Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 1

by Bertolt Brecht

  4

  1918: The Kraglers’ Revolution

  When the play proved successful what succeeded was the love story and the use of drums offstage. (At the same time I’m prepared to admit that a certain fresh and personal quality and a fairly unrestrained penchant for putting things in a poetical way counted in my favour.) My interest in the revolution whose job it was to serve as background was about as great as the interest felt in Vesuvius by a man who wants to boil a kettle on it. Moreover, my kettle seemed to me a very large affair compared with the volcano in question. It truly wasn’t my fault that the play ended up by giving something like a picture of the first German revolution and, even more, a picture of this particular revolutionary.

  This revolution followed after a war which originated in a nervous breakdown on the part of the diplomats and was finished off by the military. The bourgeoisie waged it with particular force. Wars have been waged before now for sillier reasons than the annexation of the coal and iron-ore districts of Briey. That famous dagger which the proletariat thrust into the army’s back (the legend of which went on … buzzing a long while in people’s heads) would, if successful, have struck a region the army had long since abandoned; defeated, it was withdrawing. That was where the Kraglers came in. They made a revolution because their country, which some of them hadn’t seen for four years, had changed. The Kraglers were rigidly conservative. Thanks to the sudden disappearance from all government positions of that part of the bourgeoisie which was aware that it was the bourgeoisie, the part which wasn’t (i.e. the Social Democrats) was put in the embarrassing situation of having to fill them. These men were revolutionaries in the sense that miners in an insecure pit are mining engineers. The problem for the Kraglers was how to become bourgeois. Most people treated them as revolutionaries, and on the stage indeed I found that Kragler gave a very revolutionary impression. Above all, he gave the impression of being a proletarian. Of course the military had been proletarianized. Their complexion was not what it used to be. Factories had always been like barracks, and now it could be seen that they had similar effects. For a while the true revolutionaries could deprecate the play, since they took Kragler to be a proletarian and had learnt what good heroes such proletarians make. They could also oppose it on the grounds that they took Kragler to be a bourgeois and didn’t want a hero like that. For there wasn’t any doubt about his being a hero. Today, however, they could no longer deny that it is a thoroughly political play. An object-lesson such as one seldom gets. What they had before them was that disastrous type of Social Democrat, and in his heroic incarnation at that. It was difficult to identify him as a bourgeois, either on the stage or in real life. The revolution had undeniably been lost. This was the type that had made it. What mattered most was to learn how to identify him. He had made it, and here he was. Here, in an ordinary romantic love story with no particular depth to it, was this Social Democrat, this fake proletarian, this catastrophic revolutionary who sabotaged the revolution, who was more bitterly fought by Lenin than the bourgeois proper, and who so evaded even Lenin’s grasp that before the Russian revolution it was scarcely possible to identify him to the masses so that they could be warned. This, then, was Kragler, this revolutionary whom sympathy converted back into a property-owner, who wept and nagged and, as soon as he got what he had been lacking, went home. As for the proletarians, they were not shown the play.

  [GW Schriften zum Theater 3, p. 960 ff.

  Written after Brecht’s move to Berlin.]

  NOTES OF CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ‘DRUMS IN THE NIGHT’

  BRECHT: Ten years since I wrote it. The whole business pretty strange to me now. What I saw was important. Possibly a lot there that I failed to see. Total impression a wrong one. Kragler = drama of the individual. But impossible to depict the German revolution as drama of the individual. I see him coming back after the war. He finds home devastated, no place for him. One’s shown what happened to the fellow. But not shown, e.g. that the fellow is first-rate material; not shown him in any situation where the revolution can make use of him; not shown how the revolution fails to do this. The way Lenin would have seen him: out of reach for four years, but submitted to increasing revolutionary tension. If he would have ratted none the less, then play bad. That isn’t what happens, though.

