Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 7

by Bertolt Brecht

  He made me play it, and I still see him smiling at my weaknesses and his advantages.

  In the event the play was first staged not in Germany at all but at the Polish army theatre in Warsaw, where Ludwik René directed it in January 1957. This was nearly fourteen years after it had been written. The Duchess of Malfi adaptation has never been performed in German.

  The Caucasian Chalk Circle was put on in America by students at Northfield, Minnesota, under the direction of Henry Goodman (now of UCLA Drama Department) who had been bitten with Brecht on seeing the Galileo production of July 1947. This took place in May 1948 after Brecht had left the country, and used Eric and Maja Bentley’s translation, which had at some point supplanted that by the Sterns and Auden. At Brecht’s suggestion the Bentleys omitted all reference to the prologue, which led to rumours alternatively that they had suppressed it as too Communist or that Brecht added it later to give a pro-Soviet flavour to an otherwise delightfully unpolitical play. Two and a half years later, when Brecht was back in Berlin, he saw the Austrian composer Gottfried von Einem in Munich and tentatively arranged for a German-language première at the Salzburg Festival, to be directed by Berthold Viertel with Homolka as Azdak and Käthe Gold as Grusha. Though their plan never materialized, he managed to interest Carl Orff in the idea of writing the music: something that Hanns Eisler found uncongenial. This was partly because there was no real certainty of a production, but above all because in his view ‘Brecht was pursuing a chimera’:

  Brecht said he wanted a kind of music to which lengthy epics can be narrated. After all, Homer was sung. He used to say, ‘Isn’t it possible to write a setting or note down a cadence that would permit the delivery of a two-hour epic?’

  By his own account Eisler made one or two sketches before deciding that this was beyond him. In 1953 therefore when Brecht determined to stage the play himself with the Ensemble he went instead to Paul Dessau, who had already in America been interested enough in the ‘Augsburg Chalk Circle’ version of the story to draft out the framework of an oratorio. Following very much the requirements posed by Brecht in the note on p. 301, Dessau provided him with the kind of orientally-derived music which he wanted for his recycling of a popular narrative tradition still observable in North Africa and the Far East. According to the composer’s Notizen zu Noten (Reclam, Leipzig 1947), he made use of Azerbaijani folk-tunes and rounded the play off with an extended dance which Brecht never staged. The production itself took about eight months to rehearse before its première in June 1954. Though it fell foul of the party critics in East Germany it made a great impression at the Paris International Theatre Festival the following year, since when the play has been among the best-known of Brecht’s works. After 1964 it was even one of those most performed in the USSR, though according to the critic Kats (reported by Henry Glade), the prologue was simply not playable before a Soviet audience, presumably because it gives too unreal a picture of conditions there.

  V

  Particularly among those who disapprove of his decision to settle finally in East Germany, it has become common to contrast Brecht’s six years in America with his seven years in East Berlin. And certainly the latter were not productive so far as his original writing went. But his American record is not all that impressive either, at least by the standards which he had set himself in Scandinavia and before that in pre-Nazi Berlin. Of course his initial difficulties did not last for ever, and some of the poems which he wrote from 1942 on show new qualities of concentrated observation which were a genuine gain; nor were they any the less deeply political for being independent of day-to-day party tactics. Though he always remained in some measure dependent on the goodwill of his fellow exiles—it is difficult, for instance, to think of his involvement in The Duchess of Malfi as due to anything less than a wish to help on the Czinners’ part—he did gradually make his mark among the non-Germans with whom he came in contact, and here his addiction to English literature, whether classical or criminal, must surely have helped. He worked hard and systematically, witness the ‘plan for the day’ which he drew up on concluding The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Santa Monica in 1944:

  get up 7 A.M. newspaper, radio. make coffee in the little copper pot. morning: work. light lunch at twelve. rest with crime story. afternoon: work or pay visits. evening meal at 7 P.M. then visitors. night: half a page of shakespeare or waley’s collection of chinese poems. radio. crime story.

