Authors: Bertolt Brecht
No one missed this fundamental epic element; and this is probably why the actors did not dare to provide it.
It is to be hoped that the present notes, indicating a few of the ideas and devices of various kinds that are necessary for the performance of a play, will not make an impression of misplaced seriousness. It is difficult in writing about these things to convey the carefree lightness that is essential to the theatre. Even in their instructive aspect, the arts belong to the realm of entertainment.
[From
Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. Text/Aufführung/Anmer-kungen
. Henschel-Verlag, East Berlin, 1956.]
When the title rôle is played in the usual way, so as to communicate empathy, the spectator (according to numerous witnesses) experiences an extraordinary pleasure: the indestructible vitality of this woman beset by the hardships of war leaves him with a sense of triumph. Mother Courage’s active participation in the war is not taken seriously; the war is a source, perhaps her only source, of livelihood. Apart from this element of participation, in spite of it, the effect is very much as in
Schweyk
, where – in a comic perspective, to be sure – the audience triumphs with Schweyk over the plans of the belligerent powers to sacrifice him. But in the case of Mother Courage such an effect has far less social value, precisely because her participation, however indirect it may seem, is not taken into consideration. The effect is indeed negative. Courage is represented chiefly as a mother, and like Niobe she is unable to protect her children against fate – in this case, war. At most, her merchant’s trade and the way she plies it give her a ‘realistic, un-idea’ quality; they do not prevent the war from being seen as fate. It remains, of course, wholly evil, but after all she comes through it alive, though deformed. By contrast Weigel, employing a technique which prevents complete empathy, treated the merchant’s trade not as a natural but as a historical one – that is, belonging to a historical,
transient
period – and war as the best time for it. Here too the war was a self-evident source of livelihood, but this spring from which Mother Courage drank death was a polluted one. The merchant-mother became a great living contradiction, and it was this contradiction which utterly disfigured and deformed her. In the battlefield scene, which is cut in most productions, she really was a hyaena; she parted with the shirts because she saw her daughter’s hatred and feared violence; she cursed at the soldier with the coat and
pounced on him like a tigress. When her daughter was disfigured, she cursed the war with the same profound sincerity that characterised her praise of it in the scene immediately following. Thus she played the contradictions in all their irreconcilable sharpness. Her daughter’s rebellion against her (when the city of Halle is saved) stunned her completely and taught her nothing. The tragedy of Mother Courage and of her life, which the audience was made to feel deeply, lay in a terrible contradiction which destroyed a human being, a contradiction which has been transcended, but only by society itself in long and terrible struggles. What made this way of playing the part morally superior was that human beings – even the strongest of them – were shown to be destructible.
[Written 1951. From GW
Schriften zum Theater
, p. 895. First published in
Theaterarbeit
, 1952.]
The audience gave off the acrid smell of clothing that had not been properly cleaned, but this did not detract from the festive atmosphere. Those who had come to see the play had come from ruins and would be going back to ruins. There was more light on the stage than on any square or in any house.
The wise old stage manager from the days of Max Reinhardt had received me like a king, but what gave the production its hard realism was a bitter experience shared by all. The dressmakers in the workshops realised that the costumes had to be richer at the beginning of the play than at the end. The stage hands knew how the canvas over Mother Courage’s cart had, to be: white and new at the beginning, then dirty and patched, then somewhat cleaner, but never again really white, and at the end a rag.
Weigel’s way of playing Mother Courage was hard and angry; that is, her Mother Courage was not angry; she herself, the actress, was angry. She showed a merchant, a strong crafty woman who loses her children to the war one after another and still goes on believing in the profit to be derived from war.
A number of people remarked at the time that Mother Courage learns nothing from her misery, that even at the end she does not
understand
. Few realised that just this was the bitterest and most meaningful lesson of the play.
Undoubtedly the play was a great success; that is, it made a big impression. People pointed out Weigel on the street and said: ‘Mother
Courage!’ But I do not believe, and I did not believe at the time, that the people of Berlin – or of any other city where the play was shown – understood the play. They were all convinced that they had learned something from the war; what they failed to grasp was that, in the playwright’s view, Mother Courage was meant to have learned nothing from her war. They did not see what the playwright was driving at: that war teaches people nothing.
Misfortune in itself is a poor teacher. Its pupils learn hunger and thirst, but seldom hunger for truth or thirst for knowledge. Suffering does not transform a sick man into a physician. Neither what he sees from a distance nor what he sees face to face is enough to turn an eyewitness into an expert.
The audiences of 1949 and the ensuing years did not see Mother Courage’s crimes, her participation, her desire to share in the profits of the war business; they saw only her failure, her sufferings. And that was their view of Hitler’s war in which they had participated: it had been a bad war and now they were suffering. In short, it was exactly as the playwright had prophesied. War would bring them not only suffering, but also the inability to learn from it.
The production of
Mother Courage and Her Children
is now in its sixth year. It is certainly a brilliant production, with great actors. Undoubtedly something has changed. The play is no longer a play that came too late, that is,
after
a war. Today a new war is threatening with all its horrors. No one speaks of it, but everyone knows. The masses are not in favour of war. But life is so full of hardships. Mightn’t war do away with these? Didn’t people make a very good living in the last war, at any rate till just before the end? And aren’t there such things as successful wars?
I am curious to know how many of those who see
Mother Courage and Her Children
today understand its warning.