  PISCATOR: That would make sense if there’d been nobody capable of showing. But you had Liebknecht, Luxemburg … When the troops came back from the war the line was all of a sudden: ‘Take part in the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils!’ Play needs changes. The man was a prisoner. Doesn’t alter the position. Battle for the newspaper offices. Everyone knew the proletarian slogans. Only a half-wit could avoid them. Can Kragler remain so ignorant and apart? Then he’s an individual case, not a typical worker. Didn’t act as a blackleg either. No feeling either for or against the revolution … That’s as close as one can get to him. There lies the tragedy, but it didn’t originate with Kragler. The tragedy about Kragler …

  BRECHT: He’s not tragic.

  PISCATOR: The world around him’s supposed to seem tragic. The tragedy is that the German revolution is a failure, that people aren’t faced with a challenge.

  BRECHT: Tragic or not tragic, from the point of view of the revolution it’s wrong that no approach was made to the man.

  PISCATOR: Establish the crux. The man turns up as an ex-prisoner. Chance is the decisive factor in the situation. He’s always having to circumvent chance incidents.

  STERNBERG: The 1918 revolution must be present in the background. I’d say that, now we’ve got a militant red organization, the German Communist Party, we’re too apt to project everything back to the 1918 period, which is something Brecht has instinctively avoided doing. The slogan ‘Convert the war into a civil war!’ only dates from the beginning of the revolution. This was one thing in Russia, where they already started trying to convert a war into a civil war in 1905, and another in Germany, where social democracy was a force. (New number of Klassenkampf today: Ebert wanted to save the monarchy as late as 9 November: the leader of social democracy!) That’s how things were in 1918 when the troops came home. So and so many million workers were then in the same sociological situation. They had the same programme as the majority Socialists: let’s hope we get in. There must have been a tremendous preponderance of pacifist forces to detach a worker from the revolution.

  BRECHT: Needs every possible force to get his girl back.

  STERNBERG: The girl’s running away isn’t an occasion for making a revolution. But suppose you were a German worker who had been slung into the war and badly misused and had heard one side’s slogans, then you would have to be a lot more positive in your attitude to the revolution. In the days of the Spartacists there were 8 million workers coming back from the war and 2 per cent who joined in.

  PISCATOR: Projecting back is something we do with Shakespeare as well as with Brecht. Seeing things in a present-day light.

  BRECHT: But not modernizing a 1918 play.

  PISCATOR: You mustn’t forget, though, that you’re now seeing what you failed to see then. Today’s angle on the subject is a new one. Not a question of seeing further; that’s not possible. The new viewpoints are different and must be brought into use too. Piscator came back to Berlin at the beginning of January. Factories all striking, workers all parading with enormous signs along Unter den Linden. More workers coming the other way with signs saying ‘Liebknecht, Luxemburg’, both groups grabbing each other’s signs. Fighting, till somebody shoots. All the workers on the streets. Everywhere small parties of people arguing.

  BRECHT: Make him just a historian. Kragler was part of the general movement. Hearing different advice from all directions, ‘You must save the revolution – You must carry on the revolution – You must pull back, reconstruct – Bourgeois republic’s the pattern now – etc.’ He is simply raw material. And on the third day? He goes home. He counts how much money he’s got in his pocket, and goes home.

  PISCATOR: That’d be an exceptionally
calculated reaction.

  BRECHT: An Ebert man, who really does reckon that private life’s more important.

  PISCATOR: In that case the line has got to be drawn very clearly. He must connect up with the subject if he’s to be dramatic. As it stands, the play is felt poetically. Brecht saw the man splitting the movement rather than the movement itself. Brecht today is looking back at the revolution scientifically; in those days he was a poet.

  BRECHT: All the same, Kragler does notice one or two things. He’s been told he must go along, he’s faced with the choice of going along, he doesn’t go along, he has an extremely bad conscience, he feels he’s a swine, that it’s a cheap drama. It ends with him saying, ‘I’m a swine, and the swine’s going home.’

  STERNBERG: That’s the crux. Piscator’s right.

  BRECHT: He turns against the revolution, rejects it; he’s for romanticism. (The Russian revolution classic, the German not.)

