Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 4

by Bertolt Brecht

  ‘Seeing me standing there with nothing to do, a soldier grabbed me by the sleeve and handed me a spade. I started digging as directed by a centurion. A man beside me said, “Back home in Picenum there was a dyke burst in ’82. The harvest was a total loss.” Of course, I realised, most of them were peasants’ sons.

  ‘Just once, so I remember, the idea of the enemy again crossed my mind. “Let’s hope the enemy doesn’t take advantage of this,” I told the man beside me. “Nonsense,” he said mopping his forehead, “it’s not the moment.” And true enough when I looked up I could see some of Mithridates’ soldiers further downstream working on the dyke. They were working alongside our men, making themselves understood by nods and gestures since of course they spoke a different language – which shows how exact the details of my dream were.’

  The old general broke off his story. His little yellow shrivelled-up face bore an expression somewhere between cheerfulness and concern.

  ‘A fine dream,’ said the poet placidly.

  ‘Yes. Eh? No.’ The general’s look was dubious. Then he laughed. ‘I wasn’t too happy about it,’ he said quickly. ‘When I woke up I felt disagreeably disturbed. It seemed to me evidence of great weakness.’

  ‘Really?’ asked the poet, taken aback. There was a silence. Then Lucretius went on, ‘What did you conclude from your dream, at the time?’

  ‘That authority is an extremely shaky business, of course.’

  ‘In the dream.’

  ‘Yes, but all the same …’

  Lucullus clapped his hands and the servants hastened to clear the dishes. These were still full. Nor had Lucullus eaten anything. In those days he had no appetite.

  He proposed to his guest that they should visit the blue room, where some newly acquired objets d’art were on display. They walked through open colonnades to a lateral wing of the great palace.

  Striking the marble paving hard with his stick, the little general continued:

  ‘What robbed me of victory was not the indiscipline of the common man but the indiscipline of the great. Their love of their country is just love of their palaces and their fishponds. In Asia the Roman tax-farmers banded together with the big local landowners to oppose me. They swore they would paralyse me and my army. In return the landowners handed the peasantry of Asia Minor over to them. They found my successor a better proposition. “At least he’s a real general,” they said. “He takes.” And they weren’t only referring to strongpoints. There was one king in Asia Minor on whom he imposed a tribute of fifty millions. As the money had to be paid into the state treasury he “lent” him that sum, with the result that he now draws forty per cent interest each year. That’s what I call conquests!’

  Lucretius was scarcely listening to the old man, who had not done all that badly out of Asia himself – witness this palace. His thoughts were still focused on the dream, which struck him as an interesting counterpart to a true incident that had occurred during the capture of Amisus by Lucullus’s troops.

  Amisus, a daughter city of glorious Athens and full of irreplaceable works of art, had been looted and set on fire by Lucullus’s soldiers even though the general – reputedly in tears – had besought the looters to spare the art works. There too his authority had not been respected.

  The one event had been dream, the other reality. Should it be said that authority, having forbidden the troops the one, could not deny them the other? That was what Lucullus seemed to have felt, though hardly to have acknowledged.

  The best of the new objets d’art was a little earthenware figure of Nike. Lucretius held it delicately in his skinny hand and looked at it, smiling.

  ‘A good artist,’ he said. ‘That carefree stance and that delicious smile! His idea was to portray the goddess of victory as a goddess of peace. This figure must date from before those peoples were first defeated.’

  Lucullus looked mistrustfully at him and took it in his hand too.

  ‘The human race,’ he said abruptly, ‘tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What’s left of kisses? Wounds however leave scars.’

  The poet said nothing, but in turn gave him a peculiar look.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked the general. ‘Did I surprise you?’

  ‘Slightly, to be honest. Do you really fear you’ll get a bad name in the history books?’

  ‘No name at all, perhaps. I don’t know what I fear. Altogether this is a month of fear, isn’t it? Fear has become rampant. As always after a victory.’

  ‘Though if my information is correct you should be fearing fame these days more than oblivion.’

  ‘True enough. Fame is dangerous for me. More than anything. And between you and me, that’s a strange business. I’m a soldier and I must say death has never scared me. But there has been a change. The lovely sight of the garden, the well-cooked food, the delicious works of art bring about an extraordinary weakness in me and even if I still don’t fear death I fear the fear of death. Can you explain that?’

  The poet said nothing.

  ‘I know,’ said the general a little hurriedly. ‘That passage from your poem is very familiar to me; in fact I think I even know it by heart, which is another bad sign.’

  And he began in a rather dry voice to recite Lucretius’ famous lines about fear of death:

  ‘Death, then, is nothing to us, it is not of the slightest importance.

  So when you see some man resenting his own destination

  Either, when dead, to rot where his mortal body is buried

  Or be destroyed by flames or by the jaws of predators

  Then you can tell he’s a fraud whose heart is surely affected

  By some latent sting, however he may keep denying

  Any belief that death does not deprive one of feeling.

  That which he claims to admit, he does not admit, nor its basis

  Nor does he tear out his roots and hurl himself from this existence

  But he makes something survive of himself, though he doesn’t know it.

