Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 7 Read online

  Bertolt Brecht

  Collected Plays: Seven

  The Visions of Simone Machard

  Schweyk in the Second World War

  The Caucasian Chalk Circle

  The Duchess of Malfi

  The seventh volume of Brecht’s Collected Plays contains the plays which Brecht wrote during his six-year stay in the United States from 1941-47. The Visions of Simone Machard is a French Resistance version of the Joan of Arc story. Schweyk in the Second World War transposes Hašek’s ‘good soldier’ to the Prague of Hitler and Heydrich. The Caucasian Chalk Circle, one of Brecht’s most popular works, promotes the idea that resources should go to those who can make the best use of them. It was originally written for production on Broadway with W.H. Auden responsible for the verse and it led Brecht to bring in Auden to help with his and H.R. Hays’s version of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, which is included here as an appendix.

  Edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, the volume includes Brecht’s own notes and relevant texts as well as an extensive introduction and commentary.

  Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg on 10 February 1898 and died in Berlin on 14 August 1956. He grew to maturity as a playwright in the frenetic years of the twenties and early thirties, with such plays as Man equals Man, The Threepenny Opera and The Mother. He left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933, eventually reaching the United States in 1941, where he remained until 1947. It was during this period of exile that such masterpieces as Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle were written. Shortly after his return to Europe in 1947 he founded the Berliner Ensemble, and from then until his death was mainly occupied in producing his own plays.

  Other Bertolt Brecht publications by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

  Brecht Collected Plays: One

  (Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, The Life of Edward II of

  England, A Respectable Wedding, The Beggar or the Dead Dog,

  Driving Out a Devil, Lux in Tenebris, The Catch)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Two

  (Man Equals Man, The Elephant Calf, The Threepenny Opera,

  The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Three

  (Lindbergh’s Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said

  Yes/He Said No, The Decision, The Mother, The Exception and

  the Rule, The Horations and the Curiatians, St Joan of the Stockyards)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Four

  (Round Heads and Pointed Heads, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich,

  Señora Carrar’s Rifl es, Dansen, How Much Is Your Iron?,

  The Trial of Lucullus)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Five

  (Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Six

  (The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,

  Mr Puntila and His Man Matti)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Seven

  (The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweyk in the Second World War,

  The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Duchess of Malfi )

  Brecht Collected Plays: Eight

  (The Days of the Commune, The Antigone of Sophocles,

  Turandot or the Whitewashers’ Congress)

  Berliner Ensemble Adaptations – publishing 2014

  (The Tutor, Coriolanus, The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen 1431,

  Don Juan, Trumpets and Drums)

  Brecht on Art and Politics (edited by Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles)

  Brecht on Film and Radio (edited by Marc Silberman)

  Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks – publishing 2014 (edited by

  Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman)

  Brecht on Theatre – publishing 2014 (edited by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn)

  Brecht in Practice – publishing 2014 (David Barnett)

  The Craft of Theatre: Seminars and Discussions in Brechtian Theatre (Ekkehard Schall)

  Brecht, Music and Culture – publishing 2014 (Hans Bunge, translated by Sabine Berendse and Paul Clements)

  Brecht in Context (John Willett)

  The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (John Willett)

  Brecht: A Choice of Evils (Martin Esslin)

  Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life – publishing 2014 (Stephen Parker)

  A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht (Stephen Unwin)

  Bertolt Brecht

  Collected Plays: Seven

  The Visions of Simone Machard

  translated by Hugh and Ellen Rank

  Original work entitled:

  Die Geschichte der Simone Machard

  Schweyk in the Second World War

  translated by William Rowlinson

  Original work entitled:

  Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg

  The Caucasian Chalk Circle

  translated by James and Tania Stern with W. H. Auden

  Original work entitled:

  Der kaukaissche Kreidekreis

  The Duchess of Malfi

  by John Webster

  adapted by Bertolt Brecht and H. R. Hays

  edited by A. R. Braunmuller

  Edited and introduced by

  John Willett and Ralph Manheim

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chronology

  THE PLAYS

  THE VISIONS OF SIMONE MACHARD

  SCHWEYK IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

  THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE

  NOTES AND VARIANTS

  THE VISIONS OF SIMONE MACHARD

  Texts by Brecht

  The Visions of Simone Machard

  Working Plan

  The Dreams

  First dream of Simone Machard (during the night of 14/15 June)

  Two characters

  Editorial Note

  1. General

  2. Scene-by-scene account

  3. Feuchtwanger’s novel

  SCHWEYK IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

  Texts by Brecht

  The story

  Staging

  Editorial Note

  1. General

  2. Scene-by-scene account

  THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE

  Texts by Brecht

  Notes to The Caucasian Chalk Circle

  Dance of the Grand Duke with his bow

  Concerning the Prologue

  Contradictions in The Caucasian Chalk Circle

  Side track

  Editorial Note

  1. General

  2. Scene-by-scene account

  3. Prologue from the first script (1944)

  APPENDIX

  Introductory Note on The Duchess of Malfi

  A note on The Duchess by H. R. Hays

  THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

  NOTES AND VARIANTS

  Texts by Brecht

  Brecht’s version of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi

  How The Duchess of Malfi ought to be performed

  Letter to Paul Czinner

  Attempted Broadway production of The Duchess of Malfi

  Editorial Note

  1. General

  2. Notes on specific scenes

  Introduction

  THE AMERICAN PLAYS 1942-6

  I

  The plays in this volume are the ones which Brecht wrote during his six-year stay in the United States. He arrived on 21 July 1941, by ship from Vladivostok, after having set out from Helsinki two months earlier via Moscow and the Trans-Siberian railway. He left again by air on 31 October 1947, to return to Europe and in due course Berlin. Most of the time in between he spent living in the Los Angeles area
where he had landed, though he also made prolonged visits to New York.

