Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 1 Read online

  He did not analyse the characters; he set them at a distance … He called for a report on the events.

  Viewed from 1926 it seemed like an early example of the‘epic’ style.

  Brecht’s Munich period came to an end with the 1923-4 theatrical season, for once established in Berlin he remained based there until he went into exile in 1933. Only the one-acters had not been performed by the time of his move. Baal, Drums in the Night and Edward were all in print, while the Hauspostille, his first book of poems, was enjoying something of an underground reputation, having been announced as early as 1922, five years before its actual publication. That first winter in Berlin he was to have the rare distinction (for a young author) of two productions in the major theatres: Edward II directed by Jürgen Fehling (this gifted director’s only Brecht production) at the State Theatre, with Werner Krauss as Mortimer and Faber once more as Edward, and Jungle at the Deutsches Theater directed by Engel, who had been lured to Berlin by Max Reinhardt a few months before Brecht. The outstanding young actor Fritz Kortner turned down a part in Reinhardt’s St Joan in order to play Shlink: another indication of the interest already stimulated by Brecht’s early work.

  II

  If the Bavarian years made Brecht’s name they also established the main lines of argument for and against his work, with Kerr and Ihering respectively as counsel for the prosecution and the defence. Already the point at issue was his literary borrowings, and a number of later attacks on him (including that dealt with in the notes to In the Jungle of Cities) were foreshadowed in Kerr’s Baal critique, with its dismissal of the play as second-hand Büchner and Grabbe. ‘The gifted Brecht,’ he wrote, ‘is a frothing plagiarist.’ To which Ihering countered:

  A writer’s productivity can be seen in his relationship with old themes. In Schweiger Werfel invented a ‘hitherto unheard of story’ and was none the less imitative in every respect. Brecht was fired by Marlowe’s Edward II and was creative through and through.

  At the same time Brecht had been able to build the nucleus of his subsequent team of supporters and collaborators: first and foremost Neher, then Engel, the rather older Feuchtwanger, Kortner, Homolka, Klabund’s actress wife Carola Neher and the playwright Marieluise Fleisser, all of them people who have left their individual marks on the German theatre. Here Brecht’s personal magnetism clearly played a part: something to which there have been many tributes, starting with Feuchtwanger’s fictional picture of him as the engineer Pröckl in his novel Success (1931). The first three plays all bore dedications: to his school-friend George Pfanzelt (the ‘Orge’ of the poems), to Bie Banholzer who bore his illegitimate son Frank (killed in the war) and to Marianne his first wife, whom he married in 1922. With Edward II this practice came to an end.

  These were Brecht’s pre-collectivist, indeed in a sense his prepolitical years. He undoubtedly had opinions, many of them progressive and even revolutionary, but they were far from systematic, and politics and economics were wholly absent from what we know of his reading. On the other hand it was an extraordinarily tense and eventful time for Germany in general and Bavaria in particular, and Brecht was much too sensitive a writer not to reflect this in his work. A good deal has been made of his supposed pacifism in the First World War – though his schoolboy writings show that in fact he set out from a conventionally patriotic attitude and hardly developed beyond concern at the casualties – and of the impact made on him by his military service, which in fact was done on his own doorstep and in a hospital for venereal diseases, and started only a month or two before the end of the war. Several of the Hauspostille poems which are held to express his post-war sense of release had in fact already been written by then. Nor is there any evidence that he was more than a spectator of the revolutionary movements of November 1918, when the monarchy fell, and the first months of 1919, when Munich and Augsburg were governed by Soviets following Kurt Eisner’s murder and the short-lived Spartacist revolt in Berlin.

