Sacrifice as Political Representation in Bertolt Brecht's Lehrstücke

In pursuing the goal of a political theater, Bertolt Brecht's Lehrstücke such as Der Jasager and Der Neinsager neither efface nor exalt the individual, but provide insight into how the representational aspect of political power in the modern world is linked to the individual's aesthetic experience of sacrifice. In a move that distinguishes his idea of Einverständnis from Ernst Jünger's notion of individual sacrifice on the one hand and links it to Carl Schmitt's notion of acclamation on the other hand, these plays revolve around the individual's decision to make a self-sacrifice, an act that most clearly embodies the aesthetic component of politics at its most basic level of an affective mobilization of individual consciousness for a collective cause that goes beyond the individual.

n the period from 1929 to 1933 when Bertolt Brecht was writing his Lehrstücke and Germany's politics were becoming more and more polarized, with Nazis, Communists, and pro-Republican parties struggling to form a majority in the Reichstag through a string of elections, these different political groups did not just represent policy alternatives within a stable state but radically different visions for the very structure of the German state and its society. The fundamental nature of these debates meant that writers and intellectuals felt increasingly compelled to take a position. In a context in which Thomas Mann publicly moved toward support of the Weimar constitution and Ernst Jünger aligned himself with right-wing nationalist elements, Brecht I moved closer to the Communists by the end of the 1920s, and his Lehrstücke coincided with the period of his most public and unequivocal support for the Communist cause in the early 1930s. As the political struggle became more and more intense, each side attempted to justify its position based on its own claim to be representing an objective and universal perspective with a special claim to truth. Liberals referred to a philosophical and cultural tradition of democracy and liberalism, the Nazis justified their racial outlook with biological arguments that claimed scientific objectivity, and the Communists invoked economic laws grounded in a Marxist historical materialism. But because each side's own claim to objectivity had to confront the universalist pretensions of its opponents in an intensifying political battle, the truth claims were also supplemented on all sides with a propaganda campaign to gain supporters. Although the Nazis were ultimately the most successful with their political propaganda, the Communists very actively pursued their own campaign as well. Although John Heartfield's posters, for example, attempted to unmask Nazi ideology, their effect clearly did not just depend upon an intellectual analysis but on the visual effect of the images as well.
Brecht's Die Maßnahme is exemplary for this period in that it combines a claim about the objective truth of communist ideology with a rhetorical project that sees works of art as tools in a political struggle. His Lehrstücke in general in fact stand as key texts in a modern German tradition of aesthetic approaches to political representation beginning with the work of Heinrich von Kleist. This increasing importance of works of art for political movements was the result of a European shift from professional to citizen armies in the wake of the French Revolution. As Carl Schmitt describes, the Napoleonic wars established the importance of an engaged citizenry for the success of a military apparatus, and Carl von Clausewitz, in his attempt to combat Napoleon, went so far as to plan German partisan warfare as part of a process of mobilizing the German people against the French (Schmitt,. Kleist's works, such as Die Hermannsschlacht, Katechismus der Deutschen, and "Germania an ihre Kinder," form the aesthetic pendant to Clausewitz's efforts. In designing his plays and essays to incite a nationalist unity among the Germans, Kleist recognized that political power in a modern world dominated by citizen armies depended upon how a political movement could represent itself in such a way as to gain the most number of fervent followers prepared to sacrifice themselves in armed combat against political enemies Schmitt,. In recognizing that the process of opinion formation is essential to the success of any modern political movement, both Kleist and Brecht designed their plays partly to influence public opinion in support of a political program and partly as artistic meditations on the very aesthetic processes that mediate between political power and individual consciousness in political acts such as incitement to war, political agitation, and terrorism. But if Brecht's Lehrstücke attempt to link aesthetics with politics, there has been a long-standing disagreement about how they do this. Reiner Steinweg's compilation and analysis of Brecht's theory of the Lehrstück indicates that Brecht did not conceive of these plays as a form of propaganda to be performed for an audience, but rather as "exercises" for the Communist participants in which the goal is to promote critical thinking . Instead of functioning as a representation that tries to use aesthetic effects to convince an audience, such thinking exercises aim to establish a new type of political subject who is not just a passive spectator following the lead of authoritarian rulers but rather a thinking participant who can independently seek the truth through reflection and act accordingly. But this ambitious project of fundamentally transforming the behavior of political subjects by shifting the aesthetic event from empathetic spectatorship to thinking participation was, as we know, a failure. Not only did Brecht and German Communism fail to bring about a fundamental change in the character of politics in the Weimar period and avoid the descent into Nazism, but the audience reactions to the Lehrstücke also tended to follow the patterns of a spectator-oriented aesthetic based on empathy rather than a new critique-producing participation. As Antony Tatlow points out, the documented accounts of audience responses demonstrate that Die Maßnahme, for instance, did not in fact create a critical distance between the action and the participants. On the contrary, the actor-participants often reacted viscerally, identifying and empathizing with the heroes to then either embrace or reject the premises of their sacrifice (Tatlow 198). Similarly, the initial responses to the first version of The One Who Says Yes from students at the Karl-Marx-Schule in Berlin are dominated by an identification with and sympathy for the boy (Brecht, Der Jasager 59-63).
More recent readings of these plays have read them as a form of political representation in which theater and politics merge (Steinmayr 406), but these readings continue to divide along the two alternatives of either seeing in Brecht's Lehrstücke a model for developing critical distance in the spectator or the depiction of the subject's identification with larger political and legal structures. In the first case Brecht's plays become "lessons in political struggle" (Steinmayr 408), and in the second case they are "the attempt to make clear how the danger of fascism inheres in every political model" 1 (Müller-Schöll, "'Wichtig zu lernen vor allem ist Einverständnis'" 524). In all of these cases, however, there is an abiding critical reluctance to affirm the notion of sacrifice that Brecht develops in these plays. Steinweg and, later, Steinmayr attempt to deny the importance of sacrifice by emphasizing the critical distance the plays produce in the spectator. Tatlow and, later, Müller-Schöll both emphasize how identification and empathy are the key components in the spectator response in order to then condemn the resulting dynamic of sacrifice that the Lehrstück exemplifies.
