Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 1 Read online

  Bertolt 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

  Volume One in the Collected Plays series contains Brecht’s first performed stage works, whose appearance in the hectic and difficult years following the First World War immediately signalled a radical new departure not only for German drama but for the theatre as a whole.

  Baal uses a heady mixture of Expressionism, symbolism and lyricism to portray the unheroic progress of an ugly, dissolute poet and his fatal attractiveness to women. Drums in the Night, set against the Spartacist uprising, is an anti-romantic ‘love story’ in which a soldier returns to find his fiancée engaged to an obnoxious war profiteer. While In the Jungle of Cities looks forward to Brecht’s preoccupations of the twenties and thirties and shows a struggle to the death between Shlink, a Chicago timber dealer, and Garga whose beliefs he wishes to destroy. The Life of Edward II of England is Brecht’s adaptation of Marlowe’s play, in which he aimed to break with the ‘lumpy monumental style’ of the German Shakespearean tradition.

  The volume also contains Brecht’s five early one-act plays which remained unpublished and, except for A Respectable Wedding, unperformed until after Brecht’s death.

  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: One

  Baal

  translated by Peter Tegel

  Original work entitled:

  Baal

  Drums in the Night

  translated by John Willet

  Original work entitled:

  Trommeln in der Nacht

  In the Jungle of Cities

  translated by Gerhard Nellhaus

  Original work entitled:

  Im Dickicht der Städte

  The Life of Edward II of England

  translated by Jean Benedetti

  Original work entitled:

  Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England

  A Respectable Wedding

  translated by Jean Benedetti

  Original work entitled:

  Die Kleinbürgerhochzeit

  The Beggar or The Dead Dog

  translated by Michael Hamburger

  Original work entitled:

  Der Bettler oder Der Tote Hund

  Driving Out a Devil

  translated by Richard Grunberger

  Original work entitled:

  Er treibt einen Teufel aus

  Lux in Tenebris

  translated by Eva Geisel and Ernest Borneman

  Original work entitled:

  Lux in Tenebris

  The Catch

  translated by John Willet

  Original work entitled:

  Der Fischzug

  Edited and introduced by Tom Kuhn

  and John Willett

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chronology

  THE PLAYS

  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

  NOTES AND VARIANTS

  Entries in roman type indicate texts by Brecht

  BAAL

  Prologue to the 1918 version

  Prologue to the 1926 version

  The model for Baal

  Bad Baal the anti-social man

  On looking through my first plays (ii)

  Editorial note on the text

  The versions of 1918, 1919 and 1920-2

  ‘Life Story of the Man Baal’ (1926)

  DRUMS IN THE NIGHT

  Ballad of the Dead Soldier

  Note for the stage

  Note to the script of the Berlin production

  Preface to ‘Drums in the Night’

  Notes of conversations about ‘Drums in the Night’

  On lookin
g through my first plays (i)

  Editorial note on the text

  Variant material from the 1922 published text

  The Deutsches Theater acting version

  IN THE JUNGLE OF CITIES

  Three early notes

  Programme note to the 1922 text

  Synopsis

  A Statement

  Prologue to ‘Jungle’

  Programme note for the Heidelberg production

  On looking through my first plays (iii)

  Editorial note on the text

  The play’s literary ancestry, by Gerhard Nellhaus

  THE LIFE OF EDWARD THE SECOND OF ENGLAND

  On looking through my first plays (iv)

  Editorial note on the text

  THE FIVE ONE-ACT PLAYS

  Editorial note

  Introduction

  BRECHT IN BAVARIA, 1918-1924

  1

  This volume contains the plays which Brecht wrote in Bavaria before moving to Berlin in the autumn of 1924. In spring 1918, when he began work on the first of them, he was just twenty and a new student at Munich university. Six and a half years later he was a recognized, if controversial writer and the winner of a major literary prize. The best directors and actors of the day were performing his plays; he had also written many poems and short stories and directed one remarkable production. He had just been on the staff of the Munich Kammerspiele, one of the most enterprising small theatres in Germany, where his first and so far most successful play had been performed. Now he was about to go as a ‘dramaturg’, or literary adviser, to Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin, at that time one of the world’s three or four leading theatres.

