Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 1

by Bertolt Brecht

  EMILIE: When’s Baal coming?

  They discuss who has any money to pay for drinks. Emilie’s husband has died. They discuss Baal, before his entrance, somewhat as in [18]. Emilie, who says she has ‘come to see the golden boy eight years later … You know, I’d feel there was something missing if he didn’t somehow or other go completely to pieces,’ asks Eckart if he is abandoning him. Eckart says: ‘Yes, it’s already written on my face. It’s obvious to everybody. Only he doesn’t realize it yet. Although I keep telling him. As I did today,’ then breaks off as Baal arrives.

  The first exchanges are much as in [18], but Baal then asks the waitress, ‘Is that you, Sophie?’ Johann answers:

  Yes, that’s her all right. How are you? I’m doing very nicely. It’s a very good atmosphere here. Beer.

  SOPHIE: Beer.

  After Eckart’s outburst, where he says he is going back to the forests, Baal says ‘Are you off again? I don’t believe it, you know. I feel perfectly well myself.’ Eckart then tells the story of the man who thought he was well, as told by the Beggar in the Bolleboll-Gougou scene [13], up to the final ‘Did he get well?’ (here asked by Baal). ‘No.’

  Johann(es) makes none of his long melancholy speeches, but when he for the second time says, ‘It really is a very good atmosphere here,’ he adds, ‘Like in the old days.’ Emilie thereupon hums her verse, and Baal turns to Eckart:

  That girl Johanna Schreiber was with us then.

  EMILIE: Oh, the one who killed herself. She’s still stuck in a culvert somewhere. They never found her. He’s got a wife now, and a nice little coal-merchant’s business.

  JOHANN: Brandy.

  SOPHIE: Brandy.

  EMILIE: Have I altered much? I wasn’t too bad after you’d finished with me. I don’t imagine you’re pleased to hear that. For a time I couldn’t take any drinks that hadn’t been mixed eight times over. My late husband got me off wood-alcohol by hitting me.

  BAAL: Nothing doing.

  EMILIE: Give me a cigar.

  SOPHIE: Cigar.

  EMILIE: Give me the strongest schnaps; it’s all right. And I’ll go to bed with any of you that knows his business. Technique: that’s what I’m interested in. What are you looking at now?

  She claims to have drunk more than any of them. Baal replies: ‘You were never drunk, you had amazing control of yourself, you never were worth anything. That girl back there, for instance, who was very close to me once, is absolutely used up. She was a first-class phenomenon on this planet.’ As Emilie weeps, Baal sits by her and makes a formal declaration:

  … If you for your part still have some inclination towards my body, then I, being unaccustomed ever in my life to let any sort of offer go by, would now like to say this to you: my outward circumstances will make me incline towards you in six years at the most, by which time you will have achieved a total age of forty years.

  He smashes the light and sings, and Eckart’s murder follows much as in [18].

  Baal on the Run. 10 Degrees East of Greenwich.

  Scene 11.

  Almost identical with [9].

  Baal Dies Wretchedly among Woodcutters in the Year 1912.

  Scene 12. Night, rain, woodcutters playing cards.

  Baal on a dirty bed.

  This is considerably cut, but otherwise very close to [21]. The main difference is as the last woodcutter is leaving, after wiping Baal’s forehead. Baal calls him closer and says:

  … I agree. [Ich bin einverstanden.]

  MAN: What with?

  BAAL: With everything.

  MAN: But it’s all over now.

  BAAL: That was excellent.

  MAN: Off we go, then.

  BAAL: Hey, give me the book.

  MAN: But you haven’t any light.

  In Baal’s final speech there is no ‘Dear God’ and no ‘Dear Baal’. He calls for Eckart, not for his mother, and his last words are ‘It’s better in the doorway. Man! Trunks. Wind. Leaves. Stars. Hm.’

  DRUMS IN THE NIGHT

  BALLAD OF THE DEAD SOLDIER

  (Sung by Glubb at the beginning of Act 4)

  And when the war reached its fifth spring

  with no hint of a pause for breath

  the soldier did the obvious thing

  and died a hero’s death.

  The war, it appeared, was far from done.

  The Kaiser said, ‘It’s a crime.

  To think my soldier’s dead and gone

  before the proper time.’

  The summer spread over the makeshift graves.

  The soldier lay ignored

  until one night there came an official

  army medical board.

  The board went out to the cemetery

  with consecrated spade

  and dug up what was left of him

  and put him on parade.

  The doctors sorted out what they’d found

  and kept what they thought would serve

  and made their report: ‘He’s physically sound.

  He’s simply lost his nerve.’

  Straightway they took the soldier off.

  The night was soft and warm.

  You could tip your helmet back and see

  the stars they see at home.

  They filled him up with a fiery schnaps

  to bring him back to life

  then shoved two nurses into his arms

  and his half-naked wife.

  The soldier was stinking with decay

  so a priest goes on before

  to give him incense on his way

  that he may stink no more.

  In front the band with oom-pah-pah

  intones a rousing march.

  The soldier does like the handbook says

  and flicks his legs from his arse.

