates without regard to the content ofthe work itself (in this case, going to war).

The technique through which Galy Gay learns the Haltung of thesoldier by imitating its gestures is the technique of epic acting. In a1934 conversation with Benjamin, Brecht recounted an experimenthe conducted with Carola Neher, who had appeared in the originalproduction of Die Dreigroschenoper and other works by Brecht. Hecalled the experiment a “didactic poem on acting” [Lehrgedicht über dieSchauspielkunst], and he saw it as a “model” for training in the

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profession, a kind of Brechtian Berufsberatung. In fact Brecht “hadintended for a long time to write a number of model poems forvarious occupations, such as engineering and writing” (SW 783–84;GS 6, 524). The model of the “didactic poem on acting” has much incommon with Benjamin’s presentation of occupational testing. It isthe task of the epic actor “to show gestures that are so to speak thehabits [Sitten] and uses [Gebräuche] of the body” (BT 45; BFA 24, 65).Thus the epic actor’s training will involve instruction both in usingthe body habitually and in demonstrating the body’s habits and uses.Brecht’s experiment tests what I want to call its subject’s gestic aptitude.Where necessary, he offers remedial instruction. (The gestic aptitudeto be tested in this case is for acting, but for Brecht the testing andpedagogy of engineering, writing, and indeed any other occupationare likewise bound to be gestic.) “I have taught Carola Neher a varietyof things,” he explains. “She has not only learned to act, but, forexample, she has learned how to wash herself. Up to then, she hadwashed so as not to be dirty. That was completely beside the point. Itaught her how to wash her face. She acquired such skill in this that Iwanted to make a film of her doing it. But nothing came of it becauseI did not want to film it myself at the time, and she did not want to doit in front of anyone else” (SW 783; GS 6, 524). When, as an actor,Neher showed herself washing herself with the intention of not beingdirty, she failed to render the Gestus of washing precisely because shefocused on the goal and content of her action rather than its habitualbodily aspect and posture.

We cannot know what Neher’s skillful performance looked like, butBrecht gives us a sense of its intensity, indeed its peculiar pathos, inwhich the test subject develops (or imagines) an intimate bond withher examiner, for whom exclusively she wishes to perform her part inthe experiment. In taking up what Brecht calls “the position of thelearner” [die Stelle des Lernenden], Neher in effect puts herself in theplace of a child acquiring the basic human skill of washing. “In a quitetheatrical manner the child is taught how to behave; logical argu-ments come only later,” writes Brecht in a 1939–40 fragment on thequestion of amateur acting. “When such-and-such occurs, it hears (orsees), one must laugh. It joins in when there is laughter, withoutknowing why . . . In the same way it joins in shedding tears, not onlyweeping because the grown-ups do so but also feeling genuinesorrow. . . . These are theatrical events which form the character. Thehuman being copies gestures, miming, tones of voice [Gesten, Mimik,Tonfälle]. And weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from

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weeping. It is no different with adults. Their education never ends.Only the dead are no longer transformed by their fellow humanbeings” (BT 152; BFA 22.1, 593).22 Now it is worth noting that Brechtconcludes his discussion of theatrical education in emotion bysuggesting that if one “thinks this over, [one will] realize howimportant the theater is for the forming of character. One will seewhat it means that thousands should act to hundreds of thousands. Ashrug of the shoulders would not be an answer to the concern of somany human beings with art” (BT 152: BFA 22.1, 593). In otherwords, the model of occupational training proposed in the Lehrgedichtüber die Schauspielkunst is a model for the education of the masses, aproposal for the production and reception of art by a new humancollective. That proposal, Brecht suggests, cannot to be dismissedwith a gesture of condescension or ignorance.23

In Mann ist Mann, the second episode of suggestion—or, thesecond experiment in being transformed by one’s fellow humanbeings, and by one’s occupation—is somewhat more aggressive thanthe first. Once the machine-gunners realize that they will need Galy

22 Haas points to those aspects of Brechtian Gestus and erlernbare Haltung in hisreflections on the 1931 Mann ist Mann in “Berliner Theaterwinter 1930/31,” where hepraises Brecht’s “highly unusual direction” and notes that in that production “humanbeings speak like automatons or school children reciting a poem; they move around onstilts like automatons and wear stiff, expressionless masks . . . And it is indeed the casethat in our lived experience a human automaton reacts that way to another inmovement, in speech, in action, in everything. That’s how human beings are, saysBrecht.” Brecht’s remarks on sorrow and weeping are strongly reminiscent of a famouspassage in which William James argues that we should understand emotion as an effect,rather than a cause, of behavior: “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike,afraid because we tremble;” we do not “cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry,angry, or fearful, as the case may be” ( James, The Principles of Psychology, intro. GeorgeA. Miller [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981], 1066.) A fuller examina-tion of Brecht’s relation to American pragmatism and to behaviorist psychology liesoutside the scope of this essay. See Giles, Brecht and Critical Theory, 63–112. OnBenjamin’s related “concept of innervation as a two-way process” and its connections toJamesian psychology and behaviorism, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin andCinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999): 306–43, esp. 317–22.

23 This seems this place to note that Mann ist Mann is commonly understood as aparable of the liquidation of the individual and his re-incorporation as part of acollective. My analysis of the play is intended to inflect rather than to contradict thatunderstanding. In addition to the secondary sources and contemporary criticism citedabove, see Brecht, “Bei Durchsicht meiner ersten Stücken,” BFA 23, 244–45; PeterSloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred, foreword Andreas Huyssen(1983; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 441–42; and Hans UlrichGumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1997), 266–67, 293–302.

