Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 4

by Bertolt Brecht

  but when he does so he’s arrested;

  Nanna Callas recognises a way out for her landlord’s sister which does not involve the oath of chastity and the convent;

  Nanna Callas denounces her landlord and onetime lover to the

  Hatsos as a Pointed Head;

  In scene 3:

  Iberin’s exhortation to the Round Heads to wage war on the Pointed Heads divides two farmers who had been going to join forces to resist their landlords;

  Farmer Lopez’s wife takes up the rifle that Farmer Callas has laid aside;

  Farmer Callas refuses shelter to Farmer Lopez’s family of Pointed Heads.

  In scene 4:

  the Hatsos throw dice for the rings of the captured landowners;

  the people and the judge disagree whether the landlord or the waitress should be in the dock;

  Iberin instructs the judge to pass judgement, not according to the case files, but according to the progress of the civil war;

  Farmer Callas accuses his landlord, not of seducing his daughter, but of rack-renting;

  Iberin condemns Señor de Guzman, not as a landowner, but as a Pointed Head, and not for rack-renting, but for racial violation; round-headed landowners sacrifice their pointed-headed class comrade;

  In scene 5:

  the attorney doubts that the rents are sufficiently high to enable the landlord’s sister to fulfil her wish and enter the convent;

  the Convent of San Barabas is content to take the estates of the Pointed Head de Guzman under their protection, but refuses shelter to his sister.

  In scene 6:

  Farmer Callas interprets a comment by Iberin about the unimportance of property as permitting him to take the horses he needs for his plough;

  Callas, thinking the horses are his, rejects the de Guzman family’s proposal that he should sacrifice the honour of his daughter;

  Nanna complains that the way Iberin has honoured her has driven away her customers;

  landlords, who have been beaten up by Iberin soldiers, are lectured by a high official about the need to pay his bodyguards.

  In scene 7:

  Iberin waits for the outcome of the civil war to decide whether or not to grant the farmer the Czich’s horses;

  the Mother Superior of the Convent, which is suing for the restitution of the Pointed Head’s horses, shows Callas that her head is round;

  Farmer Parr gives the reason why he took the horses, that he needs them for ploughing;

  Farmer Callas denounces him for it; Farmer Callas, having lost the horses, wants to join the Sickle again; he learns that it has been defeated.

  In scene 8:

  Farmer Callas, unable to feed his daughter, takes her back to the brothel;

  Farmer Callas recognises that by defeating the Sickle Iberin has defeated him too;

  the landlord de Guzman demands of his sister that she submits to his gaoler; his attorneys don’t understand his faint-heartedness;

  Nanna Callas declares that she isn’t interested in the death sentence hanging over her father’s landlord;

  In scene 9:

  the landed lady discovers that she too is well-suited to be a prostitute; the only thing that speaks against her submitting to this fate is that she is so well-heeled;

  for a suitable payment, Nanna Callas is prepared to prostitute herself, in order to save the landlord who has himself been condemned to death for prostituting her.

  In scene 10:

  in the face of death the landlord and the tenant are still arguing about the rent;

  the round-headed Farmer Callas, in exchange for a rent reduction, accepts the risk that he’ll be hanged in the place of his pointed-headed landlord.

  In scene 11:

  Iberin, to keep a hold on power, declares he is prepared to cash in his doctrine of Round and Pointed Heads;

  the Viceroy shows Señor Iberin the fish that got tangled in his net;

  the Viceroy declares that he needs the tenant farmers because there’s to be a war with a neighbouring people of square heads;

  seeing the execution of the people of the Sickle, Farmer Callas rejects the Viceroy’s soup;

  under the Viceroy’s gallows and at his table Round and Pointed Heads hang and sit side by side.

  Examples of ‘Verfremdung’ in the Copenhagen production

  When Nanna Callas sang her introductory song (scene 2), she stood beneath the signboards of the small traders (see ‘stage set and masks’), a commodity amongst other commodities, beckoning to the audience before the third verse with a mechanical prostitute’s smile which she promptly switched off.

