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

by Bertolt Brecht

  [’Anmerkung’ from Versuche 9, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1949, reprinted in GW Stücke 4.]

  THE STORY

  Curve of the dramaturgy

  1

  This scene emphasises that things are at the beginning. Courage’s canteen business and the new war as new undertakings of a familiar sort. (They begin and they continue; they begin by continuing.) Needed: energy, enterprise, the prospect of new times, arrival of new business, together with new dangers. She longs for war and at the same time fears it. She wants to join in, but as a peaceable business woman, not in a warlike way. She wants to maintain her family during the war and by means of it. She wants to serve the army and also to keep out of its clutches.

  Her children: With her eldest son she is afraid of his bravery, but counts on his cleverness. With the second she is afraid of his stupidity but counts on his honesty. With her daughter she is afraid of her pity but counts on her dumbness. Only her fears prove to be justified.

  She is anticipating business; she is going to go bankrupt.

  The play begins with the entrance (i.e. hanging about) of the men of war. The vast disorder of war begins with order, the vast disorganisation with organisation.

  The peaceful landscape and the men of iron. Courage arrives four strong, goes away three strong.

  2

  War as a business idyll. Courage swindles peasants out of a capon; her elder son robs peasants of their oxen. He wins fame and possessions; she profits. She pillages the army somewhat too. The danger for her son becomes more real.

  3

  Being taken prisoner need be no disadvantage to her business. It seems that she had nothing to say against her younger son’s joining the army as a paymaster. All she thinks necessary in his case is honesty. This is the finish of him. If he had not been connected with the army he would not have been killed. Her stubborn bargaining over her cart costs her son his life. She stops her daughter from becoming a whore – the only career open to her in wartime, and one which brings good fortune to Yvette. In any case she is no Antigone.

  4

  Courage stifles her human reactions (any kind of outrage, rebellion or criticism) for the sake of her business. She thinks capitulation will do something for her.

  5

  All the same, human reactions sometimes override her business principles. The general’s victory leads to financial losses.

  6

  Business, meant to earn her daughter’s (peacetime) dowry, leads to her wartime disfigurement. Courage counts on the length of the war, which is helpful to her finances but means spinsterhood for her daughter. Finally for the first time she curses the war which, from a business standpoint, she must needs want.

  7

  Peacetime is pleasant, if also ruinous. Thanks to the peace she does not get her son back, but loses him for good. In her daughter’s case peace arrives too late. The son falls because he has applied the principles of war in peacetime. The former camp prostitute Yvette Pottier has prospered as a result of the war and married a colonel. The war starts up again. Will business start up again too?

  8

  Business is on the downgrade. The war is too long. Disorganisation and disorder on every side. In a song Courage (quâ beggar) curses all the human virtues as not only uncommercial but positively dangerous. For her daughter’s sake she must give up the cook, who could have provided her with a roof over her head. She is bound to the war by pity for her daughter.

  9

  The daughter perishes because of her pity for other people’s children. Courage goes on dragging her empty cart, alone, in the wake of the tattered army.

  [From Werner Hecht (ed.): Materialien zu Brechts ‘Mutter Courage’, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1967, pp. 7–9.]

  THREE DIARY NOTES

  (i)

  Going over Mother Courage I am quite pleased to see how war emerges as a vast field akin to the fields of modern physics, in which bodies experience peculiar deviations from their courses. Any calculation about the individual based on peacetime experience proves to be unreliable, bravery is no help, nor is caution, nor honesty, nor crookedness, nor brutality, nor pity: all are equally fatal. We are left with those same forces that turn peace into war, the ones that can’t be named.

  (ii)

  Why is Courage a realist work?

  It adopts a realist point of view on behalf of the people vis-à-vis all ideologies. To the people war is neither an uprising nor a business operation, merely a disaster.

  Its point of view is not a moral one: that is to say, it is ethical, but without being derived from the currently prevailing morality.

  The actions of the characters are given motives that can be recognised and allowed for and will facilitate dealing with real people.

  The work functions in terms of the present state of consciousness of the majority of mankind.

  (iii)

  Rehearsing the new production of Courage (with Busch, Geschonneck and Lutz). Paying particular attention to the dialectical elements. Cook and chaplain in scene 8, where peace brings them both to the edge of the precipice, are fighting for their quarters: their respective setbacks make them better people. The two enemies meet amicably on the plane of reminiscent nostalgia for the war.

  Working on Ruth’s Model book is a grind; but it has to be done if only to show how many things have to be taken into account for a production.

  [From Brecht’s Arbeitsjournal, Suhrkamp, 1973, entries for 5 January 1941, 22 April 1941 and 4 June 1951. The new production by the Berliner Ensemble had its première in September 1951 and was then seen at the Paris International Theatre Festival in 1954. Ruth Berlau was a collaborator.]

