Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 1

by Bertolt Brecht

  The detailed notes that follow show what passages Brecht cut or changed when he reviewed the 1922 text in the early 1950s. One or two minor amendments apart, the whole of the 1922 edition can be reconstructed from it. The script used by the Deutsches Theater is different yet again, particularly where Acts 4 and 5 are concerned. This would be too complicated to analyse in full, but an account of the more substantial changes follows the extracts from the 1922 edition. It will be found to shed light on one or two obscurities, notably the characters of Glubb and Laar.

  VARIANT MATERIAL FROM THE 1922 PUBLISHED TEXT

  The figures correspond to the annotations marked in the play. A figure in the play shows where a passage or phrase has been cut from the 1922 text. Figures with small arrows show the beginning and end of a passage or phrase which Brecht rewrote in the 1950s. In each case the original is given below. There were also a very few entirely new additions, which are marked by arrows without figures.

  Where the 1922 text ends with a different punctuation mark from that shown in the play the next word should be correspondingly amended to start with a capital or lower-case letter, whichever is required.

  A few very minor amendments have been overlooked for the sake of simplicity.

  ACT 1

  1 It looks as if the revolutionaries are confining their action to the suburbs.

  ACT 2

  2 Then an ever-louder sound of stamping feet outside. Shouting. Whistling. Singing. Drumming. The stamping and shouting are prolonged.

  3 and whistling into the cafés.

  4 And got drums out in the street?

  ACT 3

  5 Street Leading to the Slums

  6 wife …

  7 Oh god, there’s sleep. There’s schnaps. There’s tobacco.

  8 tobacco

  9 down.

  MARIE: They’ll be swimming in schnaps down there tonight.

  10 THE ONE: They’re drumming pretty hard.

  THE OTHER: Hell! In our district!

  11 THE ONE: Feeling dizzy?

  THE OTHER: Haven’t you got a slow puncture?

  THE ONE: You’re getting smelly already.

  12 slums

  13 Now it’s drunk, but once it had buttoned boots and could do what it wanted with a tart on the dance-floor. Still, it’s cold now, I’d say, and has no very clear idea what to do. And shouldn’t be left lying about.

  14 Is it that sack of booze?

  15 and that will be him who is frightened out of his wits. I’ve known him since he was a boy.

  MANKE: To the dogs and to Glubb’s schnaps parlour, that’s where he’ll go. If he’s lucky he’ll be put up against a wall.

  BABUSCH: He’ll choose the schnaps parlour. Or else he’ll whistle them all up and when you hear a din towards dawn at the newspapers and there’s something drumming in the night: there he goes!

  16 MURK: Don’t you see me?

  ANNA: Yes.

  17 MURK sobering up: The linen has been bought and the flat is rented. And where do you want to go?

  MANKE: Hear the rabble singing? Where does she want to go? We say: to the little filthy houses, that’s where. You know, where one slithers on all the sick on the staircase. To the tumbledown black attics the wind whistles through.

  ANNA: That’s where I want to go.

  MANKE: We’re not beaten. The old beds with the rain coming in on them, and how’s anyone to keep warm, the wind whistles through. Perhaps it’s worse there. You go there! One disappears there. Those are the houses they are drumming in now. Stuffed full of sacks like this one, with no shirt on, and everything takes twenty or thirty years, the last years on this earth, they’ve never counted and yet your soul feels more at home there than anywhere else.

  MURK: Father and Mother are fixing the wedding.

  18 waited four years.

  MURK: Who has no clean shirt on his body …

  MANKE: And his skin is like a crocodile-hide!

  MURK: Whom you failed to recognize, the way he looked.

  MANKE: But the lily was still in her hand when he came.

  ANNA: He is come who has

  19 slums.

  20 To the slums, the darkness, the nothingness?

  ANNA: Yes. Into nothingness.

  MURK: Nothing but a drunk man’s dreams. Nothing but a woman’s magazine story. Nothing but a snow of yesteryear.

  ANNA: Nothing else …

  MANKE: That’s it: nothing else! She knows now: it’s for nothing!

  MURK:

  21 What about the ‘lily’? What about when no breath of wind

  gets to you and you’re frightened out of your wits?

  22 MURK: We packed him off. Bag and baggage.

  ANNA: And they

  23 was, packed off good and proper.

  ANNA: And he was finished.