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Gay to take Jeraiah Jip’s place not only at roll-call but also when thearmy heads into battle, they undertake to transform him permanentlyinto a soldier. To that end they engage him in an illegal scheme to buyand sell one of the regiment’s elephants, intending thereby to makethe packer Galy Gay guilty of an act punishable by death. For hisdeath, if they can convince him that it has occurred despite his stillbeing alive, will allow Galy Gay finally, as it were, to be born as JeraiahJip. (In this sense, his birth will follow his christening, which tookplace at roll-call.) Galy Gay is eager to get in on the elephant deal,and cites his gestic aptitude as evidence of his qualifications. As amember of the Kilkoa wrestling club, he can lift great weights. Butmore importantly, he possesses the wrestler’s special way of behaving[eigenes Benehmen] in social situations: “for example, when a wrestlercomes into a room full of people, he hoists his shoulders on entering,raises his arms to shoulder height, then lets them dangle and sauntersinto the room. You can count on me in any situation” (MEM 35; MM3200).

Galy Gay has a capability Benjamin describes as advantageous toworkers in conditions of economic crisis: he is able “to fit quickly intoa new occupation” (GS II.2, 668). He is quick to grasp, and capable ofimitating, the Haltung of the occupation he must take on, firstrepresented in Mann ist Mann by the machine-gunner’s rapid-fireresponse at roll-call. That Galy Gay is “quick to grasp” the soldier’sHaltung should come as no surprise, since that aptitude is in some asense a requirement of his occupation. Galy Gay, as the text of Mann istMann tells us again and again, is a packer; Brecht’s protagonist is onlya soldier when he answers to the name Jeraiah Jip. As a packer, GalyGay is a man whose job it is to carry burdens. The play begins with himdoing just that as he takes up Widow Begbick’s basket of cucumbers,for which, in the 1931 production, he is to be “paid by the hour” (MM3177), a detail that underscores the fact that Galy Gay is performing ajob rather than an act of courtesy.24 Later, as he negotiates with thesoldiers concerning his compensation for standing in for their missingman, Galy Gay explains that his Beruf als Packer compels him to look outfor his own interests in every situation (MM3 185; MEM 18). As with theearlier mention of the hourly wage, this reference to Galy Gay’soccupation and “how it influences him” was added to the text as Brechtrevised it for the 1931 production. But Galy Gay is also a Packer in the

24 Brecht added this line as he revised the play for the 1931 production. See Mann istMann (Berlin: Arcadia, 1930), Bühnenfassung 1931, Rollenbuch Weigel (BBA 1241).

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sense that he “grasps” things, both literally and figuratively.25 He graspsthings in order to carry them, but he also grasps things by recognizingwhat situations require of him. Put in the terms in which Benjaminunderstands Brecht’s representation of erlernbare Haltung, at the roll-call drill Galy Gay notices the words ( Jeraiah Jip! Jeraiah Jip!) that gowith the exercise of standing at attention, he practices them, and onlymuch later, after his Ummontierung is complete and he is headed intobattle, does he understand them. Galy Gay’s grasping is a skill related tohis capability for unsympathetic imitation, his gestic aptitude. Take theroll-call scene discussed above. Responding instantaneously to themachine-gunner’s suggestion, Galy Gay grasps the procedures of thedrill. In bodily gestures and the gestic language that goes with them(together, the social Gestus of the military exercise), he imitates thesoldier’s Haltung of aggressive compliance.

The deal proceeds and the soldiers turn on Galy Gay. Tried andconvicted of selling an elephant that in the first place was not his to selland in the second place was not real, he denies that he is Galy Gay.Using the technique he learned and practiced at roll-call, he says thathis name instead is Jeraiah Jip. But wearing a uniform and speakingJip’s name are no longer enough; even changing his face will notsuffice. “He must be shot.” Galy Gay’s execution is as artificial as theelephant the gullible packer is convinced he has purchased and re-sold, but as a technique of suggestion it will achieve its goal: his finaltransformation [Verwandlung] into Jeraiah Jip. By way of confirmingthat their act of transforming one man into another will work, onesoldier assures another that “[Galy Gay’s] kind change of their ownaccord [verwandeln sich eigentlich ganz von selber]. Throw him into apond and two days later he’ll have webs growing between his fingers”(MEM 31; MM3 196). In other words, Galy Gay is a man susceptible tosuggestion; this they know from the roll-call drill. The trick will be toget it to stick. To that end they intensify the violence, specifically theeffects of shock and terror [Schrecken], in their technique.26

The soldiers load their weapons with blanks. They count down:One! . . . Two! . . . Galy Gay pleads for his life, explaining that he nolonger knows who he is, but he is not Galy Gay . . . Three! . . . Galy Gay

25 On the motif of Handgreiflichkeit in Benjamin, see Eva Geulen, “Zeit zur Darstellung:Walter Benjamin’s Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” MLN107 (1992), 596–97.

26 In “Nachtrag zum Falle Brecht,” Bab notes the important role that Schrecken playsin the transformation of Galy Gay (188).

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screams . . . Fire! But before they can shoot, Galy Gay faints. Thesoldiers fire anyway, so that the unconscious packer will “hear thathe’s dead” (MEM 53–54; MM3 216–17). But since he will not be dead,when he hears that he is, he will still be subject to transformation byhis fellow men; indeed hearing a fellow human being say that he isdead will be instrumental in effecting his transformation. “We havereached the end of our montage,” says one of the soldiers. “Webelieve that our man has now been reconstructed [umgebaut]” (MEM57; MM3 220–21; see figures 3 and 4).

Once he comes to, Galy Gay and his comrades assess the success ofthe Ummontierung by testing his gestures. “What am I doing now?”Galy Gay asks, and bends his arm. “Bending your arm.” “And now?”“Now you’re walking like a soldier.” “Do you walk the same way?”“Exactly the same way.” “What will you say to me when you wantsomething?” “Jip.” “Say: Jip, walk around” (MEM 59; MM3 223). Theysay walk around; he walks around—a soldier now standing erect,walking a soldier’s walk.

Figure 3. Mann ist Mann, written and directed by Bertolt Brecht, stage design byCaspar Neher. Seated figures: Widow Leokadja Begbick (Helene Weigel), Galy Gay(Peter Lorre). Staatliches Schauspielhaus, Berlin. 1931. Photograph courtesy ofBertolt-Brecht-Archiv, Berlin.

