Authors: Bertolt Brecht
Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (6 page)
But it is true that the point of the play had in some measure changed, and the audiences who saw it in Berlin and Munich (where he re-staged it with Giehse as Courage and a new cast), or during the Berliner Ensemble’s various tours, were very different from that in wartime Zurich. For these people had been through a European war; they did not have to be warned about it; they were actually beginning to experience the consequences, including some which Brecht had not foretold. None the less he remained convinced that his countrymen were a long way from understanding how far they had contributed to the horror, the chaos and the suffering – their own included. Doubtful whether they had learnt anything, he was convinced that it would be misleading to make Courage finish up any less short-sighted than they. In fact the surprising thing, to anyone familiar with Brecht’s restless revaluation of his own plays, is that he did not alter the text more. Perhaps the reason for this is that his chronic itch to revise could in this case be worked out on the (alas, unrealised) film version, whose making by the East German DEFA was decided as early as September 1949.
Initially the work on its script was done by Emil Hesse Burri, Brecht’s old collaborator of the mid-i92os, who had been a scriptwriter in Munich under the Nazis; and the intention was that Engel should direct it. When Engel fell out some time during 1951 he was replaced by the forty-five-year-old Wolfgang Staudte, a former Piscator trainee whose DEFA film
Die Morder sind unter uns
had been the first great postwar success. Though Brecht himself did not actually do any of the writing, he was in on the planning, and many of the changes were in line with his suggestions. The film, said his first notes for DEFA, ‘must bring out even more clearly than the play how reality punishes [Mother Courage] for her failure to learn’. The treatment was simplified to distinguish her from the ‘little people’ and show her marked urge to go forward and profit from the war; later the ‘little people’ too were criticised as ‘the worst of the lot. Why? The big shots plan it, and the little people carry it out’. Kattrin in turn was given a lover, a young miller whose vision of popular resistance to the rulers and their foreign mercenaries is echoed during the scene of her death, when the peasants in the besieged town take up improvised arms and drive out the attackers (now made Croats in order to seem more alien). This is clearly in accordance with the criticism made of the play by Wolf and others, who wanted a greater element of optimism at the end; though the old woman herself, her eyes lighting up ‘with an expression of greed and desperate hope’ as she hears the troops marching off, finishes up more incorrigible than ever. After Burri had completed this first script he and Brecht agreed to make the story relevant to the postwar occupation of Germany by stressing the contrast between the German protagonists (Eilif and Yvette were now to be Germans, like Courage and Kattrin) and their motley foreign invaders; there would be control barriers everywhere and a ‘Babylonian’ mixture of strange tongues. Evidence too would be given of persistent foreign attempts to recruit Germans (including the young miller) for continued wars. Brecht’s feelings at this point are well summed up in the poem ‘Germany 1952’ which was worked into the final script, where a group of deserters led by the young miller throw down their
weapons in an abandoned house full of bourgeois comforts and one of them sings:
O Germany, so torn in pieces
And never left alone!
The cold and dark increases
While each see to his own.
Such lovely fields you’d have
Such cities thronged and gay;
If you’d but trust yourself
All would be child’s play.
But this film was never made. The trouble seems to have been that DEFA, instead of setting out from the Brecht—Engel production and the actors associated with it, wished to make a grand international co-production with star appeal. Simone Signoret was booked as Yvette, whose part was then disproportionately inflated; the French actor Bernard Blier became the Cook. Angelika Hurwicz, the unforgettable stage Kattrin, was replaced by Sigrid Roth; difficulties were made over Helene Weigel, who had to be cast as Courage on Brecht’s insistence. In many other ways, too, Brecht’s vision and Staudte’s proved deeply incompatible. Staudte wanted to use colour, Brecht to achieve ‘daguerreotype-like’ effects in black and white; Staudte commissioned period costumes, Brecht rejected them as too operatic; Staudte’s French designer provided the heavy baronial setting seen in the surviving stills and located the camp scenes in a sandy waste, Brecht objected that the Thirty Years War didn’t take place in a desert. Staudte’s verdict was that Brecht was ‘utterly hostile to the cinema’. Shooting nevertheless began, apparently on the assumption that Brecht would feel forced to accept designs which had only been put before him at the very last moment. He did not, and as a result the whole operation had to be called off after about a fortnight’s unhappy work. It was never resumed, though plans for some kind of
Mother Courage
film continued to be discussed, this time with Engel and Burri, right up to Brecht’s death in August 1956. The film which DEFA did finally realise some four years later was made on an entirely
different basis, for it was a largely static film version, made in a studio and photographed in Cinemascope of the Berliner Ensemble stage production: a kind of Model-book in motion, preserving Brecht’s original vision with minor changes. Its directors were Brecht’s young assistants Manfred Wekwerth and Peter Palitzsch, who subsequently directed, respectively, the Berliner Ensemble itself and the Frankfurt city theatres.