  24 He’s drunk.

  25 Into the wind and I’m so drunk. Can’t see my own hands, and she leaves me!

  BABUSCH: Now I begin to get it, man. So that’s the fish we’re frying. That’s the end of the Ride of the Valkyries now, my boy. The whole fishy ghost story’s starting to turn horribly serious.

  26 to the slums.

  27 Take it home, do something for your immortal soul.

  28 MANKE drags Murk to his feet, spreads both his arms widely once more, says grandly: The slums are

  ACT 4

  29 THE SCHNAPS DANCE

  30 BABUSCH at the window: Has a man in artillery uniform been here?

  GLUBB pouring schnaps: No, not here.

  BABUSCH over his shoulder: He hasn’t been here.

  GLUBB: Is one supposed to be coming?

  Babusch shrugs his shoulders.

  GLUBB: Shall I tell him anything?

  BABUSCH looks at Anna, who shakes her head: No, we’ll come back.

  Exeunt both.

  MANKE: When they grab something it’s schnaps, when they share something it’s a bed, and when they produce something it’s babies. My god, my god. When they had some schnaps in them, dear man, with those pale faces and trembling knees – he imitates it – and their nose in the air where it was raining, raining bullets, dear man. And a gun in the hand and a sticky feeling at the tips of the fingers, my boy!

  BULLTROTTER: Freedom! Space! Air!

  31 Marseillaise

  32, you bourgeois!

  BULLTROTTER throws a newspaper at him: Where there’s a horse there’s horseshit. They throw papers at one another. Freedom!

  MANKE:

  33 So that’s the sort you are?

  34 BULLTROTTER: Riots! Strike! Revolution!

  35 BULLTROTTER: But what’s that wind?

  36 BULLTROTTER: That’s fine. He’s got an artillery tunic on.

  MANKE: A funny sort of casing. Are you laying an egg, then?

  37, turning up with the guns like that?

  38 MANKE goes across to him: Well, what have you been up to, my boy? I know the type. A row in a bar, eh?

  (AUGUSTA continues:)

  39 MARIE: They took away his beloved he had waited four years for. They drove to the Piccadilly Bar; he trotted the whole way to the Piccadilly Bar behind the cab.

  THE DRUNK MAN: Like a calf? What a story.

  AUGUSTA: A love story?

  KRAGLER: None that I know.

  BULLTROTTER: Where do you belong? Belong to him?

  MARIE: I just ran along with him.

  MANKE: What are you running like a calf for?

  40 THE DRUNK MAN: Is there a story?

  BULLTROTTER: What do you mean, story?

  THE DRUNK MAN: Or is it a gospel, perhaps? Give him some schnaps, let him smoke and then he can tell it. The door is shut. Kragler stands against the wall. The others smoke and stare at his mouth. Glubb wipes glasses.

  THE DRUNK MAN: Keep that door shut. It’s only the wind, brother, but there’s wood between. There’s wood between.

  KRAGLER boasting, with sour humour: I was in Africa … The sun’s hot there. We shot up wogs, boy, and … so on. We were making road
s too. We’d gone down there in cattle trucks.

  41 KRAGLER: Ah, Africa. Silence. The sun shrivelled your head up like a dried fig, our brains were like figs, we shot up the wogs, always in the belly, and worked on the roads and I’d got a fly in my head, my friends, and no brains left and they hit me on the head a lot.

  BULLTROTTER: That’s a true-life story. Well told. Drink up. What came before that?

  KRAGLER: Before that? I lay in a hole full of mud. Like a corpse in polluted water. We pumped water out. We stared at the time. It never moved. Then we stared at the sky, a patch like an umbrella, dark as a puddle always, but anyway we had the dropsy because the trench was always full. He drinks.

  42 AUGUSTA: About Africa! About Africa!

  KRAGLER: Well, it never moved, nothing for us to do but stink. We defended our homes, our native soil and the other thing, and I defended the lot, the sky and the earth and the water and – the lot.

  MARIE: Andy! They call him Andy.

  KRAGLER: Andy! They call me Andy. They used to call me Andy. Thick green trees in the air, that’s something I’ve seen. But not those four years.

  GLUBB: You didn’t see them, what of it?

  KRAGLER: I defended and now and again somebody fell and I’d got a fly in my head, a fly, and that was my wife, only she wasn’t that yet, she was innocent drinks and then came Africa.

  BULLTROTTER smiling broadly: And the tarts down there, what were the tarts like?

