Bertolt Brecht

by Bertolt Brecht

  She testified that, although she had called at the house of Frau Zingli’s uncle that night, she had not gone back to the tannery, out of fear of the imperial troops and because she was worried about her own illegitimate child which had been placed with good people in the neighbouring village if Lechhausen.

  Old Dollinger interrupted her rudely and snapped that at least there had been one person in the city who had felt something like fear. He was glad to be able to establish the fact, since it proved that at least one person had had some sense at the time. It was not, of course, very nice of the witness that she had only been concerned about her own child, but on the other hand, as the popular saying went, blood was thicker than water, and anyone who was a proper mother would go to the lengths of stealing for her child, though this was strictly forbidden by law, for property was property, and those who stole also lied, and lying was similarly forbidden by law. And then he gave one of his wise and pungent lectures on the infamy of people who deceived the Court till they were blue in the face; and, after a short digression on peasants who watered the milk of innocent cows and the City Council which levied too high market-taxes on the peasants – which had absolutely nothing to do with the case – he announced that the examination of witnesses was over and had led nowhere.

  Then he made a long pause and showed every sign of being at a loss, gazing about him as though he expected someone or other to suggest how to arrive at a solution.

  People looked at one another dumbfounded and some of them craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the helpless judge. But it remained very quiet in the hall; only the crowd in the street below could be heard.

  Then, sighing, the judge began to speak again.

  ‘It has not been established who is the real mother,’ he said. ‘The child is to be pitied. We have all heard of fathers dodging their duty and not wanting to be fathers – the rogues! – but here are two mothers both laying claim. The Court has listened to them as long as they deserve, namely a full five minutes to each, and the Court is convinced that both are lying like a book. But, as already said, we still have to think of the child who must have a mother. Therefore it has to be established, without paying attention to mere babble, who the real mother of the child is.’

  And in a cross voice he called the usher and ordered him to bring a piece of chalk.

  The usher went and fetched a piece of chalk.

  ‘Draw a circle with the chalk on the floor big enough for three people to stand in,’ the judge directed him.

  The usher knelt down and drew the circle with the chalk as requested.

  ‘Now fetch the child,’ ordered the judge.

  The child was brought in. He started to howl again and tried to go to Anna. Old Dollinger took no notice of the crying and merely delivered his address in a rather louder voice.

  ‘This test which is now about to be applied,’ he announced, ‘I found in an old book and it is considered extremely good. The simple idea underlying the test with the chalk circle is that the real mother will be recognized by her love for the child. Hence the strength of this love must be tested. Usher, place the child in that chalk circle.’

  The usher took the wailing child from the nurse’s hand and led him into the circle. The judge went on, turning towards Frau Zingli and Anna:

  ‘You go and stand in the chalk circle too; each of you take one of the child’s hands and when I say “go!” try and pull the child out of the circle. Whichever of you has the stronger love will also pull with the greater strength and thus bring the child to her side.’

  There was a stir in the hall. The spectators stood on tiptoe and had words with those standing in front of them.

  But there was dead silence again as the two women stepped into the circle and each grasped one of the child’s hands. The child had also fallen silent, as though he sensed what was at stake. He turned his little tear-stained face up to Anna. Then the judge gave the order ‘Go!’

  And with a single violent jerk Frau Zingli tore the child out of the chalk circle. Bewildered and incredulous, Anna’s eyes followed him. For fear that he might come to harm if both his little arms were pulled in two directions at once, she had immediately let go.

  Old Dollinger stood up.

  ‘And thus we know,’ he said loudly, ‘who is the right mother. Take the child away from the slut. She would tear him to pieces in cold blood.’

  And he nodded to Anna and quickly left the hall to have his breakfast.

  And in the following weeks the peasants round about, who were pretty wide-awake, talked of how the judge on awarding the child to the woman from Mering had winked at her.

