Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 1

by Bertolt Brecht

  KRAGLER angry and obstinate: No, it isn’t.

  BABUSCH: Bravo! No, it isn’t! When a woman’s going to pieces it isn’t the idea that matters.

  GLUBB: Well? Do you want to stay back here?

  Offstage crowds are marching by. The wind brings snatches of the Marseillaise and military band music.

  Kragler is silent.

  In all this concluding section of the play Anna now gets given nothing to say, nor is there any mention of Kragler’s knife as in the 1922 edition. His ‘fling stones at me’ speech ends ‘It’s a waste of time, believe me, it’s nickelodeon stuff and you’re all drunk and that way you’re going to hell.’

  GLUBB: Andy, it’s not a waste of time. God forbid that you found it one. There’s a thin red flame shooting sharply out of the human breast and scorching the world.

  KRAGLER: What for?

  GLUBB: At the innermost heart of the world, racing at the speed of our planet – a man blown like a leaf, lonely, ice-cold, and without a home, a man who goes on strike and the world falls apart.

  BABUSCH: Don’t be bamboozled; he’s got a pigeon’s egg in his head. His talk is all newspaper articles, his ideas are grand opera. Go to bed. Don’t be drunk. Mind the cold wind – it’s November 9th – and go home.

  KRAGLER: I was drunk. I’m sober now. It’s a waste of time.

  GLUBB: Heaven and hell are full of revolution, and you are going to bed! Smash your head against the bridge! Jump in the water and float with the ice; but don’t go home!

  BABUSCH: You’ve no coat and it’s freezing, Andy. November nights are cold, and it’s nearly morning. Four years is a long time. Take your woman with you.

  GLUBB: Let her lie, let the woman lie. Let her lie where she’s lying on the stones. She’s like grass in the wind, she’s not there any more and she doesn’t know where she belongs. In four times four years her face will have faded, and we’ll all be dead by then and wondering where to go next.

  BULLTROTTER: The whole lot have gone past, pretty well. We’re last, and you’re still hanging back.

  CARMEN: They’re last, and they’re still hanging back.

  GLUBB: And we’re hanging back. He’ll never let her lie, the world will roll on, and they’ll let the schnaps go down the gutter and nothing’ll ever change. O Andy, come with us. We’re setting off into the dark, into our most crucial hour. Don’t abandon us. What can we do with the schnaps in our heads if there are so few of us? What will the beast do if we’re beaten? I’ve known you for only four hours, yet in that time whole skies full of stars have floated away and kingdoms have surrendered. I’ve known you for four ages; oh, don’t disappoint me.

  Silence.

  Why do I have to stand here at a street corner in the dark after all those years, so they can shoot me tomorrow? Wrestling with you for your soul, and my hands not strong enough? Look: none of these people are any help to me.

  KRAGLER calmly: We all know a lot of unfortunates go under, and if it’s in our power we give a hand. But I’m nearly done for myself and must fight for dear life. My girl’s with child.

  GLUBB: Is that all you have to say?

  CARMEN: Coward! Coward! He’s shaking like a jelly because he heard shots. He isn’t coming with us, you bet, he’s going to take cover. In her body, which has already got something in it.

  KRAGLER calmly: Don’t you think it takes rather more to go home now and tell the hyenas ‘I want no part of it’, and say to the sharks as they swim round under the red moon hunting for corpses ‘I’ve got some procreating to do’? More than to run along after you lot yelling something I don’t believe in?

  THE DRUNK MAN: Look at the old blood-orange! Sh! Quiet! Don’t shoot, look at the sky!

  KRAGLER: Go home too. All one has to do is what one wants. Because one mustn’t do what the others want. And I want to go home. That’s all I wanted. I ought to know. Very calm. I can’t go on. Silence.

  GLUBB: I don’t know what to say to you. There’s nothing in my mouth that would fit you.

  KRAGLER: They poured your schnaps into the shit, brandy-seller, and they turned your farm into paper, Laar. But I’ve got my woman back.