* * *
It was one of Brecht’s endless inconsistencies (or ‘contradictions’) that, while believing firmly in the need for change, he established certain standard productions which other directors of his plays were expected to study before deciding their own interpretations.
Mother Courage
was a prime candidate for this treatment, thanks on the one hand to its high reputation with other theatres throughout the globe and on the other to the critical disagreements which it provoked. The ‘Mother Courage Model’ therefore consists not only of the notes which we print on pp. 277–323 but of a series of carefully-keyed photographs of the Berliner Ensemble production which exists in a published version but was originally made as a much fuller and more detailed album for loan to prospective directors. Brecht’s purpose here has often been regarded as absurdly rigid, and the Ensemble itself has been accused of putting Brecht’s works into some kind of airless museum showcase. On the one hand there have been instances of lifeless copying or resentful friction whenever the standard model was imposed; on the other it has shocked more jealously ‘original’ producers to go as far as they can in some alternative, if not actually opposite, direction. Seldom has any director done what Brecht really had in mind: that is, gone through the ‘model’ to see exactly what problems Brecht was trying to solve in each detail of his production, and how he arrived at his answers, and then gone on to think out an approach of his own based on the same understanding of the play. So the use of Model-books has proved to be a somewhat two-edged device, hindering as much as helping the assimilation of this great play, particularly by non-German theatres.
Certainly
Mother Courage
has never become securely established in the English-speaking countries, where the size of the cast and the length of the play present a more formidable initial problem than they do in the German subsidised theatres. Generally it has proved a box-office disaster, and the one production to enjoy a long run – Richard Schechner’s with the Performance Group off-Broadway – seems to have done so more because of its original treatment of the audience than by its conception and performance of the text; it became a vivid, sharply biting Courage experience, almost a happening. The odd thing is that this overall failure in the professional theatre has not impaired the play’s critical and academic reputation, nor even its attraction for amateurs, to whom of course a large cast often seems an advantage. As a result
Mother Courage
is still somehow lurking in the wings as an enormous challenge, even something of a reproach to our finest directors and actors. Why have they never been able to communicate its pessimism, its savagery and its force? A large part of the reason surely lies in the language, which in the original is unique, the invention of a major poet who chose neither to imitate seventeenth-century dialogue nor to reproduce modern everyday speech but devised his own curt, sardonic lingo, full of elisions and with few conjunctions, vividly conveying not only Courage’s own character but also the hard pressures of the war. This is established in the very first speeches, and from then on it becomes the principal dynamic force of what is otherwise a stragglingly episodic play. Those directors who have enough German to appreciate it have generally treated it as untranslatable, thereby losing their main chance of holding the audience’s attention; the sense has been communicated at the cost of Brecht’s imaginative assault on the ear. Our translation therefore sets out to tackle this key problem by using a somewhat analogous artificial diction, based this time on those north English cadences which can reflect a similarly dry, gloomily humorous approach to great events. It could have been done in other ways – by a Welsh or Irish writer perhaps, or one versed in Lallans – but so far it has not. The aim must be to find a language which will keep the play moving across
twelve years of history, a great slice of devastated Europe and, last but not least, three or four hours in the theatre.
Add this to the barriers sometimes presented by the ‘Model’, plus the widespread feeling among actors that performing Brecht demands outlandish technical methods, and there is some danger of
Mother Courage
appearing a horribly complicated play. You only have to read it to see that it is not. Even the changes which Brecht made to it are only designed to clarify and bring out more strongly what was already meant to be there; they were correctives, not major switches of direction. All this belongs in the background, to be digested and understood certainly, but not to obstruct the story of the play and the long chain of small, conflicting episodes which goes to make it up. The stage must be cleared, as Brecht cleared it in 1950 to tell German children ‘The story of Mother Courage’:
There once was a mother
Mother Courage they called her
In the Thirty Years War
She sold victuals to soldiers.
The war did not scare her
From making her cut
Her three children went with her
And so got their bit.
Her first son died a hero
The second an honest lad
A bullet found her daughter
Whose heart was too good.
In the end it has to be as simple as that.
