Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 1

by Bertolt Brecht

  6

  My choice of an American setting is not, as has frequently been suggested, the result of a romantic disposition. I could just as well have picked Berlin, except that then the audience, instead of saying, ‘That character’s acting strangely, strikingly, peculiarly,’ would simply have said ‘It’s a very exceptional Berliner who behaves like that.’ Using a background (American) which naturally suited my characters, covering them rather than showing them up, seemed the easiest way of drawing attention to the odd behaviour of widely representative contemporary human types. In a German setting these same types would have been romantic; they would have contrasted with their setting, not with a romantic audience. In practical terms I would be satisfied if theatres projected America photographically on the backcloth and were content to imply Shlink’s Asiatic origin by means of a plain yellow make-up, generally allowing him to behave like an Asiatic, in other words like a European. That would keep at least one major mystery out of the play.

  [‘Für das Programmheft der Heidelberger Auffiihrung’,

  24 July 1928, from GW Schriften zum Theater, p. 969.]

  ON LOOKING THROUGH MY FIRST PLAYS (iii)

  My memories of writing the play In the Jungle of Cities are far from clear, but at least I remember the desires and ideas with which I was seized. One factor was my having seen a production of Schiller’s The Robbers: one of those bad performances whose very poverty emphasizes the outlines of a good play, so that the writer’s high aims are brought out by the failure to fulfil them. In The Robbers there is a most furious, destructive and desperate fight over a bourgeois inheritance, using partly non-bourgeois means. What interested me about this fight was its fury, and because it was a time (the early 1920s) when I appreciated sport, and boxing in particular, as one of the ‘great mythical diversions of the giant cities on the other side of the herring pond’ I wanted my new play to show the conclusion of a ‘fight for fighting’s sake’, a fight with no origin other than the pleasure of fighting and no object except to decide who is ‘the best man’. I ought to add that at that time I had in mind a strange historical conception, a history of mankind seen through incidents on the mass scale and of specific historical significance, a history of continually new and different modes of behaviour, observable here and there on our planet.

  My play was meant to deal with this pure enjoyment of fighting. Even while working on the first draft I noticed how singularly difficult it was to bring about a meaningful fight – which meant, according to the views which I then held, a fight that proved something – and keep it going. Gradually it turned into a play about the difficulty of bringing such a fight about. The main characters had recourse to one measure after another in their effort to come to grips. As their battleground they chose the family of one of the fighters, his place of work, and so on and so forth. The other fighter’s property was likewise ‘thrown in’ – and with that I was unconsciously moving very close to the real struggle which was then taking place, though only idealized by me: the class struggle. In the end it dawned on the fighters that their fight was mere shadow-boxing; even as enemies they could not make contact. A vague realization emerged: that under advanced capitalism fighting for fighting’s sake is only a wild distortion of competition for competition’s sake. The play’s dialectic is of a purely idealistic kind.

  At the same time one or two seemingly quite formal wishes were involved. In Berlin I had seen Jessner’s production of Othello with Fritz Kortner and Hofer at the then State Theatre on the Gendarmenmarkt, and had been impressed by one of its technical aspects: the lighting. Jessner had used intersecting spotlights to create a peculiar dusty light which strongly emphasized the figures; they moved about in it like figures by Rembrandt. Other impressions also played a part: my reading of Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer and of J. V. Jensen’s Chicago novel The Wheel. Also the reading of a collection of letters whose name I forget; they had a chilly, conclusive tone almost like that of a will. The influence of the outskirts of Augsburg should also be mentioned. I often used to go to the annual autumn Plärrer, a fair with sideshows on the so-called Small Parade Ground, with music from a number of roundabouts and with panoramas showing such naïve art as ‘The Shooting of the Anarchist Ferrer in Madrid’ or ‘Nero Watching while Rome Burns’ or ‘The Lions of Bavaria Storming the Earthworks at Düppel’ or ‘Flight of Charles the Bold after the Battle of Murten’. I remember Charles the Bold’s horse. He had huge scared eyes, as if aware of the historical situation. I wrote the play very largely out of doors while walking. An alley of Spanish chestnuts ran parallel with the old city moat past my father’s house; beyond it were the wall and the remnants of the fortifications. The chestnuts were shedding their yellow leaves. The paper I wrote on was thin typing paper, folded in four to fit inside my leather notebook. I made concoctions of words like strong drinks, entire scenes out of words whose texture and colour were specifically designed to make an impression on the senses. Cherrystone, revolver, trouserpocket, paper god: concoctions of that kind. At the same time I was of course working on the story, on the characters, on my views of human conduct and its effectiveness. I may be slightly overstressing the formal side, but I wanted to show what a complex business such writing is and how one thing merges into the other: how the shape arises from the material and in turn moulds it. Both before and later I worked in a different way and on different principles, and the resulting plays were simpler and more materialistic, but there too a considerable formal element was absorbed by the material as they took shape.