  After Glubb’s ‘So you’ve no sympathy for these people’, etc. (p. 420) (his following remarks having been transposed as above) they move more or less straight on as in the 1922 edition to Carmen/Augusta’s ‘Then that was all lies, Africa and so on?’ and to an extended version of Manke’s ‘The gentleman was bellowing like a stockbroker’. Right up to the attack on Anna by Laar and Manke (p. 113) the only substantial differences lie in Anna’s silence and the absence of any clue as to how the fighting is going. This is given only when the shooting starts after Glubb has extricated Anna. The final section which follows is a good deal longer, but the changes are unimportant until everybody begins moving to the bridge. Then:

  GLUBB: If he wants to go, let him. Don’t stop him. Let him get into bed, we’re fighting for him. Let them all do as they want, don’t press them. He shouted for us, he went with us. There are so many of us, allow him to feel tired. We’ve got the room, we can accommodate lots of them. Admit him too, he still belongs to us.

  KRAGLER laughs raucously: You people almost drowned at first with weeping at my story, and now you want to drag me down to the newspapers to get shot. Just because you’ve stuffed your heads with newspapers and novelettes, because you can’t get grand opera out of your system. I barely managed to get my own wife; am I now supposed to liberate all yours? Free my neck so I can hang a hurdy-gurdy round it? And I simply washed my shirt in your tears. Ha ha ha ha! My flesh is to rot in the gutter so that your idea can come out on top! Are you drunk?

  CARMEN: What nonsense is he talking? Come on! They’ve retreated. We’ll still be in time for the attack!

  BULLTROTTER: It’s about time, damn you!

  GLUBB with simplicity and grandeur: Tonight everybody must be out on the street. Tonight it will happen. Come with me, we must stick together now. Take each other by the hand and run for all you’re worth. That’s the way!

  They run up the slope and vanish over the bridge. Glubb can still be heard, singing:

  They’ll have the whole damn lot –

  Wife, land and all you’ve got.

  Let them swallow it,

  They’ll get no benefit

  The kingdom must be ours.

  BABUSCH flaps along after him: There’ll be heavy gunfire over Berlin in a quarter of an hour’s time.

  Exit across the bridge.

  KRAGLER piqued: All right, go off to your newspaper buildings. Do yourselves in! If you won’t let a man help you.

  He throws dirt after them. Anna tries to come to him, but he thrusts her off and doesn’t look her in the eyes.

  ANNA: Andy! She has sat down. I must go home, Andy. I’m not going to have one. I’m not going to have a baby.

  Kragler’s long last speech, which follows, is basically the same as in the other two versions, including the anomalous mention of ‘so early in the year’. Among the passages added are ‘The shouting and that red moon they hoisted over the newspaper buildings: all of it’s to swindle the people!’, and

  Am I a baritone? Ha ha ha! Were you aiming to wash your dirty faces with tears once again? Did you want a swollen pregnant body floating down to the weir under the red moon? Was I myself to die in the newspaper buildings for you? Every evening? Did you want to have a good cry? Well, I’m going to bed. Would you like to help them? Rip the phrases from their throats! Drumbeat. Wash your own shirt! Drumbeat. Hang, hang yourselves if you don’t get ahead!

  Finally, in lieu of ‘Very drunken and infantile’ comes ‘You can all stuff it. I’m the lover.’

  IN THE JUNGLE OF CITIES

  THREE EARLY NOTES

  (1) The play is set in an unreal, chilly Chicago. Shlink wears a long dirty yellow costume down to his ankles, picturesquely blackened hair, and a black tuft on his chin.

  George Garga is like A. Rimbaud in appearance. He is essentially a German translat
ion into American from the French.

  (2) Towards the end of Jungle

  Everything performed in front of a cyclorama. At the back all the actors not immediately involved sit in a dusty light, following the script. When Jane Garga dies she drops hers, and so on.

