Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 5

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  In our view Galileo is Brecht’s greatest play, and it is worth tracing its long and involved history in order to understand why. Not just one, but three crucial moments of our recent history helped to give it its multiple relevance to our time: Hitler’s triumphs in 1938, the dropping of the first nuclear bomb in 1945, the death of Stalin in 1953. Each found Brecht writing or rewriting his play. And on each occasion the conditions of work were different: thus it was first written in his measured, stylish yet utterly down-to-earth German, then re-thought in English for Anglo-Saxon tongues and ears, then put back into German so as to combine the strengths of both. At none of these three stages was its form in any way mannered or gimmicky: sprawl as it might, particularly in the two German versions, it was outwardly a straightforward chronicle of seventeenth-century intellectual history, sticking surprisingly closely to the known facts. This was not ‘opportunist’ as Brecht at one moment termed it, even if it did represent a reaction against the conventionally realistic small-scale forms which he had used in 1937. Undoubtedly however his new approach made for accessibility, and as a result almost any competent and unpretentious production of the play will grab the audience’s attention and get the meaning across.

  What is that meaning? In fact there are several that can be read into the play, nor is this surprising when you think that Brecht’s active concern with it covered nearly twenty years. So the problem for the modern director is to sift out those that matter from those that don’t. First of all, this is not only a hymn to reason, but one that centres specifically on the need to be sceptical, to doubt. The theme is one that recurs more briefly in others of Brecht’s writings of the later 1930s – for instance the poems ‘The Doubter’ and ‘In Praise of Doubt’ and the ‘On Doubt’ section of the as yet untranslated Me-Ti – and it very clearly conflicts with the kind of ‘positive’ thinking called for by both Nazis and the more rigid-minded of the Communists, which must not be critical (’negative’) but optimistic. This notion of Brecht’s that doubt and even self-doubt can be highly productive – that ‘disbelief can move mountains’, as he later put it in the Short Organum – is deeply engrained in the play; and although it ties in with his doctrine of ‘alienation’ or the need to take nothing for granted it also surely represents a reaction against the orthodox Socialist Realist view. How far it can be attributed to the historical Galileo is another matter. As Eric Bentley and, more recently, Paul Feierabend have pointed out, Galileo’s reliance on the evidence of his senses was largely limited to the observations which he made with the telescope; elsewhere he was more speculative and less rational than Brecht suggests. What is true however is the conflict between authority and free scientific enquiry, both on the institutional level and within Galileo’s own character (for he was indeed a believing Catholic). If anything, the former’s position is presented too reasonably, both Barberini and the Inquisitor having in fact behaved much worse than Brecht let them do.

  Brecht all along was writing about attitudes which he could understand and even sympathise with; it is a play that contains very little element of caricature. This does not turn his Galileo into the self-portrait it is sometimes alleged to be, particularly by those who wish to present Brecht as a ‘survivor’ – as if surviving was not a very reputable thing for him to have done. Nor does it bear out Isaac Deutscher’s interpretation of the first version as an apologia for those who, like Brecht himself, supported Stalin whilst disliking many aspects of his regime. Not that such autobiographical considerations – which can of course be clamped on to almost any play – are much help to the director, who has first and foremost to take the work at its face value. What matters here is the overlaying of the original message, about the need at all costs to establish and communicate the truth in defiance of authority, by Brecht’s growing recognition of the losses that this may involve: for instance, the creation of such a cleft between the intellectual and the average man that the former eventually comes to overlook the social consequences of his research. The intertwining of these two contradictory morals has presented problems to actor and director alike, and of course it devalues the original happy ending. None the less it represents a considerable enrichment both of the Galileo figure and of the story; while taking away nothing from the vividness with which the scientific attitude is depicted, it cuts down the improbabilities and brings the whole thing closer to the uneasy compromises of real life. The problem in production, then, is how to compress the play into a length appropriate to its audience without losing essential elements of so carefully thought-out a mixture. As a reading text it has a balance which needs also to be achieved under the very different conditions of the stage.

