Authors: Bertolt Brecht
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Quickly as the play was written, in Brecht’s view it came too late to serve as the intended warning. ‘The great bandit [i.e. Hitler] got his hooks on the theatres much too soon.’ His immediate hope had been that it could be staged in Stockholm with Wifstrand as Courage and Helene Weigel in the non
speaking part of Kattrin, who is supposed to have been made dumb so that Weigel could play her. That winter, while Russia invaded Finland, Weigel gave some classes in Wifstrand’s acting school, for which Brecht wrote his Shakespearean
Practice Scenes for Actors
; meanwhile Brecht, on a commission from Stockholm Radio, wrote
The Trial of Lucullus
for the composer Hilding Rosenberg to set. Given the threat represented by the Nazis, however, neither work was performed in Sweden; and in April the police searched the Lidingó house, the German forces moved into Denmark and Norway, and Brecht thought it wise to move on. The plan for a
Mother Courage
production was then resumed in Finland, where the Brechts lived for a further year before the last of the party’s American visas came through. The aim there was to secure a production in the Helsinki Swedish-language theatre during the winter of 1940–41. To this end Brecht worked on the songs with the Finnish composer Simon Parmet, who appears to have dropped out for fear of echoing Weill too closely. Once again, however, the reason for the play’s rejection was evidently the increasing Nazi pressure, and that January Brecht listed it as one of his six unstaged plays ‘which cannot at present be performed’.
In German-speaking Switzerland the Zurich Schauspielhaus was less inhibited. Cut off from the dramatist himself by the war, this predominantly German company contained a high proportion of anti-Nazi actors of whom some, like Leonard Steckel and the director Leopold Lindtberg, had worked in Berlin with Piscator, while Wolfgang Langhoff of the Rhine-land Agitprop Truppe im Westen had subsequently been in a concentration camp. Under the sympathetic management of Ferdinand Rieser and Oskar Wálterlin they had given the premieres of a number of plays unacceptable in Nazi Germany, notably Ferdinand Bruckner’s
Die Rassen
and Friedrich Wolf’s
Professor Mamlock
(both about anti-Semitism) as well as others by Kaiser, Horváth, Zuckmayer and such Anglo-American authors as Wilder, O’Neill, Priestley and Shaw. On 19 April 1941, a month before the Brechts left Helsinki on
their long trip to California, the company now gave the premiere of
Mother Courage
before a predominantly Swiss and German emigré audience, among those who saw the production being Thornton Wilder.
This was one of the great theatrical events of the Second World War, and the play itself made a great impact, thanks above all to the performance of Therese Giehse (who oddly enough was a British subject) in the title part and to the setting devised by Teo Otto, who had worked with Brecht before 1933. Lindtberg directed, and the Swiss composer Paul Burk-hard wrote a new score. Langhoff and the Austrian Karl Paryla played the two sons, Wolfgang Heinz the Cook. Meanwhile Sigfrit Steiner, the Chaplain of this production, was staging the far more directly political
Mother
for the first time in Switzerland with a cast of amateurs. And yet there were only ten performances, and Brecht, appreciative as he was, felt that to some extent his intentions had been traduced. Thus the
Easier Nachrichten
saw Courage as a model example of how to get through a terrible time in the face of human crudeness, while Elisabeth Thommen in the Basel
National-Zeitung
wrote that ‘all women should be grateful to Bert Brecht for his portrayal of this strong female character’. It was only Brecht himself whose notes (p. 271) referred to the figure of Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, as the classic example of maternal grief. But even Bernhard Diebold, who had been one of the outstanding German theatre critics before 1933, wrote in
Die Tat
that this Courage, far from being primarily a ‘hyaena of the battlefield’ (as the Chaplain calls her), made her commercial toughness ‘almost too subsidiary’ to the strength of her maternal feelings; while as for Lindtberg’s direction, it ‘either failed to take enough account of the crude earthiness of the period and Brecht’s own malicious sarcasm, or else it deliberately softened them’.