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“Observation,” Brecht writes in the Kleines Organon für das Theater,“is a major part of acting. The actor observes his fellow human beingswith all his nerves and muscle in an act of imitation [Nachahmung]which is at the same time a thought process [Denkprozeß]. For pureimitation would only bring out what had been observed; and this isnot enough” (BT 196; BFA 23, 86). In other words, pure imitation

Figure 4. Mann ist Mann, written and directed by Bertolt Brecht, stage design byCaspar Neher. Galy Gay (Peter Lorre) after his Ummontierung. StaatlichesSchauspielhaus, Berlin. 1931.

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does not represent the Gestus. It is not enough for an actor to observe(and imitate) actions, he must conceptualize the “general Gestus ofshowing” as a component of any action observed. Galy Gay, like theepic actor, “looks at people as though they were playing him theiractions, in other words as though they were advising him to give theiractions careful consideration” (BT 196; BFA 23, 86).

While travelling with them in the south of France in June 1931,Brecht mentioned to Benjamin and Carola Neher his “wish to receivefrom people little descriptions about ‘human behavior’ taken fromdirect experience,” a wish Benjamin had expressed to his audience in“Karussell der Berufe,” and one whose fulfillment could surelyprovide material for the development of Lehrgedichte for any numberof occupations. Neher, it turns out, “had been making similarexperiments of this sort for some time. Brecht was keen to encourageher in this.” The conversation, Benjamin notes, has much to say aboutthe epic theater (SW 483; GS 6, 440). In dialogue with his fellowsoldiers, Galy Gay observes them, and he also “observes himself. . . . Heobserves his own arms and legs, adducing them, testing them andperhaps finally approving them.” In the case of the actor, “self-observation . . . stops the spectator from empathetically losing himselfin the character completely” but it nonetheless allows the spectator to“empathize with the actor as being an observer.” Through thatmediated form of Mitahmung, the spectator “accordingly develops hisown Haltung of observing” (BT 92–93; BFA 22.1, 201).

Galy Gay’s behavior at once represents and provides an occasionfor exemplary gestic acting. In Peter Lorre’s appearance in the 1931production both Brecht and Benjamin saw a performance as exem-plary as Galy Gay’s own. In a long speech added to the script for thatproduction, Galy Gay is ordered, after showing his skill at walking likea soldier and taking up his place as Jeraiah Jip, to deliver (as Jip) theeulogy at Galy Gay’s funeral.

Woran erkennt der Galy Gay, daß er selberDer Galy Gay ist?Würd abgehackt sein Arm ihmUnd fänd er ihn in einem MauerlochWürd Galy Gays Aug erkennen Galy Gays Arm?Und Galy Gays Fuß ausrufen: dieser ist’s?

[By what sign does Galy Gay know himselfTo be Galy Gay?Suppose his arm was cut offAnd he found it in a chink in the wall

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Would Galy Gay’s eye know Galy Gay’s arm?And Galy Gay’s foot cry out: This is the one!?]

(MM3 224; MEM 61)

No, he thinks, a man’s eye would not know his own severed arm, norwould a foot articulate that knowledge. But that sort of recognition, theknowing of the self-same body, does not matter much; it has none ofthe importance of the observation of habits, gestures, and posture.What matters in Mann ist Mann is that “der eine ich und der andere ich /Werden gebraucht und sind also brauchbar” [the one I and the other I /Are used and accordingly usable] (MM3 224; MEM 61). And that is asituation which Galy Gay’s gestic aptitude makes possible. “The epicactor,” writes Brecht in his defense of Lorre’s performance, “lets thecharacter grow before the spectator’s eyes out of the way in which hebehaves. ‘This way of joining up,’ ‘this way of selling an elephant,’ ‘thisway of conducting the case’ [i.e., Galy Gay’s defense before he issentenced to death], do not altogether add up to a single unchange-able character but to one which changes all the time and becomesmore and more clearly defined in the course of ‘this way of changing’”(BT 56; BFA 24, 50). The Grundgestus of Mann ist Mann is the Gestus ofchanging, more precisely the Gestus of showing change, which isdemonstrated by showing Galy Gay’s transformation into a soldier as achange of occupations, itself indicated by changes in “the way in whichhe behaves,” which is to say by changes in posture and gesture.

As an interrogation of the techniques and consequences of theobservation and unsympathetic imitation through which Galy Gay hassucceeded in taking the place of Jeraiah Jip, the eulogy is not withoutpathos. But the pathos is abbreviated and interrupted by the form ofthe speech itself, which is “split into separate lines by caesuras as in apoem” (Würd abgehackt sein Arm ihm � Und fänd er ihn in einemMauerloch), and especially by Lorre’s delivery, which was “broken upgestically” (BT 54; BFA 24, 47).27 The eulogy would seem to offer anunusually, even paradoxically, poignant moment in which the spectatorcould empathize with the actor, and indeed with the character, as anobserver. Or, perhaps the pathos would derive not only from theaudience’s seeing Galy Gay’s dismissal of the self-same body as apoignant (or terrifying) gesture of observation, but from its recogni-

27 On the caesura in Brecht and Benjamin, see Rainer Nägele, Theater, Theory,Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore and London: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 142–44, 157–65.

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tion of that dismissal as a familiar one. “Here we see for the first timethat it is possible to have one’s own arm, even one’s own body, stolen,”writes Benjamin in a fragment on Mickey Mouse. Throughout thefragment, which records a 1931 discussion whose participants includedKurt Weill, the composer of several pieces of music for that year’sproduction of Mann ist Mann, Benjamin could be describing Galy Gay’spredicament. “All Mickey Mouse films are founded on the motif ofleaving home in order to learn what fear is. So the explanation for thehuge popularity of these films is not ‘mechanization,’ not their ‘formal’aspect; nor is it a ‘misunderstanding.’ It is simply the fact that thepublic recognizes its own life in them” (SW 545; GS 6, 144–45).