  KRAGLER: It was like an island. No letters, and chilly nights. Opening his eyes. All you people need do is chase cats off a wall! Drinks.

  MARIE: How long did it last, how long?

  KRAGLER: Three years. Three years, that’s more than a thousand days. They held us under water, you see, like kittens in a bucket, they don’t want to die. Counting on his fingers. I could have died the second day, or the tenth, or in twenty days, or in forty days … But there was Anna, standing dawn after dawn behind the barracks, among the dogs.

  THE DRUNK MAN: Didn’t you desert?

  KRAGLER calmer: The third time I deserted it went well, and I sang when it became too tough, and it went well and there I was. He sits down, speaks more and more slowly and laboriously, drinks a lot; now he makes a break and says quite calmly: You mustn’t think I was sort of mean and imagined she went to the barracks in the morning and that was all she did. I’d worked out a plan how she was to get accustomed to me once more, because I’d become a ghost. That’s a fact. He drinks. Sound of wind. The drunk man groans with the suspense.

  KRAGLER calmly: She wasn’t at home when I came.

  GLUBB: No, that she wasn’t. Truly not.

  BULLTROTTER: Well, then?

  THE DRUNK MAN: Had she gone? Where was she?

  KRAGLER: The schnaps was drunk and the wogs were dead and the umbrella had been rolled up and the fly, the fly had flown off. Stares ahead. I defended him. He sent schnaps for the cattle and he sent the umbrella, and he let the fly live so we shouldn’t be bored. Points with his finger as if he could see him. And now he’s going round in the sun, the other fellow. And now he’s lying in bed, and you take off your hat when he arrives and he takes the skin off your back and my wife’s lying in his bed.

  BULLTROTTER with the paper: Somebody stole her, eh?

  GLUBB: They stole my bicycle.

  MANKE passes his hand across his throat: I’ll say you’re patient, mate!

  AUGUSTA: Didn’t you strangle her like a cat?

  MARIE: They went off with her. He just trotted along after.

  KRAGLER drinks: So I went quite cold when I heard that, and my mind was a blank. And even now my pulse is normal when I think about it; feel for yourselves. Stretches his hand out, drinks with the other one. I looked for her and she knew me too, even though my face was once like milk and blood and she said something to me. Give me another glass.

  THE DRUNK MAN: Go on. What did she say?

  KRAGLER: Yes, she said. He drinks. It’s all over. Silence. He is still absent-mindedly feeling his pulse.

  GLUBB: Oh, you’ll forget in time.

  THE DRUNK MAN: What did you do then?

  KRAGLER: Booze away, I’m going. Keep it up, I’m getting out. Jig and drink and drop dead at the right moment. He is getting noisy. Me for instance, Africa’s in my blood, a nasty malady. A fly in my head, a horsefly, dance up, give me schnaps, they don’t know the half of it. Let’s have a tune, they’re going to know.

  MANKE: It’s bad, what you’ve been through. Drink all you like, mate.

  BULLTROTTER: Booze yourself silly. He’s got a feeling like a corpse, he’ll live longer than himself. Last week we had a story from Merseburg …

  THE DRUNKEN MAN: Is she still alive? He has started the nickelodeon. Not possible.

  KRAGLER hums the tune, seizes Augusta, jogs round with her: March, march, double march!

  43 KRAGLER who is being given schnaps by Augusta upstage: Is it a relief? Is he paper, isn’t he made of flesh? Console yourself, brother, just say: Not possible. Can you hear, brother Schnaps-vat, can you hear the wind? Hop, sister prostitute! Hop, brother Red! I say unto you, you mustn’t wait. What is a swine before the Lord? Nothing. Drink yourselves silly, nothing to do with the swine, then you won’t notice.

  GLUBB: What are you shouting like that for?

  KRAGLER: Who’s paying here? Who’s responsible for the music here? There’s always music, isn’t there? I’ve got the fly! I just need schnaps and it’ll drown itself. Can we do away with the army or God? Can we do away with suffering and the torments the devil has learnt from the human race? No, we can’t do away with them, but we can drink. You can drink schnaps and sleep even on paving-stones. They that sleep, please note, shall find everything of service to them; that’s in the catechism, it must be true.