  Yet the ‘Legend of the Dead Soldier’ which he wrote in 1918 and took into Drums in the Night (see pp. 101 and 391) is always supposed to have earned him a place on the Munich Nazis’ black list, while the play itself, though their paper the Völkischer Beobachter thought that it ‘at any rate showed something of the idiocy of the November Revolution’, struck none of the liberal critics as an unfair picture. It was certainly a very confused one, as the muddle over the dating of the action will confirm, and Brecht himself came to judge it in the severest terms, very nearly suppressing the play altogether. The revolutionary setting, however, was only a background to the real drama, and it had an instinctive poetic power which was not to be found in Brecht’s later amendments.

  The element of revolt in his writing of this time was largely directed against his own middle-class background: the satirical first scene of Baal, for instance, and the first two acts of Drums in the Night. Much of his reading, too, was exotic-escapist, as can be seen from the allusions in this volume to Gauguin and Treasure Island and Rudyard Kipling, and certainly this partly explains Brecht’s interest in Rimbaud, whose elevated prose underlies Garga’s ‘psalmodizing’ in In the Jungle (cf. Brecht’s own semi-prose ‘Psalms’) and whose relationship with Verlaine was surely the model for that of Baal and Ekart. ‘How boring Germany is!’ says a note of 18 June 1920. ‘It’s a good average country, its pale colours and its surfaces are beautiful, but what inhabitants!’ ‘What’s left?’ he concluded: ‘America!’ That year he read two novels about Chicago, J. V. Jensen’s The Wheel (which has never appeared in English) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and when he began work on his own In the Jungle it was under their influence, intensified no doubt by his first experience of ‘the crushing impact of cities’ (about which he wrote an early poem) in the hard winter of 1921-2.

  By the time of its first performance the French occupation of the Ruhr had given a great stimulus to nationalism throughout Germany, and not least to the Nazis in Bavaria. The Völkischer Beobachter particularly detested this play, claiming that the audience was full of Jews and that the Chinese characters spoke Yiddish. A month later Brecht and Bronnen heard Adolf Hitler addressing a meeting in a Munich circus, and were inspired (according to Bronnen) to work out what sort of a political show they could put on in a circus themselves. In November the Beer-Cellar Putsch interrupted the rehearsals of Edward II for a day. Brecht, with his colleague Bernhard Reich, went to call on Feuchtwanger, who saw this as the sign that they must leave Bavaria (and did in fact leave in 1924). But Reich recalls no particular concern with the Nazis on Brecht’s part, and indeed not only was the putsch quite firmly suppressed – and Hitler jailed – but the stabilization of the currency by the central government set the Nazi movement back for a number of years.

  The period covered by this volume saw not only a certain element of political restoration throughout central and eastern Europe but also the end of Expressionism in the arts. To the poet-playwright Iwan Goll, who in 1921 published an essay called ‘Expressionism is Dying’, the two phenomena were connected. ‘Expressionism was a fine, good, grand thing…’ he wrote. ‘But the result is, alas, and through no fault of the Expressionists, the German Republic of 1920.’ Dadaism likewise was breaking up by 1922; at the Bauhaus the semi-mystical Itten was about to be succeeded by the technologically minded Moholy-Nagy; while artists like Grosz, Dix, Beckmann and Schlichter were evolving the coolly representational, socially conscious style which in 1924 became known as Neue Sachlichkeit. Brecht was always much too conscious of his own aims to care to be labelled as part of a movement; none the less his works of these years very clearly reflect the decline of Expressionism and the rise of the new style. He defined his position admirably in a note of 27 June 1920:

  I can compete with the ultra-modernists in hunting for new forms and experimenting with my feelings. But I keep realizing that the essence of art is simplicity, grandeur and sensitivity, and that the essence of its form is coolness.