Brecht’s production of Mann ist Mann was hardly popular; itspotential for a mediated pathos seems not to have been realized. Yetthe correspondence between Mickey Mouse and Galy Gay remainsstrong, as does the implication that the 1931 Berlin audience mighthave recognized its own life in the packer’s. It would have done so byhaving in mind what Benjamin in 1930 called der Gedanke derLeistungsprüfung, in other words not so much mechanization itself asthe “sciences” of psychotechnics and Berufsberatung that came in itswake. For Brecht and Benjamin, it was some measure of Lorre’sachievement that his audience was outraged rather than empathetic.Yet Brecht was hardly satisfied with the outrage; scandal was not whathe meant to achieve, and for that reason he would mount his defenseof Lorre’s performance in the form of a letter to the Berliner Börsen-Courier, where he could once again explain to the public the aims ofthe epic theater.

When he faces the audience at the end of the play, Galy Gay is asoldier and perhaps now a Packer in another expanded sense: ruthlessand charismatic, he has a new capability to seize, thrill, enthrall[packen], and thereby dominate his fellow human beings, whom headdresses from the front of the stage, fully outfitted [montiert] forbattle and offering his military Haltung, along with his “countenance[which is] inscribed by the Gestus of his body,” as an image of a manspellbound by the prospect of going to war (BFA 201; see figure 4). Itfalls to the epic actor Lorre to represent the Gestus of enthrallingrather than to be so.

The final speech of the 1931 production repeats the quasi-poeticform of Galy Gay’s eulogy, in which glimpses of Gesten are interruptedby caesuras materialized in print as the end of lines. The breakspunctuate the Gesten and mean to render them quotable, but notsubject to Mitahmung:

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Und schon fühle ich in mirDen Wunsch, meine Zähne zu grabenIn den Hals des FeindsUrtrieb, den FamilienAbzukillen den ErnährerAuszuführen den blütigen AuftragEin wilder Schlächter!

[And already I feel within meThe wish to sink my teethInto the enemy’s throatAn instinct to slaughterFamilies, breadwinnersTo fulfill the taskOf the wild conqueror!]

(MM3 227; MEM 76)

Violence is represented vividly here, its gestures made observablethrough interruption (the caesura between “sink my teeth” and “intothe enemy’s throat” is exemplary). But if it makes them vivid, thebreaking up of gestures also means to make them difficult to imitate,or, at any rate, difficult to imitate without maintaining a measure ofdistance (as an effect of interruption) in relation to one’s ownactions. In Brecht, the assumption of postures—the Haltung of thesoldier as well as the Haltung of the spectator—will always bemediated, and that mediation will be figured above all as interruption.28

Two aspects of the word Haltung need to be addressed here: first, itsmilitary connotations, and second, its relation to interruption. Themilitary connotations of Haltung come to the fore thematically inMann ist Mann, where the specific Haltung Galy Gay must adopt isthat of the machine-gunner Jeraiah Jip. Indeed Haltung itself figuresin the term for the stiff-backed posture of a soldier standing atattention (Haltung annehmen).29 As with occupational Haltung forBenjamin, for Brecht, military Haltung will be evident, and testable, inGewohnheiten. In Mann ist Mann, Sergeant Charles Fairchild assertsthe importance of habit and its enforcement through military drillswhen, just before starting roll-call, he declares: “the collapse of thehuman race began when the first of these bums left a button undone.The Military Training Manual [Exezierreglement] is a book full of terror

28 Ibid., 142–44.29 Ibid., 142–52. See also Nägele, “Brechts Theater der Grausamkeit: Lehrstücke und

Stückwerke,” in Brechts Dramen, 306–08.

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[Schrecken], but it is the one thing a man can fall back on, because itstiffens the backbone” (MEM 20; MM2 23).30 In the army, habits areengendered and enforced by drills, exercises in terror that produceand maintain the soldier’s stiff backbone, a Haltung read as a sign ofcivilization. When soldiers shirk military habits, humankind begins tocollapse, and only by falling back on a training manual can thespecies regain its composure, its proper upright posture.

As with occupations in Benjamin’s “Karussell der Berufe,” in Mannist Mann a soldier’s habits determine his Haltung, a mental andphysical stance whose model pose is that of the man standing stiff-backed at attention. For William James in his chapter on “Habit” inThe Principles of Psychology (1890), a “veteran soldier” is the person bestable to attest to the power of habit because “the daily drill and theyears of discipline end by fashioning a man completely over again.”31

James offers an anecdote to underscore his point: “There is a story,which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practicaljoker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner,suddenly called out ‘Attention!’ whereupon the man instantly broughthis hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. Thedrill had been thorough, and its effects had become embodied in theman’s nervous structure.”32 Like the veteran who loses his grip on hissupper when called to attention, under the power of a soldier’ssuggestion at roll-call, Galy Gay “lets his private fish go for a swim;” heabandons his plans to purchase a flounder to carry home for dinnerand instead takes on the job of being Jeraiah Jip. The letting-go ofthings to be procured and carried signifies the letting-go of hisprofession as packer, at first a temporary letting-go but by play’s enda permanent one. The Gestus of grasping is replaced by the Gestus ofstanding at attention, the definitive aspect of the soldier’s Haltung.

For our purposes, it should be noted that the Haltung of the Germansoldier was the subject of extensive psychophysical testing, fromNathan Zuntz’s and Ernst Friedrich Schumburg’s Studien zu einerPhysiologie des Marsches, published as a 336-page volume in Berlin in

30 In MM1 and MM3 the word “Schwächen” [flaws or weaknesses] replaces the word“Schrecken.” I do not believe that the change to Schrecken in the 1929–30 version was anerror, although Brecht seems to have changed his mind about it in revising the play forrepublication in 1938. As the contemporary criticism makes clear, effects of Schreckenare crucial to the 1931 production.

31 James, The Principles of Psychology, 125.32 Ibid. ( James quotes the story from Huxley, Lessons in Elementary Physiology, lesson

XI.)

