Mann ist Mann

Are we all interchangeable? A comedy about combat readiness to the point of self-sacrifice.

Imagine you’re leaving the house in the morning. You just want to pop to the weekly market. To buy a fish for lunch. You’ll be back in ten minutes. But then everything changes: before sunset, you’ve made new friends, shed your old identity, joined the machine-gun unit of a military company stationed in the village under a new name, and are raiding the neighbouring country. This is what happens to the packer Galy Gay in Bertolt Brecht’s Man Equals Man. After a group of drunken soldiers lose their fourth man and because the new Sergeant Fairchild is not to be trifled with, the remaining three recruit a new one without further ado. Before the gullible Galy Gay knows it, he is gradually turned into the soldier Jeraiah Jip. And all that just because he can’t say ‘no’?

“Here tonight a human being is being reassembled like a car,” proclaims the enterprising canteen operator, Widow Begbick, at a pivotal moment in the parable. But how involuntary, how inevitable is this reassembly? First performed in 1926, the initial sketches for Mann ist Mann were already conceived under the shadow of the First World War. Brecht depicts a pre-war society characterised by authoritarianism and opportunism, which dissolves the bourgeois individual into a war-ready mass. And at the same time, he shows an individual who adapts to the point of complete self-denial and is rewarded for it with a place in the chain of command: “War has broken out. The time of disorder is over. Private wishes can therefore no longer be taken into account.”

Johan Simons, who repeatedly places at the centre people torn between conformity and resistance, is staging a text by Bertolt Brecht for the first time. With drama students from the Folkwang University of the Arts – the very generation whose future is at stake when we speak of a state of defence once again today.