Hate And Injustice In Bertolt Brecht's Play The Spy

Resentment. Hate. Injustice. These feelings and actions are what inspired Bertolt Brecht to write the play The Spy. In this play, a husband and wife are arguing about whether or not to call back the neighbors because of the rain. Their son hears them arguing and they give him money to go out and buy something to keep himself busy. In the end their child comes home with chocolate. That is the cliff notes version of this story but it goes much deeper than that. Authority figures can create environments in which equals are given power over each other which in turn, instills a sense of fear and paranoia. That is what Brecht explains in his satirical play The Spy.

Bertolt expresses his criticism towards the Germans and Hitler in many different ways throughout the play. In the play the “Man” and his wife are angry at the Nazi’s. They are angry at Hitler for taking their world and flipping it upside down. “At least in the old days you could go and meet someone.” “In the old days... All this talk of the old days gets me down.” Hitler completely changed the lives of not only the Jews but the Germans as well. This is not something we would expect. We would expect the lives of the Germans to have improved significantly but now we know the truth. The

“Man” is not just some character in a play. He is the advocate for Bertolt’s anger and resentment. Bertolt is voiceless and “The man” is his voice.
“They’ve something against everyone. Everyone’s suspect. Once the suspicion’s there, one’s suspect.” Anyone and everyone has been given power. Hitler has done this and in doing so he has created an environment where no one is safe and there is no trust. If you speak your mind then you are guilty. Guilty of having your own thoughts. Guilty of speaking up. Guilty of having a moral conscious and knowing that what is happening isn’t right. “The youth scares me stiff.” They now live in an environment where they can’t even trust their own kids. “What about that boy the Schmulkes were telling us about? They say his father’s still in a concentration camp. I wish we knew how long he was in the room.” One wrong thing said, one misunderstanding and you were off to the concentration camps to be treated like animals. One thought “out of line” and you were done for.
What right did Hitler have to do this to them?

To all of them? To the countless families and children. What right did he have to take their world and break it to shambles? They had no right. They had no reason. But still they did. Bertolt is resentful. Resentful to be German. To be associated with the name “Nazi.” To be part of a culture that took the lives of millions upon millions and even screwed with the lives of those who lived under Hitler’s reign. “Neither in the old days nor now did I wish to have my son’s imagination perverted for him.” They’ve corrupted the children. Turned them against their parents by influencing them to join “Hitler youth groups.” The words youth group and Hitler in the same sentence are pure

irony.
The “Man” asks his wife to pack him some things if worst comes to worst, which they thought would. They are ready to abandon everything after spending time paranoid on where their son might have gone and if he had told the authorities that his father would not stand for such filth in the paper and that their acts of treason between the four walls of their house were grounds for sentencing to concentration camps. His wife had borne him a Judas. A betrayer. A spy. But in the end their son had simply gone to buy chocolate. “Whatever else? Obvious, isn’t it?” Obviously he had gone out to get chocolate. Obviously he was loyal to his family. “Obviously” huh? Or so it seems.