  Baal was written as a kind of counter-play to th
e Expressionists’ invocations of Humanity with a capital H, yet the wandering poet remains a romantic-expressionist figure, while the influence of Georg Büchner is one that is also noticeable in a number of Expressionist plays. Drums in the Night too, with its symbolic use of the moon, its cinematic third act and its hero’s slightly mad rhetoric, can reasonably be termed an Expressionist play. In the Jungle, however, was written at the turning-point, the watershed between the two movements. The Rimbaud allusions, the colour references before each scene in the 1922 version, the attic-cum-undergrowth setting, the use of spotlights referred to in Brecht’s note of 1954: all this is expressionistic, whereas the American milieu, the preoccupation with the big cities and the very notion of the ‘fight’ were to become characteristic concerns of the mid-1920s. A further note of 10 February 1922 even suggests that Brecht was looking forward to his own 1930s doctrine of ‘alienation’:

  I hope in Baal and Jungle I’ve avoided one common artistic bloomer, that of trying to carry people away. Instinctively, I’ve kept my distance and ensured that the realization of my (poetical and philosophical) effects remains within bounds. The spectator’s ‘splendid isolation’ is left intact; it is not sua res quae agitur; he is not fobbed off with an invitation to feel sympathetically, to fuse with the hero and seem significant and indestructible as he watches himself in two different versions. A higher type of interest can be got from making comparisons, from whatever is different, amazing, impossible to overlook.

  Thus though In the Jungle is still wildly romantic it already foreshadows the detached impersonalities of the machine age. And those supporters who, like Ihering and Engel and Geis, thought that Brecht would help lead the theatre out of the Expressionist undergrowth can now be seen to have been absolutely right.

  III

  The final texts of these plays often make Brecht’s evolution difficult to follow. He was a restless amender and modifier of his own work, so that any one of them may consist of layer upon layer of elements from different periods. ‘He is more interested in the job than in the finished work,’ wrote Feuchtwanger in an article of 1928 called ‘Portrait of Brecht for the English’,

  in the problem than in its solution, in the journey than in its goal. He rewrites his works an untold number of times, twenty or thirty times, with a new revision for every minor provincial production. He is not in the least interested in seeing a work completed….

  Thus between 1922 and its publication in 1927 In the Jungle became In the Jungle of Cities. The city allusions were strengthened, the boxing foreword was added and various boxing allusions worked into the text, the colour references at the start of each scene gave way to mock-precise (‘objective’) data of time and place, the whole flavour of the play was changed. The same was done still more drastically with Baal in 1926, though in this case Brecht later decided to scrap the more ‘objective’, technologically flavoured version and go back (more or less) to the 1922-3 text. Drums in the Night he seems to have left alone after 1922, perhaps because it was not performed again after the first, largely topical wave of interest had subsided – though the discussion on p. 401 ff. suggests that Piscator was considering it. Then for his Collected Plays in the 1950s he largely rewrote the last two acts.

  All this means that each play as we now have it reflects the views and to some extent the spirit of a number of different periods. The performances which have gone into theatrical history were not based on these particular texts. Even Brecht’s own notes are difficult to understand without knowing to which version each of them relates.

  It is an impossible problem editorially, and our policy has been to print the final text but to provide all the variant material from other versions published in Brecht’s lifetime, together with extensive notes on the main unpublished scripts. This is so that the reader should not get false ideas of Brecht’s evolution and of his ideas and achievements at any given time. Brecht was a profound believer in change, whom it would be wrong to present statically in a final ‘authoritative’ mould. Indeed opinions might well differ as to whether any such mould is the right one: not only are there fine things in many of the rejected versions, which it would be cruel not to publish, but informed judgement often disagrees with Brecht’s last choices. Thus the chief German expert on Baal and the author of much the best book on Brecht’s early years both prefer the 1919 script of Baal; an outstanding West German theatre critic wants the 1922 Drums in the Night; while Ihering wrote of the (final) published version of In the Jungle of Cities in 1927:

  I love the fullness and colour of the old Jungle. There seemed to be no better evidence of Brecht’s richness and gifts than those crackling, exotically pulsating scenes as they shot to and fro…. The new Jungle, the Jungle of Cities, has lost in colour and atmosphere. It has gained in clarity and concentration.

