The twenty-year-old Bertolt Brecht began writing Baal in 1918 as a response to Hanns Johst’s drama Der Einsame: Ein Menschenuntergang (1917; the lonely one: a human decline), an expressionist work about the nineteenth century poet Christian Dietrich Grabbe. Brecht had seen a production of Johst’s play and discussed it in a seminar led by Arthur Kutschler at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. Brecht despised the play for its idealism—the notion that artists are different from other people—and for its sentimentality. He set out to write an antithetical play, using as his models for the protagonist the fifteenth century French poet François Villon, German expressionist balladeer and playwright Frank Wedekind, and Brecht’s own bohemian experiences.

Suggestions of the relationship between the French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud also appear in the play. Brecht’s first draft, written in 1918, closely follows the structure and episodes of Johst’s play; later drafts move away from his antimodel, de-emphasizing Johst’s influence.

As Brecht’s first mature play (he had written a short play during his school years), Baal is “indispensable reading for anyone who would understand Brecht’s development,” according to critic Ronald Speirs. The play is a heady brew of disparate influences and impulses that continued to be played out in many guises throughout Brecht’s career. The tension of the play is dialectical: Decay is linked to existence, destruction to productive energy, and Eros to Thanatos. Brecht allows no triumphant rebirth or transcendence.

The paganism implied in the protagonist’s name is not simply a reflection of a naïve and innocent longing to return to nature. Baal is the Semitic-Phoenician fertility god, associated with storms and the figure of the bull. His attraction for Brecht, no doubt, in part derives from the knowledge that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Baal is the embodiment of evil. Brecht’s character has strong associations also with philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle and with Wedekind’s neopagan, antiheroine Lulu.

Although the action of the play takes place over many years, the essential movement is seasonal, as befits its roots in a mythic paganism. The play begins in spring with an emphasis on Baal’s erotic desires. He successively seduces Emily, Johanna, and Sophie. The friendship between Ekart and Baal ripens through the summer until the autumnal harvest is signaled by Sophie’s pregnancy. The fall’s torrential rains drive Ekart and Baal from the woods into inns and taverns inhabited by worn-out social pariahs. Death marks the winter—first Baal’s enraged murder of Ekart and then Baal’s own lonely death under the starry sky.

Baal is seduced by nature, “that girl the world, who gives herself and giggles/ If you only let her crush you with her thighs,/ Shared with Baal who loved it, orgiastic wriggles,” but he suffers no spiritual or metaphysical illusions. Nature will abandon him as easily as he abandons the lovers of which he has tired. Brecht’s vision of nature incorporates a Darwinian materialism that does not deny the inevitability of death.

In the dark womb of the earth the rotting Baal did lie.Huge as ever, calm, and pallid was the sky,Young and naked and immensely marvelousAs Baal loved it when Baal lived among us.

As an amoral child of nature, Brecht’s protagonist is lusting, romping, scratching after life, gobbling it up in great mouthfuls, all the while trying to survive in a world that is consuming and mad in itself.

Baal also belongs to the satiric tradition, contemptuous of established institutions and sanctioned morality. Baal’s lust is voracious, and his teeth are sharp. When Baal insists that one must have teeth to reach love’s ecstasy, “like biting into...