  Two Sons

  In January 1945, as Hitler’s war was drawing to a close, a farmer’s wife in Thuringia dreamt that her son at the front was calling her and, on going out into the yard dazed with sleep, she fancied she saw him at the pump, drinking. When she spoke to him she realized that it was one of the young Russian prisoners of war who were working as forced labour on the farm. A few days later she had a strange experience. She was bringing the prisoners their food in a nearby copse, where they were uprooting tree-stumps. Looking back over her shoulder as she went away she saw the same young prisoner of war – a sickly creature – turning his face with a disappointed expression towards the mess-tin of soup someone was handing to him, and suddenly his face became that of her son. During the next few days she repeatedly experienced the swift, and as swiftly vanishing, transformations of this particular young man’s face into that of her son. Then the prisoner fell sick; he lay untended in the barn. The farmer’s wife felt a rising impulse to take him something nourishing, but she was prevented by her brother who, disabled in the war, ran the farm and treated the prisoners brutally, particularly now that everything was beginning to go to pieces and the village was beginning to feel afraid of the prisoners. The farmer’s wife herself could not close her ears to his arguments; she did not think it at all right to help these sub-humans, of whom she had heard horrifying things. She lived in dread of what the enemy might do to her son, who was in the East. So her half-formed resolve to help this prisoner in his forlorn condition had not yet been carried out when, one evening, she came unexpectedly upon a group of the prisoners in the little snow-covered orchard in eager conversation, held in the cold, no doubt, to keep it secret. The young man was there, too, shivering with fever and, probably because of his exceptionally weak condition, it was he who was most startled by her. In his fright, his face now again underwent the curious transformation, so that she was looking into her son’s face, and it was very frightened. She was greatly exercised by this and, although she dutifully reported the conversation in the orchard to her brother, she made up her mind that she would now slip the young man some ham-rind as she had planned. This, like many a good deed under the Third Reich, proved to be exceedingly difficult and dangerous. It was a venture in which her own brother was her enemy, nor could she feel sure of the prisoners either. Nevertheless, she brought it off. True, it led her to the discovery that the prisoners really did intend to make their escape, since each day, with the approaching Red Armies, there was greater danger that they would be moved westwards or simply massacred. The farmer’s wife could not refuse certain requests, made clear to her in mime and a smattering of German by the young prisoner, to whom she was bound by her strange experience; and in this way she let herself be involved in the prisoners’ escape plans. She provided a jacket and a large pair of hand shears. Curiously enough, from that time on the change no longer occurred: she was now simply helping the young stranger. So it was a shock when, one morning in late February, there was a knock on her window and through the pane she saw in the half-light the face of her son. And this time it was her son. He wore the torn uniform of the Waffen S.S., his unit had been cut to pieces and he said agitatedly that the Russians were now only a few kilometres from the village. His homecoming must be kept a dead secret. At a sort of war council held by the farmer’s wife, her brother and her son in a corner of the l
oft, it was decided first and foremost that they must get rid of the prisoners, since they might have caught sight of the S.S. man and in any case would presumably testify to their treatment. There was a quarry not far off. The S.S. man insisted that during that night he must lure them one by one out of the barn and kill them. The corpses could then be dumped in the quarry. Earlier they should be given some rations of alcohol; this would not strike them as too odd, the brother thought, since lately he, as well as the farm-hands, had been downright friendly to the Russians, to put them in a favourable frame of mind at the eleventh hour. Whilst the young S.S. man expounded his plan, he suddenly saw his mother shudder. The menfolk decided not to let her go near the barn again in any circumstances. Thus, filled with horror, she awaited nightfall. The Russians accepted the brandy with apparent gratitude and the farmer’s wife heard them drunkenly singing their melancholy songs. But when, towards eleven o’clock, her son went into the barn, the prisoners were gone. They had feigned drunkenness. It was precisely the new, unnatural friendliness of the farm people that had convinced them that the Red Army must be very close. The Russians arrived during the latter part of the night. The son was lying drunk in the loft, while the farmer’s wife, panic stricken, tried to burn his S.S. uniform. Her brother had also got drunk; it was she who had to receive the Russian soldiers and feed them. She did it with a stony face. The Russians left in the morning; the Red Army continued its advance. The son, haggard with sleeplessness, wanted more brandy and announced his firm intention of getting through to the German army units in retreat to go on fighting. The farmer’s wife did not try to explain to him that to go on fighting now meant certain destruction. Desperate, she barred his way and tried to restrain him physically. He hurled her back on to the straw. As she got to her feet again she felt a wooden stake in her hand and, with a great heave, she felled the frenzied man to the ground.

  That same morning a farmer’s wife drove a cart to Russian headquarters in the neighbouring hamlet and surrendered her son, bound with bullock-halters, as a prisoner of war, so that, as she tried to explain to an interpreter, he should stay alive.

  Appendix

  Life Story of the Boxer Samson-Körner

  When they ask you to write something about your own life it isn’t all that easy to get it together. The trouble is that when you come to look closely there are two sides to everything, and one of those sides gets more or less paid for while the other can run you into a lot of expense. This makes it particularly important that everything should be looked at with a view to the second side.

  So let me say right away that I was born in Beaver, State of Utah, U.S.A., in the Mormon area close to the Great Salt Lake. I can also suggest why I was born there: it was because Beaver, State of Utah, U.S.A., is not on the railroad. It is a place where you can marry twelve wives, but if you want to look at the house where I was born you can’t get there except on foot.

  That’s one side of it. It’s very important, because that’s the only reason why I came to be a proper Yankee and didn’t need to spend twelve years behind barbed wire playing poker.

  To look at the other side: I was born in Zwickau, Saxony, because that’s where I first saw daylight. I remained in Zwickau for roughly thirteen years, most of which I spent in the Hotel Deutscher Kaiser. The hotel was named after the Emperor of Germany and belonged to one of my uncles. There I learned a game known as opening doors, carrying bags and cleaning shoes. This came in very handy a bare year later in England, when the wolf was somewhat at the door: it helped me get a job in Cardiff; for it’s the same the whole world over, or so I’ve always maintained. London and Hamburg are not all that different, and anybody who thinks there are things that matter more in this world than having your shoes cleaned, your bags carried and your door opened is kidding himself.