  [From ‘Bei Durchsicht meiner ersten Stücke’ in GW Schriften zum Theater, pp. 949-50. Dated March 1954. Brecht reviewed a production of The Robbers at the Augsburg municipal theatre on 23 October 1920. Leopold Jessner’s Berlin production of Othello with Fritz Kortner, Johanna Hofer, Albert Steinrück and Rudolf Forster had its premiere on 11 November 1921; it must have been one of the first plays that he saw in Berlin. For a note on Brecht’s debt to Rimbaud and Jensen, see p. 450 below. The collection of letters, so Dr Reinhold Grimm has suggested, may be a volume called Knabenbriefe edited by Charlotte Westermann and published in Düsseldorf in 1908.]

  Editorial Note on the Text

  This is based, with grateful acknowledgements, on the texts and information given in the volume of ‘materials’ edited by Gisela E. Bahr under the title Im Dickicht der Städte. Erstfassung und Materialien, and published by Suhrkamp-Verlag in 1968 (‘edition suhrkamp’ number 246). References in the text are to the notes on The Play’s Literary Ancestry, which follow on p. 450.

  A diary note of 4 September 1921 shows Brecht just before his visit to Berlin wondering why ‘nobody has yet described the big city as a jungle’.

  Where are its heroes, its colonisers, its victims? The hostility of the big city, its malignant stony consistency, its babylonian confusion of language: in short, its poetry has not yet been created.

  As he was then fresh from reading Jensen’s The Wheel and Sinclair’s The Jungle, both of which are set in Chicago, this cannot be taken too literally, but it relates none the less to the first draft of the play, on which he embarked about that time.

  In the Jungle, as it was then called, had its premiere on 9 May 1923. The typescript (of which two versions exist in the Brecht Archive) had by then already been considerably modified, to judge from the evidence of the two heavily amended scripts used by the director Erich Engel (and left by him to the East German Academy of Arts) and of the printed programme. Thus there are sixteen scenes in the typescript, but the programme says it is a ‘Drama in 10 Scenes’. It evidently began with the shouted headlines from the Programme Note (p. 432 above), and lasted over three hours. At the first Berlin performance, which took place on 29 October 1924 at the Deutsches Theater, again under Engel’s direction, it was renamed Jungle, with the subtitle ‘Decline of a Family’ and prefaced by the present prologue. Essentially, however, it seems to have been a cut version of the same play.

  The revised In the Jungle of Cities, virtually i
n its final form, was published by Ullstein (Propyläen-Verlag) in spring 1927, and given its first performance under Carl Ebert’s direction in Darmstadt that December. There are eleven scenes (though misnumbering makes it look as if there were only ten); their titles have been made apparently more precise, with exact dates and times; stage and lighting directions are less atmospheric; some names and characters are altered, notably those of Skinny and Manky; there are fewer references to the jungle and more to the fight; a generally more urban, American, technological flavour is given, not least by the illustrations at the end of the book, which show ‘typical cities and people of the first decades of the century’. There are also some major alterations in the story: Jane’s murder is dispensed with; the illegal reselling of Shlink’s timber is new, and the lynchers who come for him in the end are no longer individuals he has wronged but citizens responding to a denunciation made by Garga before he goes to gaol and left smouldering under Shlink like a kind of time-bomb.

  In the 1950s a few very small changes were made when the play was republished in Brecht’s collected Stücke. Among them are the substitution of ‘Schönes’ (or ‘beautiful’) for Manky’s odd English term of endearment ‘Nice’, and the cutting of the dedication to Brecht’s first wife Marianne.

