BRECHTEFFEKT
SIR,—I have read with interest the comments of the English critics on the occasion of the visit of the Berliner Ensemble. In their differences of opinion on the merits of Brecht's plays, they call to mind an incident from my student days in WUrttemberg. I was a member of a group which prided itself on its avant- garde attitudes: in which we were fairly catholic, as among our heroes was James Thurber, not then well known even in the United States.
Naturally the appearance in the Tubingen Schauwetterdamm of Brecht and his company was an event. I can well remember the applause that greeted the penultimate scene in which the dumb girl, who has climbed with her drum on to a roof to sound the tocsin, is shot by the soldiery. We thought that this was most moving; a view we expressed to members of the company when we met them in the bierhalle afterwards. They accepted our plaudits, and our beer, without demur.
Later in the evening, however, our group was broken into by a member of a rival student organisation, one Adelbert Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer, who had obviously been drinking, announced that the penultimate scene re- minded him of nothing so much as (and this, I fear, gave him malicious pleasure) Thurber's illustrations of Rose Ha rtwick Thorpe's Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight. We, of
course, protested; but to our astonishment members of the company congratulated Pfeiffer. Brecht, they said, had not intended the scene to be moving: pathos, he considered, was a disreputable emotion. Though they did not, like Mr. Anthony Hartley, quote Yeats in their support, they did anticipate Mr. Hartley by saying, in effect, that the characters ought to be 'the vehicles of a sensation altogether beyond individual experience.'
The now famous verfremdungseflekt was then explained to us; and Pfeiffer, whom previously we had known only as a rather insanitary zoologist (he claimed to he studying the life-cycle of the cod), became more drunk at our expense. Eventually he rose, rather un- steadily, and announced, just before departure, that what he really liked about the company was its A ufbeidenpferdenrennenseffekt. He had gone before we grasped what he meant: the term, colloquially rendered, means 'to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.'—
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