  But three of our four plays are to a greater or lesser extent flawed, and there was only one which he chose to stage himself when he had the chance. Thus Simone Machard not only reflects Brecht’s uncertainties while writing it (as our editorial note attempts to show), but is in essential ways inconsistent with his own attitude, just as Eisler—a judge whom he always respected—pointed out. (Of course some audiences like it all the better for that.) Schweyk, despite its success in capturing Hašek’s tone of voice, has none of the panoramic sweep of the novel, or even of the Piscator adaptation, while there is something deeply inappropriate about pitting the amiable Good Soldier—so perfect an instrument for undermining the whiskered Emperor Franz Josef—against political psychopaths and mass murderers. Both plays, moreover, take a romanticized view of the resistance movements, whose topical appeal they were in some measure surely designed to exploit. Since The Duchess of Malfi was so mangled that there is difficulty in reconstructing Brecht’s conception of it—something that he never seems to have wished to do himself, to judge from the absence of any German version—the only one of the American plays to succeed in Brecht’s own terms is The Caucasian Chalk Circle, whose original translation was dug out by us and revised by the Sterns and Auden in 1959. Despite its awkward combination of two largely unrelated stories (though these had long been married up in the author’s mind) and the uncharacteristic sweetness of the heroine, it is a truly epic work, embodying many of Brecht’s special ideas, tastes, and talents. In many opinions it is a masterpiece.

  It is significant that although this play was commissioned for a Broadway production Brecht himself could attribute its structure to ‘a revulsion against the commercialized dramaturgy of Broadway’. For everything else that Brecht wrote in America, apart from his poems, was written for more or less commercial ends; and if he kicked against the commercial spirit it was surely because he knew that he was being conditioned by it. Most obviously this was so of his film stories, which were without exception what he termed ‘daily bread and butter work’ even though he could hardly help imbuing them with some of his own qualities (whence, no doubt, their ill success). But Simone Machard too was written with one eye at least to the film industry; Schweyk was to be a Broadway musical, while not only the other two plays but also the adaptation of Galileo were written with Broadway productions in view. For the first time in the fourteen years since the success of The Threepenny Opera, Brecht was writing exclusively for the commercial stage in its most nakedly competitive form; nor was anything that he is known to have written in America (apart possibly from a short unpublished ballet libretto for Lotte Goslar) performed by the students, musicians, or left-wing amateurs who had helped to shape some of his most original works. He was never particularly good at working for the box-office or respecting other people’s conventions, while his natural cussedness made him spoil any chance he might have had of succeeding: witness his wanton (was it unconsciously deliberate?) antagonizing of Leventhal and Luise Rainer. One might almost say that it was his very failures that justify this group of plays.

  Why then did he never make contact with any other form of theatre (or cinema) in the United States during those years? Perhaps it was the result of his experiences over the New York production of Mother in 1935 that alienated him so from the American left-wing stage; certainly he seems to have had little use for the ideas of Odets or John Howard Lawson, while even so good a friend as Gorelik was largely in disagreement with him. Nor was university theatre then anything like so active as it has since become. Perhaps too the identification of Hollywood and
Broadway with the war effort was itself misleading, for Brecht was always primarily concerned to see the Nazis beaten. Hangmen, Simone, and Schweyk all deal with the same theme of European resistance to Hitler, while the revised prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circle sets it too within the framework of the war, despite the remoteness of its legend. Oddly enough he never again took up those American themes which had fascinated him earlier, from In the Jungle of Cities to Arturo Ui, in other words from Munich days right up to his departure from Europe. As Professor James Lyon has pointed out, he did come to take a good deal of interest in the affairs of his half-adopted country and at one point considered basing a script on Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology; but the only direct reflection of his surroundings is in his poems. Much must have been due to his lack of money and dependence on the German colony’s esteem for him; much too to the lack of his two most-valued women collaborators, Margarete Steffin and Elisabeth Hauptmann (though the latter was then living elsewhere in the US). One can only speculate what might have happened if he had come into contact with the student movement as it later developed, or chosen to associate himself with the blacks. As it was he did neither.