  The following is a scene by scene comparison of the typescript (corrected version) of In the Jungle (1922) and the published text of In the Jungle of Cities (1927). Arabic scene numbers refer to the former, Roman to the latter.

  1. Lending Library. (Fairly close to I.)

  Described as ‘Brown. Wet tobacco leaves. Soapy-green sliding windows, steps. Low. Lots of paper’. Shlink (who had originally been conceived of as Chinese) wears a ‘long dirty yellow soutane’. According to Engel’s script he ‘speaks quickly, but with large slow gestures, never giving anything away. Broad, powerful back.’ Moti Gui, who was renamed Skinny in the 1927 text, ‘has a rather asthmatic snuffle. Rhythmic speech due to pauses for breath. Half-breed, run down, agog for sensations.’ Worm, who then had no other name, is ‘bald, syphilitic. Saddle-shaped nose, wide-set eyes. Genial.’ Baboon, likewise, ‘A pimp. Dressed in greasy black. Occasionally imitates Shlink.’

  The references to Jensen and Rimbaud early in the scene are new in 1927. In 1922 Garga at one point recommends ‘Noa! Noa! A good, first rate book, written in blood on leather…’ and Brecht evidently considered inserting a quotation from this work of Gauguin’s to follow Shlink’s first reference to Tahiti.

  By 1927 pounds had become dollars and schnaps whisky. Garga’s references to prostitution and Shlink’s declaration that he is opening the fight against him and will shake his foundations are all new.

  2. In the Quarry. (Cut.)

  This dialogue between Garga and The Green Man is given in full at the end of the present notes. It was cut from the 1927 version, and probably also from the two earlier productions as, although it is in Engel’s and Erwin Faber’s (the Munich Garga)’s scripts, The Green Man is not named on the 1923 programme.

  3. Shlink’s office. (Cut and slightly transposed to form II.)

  Described as ‘Brown, like an open sluice-gate’. In lieu of the opening exchange with Worm, Shlink soliloquizes:

  Smooth, round, full, that’s me. It’s all so little effort, it all comes easy to me. How easily I digest! Silence. For ten years there’s been no difficulty in living like this. Comfortable, well dug in, avoiding any kind of friction. Now I’ve begun to take easiness for granted, and I’m fed up with everything.

  Marie enters in white. As Garga puts on his new linen behind the screen he exclaims ‘White linen! That means adventures. White muslin. For daydreaming about horses in.’ He makes his remark about Shlink having stripped his skin (now on p. 128) immediately after emerging from behind the screen, thus establishing the relation between the two leit-motivs of skin and linen.

  The resale of Broost and Co’s timber is all new in 1927. In the 1922 text the sacking of Moti Gui (= Skinny) is more elaborate. Baboon is not in this scene at all (nor are his remarks re Papua and ‘the chick’), so when Shlink tells Marie ‘he loves you’ he is referring to Moti Gui – altogether a more pathetic and less comic character in this version. He tries to woo Marie by telling her that she gives off a smell like a horse; hence Garga’s remark at the end of the scene, which remains, a little bafflingly, in the 1927 text. In a sub-episode labelled ‘The Auction’ and cut in the second of Engel’s scripts Marie is inspected ‘like a horse’ and has been put up for auction when the Salvation Army arrive. Her closing lines to the scene are new.

  4. The Family Sacrificed. (III is much the same, but plus the episode with Worm and subsequent references to it.)

  The setting is an ‘attic with light-coloured wallpaper. Ivory people. Dark circular table. John, Mae, Mankyboddle seated around it.’ Mankyboddle, sometimes called Manky for short in this version, is altogether more prominent and more emphatically an old sea dog than in 1927. A very early note referring to Marie’s suitor as ‘(Kutteldaddeldu)’ suggests that both name and character may derive from Joachim Ringelnatz’s comic seaman of that name.

  More is made in 1922 of the tension between the Garga parents, also of George Garga’s drinking. ‘This is a city,’ says John before George’s entrance, ‘people live in holes like this; my brother ran around in the jungle – the deserter. George has got his blood.’ It is new in 1927 that George should bring money and hand it to Mae. The episode with Worm is already in two of the 1923 stage scripts.