  For if someone who lives can see himself enter a future

  Where when he’s dead wild beasts and birds will mangle his body

  Then he pities himself, for he can’t see the thing with detachment

  Nor can he stand back enough from the body that he has rejected;

  Rather he stands beside it, infecting it with his own feelings.

  So he fills with resentment at having been born a mere mortal

  Failing to see true death can allow no new self to be, which

  Living, could tell itself how much it regrets the deceased and

  Standing, lament that, prone, either wounding or fire will consume it.’

  The poet had listened carefully while his verses were recited, though he had to struggle slightly not to cough. This night air … However he could not resist the temptation to acquaint his host with a few lines which he had cut from the work so as not to depress his readers unduly. In them he had set out the reasons for this same effort to cling to what is disappearing. In a hoarse voice, very clearly, slowed down by the need to remember, he spoke these verses:

  ‘When they complain their life has been stolen from them, they’re complaining

  Of an offence both practised on them and by themselves practised

  For the same life that they’ve lost was stolen by them in the first place.

  Yes, when the fisherman snatches his fish from the sea, then the traders

  Snatch it in turn from him. And the woman who’s hoping to fry it

  Ruefully eyes the bottle and pours the oil with reluctance

  Into the waiting pan. O fear of a shortage! The risk of

  Never replacing what’s gone! The awful prospect of robbery!

  Violence suited our fathers. And once their inheritance passes

  See how their heirs will stoop to criminal acts to preserve it.

  Trembling, the dyer will keep his lucrative recipe secret

  Fearfu
l of leaks. While in that circle of roistering writers

  One will bite off his tongue on betraying some new inspiration.

  Flattery serves the seducer to wheedle his girl into bed with

  Just as the priest knows tricks to get alms from penurious tenants

  While the doctor finds industrial disease is a goldmine.

  Who in a world like this can confront the concept of dying?

  “Got it” and “drop it” alone determine how life will develop.

  Whether you snatch or you hold, your hands begin curving like talons.’

  ‘You know the answer, you versifiers,’ said the little general pensively. ‘But can you explain to me why it is only now, in these particular days, that I again start hoping that not everything I’ve done will be forgotten – even though fame is hazardous for me and I am not indifferent towards death?’

  ‘Perhaps your wish for fame is at the same time fear of death?’ The general seemed not to have heard. He looked nervously round and motioned the torchbearer to withdraw. When he was a few paces away he asked half-ashamedly, in something like a whisper:

  ‘Where do you think my fame might lie?’

  They started walking back. A gentle puff of wind broke the evening stillness that lay over the garden. The poet coughed and said, ‘The conquest of Asia perhaps?’ He realised that the general was holding him by the sleeve and gazing round in alarm, and hastily added, ‘I don’t know. Perhaps also the delicious cooking of the victory banquet.’

  After saying this casually he came to a sudden stop. Extending his finger he pointed at a cherry tree which stood on a small rise, its white blossom-covered branches waving in the wind.

  ‘That’s something else you brought back from Asia, isn’t it?’

  The general nodded.

  ‘That could be it,’ said the poet intensely. ‘The cherry tree. I don’t suppose it will recall your name to anyone. But what of that? Asia will be lost once more. And it won’t be long before the general poverty forces us to give up cooking your favourite dishes. But the cherry tree … There might all the same be one or two people who would know it was you that brought it. And even if there aren’t, even if every trophy of every conqueror has crumbled to dust, this loveliest trophy of yours, Lucullus, will still be waving each spring in the wind of the hillsides; it will be the trophy of an unknown conqueror.’

  [It was in autumn 1937 that Brecht began reading Roman history with a view to writing a play about Julius Caesar. A fairly detailed description of its scope will be found in his letter to the Paris lawyer Martin Domke on 13 November. Within a few months however he was changing it into a novel, only to lose interest around the time of the Munich Agreement.

  Lucullus, another product of his historical researches, came to the surface of his concerns in Sweden at the beginning of 1939 when he wrote this story, which was first published in his Geschichten, 1962, GW 11 (our version comes from Collected Short Stories, Methuen, 1983). There is nothing in his subsequent radio and opera versions to echo the story’s picture of the great general as a little man, with a ‘skinny hand’ and a ‘little yellow shrivelled-up face’. Lucretius would occupy him further during his exile in the US, where he would base his verse rendering of the Communist Manifesto on the hexameters of Lucretius’s great poem De Rerum Natura. The second passage quoted in this story is taken from Brecht’s adaptation.]

