Der kaukasische Kreidekreis

kaukasische Kreidekreis, Der, a play by B. Brecht with music by P. Dessau. It was written in 1943-4 after the story Der Augsburger Kreidekreis, and was first performed in Nourse Little Theatre, Northfield (Minnesota) in 1948 (German première at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin, in 1954), and published in 1954. The play incorporates an adaptation of the 13th-c. Chinese parable figuring in The Chalk Circle by Li Hsing Tao, which in 1925 was adapted by Klabund; the parable is also prefigured in Solomon's judgement (1 Kings 3:16-28). The play consists of six episodes, the first introducing the parable (the play within a play) which in turn falls into two parts: the Grusche action (episodes two to four), and the story of the judge, Azdak (episode five). The last episode brings the two together.

The play opens in post-war Russia. Two villages dispute the ownership of a valley after its liberation from German occupation. The claims of the Galinsk commune, to whom the valley previously belonged, are challenged by the Rosa Luxemburg commune, which has designed an irrigation system enabling it to turn the valley into fertile land for orchards and vineyards. It is agreed that the latter claim is the stronger one. To illustrate the transfer of the valley to the more productive and useful commune, the Sänger Arkadi Tscheidse and a group of actors stage a play depicting the age of tyranny in a distant past.

On an Easter Day a group of minor princes revolt against their rulers. Prince Arsen Kazbeki orders the execution of the powerful governor of Grusinien. His wife Natella flees, deserting her small child Michel. But her maid Grusche saves him from persecution and looks after him for two years, when the ruler of Grusinien returns to power, and Natella reappears to claim her child. As Grusche refuses to hand him over, the judge Azdak has him placed in the middle of a chalk circle from which the two women are to claim him. Natella wrests her son from Grusche, but the judge gives Grusche possession of the child: in refusing to harm the boy she has proved herself the better mother. Azdak is satisfied of her ability to make the child a useful member of the community. Her greatest sacrifice for the child was her marriage to the farmer Jussup. Azdak divorces her, enabling her to marry her love, the soldier Simon Chachava, who has returned from the war. The fifth episode reverts to the time at which the Grusche action opens, to show how Azdak, the village clerk, becomes the judge of the poor, and how he defends their rights (including his own) by the unwritten laws of his social conscience and by his wit. At the end of the play he vanishes into anonymity. While Brecht develops Grusche (against his original intentions) from a simpleminded maid into an ideal mother, Azdak becomes increasingly a ‘realist’: he is content not to sacrifice his life in an act of senseless heroism for his socialist principles. In his Materialien zum Kaukasischen Kreidekreis (1966) Brecht comments that the inner action is not a true parable (although it contained a ‘certain kind of wisdom’), thus justifying the absence of a final episode (Nachspiel) to balance the outer action of the first episode (originally the Vorspiel).