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Figure 5. Test of respiration while marching. In Nathan Zuntz and Ernst FriedrichSchumburg, Studien zu einer Physiologie des Marsches (Berlin: August Hirschwald,1901), 208. Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

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1901 (figure 5), to the tests performed by psychotechnical expertsduring and after World War I, when technologies such as cinematogra-phy were employed to evaluate a soldier’s aptitude for specific militarytasks, or a wounded veteran’s capacity to acquire new habits in order toreturn to work (figure 6). It is in the situation of the military roll-calland marching drill that Galy Gay demonstrates his gestic aptitude andwith it his capability for unsympathetic imitation. As we have seen,interruption plays an important part in Galy Gay’s demonstration of hisgestic aptitude and mimetic capability. We can best understand theimportance of interruption in Brecht, and in Mann ist Mann inparticular, through Benjamin’s 1931 reflections on Haltung.

One morning in early May 1931, while staying at Juan-les-Pins inthe south of France, not far from where Brecht was then in residenceat Le Lavandou, Benjamin set down these diary notes on Hemingway’sprose style:

The foundation of every insight into questions of style is the realization thatthere is no such thing as “saying what you think.” The fact is that speech isnot so much the expression as the making real of thought, a process thatsubjects thought to the profoundest modifications—much as walkingtoward a goal [das Gehen auf ein Ziel zu] is not just the expression of a wishto reach it, but a making real, a process that likewise subjects the wish toprofound modification. Yet the way these modifications turn out . . .depends on the writer’s training regimen [das Training des Schreibenden].The more he restricts his body to walking [aufs Gehen beschränkt] and avoidssuperfluous, uncoordinated, or slack movements, the more his gait [Gang]will itself become a criterion of the goal of his wish . . . The magic ofHemingway is his ability to make these phenomena, which normally onlythe practiced eye can discern in a rigorously and intelligently trained body,visible in his style . . . His prose presents us with the great drama of aneducation in right thinking through correct writing [das große Schauspiel derErziehung zu richtigen Gedanken durch richtiges Schreiben]. (SW 472; GS 6, 425).

That night, as he was riding a bus home from a casino in Nice, an“illuminating etymological insight” occurred to Benjamin: “The Frenchsay allure [walk, gait, bearing]; we say Haltung. Both words are derivedfrom ‘walking’ [sind aus dem ‘Gehen’ genommen]. But in order toindicate the same thing (and just how little it is the same can be seenfrom this observation), the French speak of the walking itself—allure—the Germans of its interruption—Haltung” (SW 472; GS 6,425).33

33 See Nägele’s analysis of this passage in Theater, Theory, Speculation, 142–43.

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Benjamin’s diary notes on walking, training, writing, Haltung, andinterruption precede by about a month his conversation with Brechtabout habits and modes of living. Like the conversation, the notes area condensed meditation on some of the central concerns of Mann istMann and of epic theater more generally. In “Bert Brecht,” Benjaminemphasizes that writing, for Brecht, “is not a work, but an apparatus,an instrument.” The notion of writing as an apparatus is related to thenotion of writing as training. Understood as an apparatus, writingacquires a capability [Fähigkeit] for “reshaping, dismantling, andtransforming,” a capability similar to that of Hemingway’s prose whenit operates as though shaped by a regimen of physical training andthereby subjects thought to an analogously rigorous discipline. Weshould also be reminded of Benjamin’s argument that the Haltungand speech of Brechtian characters are quotable if they are practiced[geübt]. Like the model of training in Benjamin’s reading ofHemingway, the model of practicing in his reading of Brecht givespriority not to thought but to gestic recognition and discipline: wordsand postures are first noticed, then practiced, and only later under-stood. In the remarks on Hemingway, Benjamin describes a mode ofwriting in which physical discipline (the restriction of bodily move-ment to das Gehen) not only makes itself visible in prose style, butestablishes der Gang, which we might call the Haltung of das Gehen, asa criterion of the writing’s capacity to convey meaning, a criterionthat for Benjamin is bound to modify the writer’s intentions as hegoes along. The writer will come to think correctly by writingcorrectly, and not the other way around: it is a matter not of “sayingwhat you think” but of “thinking what you say.” Hemingway’s prose isexceptional for its capacity to make the phenomena of the writer’sGang discernable to someone other than a practiced observer; itreveals to the reader the process and effects of “thinking what yousay” as though displaying to a well-trained eye the meaningfulgestures of a well-trained body. By making his prose the stage for an“education in right thinking through correct writing,” Hemingwaytransforms his audience into experts at reading, and testing, thedisciplined exercises of his writing. Finally, we might think of Heming-way’s prose as accomplishing what Brecht says novelists are bound tostrive for once they have felt the impact of technological media suchas film and radio: “Once instruments are used even the novelist whomakes no use of them is led to wish that he could do what theinstruments can: to include what they show (or could show) as part ofthat reality which constitutes his subject-matter; and above all, when

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he writes, to assume the attitude [Haltung] of somebody using aninstrument” (BT 47; BFA 21, 464). As Benjamin sees it, Hemingway’swriting offers its reader something like the psychotechnical expert’scinematographic analysis of bodily motion and work (figure 6).

When Benjamin’s thoughts return to the modalities of das Gehenlater that same day, their object is Haltung itself. As far as thinkingwhat you say is concerned, the French find the meaning of “bearing”in the word allure, where motion and speed reside, while the Germansdiscover it in Haltung, a word derived from the stopping or interrup-tion of das Gehen rather than its progress. Once again his meditationstake us to the body in the situation of the psychotechnical test, wherethe interruption of action and movement is a technique for exposingthe Haltung of a test subject as a means of assessing his fitness for aparticular occupation.