  He already seems to have decided to return to Germany well before his summons to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. 1946 is a mysteriously blank year in his life, when he wrote virtually no poems, worked on no plays other than Galileo, and made no entries in his journal (unless the relevant pages have somehow been lost). But by that winter he was already planning his return, to judge from his correspondence with Piscator and Caspar Neher, to whom he reported receiving offers ‘to be able to use the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm for certain purposes’. His hearing by J. Parnell Thomas’s committee the following autumn was in some measure a by-product of their investigation of the motion-picture industry, though his only real link with the so-called Hollywood Ten was his friendship with Donald Ogden Stewart and his wife. What clearly was of more interest to the investigators was his association with Hanns Eisler and through him with his brother Gerhart, the one genuinely important international Communist functionary whom they were able to unearth. This was in some measure due to the Eislers’ sister Ruth Fischer, who had been one of the leaders of the German Communist Party in her youth, knew Brecht, and now coined the pleasant phrase for him ‘minstrel of the GPU’. Hanns was effectively deported in February 1948; Gerhart (whose prosecution was called for by Richard Nixon in his maiden speech as a Representative) left the US on a Polish liner and was lucky to escape arrest. Brecht stood up well under examination, made the committee laugh, and left for Europe under his own steam a day later. He never came back.

  THE EDITORS

  A Chronology

  1898

  10 February: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht born in Augsburg.

  1917

  Autumn: Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Brecht to Munich university.

  1918

  Work on his first play, Baal. In Augsburg Brecht is called up as medical orderly till end of year. Elected to Soldiers’ Council as Independent Socialist (USPD) following Armistice.

  1919

  Brecht writing second play Drums in the Night. In January Spartacist Rising in Berlin. Rosa Luxemburg murdered. April–May: Bavarian Soviet. Summer: Weimar Republic constituted. Birth of Brecht’s illegimate son Frank Banholzer.

  1920

  May: death of Brecht’s mother in Augsburg.

  1921

  Brecht leaves university without a degree. Reads Rimbaud.

  1922

  A turning point in the arts. End of utopian Expressionism; new concern with technology. Brecht’s first visit to Berlin, seeing theatres, actors, publishers and cabaret. He writes ‘Of Poor BB’ on the return journey. Autumn: becomes a dramaturg in Munich. Première of Drums in the Night, prize-winning national success. Marries Marianne Zoff, an opera singer.

  1923

  Galloping German inflation stabilised by November currency reform. In Munich Hitler’s new National Socialist party stages unsuccessful ‘beer-cellar putsch’.

  1924

  ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ exhibition at Mannheim gives its name to the new sobriety in the arts. Brecht to Berlin as assistant in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater.

  1925

  Field-Marshal von Hindenburg becomes president. Elisabeth Hauptmann starts working with Brecht. Two seminal films: Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin. Brecht writes birthday tribute to Bernard Shaw.

  1926

  Première of Man equals Man in Darmstadt. Now a freelance; starts reading Marx. His first book of poems, the Devotions, includes the ‘Legend of the Dead Soldier’.

  1927

  After reviewing the poems and a broadcast of Man equals Man, Kurt Weill approaches Brecht for a libretto. Result is the text of Mahagonny, whose ‘Songspiel’ version is performed in a boxing-ring at Hindemith’s Baden-Baden music festival in July. In Berlin he helps adapt The Good Soldier Schweik for Piscator’s high-tech theatre.

  1928

  August 31: première of The Threepenny Opera by Brecht and Weill, based on Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.

  1929

  Start of Stalin’s policy of ‘socialism in one country’. Divorced from Marianne, Brecht now marries the actress Helene Weigel. May 1: Berlin police break up banned KPD demonstration, witnessed by Brecht. Summer: Brecht writes two didactic music-theatre pieces with Weill and Hindemith, and neglects The Threepenny Opera’s successor Happy End, which is a flop. From now on he stands by the KPD. Autumn: Wall Street crash initiates world economic crisis. Cuts in German arts budgets combine with renewed nationalism to create cultural backlash.

  1930

  Nazi election successes; end of parliamentary government. Unemployed 3 million in first quarter, about 5 million at end of the year. March: première of the full-scale Mahagonny opera in Leipzig Opera House.

  1931

  German crisis intensifies. Aggressive KPD arts policy: agitprop theatre, marching songs, political photomontage. In Moscow the Comintern forms international associations of revolutionary artists, writers, musicians and theatre people.

