Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 4

by Bertolt Brecht

  Brecht’s other significant literary source is Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamenti (1534/36), which provided the basis for the scene in which Madame Cornamontis instructs Nanna (originally Judith) how to conduct herself in her role as the false Isabella. More or less from the beginning Brecht had determined that, when she goes to plead for her brother with Angelo, Claudio’s sister Isabella (as they are in the Shakespeare original; in Brecht: Isabella von Klausner, Calausa, and eventually de Guzman) should have her place taken, not by Angelo’s betrothed, but by a prostitute. Thus he introduced one of his favourite motifs: the sex industry as an extreme case of commodification and self-alienation in a capitalist society (versions of which appear also in The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, and The Good Person of Szechwan). The theme is entirely congruent with the understanding of sexual relations and prostitution propagated by many early socialists: ‘Prostitution is only a particular expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since prostitution is a relationship which includes not only the prostituted but also the prostitutor – whose vileness is even greater – so also the capitalist etc. fall in this category’ (Karl Marx, 1844).

  In later versions of the first scene, Angelas’s nature and the nature of his task were sketched out in far more detail than in the quoted extract. And of course the conclusion of Shakespeare’s parable was altered also. The Viceroy is very far from Shakespeare’s image of the ideal ruler, indeed he too represents little more than class interest. Any fragmentary hope of a political, social, moral ‘measure for measure’ is satirised as a foolish illusion. In the ‘rosy dawn’ of the final scene, war is revealed as another, still more terrible political distraction by which to govern the oppressed. And yet the old regime is not restored undamaged. The landowners’ verse at the end insistently repeats ‘perhaps’; and Brecht gives the last word to the peasants’ song: since death awaits us all beyond this world of illusion and betrayal, let us take whatever little opportunity we have on earth, and assert ourselves.

  All of these alterations, adaptations and versions had already been undertaken by the end of 1932, at which point the play was published as a stage manuscript by the theatre publisher Felix Bloch Erben, Berlin-Wilmersdorf. At the beginning of 1933 an almost identical text, under the title Pointed Heads and Round Heads or Money Calls to Money was prepared for volume 8 of Brecht’s Versuche (‘Experiments’) series, as the seventeenth ‘Versuch’. The subtitle, ‘Reich und reich gesellt sich gern’, which survived all subsequent changes, is a play on the saying ‘Gleich und gleich gesellt sich gern’, a loose equivalent of the English ‘Birds of a feather flock together’. Although publication of this volume of the Versuche was prevented by the Nazis, type was set and page-proofs printed. Brecht took the proofs with him into exile, and the surviving text is reproduced in full in BFA 4, pp. 7–145.

  By this time only a couple of isolated lines of text and the slogan ‘measure for measure’ still survived as direct quotations from the Shakespeare translation, although of course many elements of the plot and several important motifs remained.

  In the original work on Measure for Measure neither fascist demagogy nor racial politics played a part. Indeed, the text may have been as much directed against the reformist Social Democratic Party as against right-wing politics. The rise of Fascism, first in Italy and then in Germany, directed Brecht to the possibility of adapting his parable into a satire against ‘völkisch’ idealist politics. In the work on the 1933 version the new governor appears as an honest fanatic who takes his own anti-capitalist slogans seriously and is exploited cynically by the ruling class. However, the working notes for the play, preserved in the Archive, also contain a lengthy article by Adolf Hitler (from the Völkische Beobachter, 21 October 1932), quotations from which begin to appear in Angelas’s speeches. And so the attack on reformism and unjust taxation and the elements of a deluded populist idealism begin to make way for ever more explicit references to National Socialism and to the person of Hitler, albeit still in a clearly agrarian context.