In contrast to these readings, the following analysis will read Brecht's Lehrstücke as attempts to develop a positive notion of sacrifice that functions to affirm the importance of a community over the needs of the individual. Just as Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy focuses on the plots of Greek tragedy to designate the contradiction between human aspiration and the limits of nature as the core of the mythic tragedy (Nietzsche 1:68-69; Pan Primitive Renaissance 51-65), Brecht first establishes the inescapability of limits on the individual to then depict sacrifice as the primary mechanism for dealing with these limits in a collective way. While Wolf's discourse history of sacrifice in German literature attempts to understand it, not in "the indeterminate power of its aesthetic content" but as the core "of a poetological program" that institutionalizes discourses and practices by order of a sovereign (Wolf 16), the approach outlined here suggests that sacrifice in Brecht does indeed follow an aesthetic logic whose patterns can be traced through a theory of self-sacrifice that reveals how, in moments when individuals reach the limits of their autonomy, they might at the same time affirm their autonomy through acts that lend a metaphysical meaning to their death (Malsch 12).
While this possibility calls up the structure of the Kantian sublime in which sacrifice ultimately affirms the power of the subject by calling forth "a might of the mind to rise above certain obstacles of sensibility by means of moral principles" (Kant, Critique of Judgment 132), 2 Brecht's plays demonstrate how such moments of sacrifice also subordinate the individual to a community's goals. Brecht's meditations on sacrifice can be clearly traced in the chronology of the Lehrstücke from the early Flight of the Lindberghs, in which Lindbergh's triumph consists primarily of the willingness to risk his life to attain his goal, to The One Who Says Yes and The One Who Says No, in which the problem of sacrifice leads from a situation of cultural unity to the bifurcated path of the two different plays, and then on to plays like Die Maßnahme and The Exception and the Rule, which construct a communist group identity that Brecht explicitly opposes to a class enemy. As Müller-Schöll points out, the assent of the individual in these plays that lead to sacrifice is based at root in "the experience of the indissoluble enmeshment of the subject or the individual within a medium" ("Wichtig zu lernen vor allem ist Einverständnis" 512-13). Because the subject is defined by its dependence on language and thus a larger community that acts as the underlying ground of the subject's existence, the experience of assent is primarily one in which the subject must embrace its own limitations and assent to the power of both external necessity and a community determination.
Yet, contrary to the idea that the Lehrstücke embody individual tragedies, the point of the sacrifice is not just to evoke sympathy and compassion nor to create a provocation, but to understand the way collective goals link to individual consciousness in a mutually constitutive process. In pursuing the goal of a political theater, the Lehrstücke neither efface nor exalt the individual, but provide insight into how the representational aspect of political power in the modern world is linked to the aesthetic experience of the individual. At the center of a theory of these plays as political representations then lies the event of individual sacrifice, an act that most clearly embodies the aesthetic component of politics at its most basic level of an affective mobilization of individual consciousness for a collective cause that goes beyond the individual.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE IN THE FLIGHT OF THE LINDBERGHS
In one of the first prototypes for the Lehrstücke, published as The Flight of the Lindberghs (Der Flug der Lindberghs) in 1930 in Versuche 1-3 , the issue of sacrifice initially arises as a question of Charles Lindbergh's courage, risking his life to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Accordingly, the central action of this radio play involves Lindbergh's struggle to maintain his resolve in the face of fog, sleeplessness, snow, and wind. To the extent that the play focuses on Lindbergh's individual victory over such natural elements that would prevent his crossing of the Atlantic, The Flight of the Lindberghs repeats the conflict between materialism and idealism that motivates In the Jungle of the Cities, although here this struggle is not between two individuals but primarily an individual struggle of the solo pilot risking death against the elements (Krabiel 34).
As Mueller has described (105-06), Brecht's play also tries to present this individual conflict in such a way as to deemphasize the role of any single individual and conceive the flight as a collective achievement. The title and the text designate the pilot of the plane not as "Lindbergh" but as the plural "Lindberghs" and motivate the choice by emphasizing at one point the collective effort of the airplane workers who built Lindbergh's machine: "They worked, I / continue to work, I am not alone, we are / Eight, who are flying here" (Der Flug der Lindberghs 6). 3 Although this passage attempts to merge the efforts of the aircraft workers with those of the pilot into a collective activity through the use of rhetorical devices, this rhetoric cannot change the fact that Lindbergh's situation is a profoundly individual one. The key difference between pilot and workers becomes apparent in another passage that again tries to rhetorically merge the pilot with the workers. While facing sleep deprivation, "Lindberghs" state: "Often 24 hours without rest / my comrades in San Diego / built this machine. May I / Not be worse than they. I / must not sleep" (Der Flug der Lindberghs 9). 4 While this passage attempts to emphasize the similarity of the pilot's sleep deprivation with the efforts of the workers in the aircraft factory, the crucial elements of risk and courage are missing from the workers' achievement. Only the pilot runs the risk of sacrificing his life for the project, and the pilot is therefore still the hero of the play. The reminder about the workers' own tireless efforts cannot change this difference in the situations of workers and pilot.
Similarly, Brecht's design of the radio play as a form of pedagogy rather than a performance also cannot overcome the fixation on the individual imbedded in the situation being depicted. Insisting that this play is "not entertainment but teaching resource" (Der Flug der Lindberghs 20), 5 Brecht envisions the play, not as a traditional radio performance with a separate audience, but-as Brecht describes in a letter to Ernst Hardt suggesting a format for a July 1929 demonstration of the play at the Baden-Baden Musical Festival-a pedagogical exercise in which the parts of the different elements (fog, water, radio, sleep) are to be performed by professionals on the radio and the part of "Lindberghs" should be spoken and sung by the radio listener with the score at home (Brechts Modell 37). There is no separate audience in such a staging. Rather, "the practicer is the listener of one part of the text and the speaker of the other part" (Brecht, Der Flug der Lindberghs 20), 6 and this participation of the listener is meant to break down the barrier between active performers and passive listeners, contributing to a collective form of art. In this pedagogical situation, it is unclear, however, whether the listener-participant embodies in the staging the role of the airplane workers as co-participants in the Atlantic crossing or whether the listener-participant is supposed to identify with Lindbergh and learn individual courage. Brecht indicates the first alternative in his notes to the play in the 1930 publication, where he specifies that in the event that the play is incorrectly staged as a traditional performance with a separate audience, the "Lindberghs" part should not be played by a single person but by a chorus (Der Flug der Lindberghs 21). The chorus of Lindberghs serves as a way to prevent the listeners from identifying with a particular hero, in which case they would be separating themselves from the collective experience. The use of the chorus deflects attention from Lindbergh as an individual and toward the collective effort that leads to his achievement.
