The Decision (Die Maßnahme), frequently translated as The Measures Taken, is a Lehrstück and agitprop cantata by the twentieth-century German dramatist Bertolt Brecht.
Created in collaboration with composer Hanns Eisler and director Slatan Dudow, it consists of eight sections in prose and unrhymed, free verse, with six major songs.
A note to the text by all three collaborators describes it as an "attempt to use a didactic piece to make familiar an attitude of positive intervention.
"[1] Four agitators from Moscow return from a successful mission in China and are congratulated for their efforts by a central committee (called The Control Chorus.)
At a party house (the last before they reach the frontiers of China) they meet an enthusiastic young comrade, who offers to join them as their guide.
Should they be discovered, the authorities will attack the organization and the entire movement; not merely the lives of the four agitators and the young comrade will be put in danger.
However, once in China, the sights of injustice and oppression enrages the young comrade and he is not able to contain his passion, immediately acting to correct the wrongs he sees around him.
"[2] To save the movement, they conclude that their only solution is for the young comrade to die and be thrown in the lime pits where he will be burned and become unrecognizable.
The central committee (The Control Chorus), to whom the four agitators have been telling their story, agree with their actions and reassures them that they have made the correct decision.
They also mark the sacrifice and cost that the wider success entailed: "At the same time your report shows how much / Is needed if our world is to be altered."
The first known published English-language translation of Die Maßnahme is the inaccurate and libelous version of the cantata, titled The Rule [or Doctrine].
This version of the text was made specifically for the House Un-American Activities Committee for use when interrogating both Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler.
The text is derived from the Eisler score published by Universal Edition and was made by Elizabeth Hanunian on September 18, 1947.
Bentley also made verse translations to be sung for selected pieces from Die Maßnahme as sheet music to directly correspond to the Eisler score in The Brecht-Eisler Songbook, published by Oak Publications (New York, 1967.)
Hanns Eisler's score for Die Maßnahme calls for a tenor soloist, three speakers/actors, a mixed choir (SATB) and a small orchestra.
[4][5][6] The festival directorate (consisting of Paul Hindemith, Heinrich Burkard and Gerhard Schuenemann) asked Brecht to submit the text for inspection, concerned with its radically political subject matter.
[1][5] The performers who appeared as The Four Agitators in the premier were: A. M. Topitz (as the tenor soloist), Ernst Busch, Alexander Granach, and Helene Weigel (who took on the role of The Young Comrade.
)[5][8][9][10] Karl Rankl conducted and the Arbeiterchor of Groß-Berlin (Worker's choir of Greater Berlin) served as The Control Chorus.
[12] The opera was given its first post-war performance by a chamber orchestra – the Phoenix Ensemble and the Pro Musica Chorus, conducted by Robert Ziegler in the Union Chapel, Islington, London, on election night 1987.
39 critics attended the performance and wrote it up and the BBC requested that the entire opera be recorded and subsequently broadcast on Radio 3.
[citation needed] Heiner Müller, a postmodern dramatist from the former East Germany who ran Brecht's Berliner Ensemble for a short time, used the Lehrstück style and storytelling of The Decision as a model when writing his plays Mauser [de] (1970) and The Mission: Memory of a Revolution (1979).
[citation needed] The Decision/The Measures Taken influenced South African playwright, Maishe Maponya, when writing his play, The Hungry Earth, about labor and apartheid in 1978.
"[15] Elisabeth Hauptmann told controversial Brecht biographer John Fuegi that "she had written a substantial portion of it," but had forgotten to list herself as co-author.
"[18] In his journals, Brecht, however, relates how he had rejected explicitly that interpretation, referring the accusers to a closer scrutiny of the actual text; "[I] reject the interpretation that the subject is disciplinary murder by pointing out that it is a question of self-extinction", he writes, continuing: "I admit that the basis of my plays is Marxist and state that plays, especially with an historical content, cannot be written intelligently in any other framework.
"[19] The play was praised as inspirational by Ulrike Meinhof, one of the leaders of German left-wing terrorist organization Red Army Faction.