Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 5

  In German-speaking Switzerland the Zurich Schauspielhaus was less inhibited. Cut off from the dramatist himself by the war, this predominantly German company contained a high proportion of anti-Nazi actors of whom some, like Leonard Steckel and the director Leopold Lindtberg, had worked in Berlin with Piscator, while Wolfgang Langhoff of the Rhine-land Agitprop Truppe im Westen had subsequently been in a concentration camp. Under the sympathetic management of Ferdinand Rieser and Oskar Wálterlin they had given the premieres of a number of plays unacceptable in Nazi Germany, notably Ferdinand Bruckner’s Die Rassen and Friedrich Wolf’s Professor Mamlock (both about anti-Semitism) as well as others by Kaiser, Horváth, Zuckmayer and such Anglo-American authors as Wilder, O’Neill, Priestley and Shaw. On 19 April 1941, a month before the Brechts left Helsinki on their long trip to California, the company now gave the premiere of Mother Courage before a predominantly Swiss and German emigré audience, among those who saw the production being Thornton Wilder.

  This was one of the great theatrical events of the Second World War, and the play itself made a great impact, thanks above all to the performance of Therese Giehse (who oddly enough was a British subject) in the title part and to the setting devised by Teo Otto, who had worked with Brecht before 1933. Lindtberg directed, and the Swiss composer Paul Burk-hard wrote a new score. Langhoff and the Austrian Karl Paryla played the two sons, Wolfgang Heinz the Cook. Meanwhile Sigfrit Steiner, the Chaplain of this production, was staging the far more directly political Mother for the first time in Switzerland with a cast of amateurs. And yet there were only ten performances, and Brecht, appreciative as he was, felt that to some extent his intentions had been traduced. Thus the Easier Nachrichten saw Courage as a model example of how to get through a terrible time in the face of human crudeness, while Elisabeth Thommen in the Basel National-Zeitung wrote that ‘all women should be grateful to Bert Brecht for his portrayal of this strong female character’. It was only Brecht himself whose notes (p. 271) referred to the figure of Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, as the classic example of maternal grief. But even Bernhard Diebold, who had been one of the outstanding German theatre critics before 1933, wrote in Die Tat that this Courage, far from being primarily a ‘hyaena of the battlefield’ (as the Chaplain calls her), made her commercial toughness ‘almost too subsidiary’ to the strength of her maternal feelings; while as for Lindtberg’s direction, it ‘either failed to take enough account of the crude earthiness of the period and Brecht’s own malicious sarcasm, or else it deliberately softened them’.

  As it turned out, this was the play’s sole wartime production. It was not one of those works which Brecht expected to see put on in the USA, nor did he make any of the efforts which he and his friends there devoted to Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Galileo and The Good Person of Szechwan, let alone the plays which he wrote after arriving. Early in 1941, at the latest, the poet H. R. Hays had made a translation from a copy lent him by Hanns Eisler (to whom Brecht sent one of the first scripts), but although this appeared in New Directions the same year there never seems to have been any move to stage it, not even as a college production. Almost it might be said that Brecht had decided to shelve Mother Courage as he shelved so many of his works, putting them out of his mind for years at a time. In 1943, however, he met the composer Paul Dessau, whose musical background was in some ways comparable to those of Weill and Eisler, and who had written some music for the original Paris production of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich in which Weigel had acted. At a Brecht recital given at the New School in New York that March, Dessau sang one of his Brecht settings with such verve that Brecht encouraged him to write more, first inviting him to come and work in California, then at some undefined date asking him to write new settings for the Mother Courage songs. These were completed by 1946, when the Zurich company used them for its guest performances in Vienna, and they became the standard music for the play. For the moment it seems that they, like the play itself, were really being reserved for the day when Brecht should return to the German-language theatre and stage the kind of performance which he and Helene Weigel had in mind.

  Though there is evidence in the FBI files of his intention to return from as early as 1944, it seems to have been at least a year after the ending of the war that he began to make serious plans. Then he wrote to his old collaborator the designer Caspar Neher (who had remained in Germany) to announce his conviction that ‘we shall build up a theatre once more’, followed by his decision to come to Zurich during 1947 and prepare his return to Berlin, where he had been offered the use of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm ‘for certain things’. This theatre, the original home of The Threepenny Opera, had now been made an offshoot of the revived Volksbühne, the great popular theatre organisation which the Nazis had suppressed thirteen years earlier. The Deutsches Theater, where Brecht had worked for Max Reinhardt on first coming to Berlin, had been put under Langhoff of the Zurich Mother Courage; both theatres were in the Soviet sector.

  Early in 1947 Brecht and Piscator started corresponding with a view to a joint descent on that city. They were in some measure encouraged in this by Friedrich Wolf, who had returned with the Red Army and now hoped to draw Piscator back to the Volksbiihne. Before Piscator made up his mind, however, the division of Berlin had occurred, and in the event he remained in New York for another three years. Meanwhile the Brechts carried out their plan of going to Zurich, and immediately on arrival began discussing plans with Neher. Within a month the two friends in collaboration had completed the adaptation of Antigone which they proposed to stage at the small theatre in Chur managed by Klemperer’s former dramaturg Hans Curjel. The object of this brilliant but short-lived exercise, so Brecht noted in his diary on 16 December, was ‘to do preparatory work with Weigel and Cas [Neher] on Courage for Berlin’. For Weigel had not acted on the professional stage for fifteen years, and the Schauspielhaus apparently had nothing for her.