  THE MOTHER COURAGE MODEL

  Now, after the great war, life goes on in our ruined cities, but it is a different life, the life of different or differently composed groups, guided or thwarted by new surroundings, new because so much has been destroyed. The great heaps of rubble are piled on the city’s invaluable substructure, the water and drainage pipes, the gas mains and electric cables. Even those large buildings that have remained intact are affected by the damage and rubble around them, and may become an obstacle to planning. Temporary structures must be built and there is always a danger of their becoming permanent. All this is reflected in art, for our way of thinking is part of our way of living. In the theatre we set up models to fill the gap. They immediately meet with strong opposition from all supporters of the old ways, of the routine that masquerades as experience and of the conventionality that calls itself creative freedom. And they are endangered by those who take them up without having learned to use them. While meant to simplify matters, they are not simple to handle. They were designed not to make thought unnecessary, but to provoke it; not to replace but to compel artistic creation.

  First of all we must imagine that the information which the printed text provides about certain events – in this case the adventures of Mother Courage and the losses she incurs – has to some extent been complemented; it has now been established that when the woman’s dead son was brought to her she was sitting beside her mute daughter, and so on – the kind of information which an artist painting some historic incident can arrive at by questioning eye-witnesses. Later he can still change certain details as for one reason or another he may think advisable. Until one has learned to copy (and construct) models in a living and intelligent way, one had better not copy too much. Such things as the cook’s makeup or Mother Courage’s costume should not be imitated. The models should not be used to excess.

  Pictures and descriptions of a performance are not enough. One does not learn much by reading that a character moves in a particular direction after a given sentence, even if the tone of the sentence, the way of walking, and a convincing motive can be supplied – which is very difficult. The persons available for the imitation are not the same as those of the pattern; with them it would not have come into being. Anyone who deserves the name of artist is unique; he represents something universal, but in his own individual way
. He can neither be perfectly imitated nor give a perfect imitation. Nor is it so important for artists to imitate art as to imitate life. The use of models is a particular kind of art, and there is a limit to what can be learned from it. The aim must be neither to copy the pattern exactly nor to break away from it too quickly.

  In studying what follows – a number of explanations and discoveries emerging from the rehearsal of a play – one should above all be led by the solutions of certain problems to consider the problems themselves.

  Music

  Paul Dessau’s music for Mother Courage is not meant to be particularly easy; like the stage set, it left something to be supplied by the audience; in the act of listening they had to link the voices with the melody. Art is not a land of Cockaigne. In order to make the transition to the musical items, to let the music have its say, we lowered a musical emblem from the grid whenever there was a song which did not spring directly from the action, or which did spring from it but remained clearly apart. This consisted of a trumpet, a drum, a flag, and electric globes that lit up; a slight and delicate thing, pleasant to look at, even if scene 9 found it badly damaged. Some people regarded this as sheer playfulness, as an unrealistic element. But on the one hand playfulness in the theatre should not be condemned out of hand as long as it is kept within bounds, and on the other it was not wholly unrealistic, for it served to set the music apart from the reality of the action. We made use of it as a visible sign of the shift to another artistic level – that of music – and in order to give the right impression that these were musical insertions, rather than to lead people to think quite mistakenly that the songs ‘sprang from the action’. People who object to this are quite simply opposed to anything intermittent, inorganic, pieced-together – this chiefly because they object to any shattering of illusion. What they ought to have objected to was not the tangible symbol of music, but the manner of fitting the musical numbers into the play: i.e. as insertions.

  The musicians were placed so that they could be seen, in a box beside the stage – thus their performances became little concerts, independent contributions made at suitable points in the play. The box communicated with the stage, so that a musician or two could occasionally go backstage for trumpet calls or when music occurred as part of the action.

  We began with the overture. It was a bit thin, for it was performed by only four musicians; still, it was a reasonably ceremonious preparation for the confusions of war.

  Stage Design

  For the production we are describing, at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, we used the well-known model devised by Teo Otto during the war for the Zurich Schauspielhaus. There was a permanent framework of huge screens, making use of such materials as one would expect to find in the military encampments of the seventeenth century: tenting, wooden posts lashed together with ropes, etc. Three-dimensional structures, realistic both as to construction and as to material, were placed on the stage to represent such buildings as the parsonage and the peasants’ house, but in artistic abbreviation, only so much being shown as was necessary for the action. Coloured projections were thrown on the cyclorama, and the revolving stage was used to give the impression of travel – we varied the size and position of the screens and used them only for the camp scenes, so as to distinguish these from the scenes on the highway. The Berlin stage designer made his own versions of the buildings (in scenes 2, 4, 5, 9, 10 and 11), but on the same principle. We dispensed with the background projections used in Zurich and hung the names of the various countries over the stage in large black letters. We used an even, white light, as much of it as our equipment permitted. In this way we eliminated any vestige of ‘atmosphere’ that could easily have given the incidents a romantic tinge. We retained almost everything else down to the smallest details (chopping block, hearth, etc.), particularly the admirable positionings of the cart. This last was very important because it determined much of the grouping and movement from the outset.