  DISCUSSION OF ‘THE CONDEMNATION OF LUCULLUS’

  The opera had already been accepted when the anti-formalist campaign was launched. Misgivings were being expressed in the Ministry of Education. The authors were urged to withdraw it. But they were only prepared to cancel the contract, not to withdraw the opera, since they did not consider it formalist. The arguments adduced failed to convince them; those put forward by musicians being indeed formalist themselves. They stressed the importance of the content, to wit the condemnation of predatory war. As to the work on the opera, which had already begun, they suggested that it should be carried on up to the point where a closed performance could be staged for the enlightenment of the artists and a responsible audience. This was accepted, and massive resources were devoted for that enlightenment to be promoted. At the performances the content had a very strong effect on the audience, if only because it stood for the peaceful policy of the GDR, with its condemnation of wars of conquest. At the same time many reservations were felt, and from a three-hour discussion between the authors and leading government members, with the President in the chair, it appeared that the work in its present form could cause a certain amount of confusion in the recently launched campaign whose importance lies in healing the undeniable breach now separating the arts from their audience. The element of parable in the text was an obstacle to understanding, and the music did not make allowance for the current state of musical education among the wider public; it spurned the classical tradition. What is more, a disproportionate importance was given to describing the aggressor, and the results were depressing and hard on the ear. Brecht and Dessau agreed to make additions in the spirit of the discussion, and to resubmit the results. A further discussion under similar conditions led to the submission of fresh texts, along with an undertaking by the composer to make certain changes. It was then decided that the work should be prepared for performance and offered for criticism by the public.

  [BFA, vol. 24, pp. 276–7, May 1951.]

  Editorial Notes

  In the case of Lucullus Brecht was writing two distinctly different works. The first was the radio play, initially without music, which he wrote in Scandinavia in November 1939, immediately after his great war play Mother Courage; it took him six days while Germany and Russia were partitioning Poland, and was first broadcast from Switzerland in the following May. The second was an opera, conceived before he left America, but mainly worked on with the composer Paul Dessau, starting in 1949 when both men were back in Berlin. The additions and revisions which followed were of various kinds. Partly they were changes made before the 1951 publication of the radio play; partly they reflected the demands of the opera medium and the change of title that followed. But the most radical and the most controversial were caused by the changed times – notably by the impact of Nazi war crimes, the revival of Socialist Realism and the pressures of the Cold War. And, far more than the first version, the alterations became news.

  In 1951 there were two new publications of Brecht’s still changeable text, both of them differing radically from that of 1940. In the Versuche series of his works, the radio play version was introduced thus:

  The Trial of Lucullus is a radio play. It forms the basis of the opera The Condemnation of Lucullus, whose music was written by Paul Dessau.

  – while the separate opera libretto appeared in the same year from Aufbau in East Berlin, giving the work its third version as:

  THE CONDEMNATION OF LUCULLUS

  OPERA BY

  PAUL DESSAU AND BERTOLT BRECHT

  There are thus three main versions of Brecht’s text, and it is their differences that have been the centre of critical and political interest ever since the Dessau–Brecht project was first accepted by Ernst Legal at the East Berlin State Opera in February 1950. We include on p. 391ff the Condemnation text as approved for the definitive public première on 12 October 1951, following the much publicised discussions and closed performances. As our primary text, however, we have reproduced Brecht’s original Trial text as broadcast in 1940 (and subsequently known by that date), which was long unpublished except in the Moscow Internationale Literatur of that time and is now given its first publication in English. Frank Jones, who translated the ‘Play for Radio’ for our Vintage Books edition in 1972, called this 1940 text ‘on paper at least, much the most effective of the three versions’, and we agree. But prior to the current Berlin and Frankfurt edition of Brecht’s Werke it was shoved away in favour of the ambiguous 1951 radio play (‘Hörspiel’) version which finished with the Condemnation closing scene. All we give here of that second version is the passa
ges which differ from the original rapidly and unhesitantly written Trial. The Brecht/Dessau ‘Notes to the Opera’ were written subsequently and appended to the 1951 radio play text in the Versuche series after the opera’s trial performances that spring. Along with the new passages, these make up a slightly flawed midway stage of the work, linking the two main texts.

  NOTES TO THE OPERA ‘THE CONDEMNATION OF LUCULLUS’ (1951, signed Brecht, Dessau)

  The ‘Hörspiel’ The Trial of Lucullus was the basis for the opera The Condemnation of Lucullus. The former work ended with the verses

  The court

  Withdraws for consultation.

  ‘The Judgement’ (scene 14) was borrowed from the latter. It kept its title, however, the better to distinguish it from this. [NB: This is both confusing and inaccurate. See the added scene as reproduced below, pp. 388–90. The Brecht/Dessau notes only give the new chorus of warriors (or legionaries).]

  The opera does not include the testimony of the stone figures from the frieze. Instead, the shadows represented there are summoned to give evidence.

  NEW PASSAGES INCLUDED IN THE 1951 RADIO PLAY

  Additions made in the Versuche edition of the radio play (no. 14, Suhrkamp, 1951), followed by later alterations from its endnotes on the further development of the opera version. Their positions in the original text of 1940 are marked there by corresponding numbers.

  (1) Add to ‘The Funeral Procession’:

  VOICES:

  Remember the mightly, the undefeated hero!

  Remember the terror of both Asias

  And the darling of Rome and of the gods

  As he drove through Rome

  In a golden chariot, bringing you

  Alien kings and curious animals

  Elephants, camels, panthers!

  And the carts full of captive women

  The baggage waggons rattling with furniture

  Ships, pictures and beautiful vessels

  Of ivory, a whole Corinth