  In one of these when John and Manky reappear before Shlink’s entrance they sing a verse of the ‘Ballad of the Woman and the Soldier’ (subsequently used in Mother Courage). In the other they sing ‘Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest’ from Treasure Island. It is suggested that they did so in the Munich production.

  5. In the Coal Yards. (Replaced by IV ‘Chinese Hotel’, which was evidently written for the 1923 production.)

  In the first half Marie, who has been bringing food to Shlink as he heaves coal, declares her love for him and is rejected. The second is a long battle of words between him and Garga, ending with the latter’s refusal to go to Tahiti. In the background ‘the thunder of awakening Chicago’.

  The 1923 ‘Chinese Hotel’ scene is largely the same as in the 1927 text, the chief addition in the latter being Baboon’s opening remarks about Shlink’s activities.

  6. In the Sack. (Cut and partly rewritten to form V, the second Chinese Hotel scene.)

  ‘Schnaps saloon in the Coal Bar. Divided by sacking, though not completely.’ The division is in effect as in V. Garga is lying on the bed ‘psalmodizing’; Manky is sitting drinking in the saloon. There are even more Rimbaud quotations or imitations than in 1927, and an introductory episode where Worm and Moti Gui/Skinny report to Garga, and the latter humiliates Moti Gui by throwing a coin into the washing-up water and getting him to fish it out with his teeth. In the 1927 text Skinny is not in this scene.

  Marie and Garga have more to say about their parents’ plight. Shlink announces that he has bought back his house. Garga tells Shlink that he is beginning to feel at home in his skin; then when he tries to cadge a drink Shlink says he can’t buy his skin with money. The general gist of the scene remains the same, though it is new in 1927 that Shlink should hand over the proceeds of the Broost timber sale and then be treated as ‘overdrawn’.

  7. Mankyboddle’s Attic. (Cut from 1927 text.)

  ‘Greenish wallpaper.’ A short scene between Manky and Marie. Her desperate efforts to love him have been too much for both. She denounces him and goes out, leaving him muttering, ‘Nice! Christ, what a hysterical cow you are! Nice!’

  Manky is rum-sodden and nautical in this scene. Thus:

  MARIE: You puff away at your cigar and lie in bed with your clothes on. Why don’t you take your pants off?

  MANKY: I got the habit on the Anaqueen, see?

  The scene is in Engel’s script, but has evidently not been worked on and is deleted from the list of scenes there.

&nbs
p; 8. At the Gargas’. (Telescoped with scene 10 to form VII.)

  ‘Attic. Sacking. Whitewash. Circular table. Midday meal.’ About five-sixths of the scene are cut in the 1927 version, and there is a good deal of cutting already in the 1923 stage scripts. About a third of scene 10 (q.v.) is tacked on to what remains.

  The evidence of prosperity in the Gargas’ room – the new clothes and furniture and John’s opening speech – is absent from the 1922 version, which begins with a desultory mealtime conversation in which Manky is prominent. He also plays the accordion, and later joins John in singing verses taken (unacknowledgedly) from Kipling’s The Light That Failed’.

  There were three friends that buried the fourth,

  The mould in his mouth and the dust in his eyes,

  And they went south and east and north -

  The strong man fights but the sick man dies.

  There were three friends that spoke of the dead -

  The strong man fights and the sick man dies -

  ‘And would he were here with us now,’ they said -

  ‘The sun in our face and the wind in our eyes.’

  In 1927 Manky is named in the opening stage direction, but has nothing to say.

  Between Shlink’s entry and Jane’s description of the wedding about 130 lines are cut. Shlink announces that Marie has left Manky, then the landlord appears demanding the rent and complaining of the accordion. Shlink produces the title deeds to some southern cotton fields and hands them to Garga, thus saving the family. A reference by Garga to the ‘chalky light’ is changed in 1927 to ‘a cold light’.

  The mention of the Broost timber swindle and of Garga’s intention to go to gaol is new in 1927. The scene ends with Mae’s disappearance and the entry of the waiter with John’s farewell drink.