  Surprisingly little is lost by the sacrifice of complete freedom of ‘artistic creation’. You have to start somewhere, with something, and it may as well be with something that has already been fully thought out. Freedom will be acquired through the principle of contradiction, which is continually active and vocal in all of us.

  Realistic Theatre and Illusion

  Writing in 1826, Goethe spoke of the ‘inadequacy of the English wooden stage’ of Shakespeare’s day. He says: ‘There is no trace here of the aids to naturalness to which we have gradually become accustomed through the improvement in machinery, in the art of perspective and in costuming.’ ‘Who?’ he asks, ‘would tolerate such a thing today? Under those conditions Shakespeare’s plays would become highly interesting fairy tales, narrated by a number of persons who tried to increase their effectiveness somewhat by making up as the characters, by coming and going and carrying out the movements necessary to the story, but left it to the audience to imagine as many paradises and palaces as they pleased on the empty stage.’

  Since he wrote these words, the mechanical equipment of our theatres has been improving for a hundred years, and ‘aids to naturalness’ have led to such emphasis on illusion that we late-comers would be more inclined to put up with Shakespeare on an empty stage than with a Shakespeare who had ceased to require or provoke any use of the imagination.

  In Goethe’s day such improvement as had been made in the mechanics of illusion was relatively harmless, since the machinery was so imperfect, so much ‘in the childhood of its beginnings’, that theatre itself was still a reality and both imagination and ingenuity could still be employed to turn nature into art. The sets were still theatrical displays, in which the stage designer gave an artistic and poetic interpretation of the places concerned.

  The bourgeois classical theatre occupied a happy halfway point on the road to naturalistic illusionism. Stage machinery provided enough elements of illusion to improve the representation of some aspects of reality, but not so much as to make the audience feel that they were no longer in a theatre; art had not yet come to signify the obliteration of all indications that art is at work. Since there was no electricity, lighting effects were still primitive; where poor taste decreed sunset effects, poor equipment prevented total enchantment. The Meiningers’ authentic costumes came later; they were usually magnificent, though not always beautiful, and they were after all compensated by an inauthentic manner of speaking. In short, theatre remained the theatre, at least where it failed in its business of deception. Today the restoration of the theatre’s reality as theatre is a precondition for any realistic representation of human relations. Too much heightening of the illusion in the setting, along with a ‘magnetic’ manner of acting which gives the spectator the illusion of being present at a fleeting, fortuitous ‘real’ event, create such an impression of naturalness that one can no longer interpose one’s judgment, imagination or reactions, and must simply conform by sharing in the experience and becoming one of ‘nature’s’ objects. The illusion created by the theatre must be a partial one, so that it can always be recognised as illusion. Reality, however completely represented, must be changed by art, in order that it may be seen to be subject to change and treated as such.

  That is why we are demanding naturalness today – because we want to change the nature of our human relations.

  Elements of Illusion

  No doubt the sight of the cyclorama behind a completely empty stage (in the prologue and in the seventh and last scenes) creates the illusion of a flat landscape with the sky above it. There is no objection to this, because there must be some stirring of poetry in the soul of the spectator if such an illusion is to come about. Thanks to the ease with which it is created, the actors are able to suggest by their manner of playing, at the beginning that a wide horizon lies open to the business enterprise of the little family of provisioners, then at the end that the exhausted seeker after fortune is faced by boundless devastation. And we can always hope that this substantial impression of the play will combine with a
formal one: that when the spectator sees the empty stage, soon to be inhabited, he will be able to share in the initial void from which everything arises. On this tabula rasa, he knows, the actors have been working for weeks, testing first one detail, then another, coming to know the incidents of the chronicle by portraying them, and portraying them by judging them. And now the play is starting and Mother Courage’s cart comes rolling on to the stage.

  If in big matters such a thing as a beautiful approximation is possible, in matters of detail it is not. A realistic portrayal requires carefully worked-out detail in costumes and props, for here the imagination of the audience can add nothing. All implements connected with working and eating must have been most lovingly made. And the costumes, of course, cannot be as for a folklore festival; they must show signs of individuality and social class. They have been worn for a longer or shorter time, are made of cheaper or more expensive material, are well or not so well taken care of, etc.

  The costumes for this production of Mother Courage were by [Kurt] Palm.

  What is a performance of Mother Courage and Her Children primarily meant to show?

  That in wartime the big profits are not made by little people. That war, which is a continuation of business by other means, makes the human virtues fatal even to their possessors. That no sacrifice is too great for the struggle against war.

  Prologue

  By way of a prologue, Mother Courage and her little family were shown on their way to the war zone. Mother Courage sang her business song from scene 1 (so that in scene 1 her answer ‘In business’ is followed immediately by the sergeant’s question: ‘Halt! Who are you lot with?’). After the overture, to spare the performer the exertion of singing against the rumbling of the revolve, the first stanza was played on a record, the house being darkened. Then the prologue began.