At Chausseestraße 125 Berlin sits the Brecht-Weigel-Museum, former home to the acting-playwriting couple Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht. A touring visit focuses mostly on the upper apartment that served as Brecht’s living and working quarters from 1953 until his death in 1956. Amidst the accumulation of books, useful oddities and useless trinkets the playwright’s bedroom stands out for its austerity, being little more than a monastic cell decked with only an uncomfortable looking single bed. If on your tour you begin to wonder where there was room for Weigel you are disabused of your cohabiting assumptions as you move to the downstairs apartment and its verdant, well stocked kitchen. She moved to this apartment after Brecht’s death, but she lived separately in an apartment on second floor when he was alive too. According to the tour guide it was Brecht’s responsibility to send a note requesting admittance before he was allowed into Weigel’s living space.
Weigel and Brecht had made a choice to live together and apart, to be partners in proximity and not a household as we would typically imagine one. Their house was not without order but the conditions of that order were a choice made between themselves, freely, though under the conditions of what it means to be a couple in bourgeois society. Breaking from the typical order in this way highlights something of the political at work in the household as an everyday unit in our society.
Under lockdown too we learn a great deal about the politics of households. The conditions of state mandated social distancing are that we pick a household and stick with it, let it be our only sanitary unit of contact and avoid the mingling of households at all costs to prevent the spread of Covid 19. This house is built not on love or trust or choosing to share a life together but the economics of living in our society. Mine is a house of six renters, five here at the moment and one living elsewhere for the lockdown. We pay rent to the same landlord, we’re friends, we already had a pattern of what we want living together to look like and now we’ll likely all get sick together if one of us gets sick. That decision is made knowing we have different levels of health, different abilities to make money to get through this period and little other choice. Would we be living through the lockdown this way if it hadn't already been chosen for us by the rental economy? Probably not.
What household was chosen for you? You might be the intergenerational family sharing a home between the most vulnerable and the most laboured with care work. You might live alone having previously spent much of your time between the houses of friends and lovers you can no longer touch. There will be those who are still living on the streets or in an unfamiliar and frightening hotel shared with everyone else who used to live on the street. Maybe you’re in Durban where your shack has just been evicted by municipal security. You might even be the health worker who has had to leave the family home because your child is severely immunocompromised, but working and being a hero is still demanded of you.
The households we live in today are detritus from the houses we were made to build before the virus. When Jenny Harries counselled that the safest thing for budding couples to do would be to ‘test the strength of their relationship’, make a choice to live together locked down indefinitely or stay apart for the duration, you might have felt a bit queasy. The government has changed its mind, we are developing herd immunity no longer, now we are social distancing and self isolating, but without mass testing. So you have to make a choice: are you a household or not? Revealed in that choice is just how viscerally political our houses are, that they fall in order from above with little room for choice from below.
These are capital’s houses, not ours. Instead we have the only choice we ever could make - to live or die together. Those who come out of self isolation to provide mutual aid, to resist illegal evictions or as legitimate but unprotected key workers escape and go to work outside the sanitary household. They take up tasks like Antigone burying her brother Polynices outside Creon’s city and its law. If it weren’t for Antigone’s disregard for the political order her brother would have rotted unjustly, without right burial and left a disgrace. How many will be left disgraced by politics as they die in this crisis? Someone has to offer them justice as a last rite.
In this Holy Week it is difficult for me not to think too of how, having entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to transform the order of that city, Christ is led out on Good Friday beyond the Roman walls to Golgotha for his execution on the cross. Government has always maintained the political city and the household in one hand and the political desert in which death is acceptable and unmourned in the other hand. Antigone and Christ both subverted this desert with their choice of justice. We can still choose justice for all those being sent to die in the desert too.
Next to Weigel and Brecht’s apartments on Chausseestraße is the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery where the two are buried next to each other, along with Hegel, Herbert Marcuse, a memorial to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and many others. Having decided how they wanted to live together, Weigel and Brecht are now beside each other in death. For us at the moment it feels as though we cannot even bury the dead as we ought. It’ll take a different politics to build our houses and cemeteries with any justice.