About the work
Bertolt Brecht's second drama was premiered in 1922 at the Munich Kammerspiele and won the young author the Kleist Prize. The play is set during the revolutionary days of 1918/19 in Berlin and is Brecht's only work to deal directly with the Spartacist uprising and the German November revolution. It belongs to Brecht's early, still Expressionist-influenced phase before his turn to epic theatre.
Plot
The soldier Andreas Kragler returns to Berlin after four years as a prisoner of war in Africa — right in the revolutionary days of 1918. His fiancée Anna, who believed him dead, is pregnant by the opportunistic manufacturer's son Friedrich Murk. In the streets the uprising rages. Kragler faces a choice: to join the revolutionaries in the newspaper district and fight with them, or to take Anna back and go to bed with her. He chooses the bed and calls out to the audience: "Am I to drown bleeding in the gutter so that you can be clean?" A sobered, cynical closing statement on revolution.
Cultural significance
Trommeln in der Nacht is Brecht's most controversial early work — he himself later rejected Kragler's apolitical final decision as "the worst mistake I ever made". Yet it is precisely in its ambivalence that the play reflects the historical disillusionment of the post-war generation. Volker Lösch's 2003 production at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg turned it into a parable of contemporary dropping-out; Thomas Ostermeier staged it in 2017 at the Schaubühne as a commentary on political passivity.