  By turning it back, finally, into something of a meditation on the notion of a ‘new time’, Brecht re-emphasised another general theme of particular significance to himself. Between 1929 and 1933 (and even, less pardonably, for two or three years afterwards) the German Communists thought that the Revolution was round the corner, and men like Brecht were stimulated much as he describes in the Foreword on p. 189. At the end of the 1930s, however, when he wrote the poem ‘To Those Born Later’ (Poems 1913–1956, pp. 318–320), their goal

  Lay far in the distance

  It was clearly visible, though I myself

  Was hardly likely to reach it.

  ‘Terrible is the disappointment’, says the Foreword, when the new time fails to arrive and the old times prove stronger than anyone thought. For what had actually arrived was the ‘dark times’ of the first line of ‘To Those Born Later’, and with this the whole concept of ‘old’ and ‘new’ got confused. ‘So the Old strode in disguised as the New’, says the prose poem ‘Parade of the Old New’ which he wrote at the time of the first version as one of five ‘Visions’ foreshadowing the coming war. The temptation was to look nostalgically backwards, as the end of the Foreword suggests:

  Is that why I occupy myself with that epoch of the flowering of the arts and sciences three hundred years ago? I hope not.

  And in this hope he was determined to hold on to his old belief in the New, writing for instance to Karin Michaelis in March 1942, when the war was still going Hitler’s way, that

  the time we live in is an excellent time for fighters. Was there ever a time when Reason had such a chance?

  What is significant in the final version is not just that it reinstates and even extends Galileo’s opening ‘aria’ of 1938 on the new age – that Elizabethan-Jacobean age which always fascinated Brecht, not least because of Germany’s failure to benefit from it. The really crucial remark, rather, comes in the final summing up of the same idea, which differs subtly from one version to another. ‘Reason’, says Galileo in the first version, ‘is not coming to an end but beginning.

  And I still believe that this is a new age. It may look like a blood-stained old harridan, but if so that must be the way new ages look.’

  In the American version, which omits the reference to Reason, Andrea asks Galileo outright if he doesn’t now think that this ‘new age’ was an illusion, and is again given the same answer. In the third version, far more tellingly, he gets the almost indifferent response ‘Doch’ – ‘On the contrary’, almost implying ‘despite all’ – followed by a quick change of subject. And it is this one word, with all its overtones from the history of Brecht’s own time – at once so new and so dark – that wryly wraps up the whole optimistic tragedy, pinning the beginning and the end together with a single jab.

  MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN

  That Hitler meant war was clear to Brecht by the beginning of 1937. During the previous November the German and Italian fascist regimes had banded together to form the ‘Rome—Berlin axis’; Franco, whose rebellious armies were on the outskirts of Madrid, was recognised by them as the legitimate ruler of Spain; an anti-Comintern alliance was forged between Japan, then on the point of invading China, and the Germans. Hitler, who had already got away with the re-militarisation of the Rhineland in defiance of the
Versailles Treaty, henceforward had no reason to moderate his aggressive aims. As Brecht put in one of the ‘German War Primer’ series of ‘Svendborg Poems’ which he wrote on Fünen Island less than fifty miles across the Baltic from Germany:

  ON THE CALENDAR THE DAY IS NOT YET SHOWN

  Every month, every day

  Lies open still. One of these days

  Is going to be marked with a cross.

  For him it was the start of ‘the dark times’: a phrase that from now on permeates his poetry. Austria fell in March 1938, the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia that September, Prague and the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Memel in Lithuania the same month, Madrid and the Spanish Republic with it. Then Hitler offered Denmark a non-aggression pact.