Yet in another text that Steinweg convincingly argues was at least approved if not written by Brecht , the listener's reading of the part is meant to allow the listener to identify with Lindbergh and his determination to attain his goal: "Now one could expect for the listener the cultivation that a man experiences in singing the Lindbergh part, in the identification with a tough man who fights his way to his goal" (Steinweg 9). 7 This text approves of the "identification with a tough man" that is explicitly rejected in the 1930 text, leading again to an ambiguity in the relationship between individual and collective in Brecht's ideas about the production of the play, an ambiguity that we have already seen in the text of the play as a conflict between the rhetoric and the situation of the play. Two issues are at work at the same time. First, the play is not clear on whether the audience is supposed to identify with the hero or whether it is to identify with a group that includes the workers as well as the pilot. The former option suggests an individualist conception of events while the latter option emphasizes the collective as the main agent. Second, the whole issue of identification ("Sichhineinversetzen") points to the tension between two types of audiences: one with a critical stance toward the action and another with the ability to empathize and identify with the hero or the collective. This conflict is not just an indication of the failure of the radio play (Krabiel 107-08), but provides the basis for Brecht's attempts to link individual heroism to a subordination to the collective in the act of sacrifice.
The sacrifice of the individual for a political collective is already a theme in the 1930 notes to The Flight of the Lindberghs, where Brecht indicates that the listener-participant is not being entertained, but, as Müller-Schöll points out (Das Theater 327-35), is carrying out an "exercise" that involves a "disciplining" of the individual, leading to "freedom" (Der Flug der Lindberghs 21). 8 The disciplining of the individual subordinates individual sovereignty to the demands of the collective, which Brecht in this text designates as the state that seeks to embody a homogeneous collective will.
Such exercises are useful for the individual only insofar as they are useful for the state, and they are useful only for a state that seeks to be equally useful to all. Lindbergh's flight thus does not have an aesthetic or revolutionary value that exists independently of its application, which only the state can organize. (Der Flug der Lindberghs 21) 9 While the state is supposed to be equally useful to all, the individual must also be integrated into the state. Although this mutual determination of individual and state seeks to eliminate conflict between the two, the price of this consensus turns out to be the elimination of a certain amount of dissent, which is explicitly replaced in later Lehrstücke with the idea of assent (Einverständnis). In the end the Lehrstück serves to "exercise" the individual into a kind of discipline that will involve sacrifice, this sacrifice then embodying the link between individual heroism on the one hand and the subordination of the individual to the collective on the other hand. Sacrifice is not a neutral and objective link, but has a particular structure that adheres to an ideological agenda. Brecht's Lehrstücke, in their constant attempts to stage sacrifice as an objectively rational event, affirm the centrality of sacrifice for a cultural order. But at the same time, in a development that goes beyond the limits of his Lehrstücke and Brecht's careful attempts to ground them in a rational perspective, both the sacrifice and the cultural order reveal themselves as culturally particular events that lie at the basis of political order.
Consequently, there emerges in this play both a dynamic of sacrifice that creates a merging of the individual with the collective and another process in which this individual must assert her-or himself to oppose either natural forces or other groups that are held together by an alternative ideology. The two tendencies lead to two forms of conduct for the subject, one that depends upon an authentic commitment of the individual to the group and the other that sets groups against each other and demands of individuals a heroic fearlessness when facing natural forces or ideological enemies. The conflict between these two separate demands on the individual expresses itself in the play as a contrast between the Lindberghs' collective character on the one hand and the "cool conduct" that Helmut Lethen identifies in The Flight of the Lindberghs at the point where Lindbergh arrives in Paris and seeks to hide his weakness from public view: "bring me into a dark shelter, so that no one may see my natural weakness" (Brecht, Der Flug der Lindberghs 18; Lethen, Verhaltenslehren der Kälte 53). 10 While the wish to hide one's weakness from the public indicates a distance to the collective, this moment contrasts with the passionate merging of individual with the collective in the rest of the play. The presence of both this merging and the distancing of the individual from the collective indicates a double dynamic in which the individual maintains a fervent commitment to the goals of a smaller collective (in this case Lindbergh and the workers) while at the same time keeping a heroic attitude when facing threats (whether in the form of natural forces or political enemies) to the goals of this collective.

DER JASAGER BETWEEN CARL SCHMITT AND ERNST JÜNGER
Though Lethen argues for a kind of "mixed culture" that includes both "ego strength and productive regression" (Verhaltenslehren der Kälte 140), he does not describe the specific way in which these two modes of conduct relate to each other in Brecht to provide a double structure of behavior, in which the development of a close-knit community also requires the willingness to take risks and make sacrifices when facing outside forces. This differentiated inside/outside structure of conduct becomes crucial for understanding the trajectory of the Lehrstücke toward politically motivated sacrifice and indicates the lines of distinction between Brecht's project and conservative writers such as Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt.