  EE

  44 Don’t let in the ghosts. They are frozen.

  45 Did you say injustice, brother Red? What sort of word is that? Injustice! Make yourselves at home on our planet, it’s cold here and rather dark, Red, and no time for injustice, the world’s too old for the millennium and schnaps is cheaper and heaven has been let, my friends. Goes upstage humming, puts money in the nickelodeon, which still plays quick short pieces only.

  BULLTROTTER has been drinking quietly: What’s one to say to that? Cuffs! Cuffs!

  MANKE gets up: But your wife’s looking for you, man.

  KRAGLER dancing on his own: Trot! Trot! Double march! Hums. A dog went to the kitchen to find a bone to chew.

  MANKE smoking: He’s dancing around with his horsefly now.

  AUGUSTA: Do you like that tobacco?

  GLUBB: Look here, all you may do is drink schnaps.

  MANKE: We’re smoking as well.

  THE DRUNK MAN: You’re the revolutionary all right. We know you and your speeches. They poured your schnaps down the lavatory, you were selling schnaps.

  GLUBB still busy with the glasses, coldly: I’d more under the floorboards. And it’s not because the schnaps went but because of the human hands pouring it down the lavatory.

  KRAGLER blinking and as if he were waking up: Anna! Anna!

  BULLTROTTER crows: Cuffs! You ought to have pinched some cuffs, mate.

  GLUBB: I was standing in the yard, it was night-time. It was just raining, I looked around, then I suppose it struck me. And now I’m for drinking and I sing.

  KRAGLER:

  The cook picked up his chopper

  And cut that dog in two.

  MARIE: What can we do? We’re nobodies. A lot of them say:

  46 MANKE: Your wife’s certainly looking for you, man.

  THE DRUNK MAN has climbed up on the table and is looking out into the night at the city: Drink, will you?

  47 LAAR: There was a fellow who just happened to have some money on him, see.

  48 beast?

  Laar goes off at the back.

  GLUBB to Kragler, who is much calmer: Just drink! There are a few people drumming outside and now they’ve even begun to shoot. One can hear it quite clearly. If
one’s prepared to shut up for a moment. They’re shooting for you. Yes, heaven and hell are making a revolution, man, and you shouldn’t even be drinking schnaps. You’ve suffered a slight injustice. Say yes and stomach it.

  49 Places a glass behind him, calmly: To the machine-guns with you!

  SOME: To the newspaper offices!

  GLUBB: Yes, you’ll have to publish a paper.

  KRAGLER: It’s pretty far to the Piccadilly Bar.

  MANKE with a cigar between his teeth, takes his coat off: If it’s too far, there’s no need for anyone to let himself be trodden on.

  GLUBB sees the man stand there in shirtsleeves: Go on, put clean shirts on your decaying skins so nobody will notice them! Are stories just fodder? God alive, a slight injustice! Eat salad and drink kirsch! Starts up the nickelodeon. Yes, you people are a bit drowned in brandy, you’ve been a bit pushed about by rifle-butts,

  50 AUGUSTA: You cowards let us starve, then say Amen. A glass of schnaps! Tumult, consternation. Look at me. I’m no good and I’ve not had it good. Just look at me. I’m called Augusta.

  GLUBB: And you’ve got syphilis.

  NEWSPAPER WOMAN in the background: Papers!

  51 State of siege! Revolution!

  BULLTROTTER: Give us a paper. That’s something for us.

  NEWSPAPER WOMAN shrilly:

  52 Bends down. Is it a joke? To the barricades with the ghost! Stands firmly, draws a deep breath. A clean end is better than schnaps. It’s not a joke. Better disappear than sleep.

  BULLTROTTER leaps on the table:

  53 Glubb shuts the cupboard full of glasses, dries his hands.

  MANKE: Let’s go, Augusta. Do or die.

  BULLTROTTER: And how about your distillery, schnaps-seller?

  GLUBB: The rats’ll take it over.

  KRAGLER on a chair, tinkering with the lamp, a prehistoricsurvival: They’re whistling again, my friends. On top in the morning or like drowned kittens in the roadway.

  THE OTHERS shout: On top in the morning, Andy!

  KRAGLER puts out the light: Or like drowned kittens!

  MANKE: Forward, Augusta!

  54 KRAGLER gets down: I’m a corpse, you’re welcome to it. Angrily. This way with you, over the top with you, to the newspaper offices with us. The others follow him.

  THE DRUNK MAN following behind: Wash me, Lord, that I may become white! Wash me that I may become white as snow!