Interruption, as we have seen, is also the epic theater’s techniquefor representing Gesten and making them quotable. “The morefrequently we interrupt someone engaged in an action, the moregestures we obtain. Hence the interrupting of action is one of theprincipal concerns of epic theater.” In epic theater, that mode ofinterruption resembles techniques of photographic representationemployed in psychotechnical testing. Interruption fixes, as if cin-ematographically, the “strict, frame-like enclosure of each element ofa Haltung [i.e., each gesture]” (UB 3; GS II.2, 521).34 The frames ofthe gesture are like the frames of a strip of film, and hence they arealso like the projections that hovered behind the action in the 1931production of Mann ist Mann, which was designed by Caspar Neher.Those projections recapitulated elements of the action in telegraphicprose and, you will recall, in arithmetic. In epic theater, projectionsare gestic; they function as interruptions, and their own form ispunctuated either paratactically or mathematically. Seen that way, theprojections call to mind Benjamin’s likening of the epic actor’spresentation of quotable gestures to the setting of type for emphasis:“he must be able to space [sperren] his gestures as the compositorspaces words” (UB 11; GS II.2, 529). That metaphor in turn recallsBrecht’s assertion of the need for “footnotes” in dramatic writing, aswell as his emphasis on the writer’s desire to emulate the apparatus, apoint I have said we should understand in relation to Benjamin’sclaims about the “training regimen” of Hemingway’s prose, and

34 Ibid., 153–54. Nägele emphasizes the photographic rather than the specificallycinematographic aspect of this image.

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hence in relation to his thoughts on Haltung as the interrupted actionof a body in motion. All of which underscore the mechanical aspectsof writing, understood in terms of a text’s capacity to represent Gesten.

For Brecht and Benjamin, the mechanical aspects of writingapproximate the conditions of cinematic representation, which arethemselves strongly analogous to the situation of the psychotechnicaltest. “Neher’s projections,” writes Benjamin in the first version of“Was ist das epische Theater,” “are materialist ideas, ideas about real‘conditions’ [Zustände], and as close as they stand to the events on thestage, the trembling of their contours nonetheless reveals the farmore intimate proximity from which they were torn in order tobecome visible” (UB 7; GS II.2, 525). For Brecht’s imagined audiencein Mann ist Mann as for Benjamin’s in “Karussell der Berufe,”prominent within that intimate proximity, a proximity captured in aframe of film, were der Gedanke der Leistungsprüfung and the livedexperience of the psychotechnical test.

According to Benjamin writing in 1931, that year’s production ofMann ist Mann provided “a model of epic theater, the only one so far”(UB 3; GS II.2, 520). In that production, Galy Gay’s assumption of thesoldier’s Haltung is achieved through a primitive application oftechniques of Berufsberatung and psychotechnics. Which is to say thatin Brecht’s parable, the military drill stands in for its civilian cousin,the psychotechnical test. “Today,” writes Brecht in the program notes,“the human being, the flesh and blood human being, can only becaptured through those processes in which and through which heexists [die Prozessen, in denen er und durch die er steht]. The new schoolof drama must systematically incorporate the ‘experiment’ into itsform” (BT 446; BFA 24, 67; BBA C1488, 2). The historical imperativeof the epic theater as Brecht articulates it here determined thestructure of the 1931 version of Mann ist Mann, which “incorporatedthe ‘experiment’ into its form” in several ways. First, Brecht ap-proached the writing and the performance of the play itself experi-mentally, with an eye to technical innovation; second, the textincluded a number of new or revised episodes that were presentedthematically as experiments; and third, Brecht produced a film ofLorre’s performance that amounted to an experiment like those heintended at the time to pursue in his Lehrgedichte for various occupa-tions, for example the one used in his training of Carola Neher.Consider these remarks from Brecht’s defense of Lorre’s acting: “Avery interesting experiment, a short film we made of the perform-ance, in which we filmed the turning points of the action with

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interruptions such that the gestic emerged in the most abbreviatedway, confirms surprisingly well, how precisely Lorre, especially in thelong speeches [e.g., the eulogy cited above] reproduces the mimicmeaning underlying every (silent) sentence” (BT 55; BFA 24, 49).The successful reproduction of the “mimic meaning underlying every(silent) sentence” is the (silent film actors’) successful representationof the Gestus, captured precisely at the moment when the flow ofwords is interrupted by a caesura.

Considering the reception of the production as a whole in hisdefense of Lorre, Brecht reflects that “perhaps the incidents por-trayed by the epic actor need to be familiar ones, in which casehistorical incidents [geschichtliche Vorgänge] would be the most imme-diately suitable” (BT 56; BFA 24, 51). In fact he had intended theUmmontierung of Galy Gay to be recognized as “an historic event”[ein historisches Ereignis]. The historicity of the Ummontierung, itselfthe definitive event of the play both formally and thematically,consists in part in its relation to the psychotechnical test. In the1931 production of Mann ist Mann, the Zwischenspruch discussedabove was presented as a Vorspruch [prelude] to frame the entirework. As a Vorspruch, still spoken by Widow Begbick standing next toa portrait of Brecht at the front of the stage, the speech insisted thatMann ist Mann be understood from beginning to end in terms oftechniques of suggestion and Ummontierung, the techniques thateffect the transformation of Galy Gay’s posture and gesture andthereby thematize the operations of epic theater.

To take the place of Widow Begbick’s speech as a Zwischenspruch,Brecht prepared the following text, which was delivered by one of thesoldiers while facing the audience, behind him a painted portrait ofGaly Gay in his original guise as a packer (this portrait of Galy Gay isa pendant to the one of Jeraiah Jip visible in figure 3). Inserted tointroduce Galy Gay’s final transformation, the speech specificallydescribes that transformation as “an historic event.” “For what ishappening here? Personality itself is being put under the microscope. . . Technology intervenes. At the lathe or the conveyor belt greatmen and little men are the same, even in stature” [Denn was geschiehthier? Die Persönlichkeit wird unter die Lupe genommen . . . Die Technik greiftein. Am Schraubstock und am laufenden Band ist der große Mensch und derkleine Mensch, schon der Statur nach betrachtet, gleich] (MEM 41–42; MM3206).