The comparison of their notions of sacrifice leads first to the insight that Brecht and Schmitt are in fact very similar in distinguishing between relations within a community and those between communities. As Müller-Schöll indicates, Brecht may have read Schmitt in the period in which he wrote his Lehrstücke (Müller-Schöll, Das Theater 386-90), and Brecht's idea of subordinating the individual to a collective clearly echoes Schmitt's ideas on the need for homogeneity within the modern state (Schmitt,Verfassungslehre 51;Legalität 43). This idea of homogeneity forms the community aspect for both writers, even if they are to be distinguished by the fact that Schmitt uses the nationstate to define the community while Brecht uses class. On the other hand, in developing a calculating attitude, Brecht takes over Schmitt's ideas from The Concept of the Political about a political battle of wills that determines enemy configurations in relationships between two different groups (Schmitt,. Again, while Schmitt looks at conflicts between states, Brecht, in The Exception and the Rule for instance, focuses on the class conflict between worker and boss. Finally, as Steinmayr suggests (410), Brecht undertakes a merging of theater with politics that is analogous to Schmitt's emphasis on the representational aspect of politics as well as the political import of theater (Hamlet oder Hekuba 42-46; Türk 84-87), and this merging is in fact the crucial element in Brecht's depiction of sacrifice as a politically and culturally constitutive event. If Schmitt develops the thesis in Roman Catholicism and Political Form that politics is primarily a representational event (Römischer Katholizismus 34-36, Weber 35), the Lehrstücke take up this theory to investigate how such representations function within individual consciousness. Significantly, though, this common focus on the political aspect of sacrifice separates Brecht's and Schmitt's work on the one hand from Jünger's work on the other hand.
In his insightful depiction of the similarities between the two writers, Lethen argues that both Brecht and Jünger emphasize the need to accept the consequences of modernity and embrace the violent changes that it implies (Lethen,"Ernst Jünger,. This acceptance of a kind of fateful development represents not simply a progressivist attitude that looks forward to continual progress in subduing nature and improving human existence, but rather a mythically structured acceptance of violence and limitations that derives from Nietzsche's idea of a "contradiction at the heart of the world" ("Widerspruch im Herzen der Welt") between the divine and the human, ultimately leading the individual to sacrilege and suffering (Nietzsche 1:70). Accordingly, Brecht and Jünger seize on sacrifice as the primary means of dealing with violence, and David Roberts argues that there is essentially no difference in their approaches to violence to the extent that they both turn to sacrifice as a fundamental structure of society (173).
Yet, within the context of their similarities there is a crucial difference between their particular interpretations of sacrifice. While Lethen points out that both Jünger and Brecht retreat from community bonds and toward a distanced attitude toward the world (Verhaltenslehren der Kälte 170-81, 206-10), their attitudes regarding community and the meaning of sacrifice can also be clearly distinguished. If Jünger eschews a notion of community to establish violence and sacrifice as valid purely from the point of view of individual sovereignty (Pan, "The Sovereignty of the Individual" 70-71), Brecht constructs works in which violence and sacrifice are necessary for the resolution of their conflicts through a subjugation of the individual to the community. Although Roberts criticizes this subjugation as a transformation of the individual into a "tabula rasa" (172), the way in which the individual is subordinated to the community in Brecht's plays involves a mutual determination of individual and collective rather than simply the erasure of the individual. Because Brecht does not deny the importance of violence for the formation of human culture, he indeed follows more conservative writers such as Jünger who also regard violence to be an unavoidable basis of culture and see sacrifice as the key way to structure the human relationship to violence. The difference is that Brecht links sacrifice to violence in such a way that the sacrifice is the appropriate response to the specific violence that threatens the previously defined community, not simply an affirmation of the enduring meaning of violence itself for the individual subject. Although courage and heroism are indispensable to Brecht's idea of sacrifice, the final point of sacrifice for Brecht is not for the individual to demonstrate courage in the face of violence but to affirm a particular ideological position defined by a specific group.
Brecht moves toward this approach in The One Who Says Yes and The One Who Says No in the development of the idea of Einverständnis, a concept that borrows from Schmitt's idea of acclamation as the crucial process in the establishment of the legitimacy of a political sovereign. As Schmitt notes, the process of acclamation-saying yes or no-is the fundamental mode by which a people can express its will: "The natural form of the immediate expression of the will of the people is the affirming or rejecting shout of the collected crowd, the acclamation" (Verfassungslehre 83-84). 11 This acclamation functions as the expression of a popular will that can affirm or reject the legitimacy of a particular political order. Although the simple yes or no alternative of the acclamation has been criticized as a poor substitute for public debate , Schmitt argues that this acclamation is the basis for political rule and in fact has a great deal of power. But this process only becomes clear in situations where the fundamental character of a particular culture is at stake. "In every case, however, the people can in general only say yes or no, agree or reject, and its yes or no becomes even simpler and more elementary the more it is a matter of a fundamental decision about its own collective existence" (Verfassungslehre 83-84). 12 Although the yes or no decision does not allow enough precision to determine the character of specific policies, Schmitt is here not interested in the way that such normal politics are conducted. Instead, in the context of the instability of the Weimar constitution, he is reflecting on the basic legitimacy of a political order that would allow it to survive a crisis that threatens to topple the entire constitutional framework. For Schmitt, such crises cannot be overcome through rational debate but only through the processes of public will formation that govern acclamation.
Brecht's staging of such situations demonstrates the way in which political acclamation functions as part of an aesthetic process that engages the individual in such a way as to create the basis for both political legitimacy in the "yes" and for the downfall of the old order in the "no." This interpretation of the acclamation provides the basis for the yes and no decisions staged in The One Who Says Yes. For the centrality of assent in the play does not just lie in the need for the boy in The One Who Says Yes to accept and embrace death, nor in the development of a critical as opposed to an identificatory attitude in the spectator. The possibility of saying "no" to the sacrifice means that every moment of decision and sacrifice becomes a moment of possible distance and critique. But the possibility of saying "yes" means that this moment could also be one in which the individual identifies with the goals of the sacrifice as dictated by the collective. Accordingly, when the Chorus at the beginning of The One Who Says Yes recites, "Important to learn above all is assent" ("Wichtig zu lernen vor allem ist Einverständnis"; 19), the specific importance of assent is not its meaning for the individual but for the surrounding collective. While this first sentence emphasizes the simple fact of assent, the following phrases indicate a set of complications that involve the way in which the assent establishes its collective meaning. This collective might assent to something without a real and sincere notion of the significance of this assent: "Many say yes, and yet there is no assent" ("Viele sagen ja, und doch ist da kein Einverständnis"). Many people within the collective may not be given the opportunity to express their assent or dissent: "Many are not asked" ("Viele werden nicht gefragt"). Finally, many people may assent to something that is false: "and many / Assent to that which is false" ("und viele / Sind einverstanden mit Falschem"). Although the assent will ultimately involve the individual's assent to her or his own death, the posing of these questions as issues for a collective immediately marks the individual's assent to sacrifice as part of a process of political representation involving a larger group and its political self-understanding. Rather than being an individual experience, the assent to sacrifice functions as a public event, in which the entire group's relationship to the sacrifice is established through the reception of the sacrifice as either a heroic or an unnecessary step.