  In 1934, by now in exile in Denmark, Brecht undertook what he called ‘a complete reformulation’ of the play. He removed the motif of the salt tax, and tightened the plot (removing four scenes and making the social and political relationships clearer). He introduced the ‘Hutabschlägerstaffel’, or Hatsos, a clear parody of the SA, and their leader Zazarante; and the other names arrived at their final versions. The Governor was given a programme with distinct echoes of the social and economic measures of the Nazi government of 1933 and ’34. The Viceroy was confined to the first and last scenes. The title now became Round Heads and Pointed Heads.

  This version benefited also from the participation of Brecht’s second major musical collaborator, Hanns Eisler. Most of the songs and musical elements were introduced in 1934 (although some of the settings go back to 1932 and a few were only completed later in the 1930s, and the instrumentation was only completed in 1954 and 1962). The Dagmar Theatre production in Copenhagen, towards which all this effort had been expended, collapsed however, amidst fears of censorship.

  After 1934 Brecht came back to his material several more times. At first his inclination was to develop the references to National Socialism, and above all to introduce the whole sorry political tale as a preparation for war. A version of this text was published in Russian, both as a pamphlet volume and in the journal International Literature (1936, no. 8). In the course of 1936, however, in rehearsal for a new Copenhagen production (the eventual première in the Riddersalen) Brecht started to remove the specific references to German Fascism. The play became a more generalised parable about the role of racism and war in right-wing capitalist politics. This general direction was underlined by the prologue, written for the Riddersalen production.

  After the eventual Copenhagen première the play was further altered, partly, it seems, in response to the experience of the text in production. A version appeared in English in International Literature (1937, no. 5) in a translation by N. Goold-Verschoyle, entitled Round Heads, Peak Heads or Rich and Rich Make Good Company (A Thriller). The version on which our translation for this volume is based was first published in Brecht’s Collected Works vol. 2, London: Malik-Verlag, 1938, where it appeared alongside the ‘Notes on Pointed Heads and Round Heads’ (see above). This is the text that has formed the basis for all further publications.

  FEAR AND MISERY OF THE THIRD REICH

  Texts by Brecht

  FEAR AND MISERY OF THE THIRD REICH

  Undoubtedly the sight of Germany, our home country, has today become terrifying to the rest of the world: that is, in so far as the world is bourgeois, to the bourgeois world. Even among the Third Reich’s friends there can hardly be one that has never been terrified by Germany as it now is.

  Anyone who talks about Germany becomes a diviner of mysteries. One favourite interpretation of the mystery which we have read on various occasions and in various languages, not excluding our own, goes like this: here is a country at the heart of Europe, a long-established nursery of culture, which was plunged overnight into barbarism, a sudden horrible senseless outbreak of savagery. The forces of good were defeated and the forces of evil got the upper hand.

  Such is the interpretation, and it argues that barbarism springs from barbarism. The impetus comes from impulse. The impulse comes from nowhere but was always there. In this interpretation the Third Reich is a natural event, comparable with a volcanic eruption which lays waste fertile land.

  The most powerful living English statesman has spoken of the German overestimation of the State. To him, naturally, the State is something natural; once you overestimate it, however, it becomes something unnatural. Think of Schiller’s lines:

  Fire is to our benefit

  Only if one watches it

  – and the object lesson that follows them.

  According to this interpretation a particular unnatural state derives from overestimation of the State. How this overestimation comes about in the first place is left open.<
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  Some interpretations are more realistic: for instance the following. Germany is a great state and industrially very strong. It has to make sure that it gets provided with markets and sources of raw materials. Twenty years ago it fought for markets and raw materials and was defeated. The victors hamstrung the State as such while promoting still further expansion of its industry by means of loan aid. Its industry’s former markets and raw material reserves were never enough and now they had been partly taken away. No wonder that industry got the State functioning again. The State will have another shot at the old objectives.

  People who talk that way at least have some explanation for the German ‘overestimation’ of the State, but even they have no explanation for the barbarism prevalent in Germany short of saying yet again that it springs from barbarism. Perhaps they see that state as an ordinary state which has got into an exceptional situation and therefore must have recourse to exceptional means; all the same the means inevitably terrify them.

  For these exceptional means clearly have something of the character of malignant growths. They can’t just be explained away by the exceptional situation.

  This is why such people find the persecution of the Jews, for instance, so exasperating, because it seems such an ‘unnecessary’ excess. They regard it as something extraneous, irrelevant to the business in hand. In their view pogroms are not essential to the conquest of markets and raw materials, and accordingly can be dispensed with.

  They fail to understand that barbarism in Germany is a consequence of class conflicts, and so they cannot grasp the Fascist principle which demands that class conflicts be converted into race conflicts. They can keep their parliaments, because they have parliamentary majorities.

  But the bourgeois world is profoundly reluctant to look and see what exceptional means a state can employ to master exceptional situations; what’s more, virtually all rules were at one time exceptions. Is it really possible that culture might become the ballast that has to be jettisoned so that this particular balloon may rise?

  The same powerful English statesman who regretted the German tendency to overestimate the State was voicing this reluctance when he spoke of conditions under which life would no longer be worth while. Does it ever strike him that there are also ‘natural’ states to whose inhabitants the same thing applies?

  Germany, our home, has transformed itself into a people of two million spies and eighty million people being spied on. Life for these people consists in the case being made against them. They are composed exclusively of the guilty.

  When the father says something to his son it is to avoid being arrested. The priest thumbs through his Bible to find sentences he can quote without being arrested. The teacher puzzles over some action of Charlemagne’s, looking for motives that he can teach without somebody arresting him. The doctor who signs a death certificate chooses a cause of death that is not going to lead to his arrest. The poet racks his brains for a rhyme he won’t be arrested for. And it is to escape arrest that the farmer decides not to feed his sow.

  As you can see, the measures which the State is driven to take are exceptional.

  The bourgeois world desperately seeks to prove that the State is making a mistake, that it is not forced to take them; that force may be necessary (what with the exceptional circumstances), but not all that much force, just so much force and no more; that moderate punishment is enough; that occasional spying will suffice; that military preparations within rational limits are to be preferred.

  And the bourgeois world has a vague feeling that it is wrong. This question of the degree of compulsion necessary in Germany is preoccupying the bourgeoisie of many nations, including the German. The way the German upper bourgeoisie saw it was this: large-scale property-owning had to be maintained, and the deal was ‘by whatever means’. The State was massively built up. There are now supposed to be odd pockets of incomprehension among the upper bourgeoisie, restrictions placed on the means. All of a sudden it’s no longer supposed to be by whatever means, just by some. Grumbling can be heard.

  Now and then a head rolls, and now and then the odd grumble is heard. ‘That signifies discontent,’ say those who have fled. Does it? Does a 27-year-old student mother have to be beheaded for the same reason that the Rhineland industrialists’ memorandum had to be torn up? If this really is discontent, just tell me how much.

  Has the regime outstayed its welcome, does it really ‘represent nobody but itself’?

  The expression ‘discontent rules’ is not a happy one. Discontent does anything but rule. The regime is a foreign body? But the knife in a bandit’s hand is a foreign body too. The industrialists are having to be kept down now? Down on top of what? Of the workers? The loss of freedom affects all alike? Does this mean that all wish all to be free?

  The regime forces the workers to submit to exploitation and accordingly strips them of their trade unions, parties, newspapers. The regime forces the employers to exploit the workers, lays down specific forms of exploitation, makes it conform to plan and foists General Goering on the employers, hence the unfreedom felt ‘on all sides’.

  The regime’s great strength, it is said, lies in the absence of any sign of opposition. This can’t apply to the workers; now and then a head rolls. It can apply to the bourgeoisie, even though now and then the odd grumble is heard. Such grumbles are not an opposition.