  As in Munich nearly a quarter of a century earlier, his mentor in this new world was the now internationally successful novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who persuaded him to remain on the West Coast where he would be close to Hollywood and its large German film colony, several of whom (like Fritz Lang and William Dieterle) were subscribing to the fund on which he and his family initially lived. Besides the three original plays which we print, therefore, and The Duchess of Malfi adaptation given in the appendix, his output in this period also embraced a number of rejected film outlines and synopses, including the story ‘Caesar and his Legionary,’ which was later taken into Tales from the Calendar, as well as an undetermined portion of the material for the film Hangmen Also Die, which Fritz Lang actually made. To this must be added the American version of Galileo, whose evolution is covered in volume 5, and a trickle of very fine but mostly rather short poems. His theoretical writing seems to have dried up almost entirely; major prose projects like the Caesar and ‘Tui’ novels went into cold storage; and he gave up writing short stories. So it is mainly on the contents of the present volume that his American experience must be judged.

  To start with, its impact on his work was disastrous. This was due above all to something that had happened on the journey: the death of his aide Margarete Steffin in Moscow from tuberculosis. Both the group of poems which he wrote ‘After the death of my collaborator M.S.’ (included in Poems 1913-1956) and his own private notes and journal entries suggest that this was among the severest blows he ever suffered; a month later he could write commenting on it:

  for nearly a year i have been feeling deeply depressed as a result of the death of my comrade and collaborator steffin. up to now i have avoided thinking at all deeply about it. i’m not frightened so much of feeling pain as of being ashamed of the fact. but above all i have too few thoughts about it. i know that no pain can offset this loss, that all i can do is close my eyes to it. now and again i have even drunk a tot of whisky when her image rose before me. since i seldom do this even one tot affects me strongly. in my view such methods are just as acceptable as others that are better thought of. they are only external, but this is a problem which i don’t see how to resolve internally. death is no good; all is not necessarily for the best. there is no inscrutable wisdom to be seen in this kind of thing. nothing can make up for it.

  Very soon after arriving, too, he learned of the fate of another close friend, Walter Benjamin, who had killed himself on the French frontier in 1940 rather than risk being handed over to the Gestapo. At the same time, however, the atmosphere of southern California was hardly such as to relieve his depression. This was partly a matter of its utter remoteness from the war—’Tahiti in urban form’ he called it soon after arriving—though Pearl Harbor that autumn brought reality closer; partly a deep-seated resentment of its artificiality and underlying commercial ethos. Thus a journal entry of March 1942 (one of many to the same effect):

  extraordinary in these parts how a universally demoralizing cheap prettiness stops one from leading anything like a cultivated, i.e., dignified life.

  On top of this came the often degrading experience of working for the films, which bore particularly painfully on him as he became drawn into the making of Fritz Lang’s Czech resistance movie during the summer of 1942. Taking stock towards the end of April, he listed all the factors hampering him, from his loss of Steffin to his lack of money, and concluded that ‘for the first time in ten years I am not doing any proper work’.

  Yet even while he was battling over that film (for adequate representation of the Czech people, for his theme song, for a part for Helene Weigel and a scriptwriter’s credit for himself: on all of which points he failed), his outlook in other respects was beginning to improve. Materially, he and his family no longer had to live on $120 a month, but were able to move into a bigger and very much pleasanter house in Santa Monica (1063 26th Street; still there at the time of writing) on the strength of the $10,000 which Lang got for him. Once again he was working with the composer Hanns Eisler, who had arrived there in April and for whom he now wrote his ‘Hollywood Elegies’, condensing much of what he felt about the civilization around him. He was also in touch with a young lecturer at UCLA called Eric Bentley, who differed from the bulk of his friends in being neither central European nor involved in show-business, and who seems immediately to have helped him to widen his English reading. From Feuchtwanger he heard that the Zurich Schauspielhaus wished to stage The Good Person of Szechwan, while Thornton Wilder had seen and been impressed by their production of Mother Courage. Still more changed for him when El Alamein was followed by Stalingrad (for it should never be forgotten how closely and continuously Brecht followed the war news). And during that October he and Feuchtwanger began collaborating on the war play, a modern Saint Joan story, which was to become The Visions of Simone Machard.