The different versions of The One Who Says Yes lay out this shift in the understanding of assent from a simple assent to death to a more nuanced insistence on the specific type of cultural meaning that the assent produces. Of the three versions of the play that Peter Szondi identifies (103-05), the first version, published in 1930 as Der Jasager, contains the most direct approach to assent to the extent that the play illustrates an acceptance of death and sacrifice without a reflection upon the possible falsity of such an assent. In the play a boy assents to being killed by the others in his party because he is too sick to be able to continue a research trip into the mountains. While this version depicts in the boy the type of assent to death that is the main theme of Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis, the justification for the death-the need to follow "a great custom" ("ein großer Brauch")-was not convincing for the pupils who performed it at the Karl-Marx-Schule in Berlin in 1930 (Der Jasager 59-63).
Based on criticisms made by the schoolchildren in the discussion of the performance of this first version, Brecht then wrote two new versions of the play that he titled Der Jasager [The One Who Says Yes] and Der Neinsager [The One Who Says No] and published together in Versuche in 1931. These new versions of the play adjusted the circumstances of the boy's assent to his death to link the assent to the particular situation of the entire group. In the second version of The One Who Says Yes the situation has been altered from the first version of The One Who Says Yes so that the boy becomes sick during a journey over the mountains with a party that is seeking medicine to cure the inhabitants of their village, including his mother, of a deadly illness. When they ask whether they should abandon him to die to go on and retrieve the medicine, he says "yes" to this sacrifice for the good of the village. The situation is constructed to make the sacrifice into an act that is justified by the situation of the entire group and ultimately of the whole village. In assenting to his sacrifice, the boy is carrying out a culturally defining affirmation of the legitimacy of the reasoning of the collective that leads to it (Brecht Handbuch 1: 246).
In The One Who Says No, however, the boy says "no" to a similar sacrifice. But, crucially, the terms of the potential sacrifice in The One Who Says No have changed. Instead of going to retrieve medicine, the party in The One Who Says No is going to retrieve learned texts. In this case, the boy defies the "great custom" and says "no" to the sacrifice because the urgency is not so great and the party should bring him back to the village to recover. As a consequence, the boy does not just save his own life, but introduces a new cultural and political order into the community. In defying the custom, the boy overturns the cultural premises upon which it is based to then establish "a new custom that we must introduce immediately, namely the custom of reflecting anew in every new situation" ("einen neuen großen Brauch, den wir sofort einführen müssen, nämlich den Brauch, in jeder neuen Lage neu nachzudenken"; 49). In juxtaposing these two complementary versions of the same story in The One Who Says Yes (version 2) and The One Who Says No, Brecht establishes sacrifice as a potentially appropriate response to a real situation of a violent threat (in this instance, both the sickness and the treacherousness of the mountains) to a particular cultural goal (the survival of the village in The One Who Says Yes [version 2] or the access to learned texts in The One Who Says No). But the process of sacrifice for Brecht is not an individual's pure facing of violence but involves a culturally defining moment in which competing customs are weighed against each other and a decision is made to support one over another. The tie that Brecht establishes between the sacrifice as the affirmation of an ideal and the circumstances that threaten that specific ideal creates an intimate link between potential violence and cultural order.
Moreover, the dependence of each decision about sacrifice on the specific situation establishes a decisionist mode of dealing with the relationship between rule and individual case. The process of assent is linked to the singularity of each situation (Müller-Schöll, "Wichtig zu lernen vor allem ist Einverständnis" 519), and every moment of assent to or rejection of a particular custom becomes a moment of a decision. Every such moment of decision can potentially redefine the cultural order into the future in a way that recalls a specific understanding of Schmitt's approach to the decision, in which the acclamation is not about specific policies but about the entire constitutional basis of order (Pan,.
Here, Brecht's emphatic linking of sacrifice to a pronouncement about the legitimacy of a specific cultural order differentiates his approach to violence from Jünger's. Because the assent to sacrifice has a defining character for the cultural order, the encounter with violence is not a goal in itself for Brecht. In Jünger's account, by contrast, the goals of sacrifice are undifferentiated and inconsequential. Jünger affirms only the moment of courage as a movement within an individual consciousness and not as part of the establishment of a collective set of values. Although he focuses on how the individual attains significance as part of a Gestalt, this formal structure, even though it integrates individuals into a collective project, never can form the basis of a community with a specific tradition. Instead, the Gestalt's main characteristic is that its structure is fixed and unchanging and consequently unperturbed by the specific structure of the sacrifice. In The Worker, Jünger emphasizes: Of the highest importance however is the fact that the Gestalt is not subordinate to the elements of fire and earth and that consequently the human belongs to the form of eternity. In his Gestalt, completely separate from any simply moral judgment, any redemption, and any "striving effort," lies his inherent, unchanging, and immortal achievement, his highest existence, and his deepest confirmation. (34) 13 The individual's integration into the Gestalt does not involve any judgment about the moral appropriateness or the value of the ideal. Instead, there is only an acceptance of a fateful determination. As a consequence, even though Jünger insists on the importance of the sacrifice for integration into the Gestalt, there is a disregard for the specific ethical and situational relation to violence established in the sacrifice, making it impervious to alterations. "So it comes to pass that the human discovers in the Gestalt at once his or her determination and fate, and this discovery is what makes the human capable of sacrifice, whose most meaningful expression is attained in the sacrifice of blood" (38). 14 In Jünger's conception the key point is that the individual must accept her or his fate, and this acceptance creates the attitude that enables the sacrifice.