  Their arms about him, keeping pace

  two kind first-aid men go

  in case he falls in the shit on his face

  for that would never do.

  They paint his shroud with the black-white-red

  of the old imperial flag

  with so much colour it covers up

  that bloody spattered rag.

  Up front a gent in a morning suit

  and stuffed-out shirt marched too:

  a German determined to do his duty

  as Germans always do.

  So see them now as, oom-pah-pah

  along the roads they go

  and the soldier goes whirling along with them

  like a flake in the driving snow.

  The dogs cry out and the horses prance.

  The rats squeal on the land.

  They’re damned if they’re going to belong to France:

  it’s more than flesh can stand.

  And when they pass through a village all

  the women are moved to tears.

  The party salutes; the moon shines full.

  The whole lot give three cheers.

  With oom-pah-pah and cheerio

  and wife and dog and priest

  and, among them all, the soldier himself

  like some poor drunken beast.

  And when they pass through a village perhaps

  it happens he disappears

  for such a crowd comes to join the chaps

  with oompah and three cheers. …

  In all that dancing, yelling crowd

  he disappears from view.

  You can only see him from overhead

  which only stars can do.

  The stars won’t always be up there.

  The dawn is turning red.

  But the soldier goes off to a hero’s death

  just like the handbook said.

  In memory of Christian Grumbeis, infantryman, born on 11 April 1897, died in Holy Week 1918 at Karasin (Southern Russia). Peace to his ashes! He could take it.

  [Appendix to the 1922 edition. Now in the ‘Hauspostille’ section of Brecht’s collected poems, dated 1918, less the dedicatory note and under the title ‘Legend of the Dead
Soldier’.]

  NOTE FOR THE STAGE

  At Caspar Neher’s suggestion this play was performed in Munich with the following scenery. Pasteboard screens some six feet high represented the walls of the rooms, with the big city painted in childish style behind them. Every time Kragler appeared the moon glowed red a few seconds beforehand. Sounds were thinly hinted. In the last act the Marseillaise was performed on a gramophone. The third act can be left out if it fails to work fluently and musically and to liven up the tempo. It is a good idea to put up one or two posters in the auditorium bearing phrases such as ‘Stop that romantic staring’.

  [GW Stücke, p. 70. In all previous editions the words ‘At Caspar Neher’s suggestion’ were absent and a second phrase ‘Everybody is top man in his own skin’ included at the end.]

  NOTE TO THE SCRIPT OF THE BERLIN PRODUCTION

  A small stage, consisting of wood and pasteboard. Thin flats, only partly painted. Doors, windows, walls all have a makeshift air. Similarly, although the great revolutionary operation steadily grows in power offstage it makes only a thin, ghostlike effect in the auditorium. The persons nevertheless must be extremely real and the acting naïve. The auditorium contains posters with phrases from the play such as ‘Everybody is top man in his own skin’ and ‘The eye of the Lord maketh the cattle fat’ and ‘Stop that romantic staring’.

  [Unpublished. Brecht Archive typescript no. 2122 and 1569. This production was in December 1922.]

  PREFACE TO ‘DRUMS IN THE NIGHT’

  1

  Conversation with George Grosz

  What the bourgeoisie hold against proletarians is their bad complexion. I fancy that what made you, George Grosz, an enemy of the bourgeois was their physiognomy. It’s fairly common knowledge that war is currently being waged between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. To judge by the arguments on both sides it isn’t a war that depends on divergences of taste; but those arguments are deceptive and unconvincing, and above all, nobody ever pays them the slightest attention. The bourgeoisie commit injustices, but then injustices are committed on all sides. You and I, George Grosz, are against injustice (like everybody else). But we would be less against it if it could be committed by the proletariat. I mean to say: that can’t be the injustice that ‘forced you to take up your brushes’. And if it were, then you’d be a counter-revolutionary, and I would shoot you and erect you a monument. I don’t believe, Grosz, that overwhelming compassion for the exploited or anger against the exploiter one day filled you with an irresistible desire to get something about this down on paper. I think drawing was something you enjoyed, and people’s physiognomies so many pretexts for it. I imagine you becoming aware one day of a sudden overwhelming love for a particular type of face as a marvellous opportunity for you to amuse yourself. It was The Face of the Ruling Class [Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse, one of Grosz’s early albums]. I’m not underrating your enjoyment of protest, which was what no doubt moved you to expose as swine the very people who saw themselves as the élite of the human race – and necessarily had to be since none but an élite could be permitted such swinish behaviour. In the Protestant sense there wasn’t any truth worth revealing in reducing a proletarian type to his basic pattern. Proletarians have no call to be other than they are. In the immense effort it costs them just to keep alive they spontaneously adopted their most genuine basic form. Any kind of frills were out of the question. In appearing better than he really was, that type of bourgeois was doing business, but proletarians don’t do business at all. Art nowadays is in the same position as you: the type you adore as subject-matter you are bound to detest as a member of the public. Politically you regard the bourgeoisie as your enemy not because you are a proletarian but because you are an artist. Your political position (which unlike you I treat as secondary, you see,) is a position in relation to the public, not in relation to your subject-matter. I have gone through the same process as you, just as seriously though with nothing like the same success. Let me refer you to a play of mine which greatly displeased those who share your political opinions: the little comedy called Drums in the Night.