As it turned out, this was the play’s sole wartime production. It was not one of those works which Brecht expected to see put on in the USA, nor did he make any of the efforts which he and his friends there devoted to
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Galileo
and
The Good Person of Szechwan
, let alone the plays
which he wrote after arriving. Early in 1941, at the latest, the poet H. R. Hays had made a translation from a copy lent him by Hanns Eisler (to whom Brecht sent one of the first scripts), but although this appeared in
New Directions
the same year there never seems to have been any move to stage it, not even as a college production. Almost it might be said that Brecht had decided to shelve
Mother Courage
as he shelved so many of his works, putting them out of his mind for years at a time. In 1943, however, he met the composer Paul Dessau, whose musical background was in some ways comparable to those of Weill and Eisler, and who had written some music for the original Paris production of
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich
in which Weigel had acted. At a Brecht recital given at the New School in New York that March, Dessau sang one of his Brecht settings with such verve that Brecht encouraged him to write more, first inviting him to come and work in California, then at some undefined date asking him to write new settings for the
Mother Courage
songs. These were completed by 1946, when the Zurich company used them for its guest performances in Vienna, and they became the standard music for the play. For the moment it seems that they, like the play itself, were really being reserved for the day when Brecht should return to the German-language theatre and stage the kind of performance which he and Helene Weigel had in mind.
Though there is evidence in the FBI files of his intention to return from as early as 1944, it seems to have been at least a year after the ending of the war that he began to make serious plans. Then he wrote to his old collaborator the designer Caspar Neher (who had remained in Germany) to announce his conviction that ‘we shall build up a theatre once more’, followed by his decision to come to Zurich during 1947 and prepare his return to Berlin, where he had been offered the use of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm ‘for certain things’. This theatre, the original home of
The Threepenny Opera
, had now been made an offshoot of the revived Volksbühne, the great popular theatre organisation which the Nazis had suppressed thirteen years earlier. The Deutsches Theater, where Brecht had worked for Max Reinhardt on first coming to Berlin, had
been put under Langhoff of the Zurich
Mother Courage
; both theatres were in the Soviet sector.
Early in 1947 Brecht and Piscator started corresponding with a view to a joint descent on that city. They were in some measure encouraged in this by Friedrich Wolf, who had returned with the Red Army and now hoped to draw Piscator back to the Volksbiihne. Before Piscator made up his mind, however, the division of Berlin had occurred, and in the event he remained in New York for another three years. Meanwhile the Brechts carried out their plan of going to Zurich, and immediately on arrival began discussing plans with Neher. Within a month the two friends in collaboration had completed the adaptation of
Antigone
which they proposed to stage at the small theatre in Chur managed by Klemperer’s former dramaturg Hans Curjel. The object of this brilliant but short-lived exercise, so Brecht noted in his diary on 16 December, was ‘to do preparatory work with Weigel and Cas [Neher] on
Courage
for Berlin’. For Weigel had not acted on the professional stage for fifteen years, and the Schauspielhaus apparently had nothing for her.
The
Antigone
production took place on 15 February 1948, five days after Brecht’s fiftieth birthday. The same occasion was celebrated in Berlin by a programme organised by Langhoff, who had staged a short version of
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich
only a fortnight or so earlier. Thereafter it was agreed that the Zurich Schauspielhaus would give the first production of
Puntila
, the fourth and last of their Brecht premieres and the first to be staged with Brecht’s own participation (as unofficial director); this took place in June, with Leonard Steckel acting the name part. After that the Brechts’ attention was again focused on Berlin (Salzburg being an alternative bet), and the main problem was how to get there. Eventually the necessary Austrian and Czech permits came through, allowing them to travel to the Soviet Zone of Germany in late October (the US authorities having refused them leave to cross Bavaria). Straightaway Brecht began holding auditions at Langhoff’s theatre, then on 8 November his co-director Erich Engel arrived from Munich and two
months of intensive rehearsal began. Brecht’s idea at this time was to set up his own ensemble under the wing of the Deutsches Theater and invite prominent outsiders to act with it; he had in mind figures like Fritz Kortner and Peter Lorre as well as Therese Giehse from Zurich.