From the point of view of the sacrifices in Brecht's plays, the difficulty with Jünger's conception of violence is that he never considers how the reaction to violence has a specific structure that is determined by the nature of the violence on the one hand and the specific identity of the culture that reacts to the violence on the other hand. If the aesthetic reaction to violence takes the form of a sacrifice, the goal, and thus the moral meaning, of this sacrifice become very important for Brecht. Jünger, however, emphasizes the pure fact of sacrifice in courage and disregards the specific goals that are outlined in the sacrifice. But this disregarding of the goals is a disregarding of the entire system of culture and the prior tradition that create both the specific identity of the sacrificer and an appropriate response to the specific violence that threatens, establishing a model for cultural order into the future. Because he is unconcerned with the goals of sacrifice, Jünger is not primarily concerned about the sources of the violence that is unleashed in World War I and never inquires into an adequate response to the violence in terms of culturally established ethical goals. Rather, he simply affirms the necessity and the aesthetic aspect of the violence. By contrast, the structure of tradition that results from the sacrifice in The One Who Says Yes (version 2) and The One Who Says No is directly connected to an ethical judgment-imbedded in the process of assent-about the characteristics of the violence that is being combated in the specific situation. The decision that the assent embodies then has defining consequences for judgments in the future. But Jünger's refusal to subordinate the individual to a community determination does not mean that the code of conduct he envisions is devoid of an ideological goal. Even if Lethen is correct in his argument that Brecht, Jünger, and Schmitt all developed modes of social detachment that were meant to replace an Expressionist focus on community, these codes of conduct are nevertheless defined by decisions about the ideological goals of this conduct. In the case of Brecht, the goal of communist revolution defines both the merging of the individual with the community within communist ranks and the deception and ruthlessness directed against the capitalist enemy. For Jünger, the focus on the individual and its apotheosis in the eternal Gestalt of the nation leads to a conduct that emphasizes individual sovereignty and a corresponding generalized detachment from others. The case of Schmitt is more complicated because he on the one hand lays out a schema for understanding the logic of absolute enemies in which an internal homogeneity is linked to the definition of external enemies, resulting in the same inside/outside dynamic as with Brecht. Yet, Schmitt on the other hand argues for a state system of limited enemies that escapes this dynamic of the absolute enemy, leading to an alternative code of conduct that requires adherence to a European state system based on national boundaries (Schmitt,84). This code of conduct is not a retreat from values, however, but represents a commitment to nationalism as the defining value for all politics, with the consequence that Communism, for instance, becomes an absolute enemy for such a politics. In all these cases, sacrifice emerges as the specific ritual by which a particular ideological goal must establish itself in a situation of competition with competing ideologies.

SACRIFICE AS A DEFINING DECISION IN DER JASAGER
This defining character of a sacrifice leads in Brecht's case to the recourse to Japanese Noh drama, which itself developed as part of a political theology that encouraged samurai support for Japanese feudal lords. Although Szondi argues that Brecht carries out a secularizing and rationalizing process with the Japanese drama, Brecht's alterations nevertheless maintain the centrality of sacrifice and with it an interest in the specific ideals for which the sacrifice is carried out. Szondi outlines several versions of the play that can be distinguished according to the degree of their rationalizing tendency. In the original Japanese version, titled The Valley Rite and attributed to Komparu Zenchiku Ujinobu (Brecht Handbuch 243; Eubanks 361), the purpose of the journey into the mountains is a religious pilgrimage and the boy insists on accompanying the pilgrims to pray for his sick mother (Brecht Handbuch 1: 243; Brecht, Der Jasager 86). Szondi argues that Brecht's first version of The One Who Says Yes makes less sense than The Valley Rite because Brecht, while taking over the "great custom" from the Japanese play, deprives it of its mythic meaning when he turns the journey into a research trip rather than retaining its character as a pilgrimage (Szondi 109). By carrying out only a partial rationalization, Brecht both undermines the meaning of the myth and is unable to justify the sacrifice based on a rational explanation. Szondi agrees, however, that in the second version of The One Who Says Yes, Brecht provides compelling reasons for sacrificing the boy. Because turning back to bring the boy to safety would lead to continued sickness and possible death in the village, the sacrifice is no longer carried out to fulfill the dictates of the "great custom," but due to a situation of "necessity" (Brecht, Der Jasager 38).
What remains of the "great custom" in the second version is no longer the law that the sick must be hurled into the valley. Rather, the custom only dictates the need for the sacrificed victim to agree to her or his fate. "But it is proper that one asks the one who becomes sick whether one should turn around for his sake. And the custom also prescribes that the one who became sick should answer: you should not turn around" (Brecht, Der Jasager 38). 15 Szondi designates this moment as the point at which the myth is superseded by reason because the victim is given the chance to agree or disagree with the sacrifice (109). This is after all the moment in which the boy in The One Who Says No is able to prevent the sacrifice by arguing for the lack of its necessity (Brecht, Der Jasager 49). By shifting the content of the custom from the sacrifice itself to the questioning of the sacrificial victim about the appropriateness of the sacrifice, Brecht's versions establish for Szondi the parameters of a rational world in which sacrifice is to be carried out according to rational necessities rather than mythically based customs. Yet, this replacement of rational necessities for mythic customs in fact avoids the crucial point, central to both The Valley Rite and all of Brecht's versions of the play, that the sacrifice of the individual for some greater ideal is affirmed as a necessary practice in times of crisis. In accepting this basic necessity of sacrifice, Brecht also adheres to a sacrificial dynamic in which the specific terms of the sacrifice will be dictated by a particular set of values whose validity cannot be rationally determined but can only be agreed upon in the act of sacrifice itself, which in both the Noh drama and in the Brechtian versions involves an ethical decision about the appropriateness of the sacrifice for the situation. This decision about sacrifice then has a defining character for the ideals around which the group is to be organized in the future.