The historic event thus described is an experiment like oneconducted by Georg Schlesinger at the Institut für Psychotechnik,

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where the test aimed to produce likeness of stature by isolating, in theframes of a strip of film, differences in gesture (figure 6). Benjaminrecognized the experiments of Brecht’s epic theater as transpositionsof the operations of the test. “At the center of his experiment standsthe human being. Present-day man; a reduced man therefore, madecold in a cold environment. But since this is the only one we have, itis in our interest to know him. He is subjected to tests, examinations.What emerges is this: events are alterable not at their climaxes, not byvirtue and resolution, but only in their strictly habitual course, byreason and practice. To construct from the smallest elements ofbehavior [i.e., Gesten] what in Aristotelian dramaturgy is called‘action’ [‘handeln’] is the purpose of epic theater ” (SW 779; GS II.2,698–99). And in the section headed “The Actor” in the secondversion of “Was ist das epische Theater” (1939), he invokes cinemato-graphic representation, specifically a strip of film like the one seen inSchlesinger’s representation of the psychotechnical test, as a point ofreference for the arrangement of theatrical scenes: “Epic theaterproceeds by fits and starts, in a manner comparable to the film strip.Its basic form is that of the shock [Chock], with which the individual,well-separated situations come into contact with one another” [UB21; GS II.2, 537].

In a 1931 fragment that seems to be a first draft of “What Is EpicTheater,” Benjamin writes that Brecht’s theater obtains its Gesten“from reality, and indeed—this is an important observation concern-ing the nature of epic theater—only from present-day reality . . .Hence the raw material of epic theater is exclusively the Gestusobtainable today, the Gestus of an action [Handlung] or of theimitation of an action” (GS II.3, 1381). The performance of anexperimental test subject represents nothing so much as the imitationof an action, in the case of psychotechnics and Berufsberatung, anaction specific to an occupation. As we have seen, Brecht conceived ofthe epic actor’s training and performance as activities to be ap-proached as the psychotechnical expert would approach the testingof a job candidate. Beginning with his 1929 revisions and culminatingin his 1931 additions, Brecht reworked Mann ist Mann such that theplay’s depiction of the transformation of Galy Gay could function asan allegory of the operations of vocational aptitude and performancetests.

In “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier-barkeit,” psychotechnical testing emerges as a technological andhistorical paradigm for the production and reception of the cinema.

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“Especially since the introduction of the assembly line,” writes Ben-jamin in the essay’s first version (1935), “the work process gives riseeach day to countless examinations in the form of mechanized tests.These examinations take place secretly [Unter der Hand; literally,under the worker’s hand, within his grasp but not under his control]:whoever fails them is eliminated from the work process. But they alsotake place openly: in the Institutes for Vocational Aptitude Test-ing. . . . These tests . . . are not exhibitable to the degree one wouldwish” (GS I.2, 450). Now perhaps we should understand Brecht’s 1931Mann ist Mann as exhibiting tests, but exhibiting them inadequately,not making their “intimate proximity” sufficiently clear. The film ofLorre’s performance, offered by Brecht in his own and the actor’sdefense, would then represent an attempt to supplement the theatri-cal production with a cinematic exhibition of the test and itsconnections to the themes and techniques of the play itself. For asBenjamin goes on to argue, it is precisely in relation to the difficultyof exhibiting the mechanized experiments of vocational aptitudetesting that “the film intervenes. The film makes test performancesexhibitable insofar as it makes a test of the exhibitability of the performanceitself. The film actor performs not before an audience but before anapparatus. The film director occupies a position identical to that ofthe examiner who directs an experimental aptitude test” (GS I.2,450). In this earliest version of the artwork essay, the film actorsuccessfully responds to the test insofar as he “retains his humanity inthe face of the apparatus [camera, lights, microphones].” Alsoconfronted with an apparatus, “the great majority of city dwellers inoffices and factories are in the course of the workday expropriated oftheir humanity.” In the evening, “these same masses fill the cinemas,in order to experience how the film actor avenges them, in that hishumanity (or what appears to them as such) not only asserts itselfbefore the apparatus, but makes the apparatus serve his own tri-umph” (GS I.2, 450).

In the third version of the essay (1936), the film audience no longerseeks redemptive vengeance in the performance of an actor with whomit identifies. Instead, the situation of the test in which the actorperforms before the apparatus restricts the audience to a mode oftechnologically mediated empathy that recalls the Brechtian notion ofactor and spectator as analogously critical observers: “The perform-ance of the [film] actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. This isthe first consequence of the fact that the film actor’s performance ispresented by means of an apparatus. . . . The audience only empathizes with

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the actor in that it empathizes with the apparatus. It therefore takes up theposition [Haltung] of the apparatus: it tests.”35 A long footnote to thatpassage begins by citing a passage from Brecht’s “Der Dreigroschen-prozess” concerning the capacity of film to “provide useful insight intothe details of human actions” (I 246n10; GS I.2, 488n17; BFA 21, 465).The note then proceeds to reassert some of the first version’s strongclaims about the correspondence between cinema and psychotechnicalaptitude testing: “The expansion of the field of the testable whichmechanical equipment brings about for the actor corresponds to theextraordinary expansion of the field of the testable brought about forthe individual through economic conditions. Thus, vocational aptitudetests become constantly more important. What matters in these tests isthe segmented performance of the individual. The film shot and thevocational aptitude test are taken before a committee of experts. Thefilm director in the studio occupies a place identical with that of theexaminer who directs an experimental aptitude test” (I 246n10; GS I.2,488n17). Thus for Benjamin the director (indeed the entire film crew),and finally the audience each in turn occupy a position analogous tothat of the psychotechnical expert, a position always aligned with theHaltung of the apparatus.36

At the height of what Benjamin called the “official recognition” ofoccupational counseling—that is, in the moment to which he turnedin order to understand the test as an historic event—the following

35 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” inIlluminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken,1969), 228–29, translation modified, hereafter abbreviated I; GS I.2, 488. In mycitations from I I have frequently modified the translation, in which case an additionalreference to GS appears. On Benjamin’s concept of the audience’s testing of the filmactor, see Giles, Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory, 118–19, 127; and Miriam Hansen,“Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’”New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), 205–12.