  Before the fifth scene a young nun entered through the Neher-curtain carrying a gramophone and sat down on some steps. A record of organ music accompanied the first, pious section of the scene (up to the sentence ‘What does the young lady bring with her?’). The nun then got up and went out with the gramophone.

  The meeting of the two de Guzmans in the eighth scene (a street in the old town) was based on Claudio’s conversation with Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. The scene has to be played with complete seriousness in the heightened and impassioned style of the Elizabethan theatre. The Copenhagen production ‘estranged’ this style by having it rain during the scene and giving umbrellas to all appearing in it. In this way the heightened style of playing was given a certain artistic Verfremdung. The spectator, however, having had his attention drawn to the outmoded nature of such conduct, was not as yet brought to notice that heightened means of expression are bound up with individual problems of the upper class. This could be achieved e.g. by having the inspector and the Hatso who escorted the prisoner adopt a particularly offhand or even amused, but at the same time slightly surprised attitude to the event.

  This demonstration of historic theatrical forms continued with the ninth scene in Madame Cornamontis’s coffeehouse, which contained elements of the late eighteenth-century French conversation piece. Isabella had a completely white make-up in this scene.

  Stage set and masks

  The basic set consisted of four ivory-coloured screens, slightly curved horizontally, which could be arranged in various ways. The lights were shown, in so far as they were movable. The two pianos were illuminated while working; their mechanism was laid open. Scene changes took place behind a small Neher curtain, which did not completely interrupt vision but allowed bridge scenes to be played.

  The set was constructed and elaborated during the rehearsals. The following were used:

  Scene 1: a low chair for the Viceroy; a billiard table covered with newspapers; a map on a wooden stand; a broken lamp with just one functioning bulb; a hatstand for the Viceroy’s hat and cane; a door-frame with a door with a small emblem, a hyena with a sceptre; a wooden chair for Iberin waiting outside the door.

  Scene 2: two rough wooden window-frames for Callamassi and Nanna; a sign ‘Palmosa Tobacconist’; a red lantern with the legend ‘Café Paradiso’; a wicker chair for Madame Cornamontis; a door-frame leading to the café; two painted two-metre-high four-storey houses with little food-shops; 6 shop-signs to suggest small shops, hanging from wires (Gorelik’s idea): a baker’s golden pretzel, a silver top-hat, a black cigar, a golden barber’s bowl, a red child’s boot, a red glove (these emblems of small-scale commerce were lowered as Nanna appeared for her song); flags with Iberin’s portrait.

  Scene 3: a big well with rough wooden benches; hanging up, a straw mat.

  Scene 4: the Viceroy’s chair for the judge, on a little wooden balcony to one side outside the stage proper; illuminated text scrolling on the back wall of the stage above the screens; a rough wooden staircase; an old bench for the accused; a damaged statue of Justice.

  Scene 5: a pew for the Superior; a painted church window on metal legs, which could be opened at the bottom; two wooden chairs; a safe with a portrait of a saint.

  Scene 6: a door-frame with a little wooden step; a table; 6 chairs; the red lantern; sawn wooden letters ‘Café Paradiso’; a candle; on o
ne of the screens the silhouette of two horses.

  Scene 7: a wooden staircase with a blue carpet; a chandelier; the Justice statue repaired, lowered on pulleys at the end of the ‘Song of the stimulating effect of cash’ in the place of the damaged statue, which was removed; a small board ‘Convent of San Barabas versus Farmer Callas. At issue 2 horses’; the chair for the judge; a new carved dock for the accused; hanging at mid height two horses made of wood offcuts which could be drawn up at the judgement.

  Scene 8: dirty flags, otherwise as in the second scene.

  Scene 9: door-frame with a red fringed curtain; a tray with a glass of water; a wooden chair; an old Récamier sofa; a green artificial house palm, used by Nanna as a screen; a red bulb above the sofa; a visitor leaving the bar that Isabella is about to enter.

  Scene 10: a large wooden frame with ropes painted black as prison bars, front stage; 2 wooden stools for de Guzman and Callas right behind the bars; a small stage with stools for the bound farmers; a lighting rig so that Callas can come into the auditorium when he speaks his monologue; 3 gallows behind one of the screens.