A closer look at The Valley Rite, for instance, shows how this play is not just about submission to an authoritative tradition but already sets up a conflict between competing notions of sacrifice. The "great custom" dictates that someone who falls ill during the pilgrimage must be hurled into the valley (The Valley Rite 324). Szondi argues that the issue is not the sickness itself but its symbolic meaning as a sign of impurity (111), and Jan Knopf goes on to claim that the boy's death atones for this impurity and makes possible the final resurrection (89). But the need for a resurrection means that there is a conflict of values in the play whose basis becomes apparent when one considers the particular reasons given for the sacrifice of the boy. In one passage in The Valley Rite this sacrifice affirms the religious principles that are part of the whole point of the pilgrimage and the dangers it represents, and the Chorus speaks the teacher's lament about succumbing to despair over the loss of his student in the sacrifice: This explanation defines the sacrifice as an affirmation of the transitory character of the world and the need to move beyond the suffering caused by human attachments such as the love between parents and children. This vision of sacrifice would de-emphasize the importance of the sick mother for affecting the boy's decisions. Yet, alongside and in conflict with this Buddhist meaning of the sacrifice, the boy is also praised for his loyalty and love for his mother. Although he is not asked to accept or reject his sacrifice, as in Brecht's version, but is merely informed of it, his response is nevertheless to accept the sacrifice and even to make an additional affirmation of his love for his mother: "I understand. I could ask for nothing better than to give up my life upon this pilgrimage / But I know how much my mother will grieve, / And this fills me with terrible sorrow" (The Valley Rite 324-35). 19 In his eyes, the only regret about the sacrifice is the pain that his death will cause her, and the meaning of the sacrifice for him is not a letting go of earthly suffering but an affirmation of his love and commitment to his mother. Consequently, one might interpret his love, insofar as it represents a commitment to earthly attachments, as part of the reason for his unsuitability for the pilgrimage, justifying the decision to hurl him into the valley.
Yet, it seems that his own devotion to his mother has enough of an ethical validity for the pilgrims that his alternative understanding of the sacrifice finally establishes itself in the play. Although the pilgrims carry out the sacrifice, they are so distraught by it that their leader wishes to be hurled into the valley as well and the pilgrims decide to use their powers to pray to bring the boy back to life. As a consequence, En the Ascetic, founder of their order, comes to them to resurrect the boy with the following explanation: "The child displayed a nature / Of peerless filial devotion, / And for that reason I forthwith / Will restore the boy to life!" (The Valley Rite 328). 20 The staging of both the sacrifice and the resurrection establishes a conflict between two understandings of sacrifice: one, in which the sufferings of the world are to be left behind in favor of an ascetic harmony and another, in which the sacrifice is a sign of love and duty for the mother. As in Brecht's decision to create two alternative versions of the play in The One Who Says Yes (version 2) and The One Who Says No, The Valley Rite struggles with the appropriateness of the sacrifice by creating an alternative ending for the play through the resurrection. This ending-which in fact was left out of the translation by Arthur Waley into English and then by the Elizabeth Hauptmann translation into German that Brecht used as a basis for his play (Brecht, Der Jasager 7-18)-can be interpreted either as a partial rejection of the Buddhist ideal or as an attempt to reconcile the two opposing ideals. In either case, the key is the appropriateness of the sacrifice and the set of values within which the sacrifice gains meaning as a determining event for the group's ideals. As Tatlow points out, it is the pilgrims "who are tested and not so much the child" (183), and the sacrifice's primary social significance lies in its functioning within the political representation of the period, in which "the feudal lords needed and received the unquestioning obedience of the samurai, to which class the Noh theatre was restricted" (203). Although Tatlow is critical of this affirmative representational character of the sacrifice, its functioning is clearly important for maintaining the stability of the political order.
In Brecht's adaptations, the basic conflict is one between adherence to a custom and the determination to make decisions according to the exigencies of a specific situation. In rejecting the dominance of custom itself as a determiner of decisions, both The One Who Says Yes (version 2) and The One Who Says No agree in establishing the judgment about sacrifice as a situationally determined one. Yet, the situational character of this judgment is already a characteristic of The Valley Rite. There is an important question in The Valley Rite about whether the boy is only tired or really sick, and this uncertainty indicates that the specific character of the boy's ailment is important for making a judgment. Further, the appropriateness of the sacrifice itself is put into question by the resurrection. If the boy is resurrected, this only takes place because there is a sense that the original sacrifice was unjustified and needed to be reversed. The resurrection is the play's attempt to make allowances for the specific situation and mitigate the consequences of the custom.
Brecht's versions of the play do not contradict the affirmation in The Valley Rite of sacrifice as a key mechanism for establishing community ideals. In establishing sacrifice as an acceptable strategy in which the individual's needs are to be subordinated to those of a larger community, Brecht repeats the affirmation of a particular set of values that is carried out in The Valley Rite. These values in Brecht's case turn out to include the same devotion to the mother that is praised in The Valley Rite, as can be seen by the way the boy in Brecht also goes on the dangerous journey out of concern for the mother. This ideal of filial piety is part of the ethical content that is affirmed by the sacrifice in both versions of The One Who Says Yes. At the same time, the three students who have decided they cannot save the boy in The One Who Says Yes (version 2) justify their decision by noting that "an entire town is waiting for the medicine that we are supposed to retrieve" ("eine ganze Stadt wartet auf die Medizin, die wir holen sollen"; Brecht, Der Jasager 37). Both Szondi and Pasche affirm this decision as rational because it makes sense that an individual would be sacrificed to save the whole village (Pasche 148-50; Szondi 109), but this rationality is not self-evident. In the first place, the boy's individual decision is not so much rational as moral in his willingness to sacrifice himself for his mother. But this morality is not itself rationally justifiable; one could easily imagine an alternative morality that would value the child's well-being above that of the mother's. From the point of view of the spectator, the rationality of the decision cannot be grounded in anything other than a kind of a mathematical calculation in which the single life of the boy is not as valuable as that of the mother or the several that might be saved with the medicine. Such a calculation is only objectively rational in the sense of a reduction to quantification. Hidden behind this quantification of morality, the sacrifice manifests a decision to affirm the ethical idea that the devotion to the mother and the village is itself an ideal for which the boy's own life may be sacrificed.