36 In his response to Benjamin’s essay, Adorno suggested that in representing thesituation of the test as the site of the actor’s taking revenge on behalf of the audience,Benjamin had “protected [himself] by raising what [he feared] to a kind of inversetaboo.” To Adorno by contrast “certain concepts of capitalist practice, like that of thetest, seem . . . almost ontologically congealed and taboo-like in function.” Adorno goeson to recommend “nothing less than the complete liquidation of the Brechtian motifs”in the artwork essay. We should recognize the test as one of the most important amongthose motifs. (Theodor Adorno, letter to Benjamin, 18 March 1936, in Aesthetics andPolitics, afterword Fredric Jameson, trans. Harry Zohn [London: Verso, 1980], 123, 124;German original in Benjamin, GS I.3, 1003, 1004). Based upon both the date and thecontent of his letter, it is reasonable to conclude that Adorno read the second versionof “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” GS VII.1,350–84, which includes in slightly revised form the passage on the test cited above fromthe first version.

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account of a psychotechnical test employing an apparatus designed toassess “steadiness [Festigkeit] of the nerves” appeared in the BerlinerIllustrirte Zeitung, along with a photograph of a subject in the midst oftaking the test (figure 2). “The job candidate,” the article explains, “isshocked [erschreckt] with gunshots, sudden flashes of light, and thelike.” Attached to the test subject’s shaking hand, what in thephotograph looks like a modified ergograph then produces by way ofa stylus attached to a kymographic tambour a “line drawn in amanner akin to the measurement of earthquakes” which “establisheshow long it takes for the applicant’s nerves to return to a state ofcalm.” The test was designed to assess the fitness of candidates foroccupations such as “pilot, truck driver, and streetcar operator,” inwhich quick mental and physical reaction and recovery times areessential.37 Who, after seeing a test like this one illustrated in thepaper, or hearing about it on the radio, would not be given tothoughts of the “colossal laboratories of the new science of work”?

Benjamin himself meditates on a similar image in a passage thatappears in all three versions of the artwork essay. He imagines a“paradoxical montage.” The situation takes place in the film studio,but it finds its precedents in the psychotechnical laboratory, in

37 Gradenwitz, “Experimentelle Berufsauslese,” 412. “Some of these tests,” noted theauthor of “Im psychotechnischen Laboratorium,” which was published shortly afterGradenwitz’s article and discussed several of the same tests and apparatuses, “remindus of the experiments and examinations performed by psychiatrists.” Indeed themanner of testing the steadiness of the nerves in Dr. Moede’s laboratory might remindus specifically of the experimental treatment of psychogenic deafness practiced onWorld War I soldiers suffering from traumatic neuroses a few years earlier by Dr. RobertSommer, which employed a so-called “Apparatus for the Representation of the ShockReaction.” The military psychiatrist shocked his psychogenically deaf war neuroticpatient by suddenly ringing a bell loudly behind his back. The patient, with his handattached to the apparatus, reacted to the startling noise with a shudder. With thatautomatic movement of his hand, the patient showed that he was capable of hearing,and produced graphic evidence to that effect. (See Brigid Doherty, “‘See: We are allneurasthenics!’ or, The Trauma of Dada Montage,” Critical Inquiry 24 [Autumn 1997],121–27.) Dr. Moede’s test proceeds along the same lines as Dr. Sommer’s experimentaltreatment. The test subject in each case gets shocked, and the apparatus in each caserepresents that shock graphically. Where the so-called “shock curve” produced by thewar neurotic is employed as a prop in his psychiatric treatment, the one generated bythe job candidate is analyzed as evidence of his mental and physical aptitude for aparticular occupation. A man who as a war neurotic in 1916 had been treated with Dr.Sommer’s apparatus could then as a job applicant in 1919 have been tested with Dr.Moede’s. In reviewing the 1931 production of Mann ist Mann, several critics describedGaly Gay as a “neurasthenic,” and, as noted above, the critic Julius Bab emphasized therole that Schrecken played in his transformation. (See Sb bba 1720; and B.W., review of7 February 1931 [source unknown], in Rühle, Theater für die Republik, 1072.)

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Brecht’s didactic experiments, and in Galy Gay’s Ummontierung. In theend, this paradoxical montage demonstrates the effects of the test onthe production as well as the reception of the work of art. Indeed forBenjamin, the image represents the fundamental transformation ofthe work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. Theparadoxical montage depends upon an experiment in aggressivesuggestion to produce, in the form of a spontaneous shock reaction,an actor’s unconscious gestic imitation of the startle response that adirector wishes to incorporate into a film. Techniques of Schreckenfamiliar from the military drill and the psychotechnical test nowshape the cinematic work of art.

Understood as a component of the apparatus of film production, apsychotechnical shock experiment generates the film actor’s techno-logically mediated mimesis. At the same time, the experiment pro-vides a model for a new relation to the work of art on the part of themasses, who would assume the Haltung of the cinematic apparatus,which performs optical tests, and of the director of the experiment,who performs psychotechnical ones. Under those conditions, themasses would be transformed from an audience of hypnotized testsubjects into a collective of experts. The experiment goes like this.“An actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. Perhapsthe actor’s startle reaction does not come off as desired. Then thedirector can resort to an expedient, when the actor happens to be atthe studio again he has a shot fired behind the actor’s back withoutthe actor’s having any knowledge of it in advance. The shock[Erschrecken] of the actor at this moment can be recorded and thencut [montiert] into the film. Nothing more drastically shows that arthas escaped the realm of the ‘beautiful semblance’ which for so longhad been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive” (I, 230;GS I.2, 452-53, 491; GS VII.2, 368).38

The Johns Hopkins University

38 On the motif of the shot in the artwork essay, see Geulen, “Zeit zur Darstellung,”592–93, 604. See also Hansen’s discussion of “the grounding of the mimetic faculty ininnervation” in “Walter Benjamin and Cinema,” esp. 331–43. The importance of theparadoxical montage of the film actor’s shock reaction to Benjamin’s larger argumentis especially clear in the second version of the artwork essay, where the passage issupplemented by a long footnote on Hegel’s aesthetic theory (GS VII.1, 368–69).