  In April 1939, with Fascist Italy in its turn starting to invade Albania, Brecht took advantage of a lecture invitation to move to Sweden, where he was lent a sculptress’s house on the island of Lidingó outside Stockholm. From now on he and his immediate entourage were even more isolated than they had been in Denmark; while their object was no longer to await the collapse of the Nazis but to move on to the United States, where Piscator, Fritz Lang and Ferdinand Reyher had already begun working on their behalf. This isolation was also in part political, starting back in 1937 when Brecht largely gave up writing those committed plays and poems which had reflected the day-to-day Communist Party line. Three things then combined to give him a much more sceptical attitude towards the Soviet Union and Stalin’s leadership. The first and most painful was the purges of 1936–39; the second, unpleasantly interwoven with the purges, was the imposition of the Socialist Realist aesthetic preached by his old adversary Georg Lukács, which forbade any kind of ‘formalism’ in the arts; this became a serious factor from 1937 on. Finally there was the switch in foreign policy which led to the Soviet—Nazi pact and the partition of Poland. The Soviet Union, noted Brecht at the time, had thereby saved itself, ‘but at the cost of leaving the workers of the world without slogans, hopes or support’.

  The day marked with a cross proved to be 1 September 1939, when Brecht somewhat uncharacteristically attended a lunch in honour of Thomas Mann at Stockholm Town Hall. That day the Soviet–Nazi pact was announced, and the Nazis invaded Poland; forty-eight hours later Britain and France declared war on Germany. At first Brecht carried on working at his old project Love is the Goods, which he had taken up before leaving Denmark and renamed The Good Person of Szechwan; he had also brought with him the unfinished Julius Caesar novel and The Messingkauf Dialogues, a by-product of the revision of Galileo. But within ten days he found work grinding to a halt. The Szechwan play was laid aside; three diary entries comment disillusionedly on the ‘singularly Napoleonic’ Russian invasion of Eastern Poland, with its ‘usurpation of all the Fascist hypocrisy about “blood brotherhood” ‘; then for nearly seven weeks, from 21 September to 7 November, the diary too goes blank.

  During this interval, and in clear reaction to events, Brecht wrote his great play about a war which would range devastatingly across great tracts of Europe, creating heroes and profiteers, imposing order and ideologies, and leaving the selfsentimentalising little people’ – particularly of Germany – as blindly unaware as they were at its start.

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  Mother Courage was written under pressure. In the words of a later note to Scandinavian audiences,

  As I wrote I imagined that the playwright’s warning voice would be heard from the stages of various great cities, proclaiming that he who would sup with the devil must have a long spoon. This may have been naive of me, but I do not consider being naive a disgrace. Such productions never materialised. Writers cannot write as rapidly as governments can make war, because writing demands hard thought.

  And the effort to speak out quickly made it one of the most spontaneous and, despite its length, most concentrated of all Brecht’s plays. It bears virtually no trace of any preliminary work or preparatory reading; there is none of the major rewriting that characterises so many of the other plays; there is for once no mention of any collaborator, nor any element of borrowing or adaptation; there are just two original typescripts, the one a straightforward revise of the other. As a feat of deeply felt anticipation it is amazing. Though there is nothing to bear out Brecht’s claim (p. 321) that the play was written in 1938 or (as the note to the 1949 edition had it) ‘before the outbreak of the Second World War’ it undoubtedly dates from well before the start of any major fighting. This was still the period of ‘We’ll hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’, of the phoney war, what Brecht termed ‘the war that isn’t waged’. At that time some kind of peace seemed quite possible, whether as a return to the prewar policy of appeasement or by means of an appeal to the German people over the heads of their government, as wishfully proposed by the Communists. Few foresaw the mass bombings, the deportations, the torture of resistants, the extermination of the Jews; those vast tragedies which any modern audience tends to assume as the understood background to Brecht’s ‘chronicle play’.