The need to make a decision refutes the idea proposed by J. P. Stern that the crucial issue in Brecht's depiction of sacrifice is compassion (41)(42). While compassion is certainly a key emotion that drives the decision making in the play, the conflict does not revolve around the presence or absence of compassion, but rather around how this compassion is to be dealt with. The sickness of the villagers and the sickness of the boy offer two competing demands on our compassion, and the play requires the members of the party to subordinate one compassion to another. This subordination, and the value system that accompanies this move, is the result of the sacrifice, which is consequently not about compassion as such, but the decision that channels compassion according to certain values.
The first value judgment is that the collective should be affirmed as more important than the individual. As Knopf notes, this is already the basic premise in the first version of The One Who Says Yes (90). The revisions leading to the second version of The One Who Says Yes and The One Who Says No take into account the circumstance that this affirmation of the collective cannot be abstract but, to be truly embraced, must include a commitment to a specific collective and its goals. In The One Who Says Yes (version 2) the particular goals include both the saving of lives in the village and the maintenance of filial piety in the son who risks his own life to demonstrate his commitment to saving his mother. The forces opposing these goals are natural, embodied by illness and the mountains, and the sacrifice of the son only takes place when the goals and the opposing forces are so arranged that the ideal can only be affirmed by means of the sacrifice. The sacrifice is consequently the link between goal and opposing forces that defines both. In this way, each sacrifice is a defining decision that enacts both a culture's goals and its understanding of the array of forces opposing these goals at a particular time and place. In The One Who Says No, the decision point results in a refusal to sacrifice for the retrieval of learned texts that in effect alters the cultural tradition and sets up a new set of values. This refusal is not a rejection of sacrifice itself, but rather is a questioning of values that leads to a transformation of the culture. While the boy declares the content of this change to consist of the introduction of "the custom, to reflect anew in every new situation," this procedure is in fact already a part of The Valley Rite. The real change is in the value system, which is no longer centered around the learned texts at any cost, but a subordination of this learning to the health and safety of the villagers. This solution begs the question of ultimate values, however, and fails to define the metaphysical goals according to which the villagers themselves will structure their lives. Significantly, Brecht understands this problem when he reinstates the dissemination of learned texts, "the teachings of the classics, the ABCs of Communism" ("die Lehre der Klassiker, das ABC des Kommunismus"), as the ideals to which the well-being of the people must be subordinated in his rewriting of The One Who Says Yes as Die Maßnahme.
The plays can only establish the importance of the content of the value system because the process of assent, like Schmitt's acclamation, includes the possibility, actualized in The One Who Says No, of dissent. By saying "yes" or "no" to sacrifice in each situation, the boy defines both a particular understanding of cultural order and with it the rules for determining the appropriateness of sacrifice for the future. In saying "yes," the boy affirms for the future the principles that justify the sacrifice. When he says "no," the boy's decision revises the tradition and initiates a new set of customs. The decision on sacrifice then determines for the future the principles that will underlie a cultural order and in turn those events and situations that would be perceived as a threat to that order and thus justify sacrifice. Within these plays, cultural order, although based on sacrifice, does not function as a fixed Gestalt like in Jünger but rather as the elaboration of sacrifice within a changing tradition, whose turning points are defined by each succeeding moment of sacrifice. Each such moment becomes a reaffirmation or a rejection of the goals of the sacrifice in a double judgment. The decision about whether the time is right for the sacrifice contains, first, a judgment about the validity of the goal itself-the particular ideal to which materiality is to be subordinated-and, second, a determination about the particular characteristics of the current situation of forces that oppose the goal that is being set forth and provide the immediate justification for the sacrifice.
In recognizing Brecht's ruthless adherence to sacrifice as a legitimate mechanism in the second version of The One Who Says Yes, Tatlow suggests that Brecht's treatment of sacrifice as political representation demonstrates difficult affinities with a Nazi political aesthetic that demands "mindless obedience to a greater unilluminated force" (186-87). But if The One Who Says Yes (version 2) is read in conjunction with The One Who Says No as Brecht intended (Brecht, Werke 3: 58), the affirmation of sacrifice does not involve mindless obedience but a consideration of sacrifice as a carefully considered decision in which dissent is always a real possibility. At the same time, Brecht's staging of dissent in The One Who Says No raises issues about the dividing effects of dissent that do indeed link Brecht's conception of political representation with a National Socialist one. Although the group at the end of The One Who Says No demonstrates solidarity with each other in walking side by side (Oesmann 151), this group must also prepare itself to face the "taunts" ("Schmähung") and "ridicule" ("Gelächter") of the villagers upon their return. Consequently, the forming of this group means that once the group accepts the boy's dissent, this group is transformed into a faction that introduces the possibility of conflict and factionalism in the village collective (Brecht, Jasager 50; Knopf 91). Although this conflict can be read as the initial political act of a communist revolution, the success of this revolution also seems to hinge upon the eradication of dissent from the new communist perspective. This possibility may be the reason why Brecht chose to concentrate on the concept of assent as a way to forestall such conflicts. Factionalism is not an issue in either version of The One Who Says Yes because the play has simplified the situation so that there is only the mother and the village, and there are no competing understandings of collective goals. But when dissent is introduced in The One Who Says No, the difficult question of the particular character of the collective arises on the horizon, although Brecht would only go on to confront this question in Die Maßnahme.
The One Who Says Yes and The One Who Says No answer the question of political representation by developing the notion of assent as an individual's decision about a sacrifice for a group. This decision on sacrifice involves both an individual's assent or dissent and an extension of this decision so that it defines the entire character of the community. By delegating such a defining decision to the boy, Brecht recognizes that political sovereignty does not just flow from the sovereign above, but hinges on the commitment to sacrifice of every individual in the collective.