  2

  Drums in the Night’s success with the bourgeoisie

  This play was performed on some fifty bourgeois stages. Its success, which was considerable, simply proved that I had come to the wrong address. I was totally dissatisfied: why, I could not immediately say. I just had an uncomfortable sensation. I had a vague idea that the people who were so wildly anxious to shake my hand were just the lot I would have liked to hit on the head, not in this play perhaps but in general. My condition was like that of a man who has fired a gun at people he dislikes, and finds these same people coming and giving three cheers for him: inadvertently he has been firing off loaves of bread. When I then consulted the papers to find out what had happened I found that the chief element of my success lay in the furious attacks launched by the aesthetically reactionary press. So there were still those who complained of the loaves!

  The whole thing was an aesthetic business of which I understood nothing. In any other period I might have been able to understand something about it, but at this particular moment, with New York being built and Moscow being destroyed, and both processes seeming likely to concern the whole world, aesthetics were wholly irrelevant. The bourgeois theatre, equally incapable of performing the oldest plays or the most modern, imagined that its continued existence was merely a question of styles. Like a foundering ship, the sinking theatre concerned itself with the possibly very difficult but basically unimportant question whether it was better to sink to the left or to the right. And the crew criticized the band, which in its confusion kept on playing ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’, meaning the God who is on the side of the big battalions. To avoid dreadful misunderstandings I should point out that this image for the decline of the theatre may perhaps be inappropriate, for the reason that the theatre was a lot more expensive than an old steamship and worth a lot less, and that those who went down in her by no means suffered any loss but quite the reverse. Moreover, a brief bout of introspection was enough to convince audience and artists alike that the theatre was bound to go under; and those shrieks of desperation were paid for by the theatres out of what they made by selling advertising space in the programmes.

  I have always regarded myself as a man who, given a few drinks and cigars, can equip himself to turn out a literary work such as careful reflection will lead him to think desirable. The only thing is that I’m not sure what will happen if I give my abilities their head. Drums in the Night is an admirable instance of the weakness of the human will. I wrote it to make money. But although, amazingly enough, I really did make money I would be deceiving you if I said that my pains had been rewarded with success. A number of people managed to hand me money for them; but I managed to write a political play.

  3

  The love story

  In view of the fact that my choice of subject for the play was decided on speculative and financial grounds, it is perhaps of public interest that I should specifically have decided that a love story was called for. Writing this play was a really serious business undertaking, which was precisely what made me able to understand the needs of the paying public. (The experiences embodied in the play, in other words, were avarice and writing.) I was accordingly quite ready to supply the love story, but what I found interesting about it above all was of course the property aspect. The character of Kragler, who struck me as a typical hero of our time, reduced it to that. He wanted a particular woman, and the only course open to him psychologically if he didn’t get her was that of a man who fails to get a house that he used to, or wishes to, possess. The causes of his desire struck me as not worth going into. I didn’t in fact make the woman particularly desirable. She commands a certain run-of-the-mill sensuality, which can hardly be termed strong since it gets satisfied without further ado, and indeed without reference to the object or partner. The entire sexual motivation remains makeshift and ordinary. You or I would call it innocuous
. It is not that powerful, almost revolutionary call for physical satisfaction which arises when a woman needs somebody to sleep with her and has to put up with whatever man she can get. To Anna Balicke a man is not an article for use but a cheap luxury. In bourgeois society the erotic sphere is exhausted. Literature reflects this by the fact that sex no longer gives rise to associations. In fact, the strongest erotic life nowadays is probably to be found in that primitive literature (which occurs in the form of certain notoriously efficacious words and) which ordinary people wield with naive virtuosity. Clearly the significance of their refusal to use vulgar words in front of women is that such words can be relied upon to be thoroughly effective.

  Today the tragic potentialities of a love relationship consist in the couple’s failing to find a room. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find out whether today’s conditions also applied yesterday, as one can hardly ask one’s father about his sex life. But at least today one can clearly establish the attraction of vulgar words relating to sex and its organs. Enjoyment of dirty words largely depends on their guaranteed obscenity. Indeed, there are times when enjoyment of sex depends on its guaranteed obscenity. This romantic factor comes into play when Miss Balicke lusts after Kragler’s obscene ignominiousness. The bourgeoisie will see it as a triumph of the ideal. In my view not even such depressing considerations as these will deprive the love story in question of its charm.

  It may also be that real sexual enjoyment is now only to be got from venereal diseases. Here is a dumping-ground for our feelings where there is still some activity going on. One of these venereal diseases is pregnancy. Murk, whose rootlessness is due to the woman’s indifference – a very common pestilence that can truly be compared with those in the Bible – goes and infects her with a child. His conduct is moral: in occupying her troubled mind he improves his economic standing. But morality is there to prevent miscalculations. And the woman behaves immorally. She thinks she will get more from that atmosphere of obscene sexuality: from lying with Kragler when in a pregnant condition.