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Doublecross your old mother, you turd!
And sell your young wife in her bed!
You think G.O.D.'s just a word?
He'll show you as soon as you're dead.
Social Chance. Brecht begins where Lear ends: the world is a rack on which mankind is tortured. A character in one of the plays is asked to recite what is called the short catechism—"it'll get worse, it'll get worse, it'll get worse." Starting thus, Brecht might have developed a tragic sense, but he apparently balked at three basic elements of tragedy—the idea of inevitability, human guilt, and the tragic hero. In Brecht's plays, G.O.D. is indeed just a word, and Fate becomes the blind workings of social chance. Men act inhumanly toward each other but are themselves victims of their social environment. It is not human nature that shapes man, argues Brecht, but his social relationships. What shapes the social relationships, if not human nature? That question Brecht, like most determinists, could not answer. But, unlike philosophers or sociologists, he did not have to. He could merely rage —or laugh.
On man as misanthrope, Brecht vented his derisive humor, the black comedy that links his work with Ben Jonson's Volpone and Melville's The Confidence Man. But Brecht sometimes seems to be laughing to keep from crying. As with most cynics, his hard words clustered around a soft core of pity. He was plagued by the defeat of goodness in the world—one of the things Brecht naively expected of Communism was a trade unionism of the good, a method for arming goodness with power—and in the majority of his works he returns to images of goodness and vulnerability.
Intimate Enmity. The earliest work in the volume, dating from 1923, is In the Swamp (alternate title: In the Jungle of Cities), which is deliberately obscure and mystifying. Two men, Shlink and Garga, engage in a relentless but seemingly motiveless duel of wills. In typically bizarre Brechtian fashion, Shlink is a Yokohamaborn Malay who has become a lumber merchant in 1912 Chicago. Garga is a lending library clerk who refuses to sell Shlink his personal judgment of a book. Shlink decides to buy Garga's soul instead, and a peculiar campaign of mutual self-abasement develops. At first the audience is led to think that Shlink is simply a capitalist villain, but halfway through the play, in an intriguing reversal, Brecht makes clear that Shlink himself is a victim—one whose skin has been so toughened by life that he can no longer feel. In fact, he probably stages his battle with Garga only to see whether any sensation will return.
Although Brecht almost ritualistically blames environment—the jungle of the modern city—he comes close to making some general, existential points about man, strikingly anticipating Beckett and lonesco: the impossibility of communication and the paralysis of feeling. At the play's violent end, Garga and Shlink face each other with only a numbing sense of apartness to show for their fiercely intimate enmity: "If you crammed a ship full of human bodies till it burst, the loneliness inside it would be so great that they would turn to ice ... so great is our isolation that even conflict is impossible."