  Scene 11: 3 sets of gallows behind the screen; blackboard outside the stage area ‘Execution of 1 landlord and 200 farmers’; a set table with golden chairs; silhouettes of soldiers made of offcuts, visible when the Viceroy enters; a huge gun barrel lowered on a wire above the table and aimed into the auditorium when Missena talks of peace.

  Heads were about 20 centimetres high. The masks showed drastic distortions of nose, ears, hair and chin. The Hatsos had unnaturally large hands and feet.

  The women’s costumes were coloured and not restricted to any particular fashion; the farmers wore black trousers, linen shirts and clogs; the rich landowners were dressed to go to the races; Missena in uniform; the small bourgeoisie in ordinary suits.

  Sound effects

  Recently the gramophone industry has started supplying the stage with records of real noises. These add substantially to the spectator’s illusion of not being in a theatre. Theatres have fallen on them avidly; so that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is now accompanied by the real noise of the mob. So far as we know the first person to make use of records was Piscator. He applied the new technique entirely correctly. In his production of the play Rasputin a record of Lenin’s voice was played. It interrupted the performance. In another production a new technical achievement was demonstrated: the transmission by wireless of the sound of a sick man’s heart. A film simultaneously showed the heart contracting. The fact that one can now get a specialist’s opinion for a case of illness on board ship or in some remote place played no part in the play. The point was simply to show how greatly human communications have been simplified by science, and that social conditions at present act as an obstacle to the full exploitation of the fact.

  In a parable-type play sound effects should only be used if they too have a parable function, and not in order to evoke atmosphere and illusion. The marching feet of Iberin’s troops as they go to war (scene 11) can come from a record. So can the victory bells (scenes 7 and 8) and the execution bell (in scene 11). A noise that should not come from a record is that, for example, of the well at which the tenants are working (scene 3). Synthetic popular noises can accompany Iberin’s entry (scene 4); while the reaction of the crowd outside the courtroom (scene 4) to the tenants’ demands and the decisions of the governor, and the crowd noises at the news of victory (scene 7), can likewise be artificial.

  It is best to place the record player, like the orchestra, so that it can be seen. But if such an arrangement would shock the audience unduly, or give too much cause for amusement it should preferably be dropped.

  [BFA 24, pp. 207–19. Brecht’s notes probably written shortly after the Copenhagen production at the end of 1936, and in any case before 1938 when the text was published in London, in volume two of the Malik edition of the works. The text, which refers in part to a different order of scenes from the published play, is a practical record, comparable to the later and much more detailed models. It is the first instance of Brecht applying the theory of Verfremdung practically to his own work.

  Some photographs and caricatures of Hitler, as well as other visual material, are preserved amongst the material for this play.

  The Neher-curtain (mentioned under ‘Examples of Verfrem-dung’) is the characteristic half-height curtain devised by Caspar Neher, which Brecht and Neher subsequently used for nearly all the productions in which they were involved.

  Brecht got to know Mordecai Gorelik, the American stage designer mentioned under ‘Stage set: scene 2’, in New York in 1935 during rehearsals there for The Mother. He visited some of the rehearsals for Round Heads and Pointed Heads in Copenhagen in autumn 1936.

  Erwin Piscator produced Rasputin (mentioned under ‘Sound effects’) in the Theater am Nollendorfplatz, Berlin, on 12 November 1927. Brecht helped with the adaptation, derived from Alexei Tolstoy.

  A photograph of the Copenhagen production of Round Heads and Pointed Heads is in Brecht on Theatre, facing p. 97; further photographs are preserved in the Brecht-Archive.]

  Editorial Notes

  This is one of Brecht’s plays, like Galileo, for which a vast number of sketches, drafts, fragments and variants are preserved. They bear witness to a long struggle with the material over a period of political upheaval, a period in which Brecht reflected on the relationship between an experimental progressive theatre and direct political engagement (see also Introduction). The texts discussed below also bear the hands of a great many collaborators: Ludwig Berger and Elisabeth Hauptmann were involved in the original work of adaptation; Emil Hesse-Burri (who had stayed in Germany and was credited under the pseudonym H. Emmel), Margarete Steffin and Hermann Borchardt all had a hand in the later development of the play, as of course had Hanns Eisler.

