In Brecht's Fatzer fragment, which works through the relation between the individual and the collective, the revolution fails to gain traction on a very basic level. It collapses before it has even begun because the individuals cannot identify themselves with the greater cause, the transformation of the state. Only one of Brecht's characters, Koch, who is renamed Keuner in later drafts, recognizes that, in order to transform the state, they need a new kind of discipline and authority. Fatzer's anarchism, his alleged egoism, becomes an obstacle for the group and makes him the adversary of Keuner, whose authoritarian leadership, by contrast, turns Fatzer into a model of individual resistance. Brecht's Fatzer fragment not only stresses the notion of the individual as a political category but also as a structure of dramatic speech. Throughout the Fatzer text, this structure—” the Fatzer verse”—prevents the assignment of speech to different characters and takes on the role of the individual as that which is not to be divided. Beyond the ideological dynamics of the fragment, resistance is developed on the rhetorical level in the so-called “Fatzer verse” and its subversive function in the text. As this type of dramatic speech ultimately shows, Brecht's first dramatic response to Lenin's revolution remains much more ambivalent than the subsequent Lehrstücke and offers instead a perspective on individual resistance to the moral consequentialism of the revolution.

As I will show, resistance in the Fatzer fragment is performed not as a collective but against collectives. To make this more concrete, I will juxtapose this model of individual resistance to forms of authoritarian leadership that Brecht would have been familiar with in the late 1920s. As these ideological currents, generally known as the Conservative Revolution, also resonate with reactionary movements today, the Fatzer fragment presents us with a model case of individual resistance against false collectives.

Fatzer's Individual Resistance

In Fatzer, Brecht stages anew the conflict between the individual and the collective, which he already investigated in such earlier plays as Baal or Mann ist Mann (Man Equals Man).