Brecht’s ironic critique backfired by removing the bourgeoisie’s hypocritical mask.

Evidence

Particularly significant in this respect was the reception given Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper in pre-Hitler Germany. The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gangsters. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song in the play, “Erst kommt das Fressert, dann kommt die Moral,” was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun. The effect of the work was exactly the opposite of what Brecht had sought by it. The bourgeoisie could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy, whose popularity proved they had been right all along, so that the only political result of Brecht’s “revolution” was to encourage everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 795

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates a core Arendtian mechanism: ironic unmasking of ideology can collapse into its adoption when the target no longer feels shame — a mechanism worth carrying into Islamophobia readings about how exposure of bigotry can normalize it.
• XREF: The audience-reception failure echoes the dynamics in Home Boy about performance and identity being co-opted, and the general ‘shock the bourgeois backfires’ theme found in culture-war arguments.