The magazine called the play a ‘History by Bertolt Brecht’, without mentioning either Feuchtwanger or Marlowe. Feuchtwanger’s name was also apparently missing from the programme of the first Berlin production at the end of the same year, and the exact nature and extent of his contribution cannot as yet be judged. Brecht’s own note ‘I wrote this play with Lion Feuchtwanger. Bertolt Brecht’ should be set against the corresponding note three years later to the published version of Feuchtwanger’s Kalkutta. 4 Mai: ‘I wrote this play with Bertolt Brecht. Lion Feuchtwanger.’ (Strictly speaking this was a joint revision, made in 1925, of a play written by Feuchtwanger in 1915.) No trace has been found of the revised text of 1926 referred to in an undated note (p. 141 of the volume Im Dickicht der Städte. Erstfassung und Materialien in the Edition Suhrkamp series: not included in GW). The relevant passage goes:
Thus in Edward (second version, summer 1926), I have tried to sketch that great sombre beast which felt the first shock-waves of a mighty global disaster threatening the individual like premonitions of an earthquake. I have shown his primitive and desperate measures, his terrible and anachronistically isolated finish. In those years the last of the saurians loomed up before the eyes of posterity, heralding the Flood.
It is the same idea as in scene 1 of the 1926 revision of Baal.
Editorial Note on the Early One-act Plays
The only one of these five small plays to be performed in Brecht’s lifetime was A Respectable Wedding, which was staged at the Frankfurt-am-Main Schauspielhaus on 11 December 1926 in a double bill with Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s farce Ollapotrida, a work which had helped earn its author that year’s Kleist Prize. Both were directed by the young dramatist Melchior Vischer, one of the runners-up for the same prize in 1923, when Alfred Döblin made the awards. They were not a great critical success. Brecht’s play was then called The Wedding.
Brecht’s Augsburg friend H. O. Miinsterer says that he read the five plays, with the exception of The Catch, at the end of November 1919. They were not, however, published until 1966, ten years after Brecht’s death. They are unmentioned in the 1300 pages of his collected theatrical writings and notes. A note to GW says that the first four of them were submitted to a Munich publisher, presumably about when Münsterer saw them, but were not accepted. To judge from the typescripts in the Brecht Archive (one of The Beggar and two of each of the others) The Catch, The Wedding, and Driving Out a Devil were at one stage grouped together, in that order, with a view to possible publication.
The Wedding was renamed, literally, The Petit-Bourgeois Wedding on its appearance in 1966 (rather as The Seven Deadly Sins, Brecht’s ballet with Kurt Weill, originally performed under that title, had been renamed The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petit-Bourgeois by the time of its publication in 1959). Without going into the social-ethical implications of such changes, it can be said that the words ‘Petit-Bourgeois’ (’Kleinbürger-) have been inserted on the title page of one of the typescripts in Brecht’s handwriting. This does not, however, appear to be the finally corrected copy, and omits the vital noise of the collapsing bed at the end of the play.
1 See p. 391.
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This edition first published in Great Britain in 1994
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This collection first published in Great Britain in 1970 by Methuen & Co. Ltd
Methuen Drama series editor for Bertolt Brecht: Tom Kuhn
Translation copyright for all the plays and texts by Brecht © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben 1970
Introduction and Notes © Methuen & Co. Ltd 1970
Copyright in the original plays as follows:
Baal: Original work entitled Baal
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1953
Drums in the Night:Original work entitled Trommeln in der Nacht
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1953
In the Jungle of Cities:Original work entitled Im Dickicht der Städte
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1953
The Life of Edward II of England:Original work entitled Leben Eduards des
Zweiten von England
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1953
A Respectable Wedding:Original work entitled Die Kleinbürgerhochzeit
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1966
The Beggar or The Dead Dog:Original work entitled Der Bettler oder Der Tote Hund
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1966
Driving Out a Devil:Original work entitled Er treibt einen Teufel aus
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1966
Lux in Tenebris:Original work entitled Lux in Tenebris
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1966
The Catch:Original work entitled Der Fischzug
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1966
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eISBN-13: 978-1-4081-6207-1
Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 1 Page 43
