Stories from the Perspective of Redemption

Brecht wrote the poem “Diese Babilonische Verwirrung der Wörter” in 1926, at a time when he and Elisabeth Hauptmann were working intensively on Jae Fleischhacker in Chikago, originally titled Mortimer Fleischhacker. Material (Stoff) for the play was Frank Norris's 1903 novel The Pit, the story of the speculator Curtis Jadwin, a wheat trader (ein Weizenhändler) who succeeds in cornering the wheat market. Norris tells the story of Jadwin's ever-growing obsession with the game of speculating, a fixation that eventually causes his bankruptcy and threatens to destroy his marriage, conceived of as a refuge from the world of the Pit, the Chicago futures exchange. Norris also describes in detail the various financial maneuvers that lead to Jadwin's corner. When Brecht first turned his attention to Norris in 1924, this type of story was topical: strong fluctuation in prices of staple foods, especially bread, was the order of the day in Germany, widely attributed to the trading of commodity futures. The events at the stock exchange and the Chicago Pit were reported in the newspapers as if they were boxing matches.3 Many of these articles, which Brecht collected for his play project, are preserved in the Brecht Archive. This poem can thus be understood in the context of such narratives (and Norris employs them too): it does not announce the failure of the Fleischhacker project, as Patrick Primavesi claims in the Brecht Handbuch4—the project was in full swing in 1926—but offers a reflection on the failure of a certain form of storytelling, namely “Erzählen mit Arglist.”