  PISCATOR: You may say I look at the revolution romantically, but Liebknecht and Luxemburg didn’t.

  STERNBERG: What he said agrees with Piscator’s view. He’s a chance instance. Finds the revolution romantic.

  BRECHT: Bunk, according to a lot of people.

  […]

  PISCATOR: What are they sitting at home for? Kragler because he realizes the revolution’s bunk; many others because they’re disillusioned.

  BRECHT: They’re still Kragler. All those you saw, Kraglers. The only kind who weren’t Kraglers, the genuine revolutionaries around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were the chaps with their eyes open, and they weren’t typical. Typical were types like Kragler. He was my revolutionary.

  STERNBERG: This is where you need […] film to show how they came to be the majority.

  BRECHT: And to get their way.

  […]

  STERNBERG: I can picture Kragler today sitting in the KPD, a proper communist. A simple type. He’s no longer typical today. He’s once again subject to the law of decreasing wages, no longer views the revolution as bunk. A type who has undergone a change.

  BRECHT: In effect: a man sits there, in this year of grace 1928, talking about 1918. Not at all the same conversation as in 1918. (What with all conversation becoming increasingly political.) In those days he thought about nothing but the woman.

  PISCATOR: It’s still an isolated case of one individual’s drama. Observed by somebody who had nothing to do with the movement.

  BRECHT: One can’t say that. He’d just as much to do as those million others.

  STERNBERG: We’re taking one man and showing what they were all like in 1918.

  […]

  PISCATOR: Why does the play have to be performed?

  BRECHT: To show why these people went home, why the revolution came to nothing. Historical enlightenment. The stumbling block was a type who really existed.

  PISCATOR: In the hope of showing how revolution can lead to something.

  [Schriften zum Theater 2, p. 272 ff, shortened as indicated. Not in GW. This conversation, dated 18 November 1928, was followed by another six days later.]

  ON LOOKING THROUGH MY FIRST PLAYS (i)

  Of all my early plays the comedy Drums in the Night is the most double-edged. Here was a case where revolting against a contemptible literary convention almost amounted to contempt for a great social revolt. A ‘normal’ (i.e. conventional), approach to this story about the returning soldier who joins the revolution because his girl has got engaged to somebody else would either have given the girl back to him or have denied her to him for good; either way it would have left him taking part in the revolution. In Drums in the Night Kragler, the soldier, gets his girl back, albeit ‘damaged’, and puts the revolution behind him. It seems just about the shabbiest possible solution, particularly as there is a faint suspicion of approval on the part of the author.

  Today I realize that my contradictory spirit – I’m suppressing my wish to insert the word ‘youthful’ as I hope I still have it at my disposal in full strength – led me close to the limits of absurdity.

  The ‘human predicament’ drama of those days, with its unrealistic pseudo-solutions, was uncongenial to the student of science. It set up a highly improbable and undoubtedly ineffectual collective of ‘good’ people who were supposed to put a final stop to war – that complicated phenomenon whose roots lie deep in the social fabric – chiefly by moral condemnation. I knew next to nothing definite about the Russian revolution, but my own modest experience as a medical orderly in the winter of 1918 was enough to make me think that a totally new and different permanent force had entered the arena: the revolutionary proletariat.

  It seems that my knowledge was not enough to make me realize the full seriousness of the proletarian rising in the winter of 1918-19, only to show me how unseriously my obstreperous ‘hero’ took part in it. The initiative in this fight was taken by the proletarians; he cashed in. They didn’t have to lose property in order to make them rebel; he got restitution. They were prepared to look after his interests; he betrayed theirs. They were the tragic figures, he the comic. All this, I realized on reading the play, had been perfectly evident to me, but I could not manage to make the audience see the revolution any differently from my ‘hero’ Kragler, and he saw it as something romantic. The technique of alienation was not yet open to me.

  Reading Acts 3, 4, and 5 of Drums in the Night I felt such dissatisfaction that I thought of suppressing the play. The only thing that stopped me erecting a small funeral pyre was the feeling that literature is part of history, and that history ought not to be falsified, also a sense that my present opinions and capacities would be of less value without some knowledge of my previous ones – that is, presuming that there has been any improvement. Nor is suppression enough; what’s false must be set right.