In mid-December he discussed this scheme with Langhoff, seemingly still in the expectation of being able to use the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Then three weeks later he was hauled out of a rehearsal to attend a formal meeting with the party authorities, the East Berlin mayor Friedrich Ebert (son of the former Social-Democratic President), Langhoff and the Schiffbauerdamm
Intendant
Fritz Wisten. Here he was told that the Schiffbauerdamm was needed for the Volksbühne; the mayor, who never addressed a word to him, spoke slightingly of half-baked schemes which might upset existing arrangements; and, in the words of the diary ‘for the first time since coming here I felt the foetid breath of provincialism’.
Within a few days, however, everything fell into the background as the white half-curtain of the Deutsches Theater fluttered open on a brilliantly lit stage. The band struck up ‘You captains, tell the drums to slacken’, and the dusty, tattered family came rolling on with its cart. Suddenly, in this still devastated city hovering between peace and war, the world could see one of the unforgettable images of our time.
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From that moment dates Brecht’s postwar reputation as a great director, which for non-Germans has even overshadowed his reputation as a playwright. It was a formidable comeback planned from three overlapping aspects, and its triple success was stunning. First of all, here was a largely unknown German masterpiece, written in language of tremendous vitality and still with many shrewd things to say about war and people’s reactions to it. Second was an outstanding acting performance from a virtually forgotten actress, whose striking voice and features have become almost inseparable from the Mother Courage figure; that night a legendary character, as well as a star, was born. Finally, embracing everything else, there was a
new, outwardly subdued but inwardly authoritative spirit emanating from the whole production and from the new Berliner Ensemble which the Brechts went on to found upon it. The object of this entire operation was of course rather different from Brecht’s original aim when he wrote the play. For he made it very clear in his notes and jottings that he wished not only to make his countrymen think about their blind involvement in Hitler’s war but also to help rebuild their shattered culture and bridge the long gap back to the progressive ideas of the Weimar Republic, thereby bringing on a new generation of actors and directors who would not have been debased by too much experience of Nazi methods. Given that he meant to tackle these worthwhile tasks from within the Communist orbit, in his old spirit of sceptical allegiance, he had to establish his constructive intentions, which he set himself to do soon after his arrival by writing some slightly vapid political songs. At the same time he had to overcome or get round the obstacles to any kind of formal innovation embodied in the revived Socialist Realism now being preached by the Russians, the Party spokesman Fritz Erpenbeck and, once again, Georg Lukács. As he put it in the foreword to
Antigone
, ‘it may not be easy to create progressive art in the period of reconstruction’. But nobody was better placed to do it than he.
The criticisms of the play which now came from both right and left arose from a feeling that Brecht, having created a great human character, had deliberately stunted her, thereby stifling much of the emotion natural both to himself as the creator and also to his audience. Some, like Friedrich Wolf in the dialogue printed on pp. 226–9 of
Brecht on Theatre
, felt that by the end of the play Courage should have seen the light – that is, the futility of war – thereby emerging as (in Communist aesthetic jargon) a ‘positive’ figure. Others, on both sides of the barriers, pointed to what they considered a theoretical inconsistency between Brecht’s ideas of ‘epic’ or ‘alienated’ acting and the undoubted empathy experienced by audiences at emotional high spots like the death of Kattrin. This notion that Brecht, for purely intellectual reasons, was denying certain powerful
elements which he had (or should have) instinctively put into the original play, was reinforced, if not actually sparked off, by the textual changes which he confesses to on pp. 271–4 of his notes. Indeed to judge from some commentators’ reactions one might imagine that he had rewritten the Zurich version as extensively as he did so many of his other plays. In fact, of course, only two of his four alterations are significant – the first, where Courage’s salesmanship distracts her from her son’s enlistment, and the second, which makes her less ready than before to give her goods for humanitarian ends – and even they would scarcely have been noticed if he had not drawn attention to them himself. What he worked much harder to correct was not only ‘softness’ in the actual play but those features of Lindtberg’s production on which Diebold had commented nearly eight years earlier, along with a certain ‘curious aura of harmlessness’ which he found emanating from his own first Berlin rehearsals. This, with its smudging-over of all sense of background or development, he blamed on the bland conformism of the Nazi theatre.