Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics)

by Bertolt Brecht

  A detail

  Hurwicz showed increasing exhaustion while drumming. The ritual character of despair

  The lamentations of the peasant woman, whose son the soldiers have taken away and whose farm they threaten when Kattrin starts her drumming to wake the townspeople, must have a certain routine quality about it; it must suggest a ‘set behaviour pattern’. The war has been going on too long. Begging, lamenting, and informing have frozen into fixed forms: they are the things you do when the soldiery arrive.

  It is worth forgoing the ‘immediate impression’ of a particular, seemingly unique episode of horror so as to penetrate a deeper stratum of horror and to show how repeated, constantly recurring misfortune has driven people to ritualise their gestures of self-defence – though of course these ritual gestures can never free them from the reality of fear, which on the stage must permeate the ritual.

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  12

  Mother Courage moves on

  The peasants have to convince Courage that Kattrin is dead. The lullaby for Kattrin. Mother Courage pays for Kattrin’s burial and receives the condolences of the peasants. Alone, Mother Courage harnesses herself to the empty cart; still hoping to get back into business, she follows the ragged army.

  Overall arrangement

  The peasants have to convince Courage that Kattrin is dead. The cart is standing on the empty stage. Mother Courage is sitting with the dead Kattrin’s head in her lap. The peasants are standing in a hostile knot at the dead girl’s feet. Courage speaks as if her daughter were only sleeping, deliberately disregarding the reproaches of the peasants who are saying that she is to blame for Kattrin’s death.

  The lullaby for Kattrin. The mother’s face is bent low over her daughter’s face. Her song fails to pacify the peasants.

  Mother Courage pays for Kattrin’s burial and receives the condolences of the peasants. When she realises that her last child is dead, she rises painfully to her feet and hobbles around the corpse (on the right) and along the footlights to behind the cart. She comes back with a sheet of canvas. The peasants ask her if she has no one else; she answers over her shoulder: ‘Aye, one left. Eilif.’ And with her back to the audience she lays the canvas over the body. Then at the head end of the body she pulls it up over the face and stands behind the body, facing the audience. The peasant and his son give her their hands and bow ceremoniously before carrying the body away (to the right). The woman also gives Courage her hand, goes to the right and stops again in indecision. The women exchange a few words, then the peasant woman goes away.

  Alone, Mother Courage harnesses heself to her empty cart; still hoping to get back into business, she follows the ragged army. Slowly the old woman goes to the cart, unrolls the cord which Kattrin had until then been pulling, takes a stick, examines it, pulls the loop of the second cord through, wedges the stick under her arm and moves off. The last stanza of the ‘Mother Courage Song’ has begun as she is bending down over the shaft. The revolve begins to turn and Mother Courage circles the stage once. The curtain falls as she turns right rear for the second time.

  The peasants

  The peasants’ attitude towards Courage is hostile. She has caused them great difficulties and they will have her on their hands if she cannot catch up with the departing army. As they see it, she is to blame for what has happened. Besides, she is an unsedentary element, and now in wartime belongs with the incendiaries, cut-throats and looters who follow in the wake of armies. In condoling with her by giving her their hands, they are only doing what is customary.

  The bow

  During the whole scene Weigel showed an almost bestial stupor. All the more beautiful was her deep bow when the body was carried away.

  The lullaby

  The lullaby must be sung without any sentimentality or desire to provoke sentimentality. Otherwise its significance is lost. The idea underlying this song is murderous: this mother’s child must fare better than other children of other mothers. By slight emphasis on the ‘you’, Weigel portrayed Courage’s treacherous hope of bringing her child, and perhaps hers alone, through the war. To this child who had lacked even the most ordinary things, she promised the most extraordinary.

  Paying for the burial

  Even in paying for the burial, Weigel gave one last hint of Courage’s character. She fished a few coins out of her leather bag, put one back and gave the peasants the rest. This did not in the least detract from the overpowering effect of desolation.

  The last stanza

  The last stanza of the ‘Mother Courage Song’ was struck up by the musicians in the box while Courage was slowly harnessing herself to the cart. It gives powerful expression to her still unshattered hope of getting her cut from the war. It gains in power if the illusion that the song is being sung by marching armies in the distance is dropped.

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  Timing

  At the end as at the beginning the cart must be seen rolling along. Of course the audience would understand if it were simply pulled away. When it goes on rolling there is a moment of irritation (’this has been going on long enough’). But when it goes on still longer, a deeper understanding sets in.

  The pulling of the cart in the last scene

  For scene 12 the peasants’ house and the barn with roof (from scene 11) were removed from the stage; only the cart and Kattrin’s body remained. The word ‘Saxony’ in big letters is hoisted into the flies when the music starts. Thus the cart was hauled off a completely empty stage recalling scene 1. Mother Courage described a complete circle with it on the revolving stage, passing the footlights for the last time. As usual, the stage was brilliantly lit.