  Where did his vision come from? It is rooted, certainly, in his particular feeling for the seventeenth century, the period in which he had already set The Life of Galileo with its proclamation of faith in a ‘new age’ (even if that age might, in the words of its Danish version, look like ‘a blood-stained old harridan’). That last leap forward of the Renaissance – one of whose forms, the Shakespearean History, he adopted for the play – failed in his view to make a modern nation of Germany because of the catastrophic effects of the Thirty Years War, which thus became the natural analogy for his pessimistic warnings. The obvious dramatic precedent here was Schiller’s Wallenstein’s Camp with its picture of a mongrel seventeenth-century army milling round the canteen tents; and indeed there are two engravings showing a camp and Wallenstein’s siege of Stralsund in one of the earliest scripts. Stylistically however, and to some extent structurally too, Brecht’s example seems to have been the earlier German writer Grimmelshausen, who himself served in the Thirty Years War before publishing his rambling picaresque novel Simplicissimus in 1669. From a lesser offshoot of that wartime saga, published separately as Die Landestórzerin Courasche, came the name of the play and of its central figure, though in fact Grimmelshausen’s Amazonian adventuress sprang from a higher social class than Brecht’s canteen woman and enjoyed a career closer to that of Yvette. ‘A horrific picture of war’, the critic Bernhard Diebold termed it, ‘written about with deliberate detachment and seen from below: a frog’s-eye view.’ The Swedish actress Naima Wifstrand, whom Brecht wanted to play the leading part, also introduced him to the figure of Lotta Svárd, a canteen woman in Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s early nineteenth-century ballads about the Russian–Swedish war. But she, very unlike Brecht’s character, was ‘a pearl on the pathway of war’, always up with the troops. ‘And the dear young soldiers’ heroic mood / she loved in its full display.’ (Thus G. B. Shaw’s translation.)

  Brueghel, of whom Brecht had two books of reproductions, may have contributed something; his Dulle Griet is gummed into another script. Peter Weiss in his Asthetik des Wider-standes describes Brecht speaking of Franco’s victory in summer 1939 and turning to this figure whose ‘devastated world’ was part of what was starting to take place:

  the Fury defending her pathetic household goods with the sword. The world at the end of its tether. Little cruelty, much hypersensitivity.

  Callot too is visually relevant, with his Miséres de la Guerre, even though Brecht nowhere mentions them.

  The character of Brecht’s Mother Courage, however, like her way of speaking, comes primarily from that other great war novelist Jaroslav Hasek; indeed Brecht saw his own Scbweyk play, when he came to write it four years later, as a ‘companion play’. Moreover there were also other significant links within Brecht’s own work. Thus in one sense Mother Courage, battling to save her children, can be compared and contrasted with his earlier Señora Carrar, whom Naima Wifstrand had translated into Swedish and acted. I
n another she is much closer to the Widow Begbick, the tough itinerant hostess of Man equals Man and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, two roles already associated with Helene Weigel. Her language looks forward to the consciously Schweik-like dialogue of Puntila and the Conversations Between Exiles. And the whole inverted morality of the play, with its suggestion that the conventional virtues sometimes have the opposite effect from what moralists imagine, is close to that of The Seven Deadly Sins and The Threepenny Opera. This perhaps is why Brecht could think of including ‘Surabaya-Johnny’ as well as the ‘Solomon Song’.

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  Quickly as the play was written, in Brecht’s view it came too late to serve as the intended warning. ‘The great bandit [i.e. Hitler] got his hooks on the theatres much too soon.’ His immediate hope had been that it could be staged in Stockholm with Wifstrand as Courage and Helene Weigel in the non speaking part of Kattrin, who is supposed to have been made dumb so that Weigel could play her. That winter, while Russia invaded Finland, Weigel gave some classes in Wifstrand’s acting school, for which Brecht wrote his Shakespearean Practice Scenes for Actors; meanwhile Brecht, on a commission from Stockholm Radio, wrote The Trial of Lucullus for the composer Hilding Rosenberg to set. Given the threat represented by the Nazis, however, neither work was performed in Sweden; and in April the police searched the Lidingó house, the German forces moved into Denmark and Norway, and Brecht thought it wise to move on. The plan for a Mother Courage production was then resumed in Finland, where the Brechts lived for a further year before the last of the party’s American visas came through. The aim there was to secure a production in the Helsinki Swedish-language theatre during the winter of 1940–41. To this end Brecht worked on the songs with the Finnish composer Simon Parmet, who appears to have dropped out for fear of echoing Weill too closely. Once again, however, the reason for the play’s rejection was evidently the increasing Nazi pressure, and that January Brecht listed it as one of his six unstaged plays ‘which cannot at present be performed’.