  Born on 10 February 1898, Brecht had been brought up in Augsburg, about forty miles west of Munich. His father, a native of the Black Forest, was sales director of the Haindl paper works there; his mother died in May 1920. Baal, whose first version was finished by July 1918, reflects much of the imaginary world of himself and his group of Augsburg friends, as well as the taverns and physical surroundings of the old city. For a few months just before and after the armistice of November 1918 he served as a medical orderly in a local army hospital, but had returned to Munich by February 1919, the early days of the Bavarian Soviet, during which he dashed off the first version of Drums in the Night. There he showed both plays to Lion Feuchtwanger, the author of Jew Süss, who was then living in Munich and had recently met him for the first time. His own drama professor Artur Kutscher was always bitterly critical of his work, but Feuchtwanger was encouraging, so that he began to make contact with publishers and, at the end of the summer vacation, to write theatre criticisms for the Augsburg Socialist paper. The one-act plays are also thought to have been mainly written that year, as well as a wealth of lost or unfinished works.

  Baal was accepted by Feuchtwanger’s own publisher Georg Müller, who had also published Wedekind’s collected plays, but was withdrawn when already in proof for fear of the censorship. Drums in the Night was shown by Feuchtwanger to the Kammerspiele ‘dramaturg’ Rudolf Frank, who at some point in the summer of 1920 accepted it for production. Neither publication nor production in fact materialized for another two years, but the encouragement to Brecht was obvious. He left the university in the summer of 1921 and in November set out to try his luck in Berlin, a much more important city from the theatrical point of view.

  The expedition was less successful than he had hoped. Neither the Deutsches Theater nor the State Theatre under Leopold Jessner would make any promises, and although Brecht was asked to direct Arnolt Bronnen’s play Vatermord for the experimental Junge Bühne, it ended disastrously with a walk-out of the actors. He himself was taken to hospital suffering from undernourishment, due no doubt in part to the galloping currency inflation. But at least he made many connections or friendships which were to be important for his work: notably Bronnen (with whom he began collaborating on film treatments and various joint theatrical projects), Herbert Ihering the critic of the Berliner Börsen-Courier (a lifelong supporter, whose paper was later to serve as a launching-platform for many of his ideas), and Moritz Seeler the organizer of the Junge Bühne (who was to produce Life Story of the Man Baal in 1926). By the time of his return to Augsburg at Easter he had also completed the first version of In the Jungle.

  In Bavaria 1922 was a Brecht year. Soon after his return the Munich Residenztheater accepted In the Jungle, thanks to the recommendations of its artistic adviser Jacob Geis and of its new chief director Erich Engel, who had arrived a few months earlier from his native Hamburg. Baal was at last published (by Gustav Kiepenheuer of Potsdam), while 29 September saw the premiere of Drums in the Night. Clearly this was very different from later Brecht productions, for Otto Falckenberg, the head of the Kammerspiele, staged it in expressionist style with angular poses and sets to match by his own staff designer Otto Reigbert. But Ihering came from Berlin to review it, and in the Berliner Börsen-Courier of 5 October he wrote that ‘At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany’s literary complexion overnight. Bert Brecht has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision.’ Here too was ‘a physical sense of chaos and decay’:

  Hence the unparallelled creative force of his language. It is a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column.

  Ihering was known to be the judge for that year’s award of the Kleist Prize. This had been founded in 1911 by a group of Kleist enthusiasts to celebrate the centenary of the poet’s death, and was intended for writers who had yet to establish themselves. Up to its abolition in 1932 it was probably the most significant literary award in Germany, having previously been given to the playwrights Sorge, Unruh, Hasenclever and Jahnn, while in 1923-5 it went to Musil, Barlach and Zuckmayer. On 13 November the Berliner Börsen-Courier announced that it had gone to Brecht, and not for Drums in the Night only but for all three of his completed plays. ‘Brecht’s linguistic power,’ said Ihering’s citation,

  is even more richly developed in Baal and In the Jungle. His language is vivid without being deliberately poetic, symbolical without being over literary. Brecht is a dramatist because his language is felt physically and in the round.