1898 | 10 February: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht born in Augsburg. |
1917 | Autumn: Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Brecht to Munich university. |
1918 | Work on his first play, |
1919 | Brecht writing second play, |
1920 | May: death of Brecht’s mother in Augsburg. |
1921 | Brecht leaves university without a degree. Reads Rimbaud. |
1922 | A turning point in the arts. End of Utopian Expressionism; new concern with technology. Brecht’s first visit to Berlin, seeing theatres, actors, publishers and cabaret. He writes Of Poor BB’ on the return journey. Autumn: becomes a dramaturg in Munich. Premiere of |
1923 | Galloping German inflation stabilised by November currency reform. In Munich Hitler’s new National Socialist party stages unsuccessful ‘beer-cellar putsch’. |
1924 | ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ exhibition at Mannheim gives its name to the new sobriety in the arts. Brecht to Berlin as assistant in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater. |
1925 | Field-Marshal von Hindenburg becomes President. Elisabeth Hauptmann starts working with Brecht. Two seminal |
1926 | Premiere of |
1927 | After reviewing the poems and a broadcast of |
1928 | August 31: premiere of |
1929 | Start of Stalin’s policy of ‘socialism in one country’. Divorced from Marianne, Brecht now marries the actress Helene Weigel. May 1: Berlin police break up banned KPD demonstration, witnessed by Brecht. Summer: Brecht writes two didactic music-theatre pieces with Weill and Hindemith, and neglects |
1930 | Nazi election successes; end of parliamentary government. Unemployed 3 million in first quarter, about 5 million at end of the year. March: premiere of the full-scale |
1931 | German crisis intensifies. Aggressive KPD arts policy: agitprop theatre, marching songs, political photomontage. In Moscow the Comintern forms international associations of revolutionary artists, writers, musicians and theatre people. |
1932 | Premiere of Brecht’s agitational play |
1933 | January 30: Hitler becomes Chancellor with Papen as his deputy. The Prussian Academy is purged; Goering becomes Prussian premier. A month later the Reichstag is burnt down, the KPD outlawed. The Brechts instantly leave via Prague; at first homeless. Eisler is in Vienna, Weill in Paris, where he agrees to compose a ballet with song texts by Brecht: |
1934 | Spring: suppression of Socialist rising in Austria. Eisler stays with Brecht to work on |
1935 | Italy invades Ethiopia. Hitler enacts the Nuremberg Laws against the Jews. March—May: Brecht to Moscow for international theatre conference. Meets Kun and Knorin of Comintern Executive. Eisler becomes president of the International Music Bureau. At the 7th Comintern Congress Dimitrov calls for all antifascist parties to unite in Popular Fronts against Hitler and Mussolini. Autumn: Brecht with Eisler to New York for Theatre Union production of |
1936 | Soviet purges lead to arrests of many Germans in USSR, most of them Communists; among them Carola Neher and Ernst Ottwalt, friends of the Brechts. International cultural associations closed down. Official campaign against ‘Formalism’ in the arts. Mikhail Koltsov, the Soviet journalist, |
1937 | Summer: in Munich, opening of Hitler’s House of German Art. Formally, the officially approved art is closely akin to Russian ‘Socialist Realism’. In Russia Tretiakov is arrested as a Japanese spy, interned in Siberia and later shot. October: Brecht’s Spanish war play |
1938 | January: in Moscow Meyerhold’s avant-garde theatre is abolished. March: Hitler takes over Austria without resistance. It becomes part of Germany. May 21: premiere of scenes from Brecht’s |
1939 | March: Hitler takes over Prague and the rest of the Czech territories. Madrid surrenders to Franco; end of the Civil War. Eisler has emigrated to New York. April: the Brechts leave Denmark for Stockholm. Steffin follows. May: Brecht’s |
1940 | Spring: Hitler invades Norway and Denmark. In May his armies enter France through the Low Countries, taking |
1941 | April: premiere of |
1942 | Spring: Eisler arrives from New York. He and Brecht work on Fritz Lang’s film |
1943 | Spring: Brecht goes to New York for three months – first visit since 193 5 – where he stays with Berlau till May and plans a wartime |
1944 | British and Americans land in Normandy (June); Germans driven out of France by end of the year. Heavy bombing of Berlin, Hamburg and other German cities. Brecht works on |
1945 | Spring: Russians enter Vienna and Berlin. German surrender; suicide of Hitler; Allied military occupation of Germany and Austria, each divided into four Zones. Roosevelt dies; succeeded by Truman; Churchill loses elections to Attlee. June: |
1946 | Ruth Berlau taken to hospital after a violent breakdown in New York. Work with Auden on |
1947 | FBI file on Brecht reopened in May. Rehearsals begin for Los Angeles production of |
1948 | In Zurich renewed collaboration with Caspar Neher. Production of |
1949 | January: success of |
1950 | Brecht gets Austrian nationality in connection with plan to involve him in Salzburg Festival. Long drawn-out scheme for |
1951 | Selection of |
1952 | Summer: at Buckow, east of Berlin, Brecht starts planning a production of |
1953 | Spring: Stalin dies, aged 73. A ‘Stanislavsky conference’ in the East German Academy, to promote Socialist Realism in the theatre, is followed by meetings to discredit Eisler’s libretto for the |