  1932

  Première of Brecht’s agitational play The Mother (after Gorky) with Eisler’s music. Kuhle Wampe, his militant film with Eisler, is held up by the censors. He meets Sergei Tretiakov at the film’s première in Moscow. Summer: the Nationalist Von Papen is made Chancellor. He denounces ‘cultural bolshevism’, and deposes the SPD-led Prussian administration.

  1933

  January 30: Hitler becomes Chancellor with Papen as his deputy. The Prussian Academy is purged; Goering becomes Prussian premier. A month later the Reichstag is burnt down, the KPD outlawed. The Brechts instantly leave via Prague; at first homeless. Eisler is in Vienna, Weill in Paris, where he agrees to compose a ballet with song texts by Brecht: The Seven Deadly Sins, premièred there in June. In Germany Nazi students burn books; all parties and trade unions banned; first measures against the Jews. Summer: Brecht in Paris works on anti-Nazi publications. With the advance on his Threepenny Novel, he buys a house on Fyn island, Denmark, overlooking the Svendborg Sound, where the family will spend the next six years. Margarete Steffin, a young Berlin Communist, goes with them. Autumn: he meets the Danish Communist actress Ruth Berlau, a doctor’s wife.

  1934

  Spring: suppression of Socialist rising in Austria. Eisler stays with Brecht to work on Round Heads and Pointed Heads songs. Summer: Brecht misses the first Congress of Soviet Writers, chaired by Zhdanov along the twin lines of Socialist Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism. October: in London with Eisler.

  1935

  Italy invades Ethiopia. Hitler enacts the Nuremberg Laws against the Jews. March-May: Brecht to Moscow for international theatre conference. Meets Kun and Knorin of Comintern Executive. Eisler becomes president of the International Music Bureau. At the 7th Comintern Congress Dimitrov calls for all antifascist parties to unite in Popular Fronts against Hi
tler and Mussolini. Autumn: Brecht with Eisler to New York for Theatre Union production of The Mother.

  1936

  Soviet purges lead to arrests of many Germans in USSR, most of them Communists; among them Carola Neher and Ernst Ottwalt, friends of the Brechts. International cultural associations closed down. Official campaign against ‘Formalism’ in the arts. Mikhail Koltsov, the Soviet journalist, founds Das Wort as a literary magazine for the German emigration, with Brecht as one of the editors. Popular Front government in Spain resisted by Franco and other generals, with the support of the Catholic hierarchy. The Spanish Civil War becomes a great international cause.

  1937

  Summer: in Munich, opening of Hitler’s House of German Art. Formally, the officially approved art is closely akin to Russian ‘Socialist Realism’. In Russia Tretiakov is arrested as a Japanese spy, interned in Siberia and later shot. October: Brecht’s Spanish war play Señora Carrar’s Rifles, with Weigel in the title part is performed in Paris, and taken up by antifascist and amateur groups in many countries.

  1938

  January: in Moscow Meyerhold’s avant-garde theatre is abolished. March: Hitler takes over Austria without resistance. It becomes part of Germany. May 21: première of scenes from Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich in a Paris hall. Autumn: Munich Agreement, by which Britain, France and Italy force Czechoslovakia to accept Hitler’s demands. In Denmark Brecht writes the first version of Galileo. In Moscow Koltsov disappears into arrest after returning from Spain.

  1939

  March: Hitler takes over Prague and the rest of the Czech territories. Madrid surrenders to Franco; end of the Civil War. Eisler has emigrated to New York. April: the Brechts leave Denmark for Stockholm. Steffin follows. May: Brecht’s Svendborg Poems published. His father dies in Germany. Denmark accepts Hitler’s offer of a Non-Aggression Pact. August 23: Ribbentrop and Molotov agree Nazi–Soviet Pact. September 1: Hitler attacks Poland and unleashes Second World War. Stalin occupies Eastern Poland, completing its defeat in less than three weeks. All quiet in the West. Autumn: Brecht writes Mother Courage and the radio play Lucullus in little over a month. November: Stalin attacks Finland.