  Admittedly I could not do much. The character of Kragler, the soldier, the petit-bourgeois, I couldn’t touch. My comparative approval of his conduct had also to be preserved. Anyway, even the workers always find it easier to understand the petit-bourgeois who defends his own interests (however sordid these may be, and even if he is defending them against the workers) than the man who joins them for romantic reasons or out of a sense of guilt. However, I cautiously reinforced the other side. I gave the publican Glubb a nephew, a young worker who fell as a revolutionary during the November fighting. Though he could only be glimpsed in outline, somewhat filled in, however, thanks to the publican’s scruples, this worker provided a kind of counterpart to the soldier Kragler.

  The reader or spectator has then to be relied on to change his attitude to the play’s hero, unassisted by appropriate alienations, from sympathy to a certain antipathy.

  [From ‘Bei Durchsicht meiner ersten Stücke’ in GW

  Schriften zum Theater, pp. 945-7. Dated March 1954.]

  Editorial Note on the Text

  The original version of this play was written in the spring of 1919 and entitled Spartakus; no script of it has so far been found. The Brecht Archive has only the typescript of the version used for the Deutsches Theater production of December 1922, three months after the Munich premiere. The earliest known text is that published by Drei-Masken Verlag in Munich in 1922, which was also reissued twice by Propyläen-Verlag (i.e. Ullstein) in Berlin during the second half of the 1920s. Brecht used it for the first volume of his collected Stücke in 1953, with the extensive revisions outlined in his own retrospective note. This revised text was printed, with minor amendments, in the Gesammelte Werke of 1967 and is the basis of the present translation.

  Three main versions are thus accessible: the 1922 publication, the script of December 1922, and the final text of 1953. The first describes the play as a ‘Drama’, the other two simply as a ‘Play’. In the second the prostitute Augusta is for some reason called Carmen, though Augusta remains a nickname. At some earlier point the Bar in Act 4 seems to have been called ‘The Red Grape’ (or ‘Raisin’): hence the nickname given to one of the waiter brothers in the final version. The confusion in the timi
ng of the action (which is said to take place in November, though the Spartacist revolt and the battle for the Berlin newspaper offices actually occurred in January) was not cleared up till 1967, when a note appeared in GW saying, ‘The action of the play now takes place in January 1919.’ The most serious divergences between the different versions however occur in Acts 3, 4, and 5, and they represent a seemingly permanent dissatisfaction on Brecht’s part with the second half of the play.

  This is already on record in his diaries of 1920, even before our earliest version. ‘I have rewritten the beginning of Act 3 of Drums,’ he noted on 3 August, ‘and the second (optional) ending to Act 4…. I’ve done four versions of Act 4 and three of Act 5. I’ve now got two endings, one comic, one tragic.’ A little later he is ‘dictating Drums in the Night. The third act is in the main good; the fourth a bastard, an abortion….’ Twenty-five diary pages later he is still at it:

  nagging away at Drums in the Night. I’m drilling rock, and the drills are breaking. It’s terribly hard to make this fourth act follow grandly and simply after the first three, at the same time carrying on the external tension of the third, which works pretty well, and bringing the internal transformation (in 15 minutes) forcefully home. What’s more, the play’s strong, healthy, untragic ending, which it had from the outset and for the sake of which it was written, is the only possible ending; anything else is too easy a way out, a weakly synthetic concession to romanticism. Here is a man apparently at an emotional climax, making a complete volteface; he tosses all pathos aside, tells his followers and admirers to stuff it, then goes home with the woman for whose sake he got involved in this extremely dangerous mess. Bed as final curtain. To hell with ideas, to hell with duty!

  The contrast between this view of the play and the author’s verdicts of 1928 and 1954 needs no stressing. Moreover, even by 1922 he had become less certain of the effectiveness of the third act, which seems to have gone badly at the première.