  Like the other two original plays in this book, Simone Machard derived from a scheme which Brecht had brought in his head with him from Europe. Already perhaps inspired by the basic idea of Anna Seghers’ radio play (which he was later to adapt for the Berliner Ensemble, as described in volume 9), he had conceived it in outline two years earlier, soon after the collapse of France:

  a young frenchwoman in orléans, working at a filling station while her brother is away, dreams and daydreams of being joan of arc and undergoing her fate. for the germans are advancing on orléans. the voices joan hears are voices of the people—the things the blacksmith and the peasant are saying. she obeys these voices and saves france from the enemy outside, but is conquered by the enemy within. the court that sentences her is packed with pro-english clerics: victory of the fifth column.

  Returning to it just before Christmas 1941, he sketched out a play in nine scenes under the title The Voices, whose social point should be (a) that vox dei is really vox populi, and (b) that ‘owners and criminals stand shoulder to shoulder against anyone who rejects the idea of property’. Exactly at what stage he first discussed this with Feuchtwanger is not clear, but he now laid the plan aside in order to read The Devil in France, the book in which the novelist described his own experiences in 1940, when he had been interned outside Aix-en-Provence, then managed to escape across the Pyrenees at the point where Benjamin was turned back. Other readings about the French débâcle followed, though Feuchtwanger, who had spent all the early part of his exile in that country, remained in essential ways better informed about it than Brecht. Their systematic collaboration began at the end of October, just before the shooting of Hangmen Also Die, which Brecht occasionally went to watch in the afternoons. They worked mostly in Feuchtwanger’s house, a quiet Spanish-style mansion on the mountains overlooking Santa Monica and the sea, which has now been made over to the University of Southern California. The curfew imposed after Pearl Harbor, together with their status as enemy aliens, prevented their meeting at night.

  In one way the work went easily. The two men got on well together, and despite their disagreement as to Simone’s age (for which see the notes, pp. 254 and 277) the division of responsibility seems to have given no trouble. Brecht set up the play’s structure, which was then filled out in discussion between them—Feuchtwanger evidently doing his best to see that the events were probable and the details authentic—after which the actual writing of the scenes would be done by Brecht and checked over at the next meeting. ‘He has a good sense of structure,’ wrote Brecht approvingly,

  appreciates linguistic refinements, is also capable of making poetic and dramaturgical suggestions, knows a lot about literature, pays attention to arguments and is pleasant to deal with, a good friend.

  at the same time, however, he

  wants to have nothing to do with the technical or social aspects (epic portrayal, a-effect, characters made up of social rather than biological ingredients, class conflicts built into the story and so on), and tolerates all that merely as my personal style …

  Perhaps b
ecause of the effect of the previous fifteen months of largely pointless work (‘that kind of thing can indeed be bad for one’s handwriting,’ noted Brecht of the role allotted by Hollywood to its authors) he was less able than usual to resist the pressure of convention, for aside from the dream element (itself not particularly daring by local standards) the play is quite Aristotelian in its observation of the unities. Moreover the collaborators almost certainly had Hollywood’s demands in mind, both in the play and in the somewhat pot-boiling novel which Feuchtwanger subsequently wrote on the same theme (it appeared in 1944 and is briefly summarized on p. 276 ff.). Before Brecht left for New York in February 1943, leaving the ending of the play still not finally settled, an agreement was drawn up between himself, Ruth Berlau (who is neither named as a collaborator nor known to have had any direct role in the work), and the Feuchtwangers, dividing the stage and screen rights equally and giving Feuchtwanger all rights to the proposed novel. Thereafter William Dieterle took an interest, and arranged for a rough translation into English, which had been completed by April. On the strength of this (so Feuchtwanger then wrote to Brecht) the agents Curtis Brown were hoping to persuade either Ashley Dukes or the Muirs to make a good English version. At Columbia Pictures the story editor was favourably impressed. Not so Hanns Eisler, who had watched the development of the play throughout and made occasional suggestions, and was now embarking on the music. He told Brecht in May that he disliked Simone’s instinctive patriotism and saw her as the poor victim of a patriotic upbringing. Brecht had failed to show that she was being exploited.

  II

  His visit to New York, which lasted from February to late May 1943, launched Brecht on the writing of Schweyk in the Second World War as well as on the first stage of The Duchess of Malfi adaptation. There is a long history to Brecht’s fascination with Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk or Schweik, arguably the outstanding fictional figure of our century; and his involvement in Erwin Piscator’s dramatization of 1928 is discussed in our notes on the play. From then on he was repeatedly returning to the theme, first hoping that Piscator would film it in the USSR in the early 1930s, then expecting to be involved in the same director’s scheme to film it elsewhere in 1937; ‘you really mustn’t do it without me’, he told Piscator that spring. Though these projects came to nothing, Piscator never abandoned his interest in the Schweik saga, and by 1943 was engaged in discussions with the Theater Guild in New York with a view to a new stage production. Brecht may not have been informed about this, but the fact that Hangmen Also Die was a story of the Czech resistance (for Brecht and Lang were presumably unaware that Heydrich’s—the hangman in question—assassins were for better or worse agents from Britain) almost certainly helped to turn his mind back to Hašek’s anti-militarist epic, since it was during his work with Lang that he noted in his journal that