  The Antigone production took place on 15 February 1948, five days after Brecht’s fiftieth birthday. The same occasion was celebrated in Berlin by a programme organised by Langhoff, who had staged a short version of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich only a fortnight or so earlier. Thereafter it was agreed that the Zurich Schauspielhaus would give the first production of Puntila, the fourth and last of their Brecht premieres and the first to be staged with Brecht’s own participation (as unofficial director); this took place in June, with Leonard Steckel acting the name part. After that the Brechts’ attention was again focused on Berlin (Salzburg being an alternative bet), and the main problem was how to get there. Eventually the necessary Austrian and Czech permits came through, allowing them to travel to the Soviet Zone of Germany in late October (the US authorities having refused them leave to cross Bavaria). Straightaway Brecht began holding auditions at Langhoff’s theatre, then on 8 November his co-director Erich Engel arrived from Munich and two months of intensive rehearsal began. Brecht’s idea at this time was to set up his own ensemble under the wing of the Deutsches Theater and invite prominent outsiders to act with it; he had in mind figures like Fritz Kortner and Peter Lorre as well as Therese Giehse from Zurich.

  In mid-December he discussed this scheme with Langhoff, seemingly still in the expectation of being able to use the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Then three weeks later he was hauled out of a rehearsal to attend a formal meeting with the party authorities, the East Berlin mayor Friedrich Ebert (son of the former Social-Democratic President), Langhoff and the Schiffbauerdamm Intendant Fritz Wisten. Here he was told that the Schiffbauerdamm was needed for the Volksbühne; the mayor, who never addressed a word to him, spoke slightingly of half-baked schemes which might upset existing arrangements; and, in the words of the diary ‘for the first time since coming here I felt the foetid breath of provincialism’.

  Within a few days, however, everything fell into the background as the white half-curtain of the Deutsches Theater fluttered open on a brilliantly lit stage. The band struck up ‘You captains, tell the drums to slack
en’, and the dusty, tattered family came rolling on with its cart. Suddenly, in this still devastated city hovering between peace and war, the world could see one of the unforgettable images of our time.

  * * *

  From that moment dates Brecht’s postwar reputation as a great director, which for non-Germans has even overshadowed his reputation as a playwright. It was a formidable comeback planned from three overlapping aspects, and its triple success was stunning. First of all, here was a largely unknown German masterpiece, written in language of tremendous vitality and still with many shrewd things to say about war and people’s reactions to it. Second was an outstanding acting performance from a virtually forgotten actress, whose striking voice and features have become almost inseparable from the Mother Courage figure; that night a legendary character, as well as a star, was born. Finally, embracing everything else, there was a new, outwardly subdued but inwardly authoritative spirit emanating from the whole production and from the new Berliner Ensemble which the Brechts went on to found upon it. The object of this entire operation was of course rather different from Brecht’s original aim when he wrote the play. For he made it very clear in his notes and jottings that he wished not only to make his countrymen think about their blind involvement in Hitler’s war but also to help rebuild their shattered culture and bridge the long gap back to the progressive ideas of the Weimar Republic, thereby bringing on a new generation of actors and directors who would not have been debased by too much experience of Nazi methods. Given that he meant to tackle these worthwhile tasks from within the Communist orbit, in his old spirit of sceptical allegiance, he had to establish his constructive intentions, which he set himself to do soon after his arrival by writing some slightly vapid political songs. At the same time he had to overcome or get round the obstacles to any kind of formal innovation embodied in the revived Socialist Realism now being preached by the Russians, the Party spokesman Fritz Erpenbeck and, once again, Georg Lukács. As he put it in the foreword to Antigone, ‘it may not be easy to create progressive art in the period of reconstruction’. But nobody was better placed to do it than he.

  The criticisms of the play which now came from both right and left arose from a feeling that Brecht, having created a great human character, had deliberately stunted her, thereby stifling much of the emotion natural both to himself as the creator and also to his audience. Some, like Friedrich Wolf in the dialogue printed on pp. 226–9 of Brecht on Theatre, felt that by the end of the play Courage should have seen the light – that is, the futility of war – thereby emerging as (in Communist aesthetic jargon) a ‘positive’ figure. Others, on both sides of the barriers, pointed to what they considered a theoretical inconsistency between Brecht’s ideas of ‘epic’ or ‘alienated’ acting and the undoubted empathy experienced by audiences at emotional high spots like the death of Kattrin. This notion that Brecht, for purely intellectual reasons, was denying certain powerful elements which he had (or should have) instinctively put into the original play, was reinforced, if not actually sparked off, by the textual changes which he confesses to on pp. 271–4 of his notes. Indeed to judge from some commentators’ reactions one might imagine that he had rewritten the Zurich version as extensively as he did so many of his other plays. In fact, of course, only two of his four alterations are significant – the first, where Courage’s salesmanship distracts her from her son’s enlistment, and the second, which makes her less ready than before to give her goods for humanitarian ends – and even they would scarcely have been noticed if he had not drawn attention to them himself. What he worked much harder to correct was not only ‘softness’ in the actual play but those features of Lindtberg’s production on which Diebold had commented nearly eight years earlier, along with a certain ‘curious aura of harmlessness’ which he found emanating from his own first Berlin rehearsals. This, with its smudging-over of all sense of background or development, he blamed on the bland conformism of the Nazi theatre.

  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.