  We have only fragmentary evidence of Brecht’s efforts, late in 1931, to adapt Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure for a production planned by Ludwig Berger for the Berlin Volksbühne. As well as mapping out the essentials of the plot as he wished to realise it, he also began detailed textual work, sticking pages out of an old Reclam edition of the play (in the translation by Wolf Graf von Baudissin for the Schlegel/Tieck edition) onto large sheets, and typing his own text underneath. An extract from the first scene of this text is translated (with reference to the Shakespeare original) above. It shows a drastic tendency to abbreviate and simplify, as well as to modernise and colloquialise the language of the original.

  As work proceeded several far-reaching changes were introduced and Brecht quickly drifted away from the idea of a straightforward Shakespeare adaptation. He moved the setting to the late nineteenth century, and then from Vienna (as in Shakespeare) to Bohemia (hence perhaps the later racial division into ‘Tschuchen’ and ‘Tschichen’, in German reminiscent of ‘Tschechen’ – Czechs). Later the action shifted to Peru (whence all the South American and Hispanic names and references) and eventually to Yahoo (a name borrowed from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels). Brecht’s Yahoo has the features of a twentieth-century country with a hesitantly developing economy: for the most part it seems agrarian and feudal, but there is a power station and a relatively developed financial set-up. Brecht uses a similar ‘mixed’ economic setting in The Good Person of Szechwan. It permits a stark and simplified presentation of class differences and of the relations of power and ownership. In the course of adaptation, the names also changed: the Duke became a Viceroy; Angelo became Graf von Angeler, Tomaso Angelas, and then Angelo Iberin; Escalus became Eskaler, Fernando Eskahler, and finally Missena; and so on.

  Above all, however, other elements were introduced to the plot. The plot of a change of government was initially exploited as a parable about how little is to be hoped from a populist reformism which contents itself with the superficial problems of a capitalist society and moral order. Angelo is merely a deputy of the old order. Not only in the Shakespeare adaptation, but also in the first complete drafts of an independent play, Angeler/Angelas’s mo
tto is ‘reform’. From the outset Brecht was concerned also to create a clear economic motivation for the transfer of power. He introduced a crisis of overproduction with clear echoes of the world economic crash of 1929. The deputy takes power with the backing of the big capitalists. And as this theme was gradually fleshed out, the motif of a salt tax was introduced (ultimately removed again), an inequitable measure to be forced on the populace in order to restock the state’s coffers. A salt tax was a historical reality in Germany: it had been dropped in 1926 only to be reintroduced as one of the first emergency decrees of the von Papen government in January 1932. Brecht was responding closely to a real political and economic situation, despite the elements of distant parable and caricature which are so important to his play.

  Lower-class resistance to such a tax had of course to be overcome, and Brecht developed scenes illustrating the popular reaction to the change in government and creating a clear social stratification. He organised the labouring class under the sign of the ‘Black Flag’, later the Sickle. At a relatively late stage (it is impossible to date it precisely from the evidence) the motif of racial politics was introduced. This racism was understood as a political ploy: to divide and overcome the resistance of the lower classes, at this stage still for the purpose of imposing the salt tax and rescuing the economy. A peasant family (Meixner or Meixenego) plays a part in even the earliest drafts, but their role and the relationship between the families of peasant farmers, Callas and Lopez, only emerged later, alongside the theme of race (see ‘Cheated hopes’, above). It has been suggested that the emphasis on a rural labouring class and on landownership may derive from Brecht’s observation of the conditions of developing Fascism in Italy.

  The story of Callas’s horses is derived from another literary source, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810). However, whereas Kohl-haas fights for his horses out of a sense of justice, Brecht’s Callas is driven only by economic necessity. His hope that the law will provide social justice for the lower classes is one of several hopes that are cheated. At the other end of this strand of the plot: whereas Kohlhaas gets his horses back but is condemned to death for his treasonable uprising, Callas abandons the uprising, escapes death on the scaffold, but then loses the horses – and is effectively condemned by the powers-that-be to a just somewhat more gradual death (or to death in war).