The Days of the Commune is a play by the twentieth-century German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. It dramatises the rise and fall of the Paris Commune in 1871. The play is an adaptation of the 1937 play The Defeat by the Norwegian poet and dramatist Nordahl Grieg. Brecht's collaborator Margarete Steffin translated the play into German in 1938 and Brecht began working on his adaptation in 1947. The process was driven by another Brecht collaborator, Ruth Berlau, who had introduced Brecht to Grieg in 1931.
The work forgoes the individual dramatic hero and focuses on the Paris Commune itself, a collective composite of people. The scenes shift between the different lives of people, going from the street corners of Montmartre to the Paris City Council. On this council, the enemies of the Commune, Thiers and Bismarck, engineer the collapse of the Commune.
The play details an event that is considered to be the original proletarian revolution and a major event in the socialist revolution. Karl Marx viewed the Commune - which remained the only attempt at a decidedly socialist government in the world during his lifetime - as the prelude of a classless communist society. Brecht's play develops a Leninist interpretation of the Commune.
It is one of the main sources for the first act of Luigi Nono's opera Al gran sole carico d'amore.
Famous quotes containing the words days and/or commune:
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their childrens lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Softly now the light of day
Fades upon my sight away;
Free from care, from labor free,
Lord, I would commune with Thee.”
—George Washington Doane (17991859)