  Realist discoveries

  In giving the peasants the money for Kattrin’s burial, Weigel quite mechanically puts back one of the coins she has taken out of her purse. What does this gesture accomplish? It shows that in all her grief the business woman has not wholly forgotten how to reckon – money is hard to come by. This little gesture has the power and suddenness of a discovery – a discovery concerning human nature, which is moulded by conditions. To dig out the truth from the rubble of the self-evident, to link the particular strikingly with the universal, to capture the particular that characterises a general process, that is the art of the realist.

  A change in the text

  After ‘I’ll manage, there isn’t much in it,’ Courage added, first in the Munich, then in the Berlin production: Tve got to get back into business.’

  Mother Courage learns nothing

  In the last scene Weigel’s Courage seemed to be eighty years old. And she understands nothing. She reacts only to remarks connected with the war, such as that she mustn’t be left behind, and takes no notice when the peasants brutally accuse her of being to blame for Kattrin’s death.

  In 1938, when the play was written, Courage’s inability to learn from war’s unprofitable character was a prophecy. At the time of the 1948 Berlin production the wish was expressed that at least in the play Courage would understand.

  In order that the realism of this play should benefit the spectator, that is, in order that the spectator should learn something, the theatre must work out a way of playing it which does not lead to audience identification with the principal character (heroine).

  To judge by press reviews and statements of spectators, the original production in Zurich, for example, though artistically on a high level, merely pictured war as a natural catastrophe and ineluctable fate, confirming the belief of the petit-bourgeois members of the audience in their own indestructibility and power to survive. But even for the equally petit-bourgeois Mother Courage the decision whether or not to join in was left open throughout the play. It follows that the production must have represented Courage’s business activity, her desire to get her cut and her willingness to take risks, as perfectly natural and ‘eternally human’ phenomena, so that there was no way out. Today the petit-bourgeois can no longer in fact keep out of the war, as Courage could have done. And probably no performance of th
e play can give a petit-bourgeois anything more than a real horror of war and a certain insight into the fact that the big business deals which constitute war are not made by the little people. A play is more instructive than reality, because in it the war situation is set up experimentally for the purpose of giving insight; that is, the spectator assumes the attitude of a student – provided the production is right. The proletarians in the audience, the members of a class which really can take action against war and eliminate it, must be given an insight – which of course is possible only if the play is performed in the right way – into the connection between war and commerce: the proletariat as a class can do away with war by doing away with capitalism. Here, of course, a good deal depends on the growth of self-awareness among the proletariat, a process that is going on both inside and outside the theatre.

  The epic element

  As for the epic element in the Deutsches Theater production, indications of it could be seen in the arrangement, in the delineation of the characters, in the accurate execution of detail, and in the spirited rhythm of the entire performance. Moreover, the contradictions that pervade the play were not taken over ready-made, but worked out, and the parts, visible as such, fitted well into the whole. Nonetheless, the central aim of the epic theatre was not achieved. Much was shown, but the element of showing was absent. Only in a few rehearsals devoted to recasting was it brought out clearly. Here the actors ‘marked’, that is, they merely showed the new members of the cast certain positions and tones, and the whole took on the wonderfully relaxed, effortless, and unobtrusive quality that stimulates the spectator to think and feel for himself.

  No one missed this fundamental epic element; and this is probably why the actors did not dare to provide it.

  Concerning these notes

  It is to be hoped that the present notes, indicating a few of the ideas and devices of various kinds that are necessary for the performance of a play, will not make an impression of misplaced seriousness. It is difficult in writing about these things to convey the carefree lightness that is essential to the theatre. Even in their instructive aspect, the arts belong to the realm of entertainment.

  [From Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. Text/Aufführung/Anmer-kungen. Henschel-Verlag, East Berlin, 1956.]

  TWO WAYS OF PLAYING MOTHER COURAGE

  When the title rôle is played in the usual way, so as to communicate empathy, the spectator (according to numerous witnesses) experiences an extraordinary pleasure: the indestructible vitality of this woman beset by the hardships of war leaves him with a sense of triumph. Mother Courage’s active participation in the war is not taken seriously; the war is a source, perhaps her only source, of livelihood. Apart from this element of participation, in spite of it, the effect is very much as in Schweyk, where – in a comic perspective, to be sure – the audience triumphs with Schweyk over the plans of the belligerent powers to sacrifice him. But in the case of Mother Courage such an effect has far less social value, precisely because her participation, however indirect it may seem, is not taken into consideration. The effect is indeed negative. Courage is represented chiefly as a mother, and like Niobe she is unable to protect her children against fate – in this case, war. At most, her merchant’s trade and the way she plies it give her a ‘realistic, un-idea’ quality; they do not prevent the war from being seen as fate. It remains, of course, wholly evil, but after all she comes through it alive, though deformed. By contrast Weigel, employing a technique which prevents complete empathy, treated the merchant’s trade not as a natural but as a historical one – that is, belonging to a historical, transient period – and war as the best time for it. Here too the war was a self-evident source of livelihood, but this spring from which Mother Courage drank death was a polluted one. The merchant-mother became a great living contradiction, and it was this contradiction which utterly disfigured and deformed her. In the battlefield scene, which is cut in most productions, she really was a hyaena; she parted with the shirts because she saw her daughter’s hatred and feared violence; she cursed at the soldier with the coat and pounced on him like a tigress. When her daughter was disfigured, she cursed the war with the same profound sincerity that characterised her praise of it in the scene immediately following. Thus she played the contradictions in all their irreconcilable sharpness. Her daughter’s rebellion against her (when the city of Halle is saved) stunned her completely and taught her nothing. The tragedy of Mother Courage and of her life, which the audience was made to feel deeply, lay in a terrible contradiction which destroyed a human being, a contradiction which has been transcended, but only by society itself in long and terrible struggles. What made this way of playing the part morally superior was that human beings – even the strongest of them – were shown to be destructible.