  Not that there is much chance that Brecht himself would have accepted his own choices as final if he had lived longer, or seen them staged, or looked again at some of the earlier texts which for one reason or another he did not have before him when preparing the collected plays. It is characteristic that he already wanted the 1926 version of Baal printed as an appendix. For he was always a man in motion, who progressed best by disagreeing with what had already been said. Often it had been said by himself.

  As for the translations, they are as good as translators and editors can make them, but they make no claim to be definitive. Better translations may well appear with time – quite apart from the obvious fact that each time must make its own translations. In all the poetry Brecht’s rules of punctuation are followed; that is to say there are no commas at the ends of lines, the line break being considered sufficient pause for anything short of a colon. Our aim is that the poetry should so far as possible fit any settings by the main composers with whom Brecht collaborated. A note will normally indicate where this is not the case, though there may be some tunes, particularly of Brecht’s own, which we have failed to track down.

  All translation in the notes is by the responsible editor, as is the selection of material printed. The aim here has been to include anything of relevance to the understanding or production of the play in question, leaving those notes which comprise more general statements of Brecht’s theatrical ideas to be published in the volumes devoted to his theoretical writings. The essay ‘On Looking Through my First Plays’, which he wrote as a foreword to the first two volumes of his collected Stücke in 1954 (too late for the first printing), has been split into its component sections, of which that on Man equals Man will follow in the next volume. It can be reconstituted by reading it in the order indicated, starting with (i), the section on Drums in the Night.

  The German text used throughout, unless otherwise stated, is that of the Gesammelte Werke (or Collected Works) edited by Elisabeth Hauptmann and a team comprising Werner Hecht, Rosemarie Hill, Herta Ramthun and Klaus Völker, and published by Suhrkamp-Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main, in 1967. This is referred to as GW, plus the appropriate subdivision: Stücke (plays), Schriften zum Theater (writings on the theatre), and so on. When the same terms (Stücke, for instance, as above) are used without the prefix GW they refer to the earlier collected edition issued by the same publisher from 1953 on. Particulars of other sources are given in full where reference is made to them. We would like to thank the editors and publisher for the help which they have given with various queries. The Brecht Archive in East Berlin has been generous in supplying material, and we are grateful for the support given us from the outset by Stefan S. Brecht.

  THE EDITORS

  Chronology

  1898

  10 February: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht born in Augsburg.

  BAVARIA

  1914

  17 August: first contribution to Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten.

  1919

  21 October: first theatre criticism for Augsburger Volks-wille.

  1921

  6 September: first short story in Der neue Merkur (Munich).

  1922

 
5 September: first contribution to Berliner Börsen-Courier. 30 September: Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night) première, Munich. Publication of plays Baal and Trommeln in der Nacht. December: Trommeln in der Nacht at Deutsches Theater, Berlin.

  1923

  9 May: Im Dickicht (der Städte) (In the Jungle of Cities) première, Munich. 8 December: Baal première, Leipzig.

  1924

  18 March: Edward II première, Munich, Brecht’s first production.

  BERLIN

  1924

  29 October: Im Dickicht at Deutsches Theater, Berlin. October: Edward II at Staatstheater, Berlin.

  1926

  14 February: Baal at Deutsches Theater, produced by Homolka and Brecht. 25 September: Mann ist Mann (Man equals Man) première, Darmstadt. December: Die Hochzeit (A Respectable Wedding) première, Frankfurt.

  1927

  First book of poems: Die Hauspostille (Sermons for the Home). 23 March: Mann ist Mann broadcast, Berlin, with Helene Weigel. 17 July: Mahagonny (‘Songspiel’) première, Baden-Baden. First collaboration with Kurt Weill. Produced by Brecht. 14 October: radio adaptation of Macbeth broadcast, Berlin. 27 November: article in the Frankfurter Zeitung on the ‘Epic Theatre’. December: Im Dickicht der Städte (revised version) at Darmstadt.

  1928

  5 January: Mann ist Mann at the Volksbühne, Berlin. 31 August: Threepenny Opera première, Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin.