DerFlag der Lindberghs is valueless unless learned from. It has no value as art which would justify any performance not intended for learning. It is an object of instruction and falls into two parts. The first part (songs of the elements, choruses, sounds of water and motors, etc.) is meant to help the exercise, i.e. introduce it and interrupt it which is best done by an apparatus. The other, paedagogical part (the Flier's part) is the text for the exercise: the participant listens to the one part and speaks the other. In this way a collaboration develops be-tween participant and apparatus, in which expression is more important than accuracy. The text is to be spoken and sung mechanically; a break must be made at the end of each line of verse; the part listened to is to be mechanically followed.
"In obedience to the principle that the State shall be rich and man shall be poor, that the State shall be obliged to have many possibilities and man shall be allowed to have few possibilities, where music is concerned the State shall furnish whatever needs special apparatus and special abilities; the individual, however, shall furnish an exercise. Free-roaming feelings aroused by music, special thoughts such as may be entertained when listen-ing to music, physical exhaustion such as easily arises just from listening to music, are all distractions from music. To avoid these distractions the individual shares in the music, thus obeying the principle that doing is better than feeling, by following the music with his eyes as printed, and con-tributing the parts and places reserved for him by singing them for himself or in conjunction with others (school class)."
Der Flug der Lindberghs is not intended to be of use to the present-day radio but to alter it. The increasing concentration of mechanical means and the increasingly specialized training - tendencies that should be accelerated - call for a kind of resistance by the listener, and for his mobilization and redrafting as a producer.
The employment of Der Flug der Lindberghs and the use of radio in its changed form was shown by a demonstration at the Baden Baden music festival of 1929. On the left of the platform the radio orchestra was placed with its apparatus and singers, on the right the listener, who performed the Flier's part, i.e. the paedagogical part, with a score in front of him. He read the sections to be spoken without identify-ing his own feelings with those contained in the text, pausing at the end of each line; in other words, in the spirit of an exercise. At the back of the platform stood the theory being demonstrated in this way.
This exercise is an aid to discipline, which is the basis of freedom. The individual will reach spontaneously for a means to pleasure, but not for an object of instruction that offers him neither profit nor social advantages. Such exercises only serve the individual in so far as they serve the State, and they only serve a State that wishes to serve all men equally. Thus Der
Flug der Lindberghs has no aesthetic and no revolutionary value independ-ently of its application, and only the State can organize this. Its proper application, however, makes it so 'revolutionary' that the present-day State has no interest in sponsoring such exercises.
Here is an example of the effect of this application on the text: the figure of a public hero in Der Flug der Lindberghs might be used to induce the listener at a concert to identify himself with the hero and thus cut himself off from the masses. In a concert performance (consequently a false one) at least the Flier's part must be sung by a chorus if the sense of the entire work is not to be ruined. Only concerted I - singing (I am so-and-so, I am starting forth, I am not tired, etc.) can save something of the paedagogical effect.
[From Versuche I, Berlin 1930. Signed 'Brecht, Suhrkamp'.]
NOTE: The music to Der Flug der Lindberghs was by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith. Brecht subsequently changed its title to Der Ozeanflug, as which it now figures in the reprint of the Versuche. Peter Suhrkamp, his collaborator on the notes, became his West German publisher after 1948.
The principle underlying the Lehrstück form - which began as a kind of didactic cantata, with solos, choruses and scraps of acting - was the notion that moral and political lessons could best be taught by participation in an actual performance. "When performing a Lehrstück," says a note (Schriften zum Theater 2, p.128):
you must act like pupils. The pupil will use a particularly clear manner of speaking in order to run over a difficult passage again and again so as to get at its meaning or fix it in the memory. His gestures too are clear and help towards clarification. Then there are other passages which have to be quickly and fleetingly delivered as if they were frequently practised ritual actions. These are the passages which correspond to sections of a speech conveying particular items of information needed for the understanding of the more important item that follows. Such passages are wholly useful to the overall process and must be delivered as performances. Then there are parts that demand acting ability of very much the old kind. e.g. when a typical way of behaving has to be shown. For there is a certain practical human way of behaving which may bring about situations that demand or facilitate new ways. To show the typical gestures and manners of speech of a man trying to convince somebody, one has to apply the art of acting.
The next few essays were published and almost certainly written subsequently to the switchover to 'paedagogics', even though the plays to which they relate were written earlier. They should he read in the light of the political and economic crisis which developed in Germany during the second half of 1929, making revolutionary change seem not only desirable but imminent. This was the period of Brecht's most sharply Communist works.