  [Written 1951. From GW Schriften zum Theater, p. 895. First published in Theaterarbeit, 1952.]

  [MISFORTUNE IN ITSELF IS A POOR TEACHER]

  The audience gave off the acrid smell of clothing that had not been properly cleaned, but this did not detract from the festive atmosphere. Those who had come to see the play had come from ruins and would be going back to ruins. There was more light on the stage than on any square or in any house.

  The wise old stage manager from the days of Max Reinhardt had received me like a king, but what gave the production its hard realism was a bitter experience shared by all. The dressmakers in the workshops realised that the costumes had to be richer at the beginning of the play than at the end. The stage hands knew how the canvas over Mother Courage’s cart had, to be: white and new at the beginning, then dirty and patched, then somewhat cleaner, but never again really white, and at the end a rag.

  Weigel’s way of playing Mother Courage was hard and angry; that is, her Mother Courage was not angry; she herself, the actress, was angry. She showed a merchant, a strong crafty woman who loses her children to the war one after another and still goes on believing in the profit to be derived from war.

  A number of people remarked at the time that Mother Courage learns nothing from her misery, that even at the end she does not understand. Few realised that just this was the bitterest and most meaningful lesson of the play.

  Undoubtedly the play was a great success; that is, it made a big impression. People pointed out Weigel on the street and said: ‘Mother Courage!’ But I do not believe, and I did not believe at the time, that the people of Berlin – or of any other city where the play was shown – understood the play. They were all convinced that they had learned something from the war; what they failed to grasp was that, in the playwright’s view, Mother Courage was meant to have learned nothing from her war. They did not see what the playwright was driving at: that war teaches people nothing.

  Misfortune in itself is a poor teacher. Its pupils learn hunger and thirst, but seldom hunger for truth or thirst for knowledge. Suffering does not transform a sick man into a physician. Neither what he sees from a distance nor what he sees face to face is enough to turn an eyewitness into an expert.

  The audiences of 1949 and the ensuing years did not see Mother Courage’s crimes, her participation, her desire to share in the profits of the war business; they saw only her failure, her sufferings. And that was their view of Hitler’s war in which they had participated: it had been a bad war and now they were suffering. In short, it was exactly as the playwright had prophesied. War would bring them not only suffering, but also the inability to learn from it.

  The production of Mother Courage and Her Children is now in its sixth year. It is certainly a brilliant production, with great actors. Undoubtedly something has changed. The play is no longer a play that came too late, that is, after a war. Today a new war is threatening with all its horrors. No one speaks of it, but everyone knows. The masses are not in favour of war. But life is so full of hardships. Mightn’t war do away with these? Didn’t people make a very good living in the last war, at any rate till just before the end? And aren’t there such things as successful wars?

  I am curiou
s to know how many of those who see Mother Courage and Her Children today understand its warning.

  [Written 1954. From GW Schriften zum Theater, p. 1147.]

  Editorial Note

  The first typescript of Mother Courage, in Brecht’s own typing with its characteristic absence of capital letters, was made in 1939, though there is also what may be a slightly earlier draft of the first few pages in verse. Amended by Brecht and by his collaborator Margarete Steffin, who died in 1941, it was then duplicated for the Zurich production and again in 1946 by the Kurt Reiss agency in Basel. This seems to have been the text which Brecht circulated to some of his friends, and of which one scene was accordingly published in the Moscow Internationale Literatur before the première, while a copy served as the basis for H. R. Hays’s first American translation. Brecht made a few further additions and alterations to the 1946 version, which was once again duplicated for the Deutsches Theater production of 1949. Brecht’s own copies of this Deutsches Theater script bear yet more notes and small amendments, as well as cuts which were disregarded in the published version. This appeared as Versuche 9 in 1949, continuing the grey paperbound series of Brecht’s writings which had been interrupted in 1933.

  The main shifts of emphasis in the play were indicated by Brecht in his own notes which followed the first publication of the play in the Versuche (1949) and have been reprinted in subsequent editions (pp. 271–274 above). The final versions of these passages, with the exception of the last (which concludes the play) are to be found in the additions to the Deutsches Theater typescript. The change in scene 1, says Brecht’s diary, was proposed by his assistant Kuckhahn. In the case of the last scene, the major change took place subsequently, between the Versuche edition of 1949 and the reprint of 1950. It consisted in the insertion of the stage directions showing Mother Courage first covering her daughter’s body, then handing over money to the peasants who carry it away, and of the last sentence ‘Got to get back in business again’. In previous versions, too, she was made to join in the refrain of the final song. Now, presumably, she was too old and exhausted to do more than pull her cart.