  Because Drums in the Night was generally regarded as the prize-winning play it was widely performed all over Germany, notably in Berlin immediately before Christmas, when Falckenberg again directed it for the Deutsches Theater with a first-rate cast. Brecht always claimed that he had only written it to make money, and certainly it differs in several ways from his other works. Alone of those in this volume it seems to contain no anticipations of his later plays.

  In Munich for two nights after the premiere it was followed by a midnight show called The Red Grape (Die rote Zibebe, a name at one time given to the tavern in Act 4, and also used of the moon which hangs so conspicuously over the action). This was described as an ‘improvisation in two scenes by Bert Brecht and Karl Valentin’, the latter being a famous Munich music-hall comedian. In the first scene Max Schreck, the actor who played Glubb, was the Freakshow Landlord who opened a series of curtained cabins, each containing a performer who stepped out to do a solo turn. The programme shows that these included the sailor-poet Joachim Ringelnatz, the reciter Ludwig Hardt, Brecht himself singing songs, and the dancer Valeska Gert, though for the second performance Brecht seems to have been replaced by his fellow-poet Klabund. The second scene was a sketch called ‘Christmas Evening’ by Valentin, whom a short programme note by Brecht compared with Chaplin, among other things for his ‘virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology’. Valentin’s influence has sometimes been seen in Brecht’s farcical one-acters, though Brecht himself acknowledged it rather as affecting his work as a director, particularly his use of grouping.

  That October Brecht was appointed to the Kammerspiele’s dramaturgical and directing staff, where his main task was the adaptation and production of Marlowe’s Edward II. The actual writing of this play, which is very largely an original work, must have
taken place mainly in the winter of 1922-3, since the Berlin State Theatre started showing an interest in it early in the new year. It was done in collaboration with Feuchtwanger, whom Brecht saw frequently throughout 1923 and who is said to have inspired the speech characteristics of Shlink in In the Jungle. It was not however performed till the next year, and although there were two more Brecht premieres in 1923, neither was at the Kammerspiele itself. First In the Jungle was staged at the Residenztheater on 9 May by Engel, with settings by Brecht’s school-friend Caspar Neher: the beginning of a lifelong collaboration between the three men. Jessner of the State Theatre came from Berlin, as did Ihering, who again wrote enthusiastically, though not without observing that to anyone insensitive to its language the play must appear a muddle. This the local critics bore out; the three-hour performance was poorly received; it ran for only six evenings, and altogether was a disastrous enough flop to occasion the sacking of the theatre’s artistic adviser. Nor was Baal in Leipzig at the end of the year any more successful. Alvin Kronacher’s production at the Old Theatre on 8 December was taken off by order of the city council within a week, and the director reprimanded. It brought an interesting press controversy between Ihering and his rival Alfred Kerr as to the relative originality of Brecht and Toller, but Kerr was undoubtedly right when he wrote that ‘The only hope for a Baalade like this is as a posthumous fragment…’. For the text as we have it was not performed again for another forty years.

  The rehearsals for Edward II began that autumn under Brecht’s own direction. Brecht also supplied the music; the sets were again by Neher, and as in the two previous Munich Brecht productions the actor Erwin Faber played the lead. The premiere on 19 March 1924 was somewhat thrown out by the drunkenness of one of the principal actors, but the local critics appreciated Brecht’s success in conveying his ballad-like conception of the story (he apparently had the scene titles and dates announced before each episode), while Ihering was impressed by his handling of the ensemble scenes and the careful dissection of the long speeches. Knowing something of Brecht’s as yet unformulated theoretical ideas, he realized that the audience with which he most sympathized was that for boxing matches, sporting events and incidents in the street, and attributed to this novel orientation part of the success of the production. Looking back two years later he saw it as something more: a major turning-point in the German theatre’s understanding of the classics. For here had been an attempt at demonumentalization, an appeal for ‘not so much plaster…’ (the title of one of Brecht’s subsequent essays), in which