  At the outset there were four months when I wanted to be an electrical engineer in Zwickau, and I could have become one as well as the next man if it had not been for my father’s remarriage. It was mainly because of this that I left Zwickau and shelved all idea of electrical engineering. Moving on to Aue – without a word to my father, let me say, since I chose not to consult him – I became oddjob man in a restaurant. There I met someone who got me a job as a farmhand on an estate near Altenburg. The estate in question was my main reason for leaving for England shortly afterwards at the age of fourteen. It was there, you see, near Altenburg that I read about Hamburg for the first time.

  From then on I set my sights on Hamburg.

  In point of fact I started by first going to Eisenach, where I got to know a gentleman who had a beer business. He set me to drive his beer waggon, but in return he wanted me to take evening classes. And that knocked the bung out of the beer barrel, so to speak. Off I went to Hamburg.

  Not that I went by train, even though my father had belatedly sent me 200 marks for the Eisenach trip. These, I thought, might come in quite useful, so I preferred ‘Shanks’s mare’.

  By the time I reached Hamburg there were three of us. The roads were packed with fellows my age wanting to go to Hamburg. Once there I was surprised to find there was so much less water than I could have wished but, in lieu of that, a vast number of establishments for losing your money in. For twenty pfennigs a night I stayed in a lodging in St. Pauli, the so-called Dalbude. We kept trying to find a ship that would take us, but they were terribly strict about papers and anyway they’d only let you come as a ship’s boy, which would by no means have been a congenial profession. I tried to maintain my funds at a certain level by buying and selling all kinds of things, mostly oldish shoes, things everybody needs and you can earn a few coppers with; but the money melted away like butter in the sun, and very soon in any case the ‘heat’ was on. Meaning by ‘heat’ that the police began taking an interest in us. As soon as they saw a young fellow without papers those policemen’s eyes popped out as if on cherry-stalks. I moved on to Bremerhaven.

  In Bremerhaven I had the advantage of knowing that you have first to have somewhere to sleep if the money is not to disappear so quickly; for you can’t tie your coins to a string in a hotel the same way you can in a dosshouse. But in Bremerhaven once again the ships had no use for me, and I was forced to spend most of my time sitting around in beer houses if I was even to hear talk of the sea. And time was something I had only too much of. I was at least as tall and strong as any twenty year-old and my cheek was boundless. But I couldn’t get on to any of those damned ships and once again my money melted like butter in the sun, in other words it was nothing more than a grease-mark. I got to know a young fellow from Saxony who was in the same kind of predicament, and we started chumming up mainly with the English sailors. The point being that they preferred going ashore to cleaning up their ship. Instead of that they now had us, and they were glad enough to pay us to hose down the engine room for them. It struck me that I might stay on board after the engines had started, and sail over to London with them whether or not it suited their book.

  One evening I told the young Saxon ‘we’re going to stow away’. That night when the ship sailed we were down in the coal bunkers, and off we went to London. It wasn’t too bad to begin with, though it was rather cramped and dark, but then the first major snag appeared. Towards dawn I started being seasick. She kept going up and down, and so did my stomach, to such an extent in fact that I said ‘I’m not staying down here, I’m going up top’.

  When they saw us they weren’t all that bothered. I said ‘me go with’. And they understood, even when I said it in German. They gave us something to eat and put us to work in the open air.

  About 9 o’clock the first pilot came aboard, and the first thing we heard was that the ship wasn’t bound for London after all but for Antwerp. Right, I said, let’s go to Antwerp.

  Soon after that things started to get very nice. The weather was better too. We sat on deck and peeled potatoes. We saw lots of ships. That lasted for three days. Then came the Scheldt, which was rather less interesting, and on the third afternoon we did
indeed arrive at Antwerp. There they promptly chucked us off.

  We didn’t know a thing about Antwerp, and it was not easy to stick it out for four whole days. Luckily the ship’s carpenter had taken a great shine to my little Saxon and before we got chucked off he gave us a few shillings. What’s more, we had regular meal tickets, that’s to say at mealtimes we went to one ship or another, queued up and held out our plates. We had begun to learn from experience.

  On the fourth day the carpenter told us ‘we sail tonight, I don’t suppose I’ll be seeing you again’.

  That evening we stowed away in the coal bunker once more. It’s a mistake to keep dealing with a different lot of people. Soon after that we were sailing down the Channel and once again I got seasick. I went above, and they were glad to see us back peeling potatoes. In Cardiff (England) they chucked us off once more.

  Once more the carpenter gave us a few shillings and said ‘Auf Wiedersehen’.

  But we wanted to get to London. Admittedly London was the other side of the island, but it was a great city with lots of possibilities. We stowed away once more.

  This time people were not so nice to us. Once they had dragged us out we had to work like beavers, and even so they shipped us off on the pilot boat with a letter baldly addressed ‘Police’. They told us that was where we should apply. However, we thought the police wouldn’t be the right people for us, and chose instead to throw the letter in the sea. On the pilot boat I got terribly seasick. The pilot chucked us off at Land’s End and we hoofed it sadly back to Cardiff. London couldn’t be reached that way. Later we got there via Alexandria.