  (3) A play

  Chicago

  The timber dealer Shlink, a Malay (Wegener’s type), fights a war of annihilation with the younger George Garga (Granach’s type), during the course of which both reveal their most extreme human characteristics. By means of an appearance of passivity the man Shlink slashes through the ties binding young George Garga to the world round him and makes him fight a desperate war of liberation against the steadily thickening jungle of Shlink’s intrigues against him. Shlink’s timber business and Garga’s family are among those annihilated. Increasingly isolated, more and more tightly entangled, the two go into the woods to fight it out. In the final conflict, which is fought with utter dedication, George Garga regains solid ground; he breaks off the fight (which was the man Shlink’s final sensation) and takes over his timber business in the great city of Chicago.

  The events dealt with are concrete ones; the fight for the timber business, the family, a marriage, the fight for personal freedom. There are not many characters, no walking-on parts.

  [From Bertolt Brecht: Im Dickicht der Städte. Erstfassung und Materialien. Edited by Gisela E. Bahr. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1968, pp. 134, 136-7. Paul Wegener and Alexander Granach were prominent German actors of the time.]

  PROGRAMME NOTE TO THE 1922 TEXT

  The judicial proceedings to clarify the Jane Garga murder mystery led to the unmasking of one of those sinister affairs in Chinatown in Chicago which are so irresponsibly exploited by the press. A Malayan timber merchant’s fishing expedition in a lending library, the almost total ruination of an immigrant family of French descent, the mysterious lynching of the Malay.

  The play before you provides a possibly somewhat rough piece of theatrical carpentry whose raw material would certainly interest a wider public. There are a fair number of gaps in it. It omits even points which the proceedings cleared up, such as the Malayan murderer’s crimes, thanks to which he regained possession of his timber business donated to the Salvation Army, and which characterized his flight into the yellow swamps with George Garga as an act of fear of the lynch law of the respectable population. Others remained obscure, and will no doubt always remain so. The fate of Mae Garga, her whereabouts, her motives for abandoning a family she had cared for for many years, have never been cleared up.

  The present stage text is primarily intended to make theatrical material of certain remarkable incidents whose originals in real life appear to have taken place in the gloomy September of 1914 in Chicago’s Chinatown, and whose consequences will no doubt be recalled from the newspapers. Accordingly only extracts are given of the few conversations that concern us here (for this unusual and most horrific story reposes only on a small number of conversations, whose substance was difficult and expensive to get at). They consist, making allowance for some clarifications and improbabilities such as are inevitable to the drama and for a perhaps over- romantic embroidery of the events due to stage requirements, simply in the most important sentences uttered here at a specific point on the globe’s surface at specific moments in the history of mankind.

  [Ibid., pp. 9-10. Brecht instructed that the italicized words should be shouted from behind the curtain before the start of the play, in imitation of newspaper sellers’ cries.]

  SYNOPSIS (incomplete)

  i. A Malay called C. Shlink appears in the life of George Garga and for no known reason starts a fight. He tries Garga out to establish his fighting qualities, then starts by annihilating his economic existence.

  ii. George Garga fights back.

  iii. Shlink gives up his property so as to fight on equal terms. He thereby arouses the interest of Marie Garga, his enemy’s sister.

  iv. Garga abandons his family so as not to be hampered in the fight. Shlink moves into the vacant space.

  v. Garga has vanished. Shlink has summoned up his reserves.

  vi. Garga reappears, determined to exploit Shlink’s fighting mood to further his own and his sister’s objectives.

  vii. Shlink is ready to follow out Garga’s instructions.

  viii. Garga tries to dig in behind his family. This results in the Garga family’s total liquidation. Garga himself disappears provisionally into prison, but not unprovided with weapons.

  [Ibid., p. 137, with the suggested date 1923-4.]

  A STATEMENT

  At one or two points in my play Jungle a character quotes verses by Rimbaud and Verlaine. In the script these passages are marked as quotations by means of inverted commas. Apparently the stage has no technique by which to express quotation marks. If it had, then a considerable number of other favourite works would become possibly more palatable for literary scholars but pretty intolerable for the audience. In view of the difficulty of their craft, those currently concerned with the manufacture of plays are unlikely, I fear, to have time either now or in the next ten years to sit back and think about such matters. Interested parties from the world of scholarship are accordingly invited to ring back in eleven years or so. (It can be divulged here and now that if the drama is to progress at all it will progress surely and serenely over the dead bodies of the scholars.)