  Admittedly that leaves the great middle class, the mass of petty bourgeoisie and peasantry. Of every ten of these people two can be seen as holding down the other eight. For them the great question, what degree of culturally destructive means should be tolerated so that the regime can maintain large-scale ownership, boils down to this: is small-scale ownership dependent on large? Certain groups get some marginal droppings from the loot, or hope to do so. Others have been unable to see the difference between their own possessions and possession of the means of production. Anyhow they aren’t asked.

  Whoever clings to cultural concepts will get arrested. In the great war which will shortly have to be authorised for the maintenance of large-scale ownership, those who cling to life (which is also a cultural value) will be punished by death. This fear is beginning to overshadow all others.

  The regime and the middle orders confront one another in a frenzied bargaining process. The regime is brandishing a list of luxuries due to be sacrificed for the maintenance of ownership. The middle orders are haggling. ‘All right, scrap Goethe. But can’t we keep religion?’ – ‘No.’ – ‘Surely a little freedom of opinion can’t do any harm?’ – ‘Yes it can.’ – ‘But our children, can’t we … ?’ – ‘What are you thinking of?’ – ‘Our bare life?’ – ‘Will have to be committed.’

  The thought that barbarism springs from barbarism won’t help solve the dreadful problem of Germany. The degree of violence employed implies the degree of opposition: to that extent the acts of violence are due not to spontaneous impulses but to deliberate reckoning, and have a touch of rationality however much stupidity, ambiguity and miscalculation may also be involved. But just as the oppression is of varying kinds, so also is the opposition. Those sections of the people who are now nervously asking ‘how many culturally destructive means are really needed to maintain large-scale ownership of capital, land and machinery?’ probably get a truthful answer from the regime when it bellows back ‘Just as many as we are using.’ Might the sections in question have to be forced into the same condition of extreme dehumanisation that the proletariat, according to the Socialist classics, is resisting by its fight for the dignity of mankind? Will it be the misery that eventually defeats the fear?

  [BFA 22, pp. 472–7. Unpublished in Brecht’s lifetime. The ‘British statesman’ referred to appears to be Neville Chamberlain, who became PM in May 1937. See the short note ‘Mr Chamberlain’s Dream’ which precedes this in BFA and duplicates certain of its arguments.]

  NOTE TO ‘FEAR AND MISERY OF THE THIRD REICH’

  The play ‘Fear and Misery of the Third Reich’ offers the acto
r more temptation to use an acting method appropriate to a dramaturgically Aristotelian play than do other plays in this collection. To allow it to be performed immediately, under the unfavourable circumstances of exile, it is written in such a way that it can be performed by tiny theatre groups (the existing workers’ groups) and in a partial selection (based on a given choice of individual scenes). The workers’ groups are neither capable nor desirous of conjuring up the spectators’ empathetic feeling: the few professionals at their disposal are versed in the epic method of acting which they learnt from the theatrical experiments of the decade prior to the fascist regime. The acting methods of these professionals accord admirably with those of the workers’ groups. Those theorists who have recently taken to treating the montage technique as a purely formal principle are hereby confronted with montage as a practical matter, and this may make them shift their speculations back to solid ground.

  [BFA 24, p. 225. Possibly intended for the Malik-Verlag edition. The last sentence is aimed at Georg Lukács.]

  FURTHER NOTE

  The cycle ‘Fear and Misery of the Third Reich’ is a documentary play. Censorship problems and material difficulties have hitherto prevented the available small workers’ theatre groups from performing more than a few isolated scenes. Using simple indications of scenery (for instance, playing against dimly lit swastika flags), however, almost any theatre with a revolving or a multiple set could resolve the play’s technical problems. It should be feasible to stage at least a selection of 17 scenes (1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27). The play shows behaviour patterns typical of people of different classes under Fascist dictatorship, and not only the gests of caution, self-protection, alarm and so forth but also that of resistance need to be brought out. In the series of Versuche whose publication began in 1930 this play constitutes no. 20.