The original title Spartacus refers to the historical-political context: the revolution of 1918. In the main character, the artilleryman Kragler, who returns home from the war and is abandoned by his fiancée, Brecht portrays the "false proletarian," the "fatal revolutionary who sabotaged the revolution, fighting Lenin more fiercely than the open bourgeois." Kragler, a proletarian and revolutionary driven by betrayed love, turns his back on the revolution when his beloved returns to him and reverts to being a privatizing bourgeois.