  [‘Eine Feststellung’, from GW Schriften zum Theater, p. 969. This appeared in the Berliner Börsen-Courier of 4 November 1924, after an article by Her warth Walden in Die Republik of 31 October complaining of Brecht’s borrowings. There were statements under the same heading by the Rimbaud translator Hans Jacob, siding with Walden, and by Herbert Ihering, pooh-poohing such revelations.]

  PROLOGUE TO ‘JUNGLE’

  What was new was a type of man who conducted a fight without enmity but with hitherto unheard of (i.e. undepicted) methods, together with his attitude to the family, to marriage, to his fellow-humans in general, and much else – probably too much. That wasn’t, however, what people regard as new. The sort of thing they regard as new is the machine, in other words something they can use without having made it or being able to understand it. In literature the last thing to strike them as new is the idea, say, that a husband ought not to treat his wife as a doll, or that marriage is dangerous, or that a cart-driver can be just as tragic as a more highly placed individual, indeed more so in that he doesn’t know his way around so well.

  To those with this culinary outlook, formal novelty lies exclusively in the packaging. Since we were served up in the oldest possible packaging we were not new enough. ‘Valencia’ with jazz is new. It’s not particularly new without. Jazz itself is of course new.

  [‘Neu und alt’ from GW Schriften

  zum Theater, p. 67.? About 1926.]

  PROGRAMME NOTE FOR THE HEIDELBERG PRODUCTION

  Visiting the play In the Jungle of Cities has turned out to be such a difficult proposition that only the most courageous theatres have been prepared to tackle it. Indeed nobody should be surprised if the audience rejects the play entirely. The play rests on certain assumptions, which is always troublesome, which is why the general run of the drama avoids it. The following notes about these assumptions will be of little or no help.

  2

  The behaviour of our contemporaries, as frequently though by no means fully expressed in the newspapers, is no longer to be explained by old motives (largely borrowed from literature). An increasing number of police reports attribute no ‘motive’ to the criminal. That being so, it ought not to surprise you if the newer plays show certain types of person in certain situations behaving differently from what you expected, or if your guesses as to the motives for a particular piece of behaviour turn out to be wrong. This is a world, and a kind of drama, where the philosopher can pick his way better than the psychologist.

  3

  In the theatre as elsewhere, the bourgeoisie, having wasted a hundred years staging fights between men merely over
women, is not going to have much time left for fights over more serious matters before it finds itself forced, in the theatre as elsewhere, to concentrate on the most serious of all contemporary fights, the class struggle. An idealized fight such as can be seen in the play In the Jungle of Cities is at present only to be found in the theatre. For the real thing you will have to wait fifty years.

  4

  In the meantime I am sure you see that I still need to defend the simple basic conception of the play In the Jungle of Cities. This is that pure sport might involve two men in a fight which transforms them and their economic circumstances to the point of unrecognizability. The passion for sport is here being classed with all the other passions already at the theatre’s disposal. No doubt it will take at least five decades of continuous practice in at least two continents before this passion is put on an emotional par with those great and tragic passions liable to produce triumphs and catastrophes on the grand scale. What I mean is: there are catastrophes today whose motive is sport even though it cannot be recognized as such. Besides this continuous practice there will have to be an end to those other, less pure motives for fighting which still preponderate, such as the urge to own women or means of production or objects of exploitation: motives, in short, that can come to an end since they can simply be organized away.

  5

  The territory used for fighting in this play is probably unfamiliar. For the territory so used consists in certain complexes of ideas such as a young man like George Garga holds about the family, about marriage or about his own honour. His opponent uses these complexes of ideas in order to damage him. Moreover, each combatant stimulates such thoughts in the other as must destroy him; he shoots burning arrows into his head. I can’t explain this way of fighting more clearly than that.