[Written 1954. From GW
Schriften zum Theater
, p. 1147.]
The first typescript of
Mother Courage
, in Brecht’s own typing with its characteristic absence of capital letters, was made in 1939, though there is also what may be a slightly earlier draft of the first few pages in verse. Amended by Brecht and by his collaborator Margarete Steffin, who died in 1941, it was then duplicated for the Zurich production and again in 1946 by the Kurt Reiss agency in Basel. This seems to have been the text which Brecht circulated to some of his friends, and of which one scene was accordingly published in the Moscow
Internationale Literatur
before the première, while a copy served as the basis for H. R. Hays’s first American translation. Brecht made a few further additions and alterations to the 1946 version, which was once again duplicated for the Deutsches Theater production of 1949. Brecht’s own copies of this Deutsches Theater script bear yet more notes and small amendments, as well as cuts which were disregarded in the published version. This appeared as
Versuche
9 in 1949, continuing the grey paperbound series of Brecht’s writings which had been interrupted in 1933.
The main shifts of emphasis in the play were indicated by Brecht in his own notes which followed the first publication of the play in the
Versuche
(1949) and have been reprinted in subsequent editions (pp. 271–274 above). The final versions of these passages, with the exception of the last (which concludes the play) are to be found in the additions to the Deutsches Theater typescript. The change in scene 1, says Brecht’s diary, was proposed by his assistant Kuckhahn. In the case of the last scene, the major change took place subsequently, between the
Versuche
edition of 1949 and the reprint of 1950. It consisted in the insertion of the stage directions showing Mother Courage first covering her daughter’s body, then handing over money to the peasants who carry it away, and of the last sentence ‘Got to get back in business again’. In previous versions, too, she was made to join in the refrain of the final song. Now, presumably, she was too old and exhausted to do more than pull her cart.
These changes were, as Brecht said, calculated to bring out Courage’s short-sighted concentration on business and alienate the audience’s sympathies. Thus in scene 1 she now became distracted by
the chance of selling a belt buckle; in scene 5 she no longer helped the others to make bandages of her expensive shirts; while in scene 7 she was shown prospering (her lines up to Them as does are the first to go’ were new, while the scene title ‘Mother Courage at the peak of her business career’ and the silver necklace of the stage direction were added after the 1949 edition). Besides these, however, Brecht made earlier alterations to two of the main characters – the cook and the camp prostitute Yvette – and to virtually all the songs, whose independent role in the play became considerably strengthened as a result. Scene 8 seems to have called for repeated amendment, thanks partly to Brecht’s uncertainty about the Yvette-cook relationship, which in turn depended on the choice of song for scene 3, where it is first expressed. Another confusion which has perhaps left its mark on the final text concerns religion: the first typescript gave the chaplain the Catholic title of ‘Kaplan’ throughout, putting Courage initially in the Catholic camp, which the Lutherans then overran in scene 3. Though Brecht corrected this on the script, to conform with the rest of the story, the religious antagonism emerges none too clearly even in the final version.
Brecht’s first typescript also numbered the scenes rather differently, so as to run from 1 to 11, omitting the present scenes 7 to 10. He altered this to make 9 scenes, a division which he retained in the 1946 script, writing the original scene titles, to correspond with it, very nearly in their present form. ‘The Story’ (pp. 274–276 above) refers to this numbering, as also does a note attached to the typescript:
The minor parts can easily be divided among a small number of actors. For instance the sergeant in scene 1 can also play the wounded peasant in scene 5 and the young man in scene 7 [8]; the general in scene 2 can be the clerk in scene 4 and the old peasant in scene 9 [11], and so on. Moreover the soldier in scene 3, the young soldier in scene 4 and the ensign in scene 9 [11] can be performed by the same actor without alteration of make-up.
Settings and costumes
High road with a Swedish city in the background/Inside the general’s tent/Camp/Outside an officer’s tent/In a bombarded village/In a canteen tent during rain/In the woods outside a city/Outside a parsonage in the winter/Near a thatched peasant dwelling.
The chief item of scenery consists in Courage’s cart, from which
one must be able to deduce her current financial situation. The brief scenes on the high road which are appended to scenes 6 and 8 [now scenes 7 and 10] can be played in front of the curtain.
So far as the costumes are concerned, care must be taken to avoid the brand-new elegance common in historical plays. They must show the poverty involved in a long war.
The following scene-by-scene résumé of the changes follows the same numbering, the present scene numbers being given in square brackets.
1. [
1
]
In Brecht’s first typescript the family arrive to the sound of a piano-accordion, not a Jew’s harp, and there are some minor differences in the Mother Courage song.
2. [
2
]
The cook’s original name ‘Feilinger’ is amended to ‘Lamb’ on the first typescript. The general’s reference to the king and Eilif’s reply were added to this; the general’s following ‘You’ve got something in common already’ was an afterthought added on the Deutsches Theater script (according to Manfred Wekwerth it was meant to refer to the enthusiasm with which Eilif drank). Eilif’s ‘
dancing a war dance with his sabre
’ was penned by Brecht on the 1946 script.
The song itself is taken over from Brecht’s first collection of poems,
Die Hauspostille
(1927), and derives originally from the verse at the end of Kipling’s short story
Love o’ Women
, itself taken from the song of the Girl and the Soldier in the story
My Great and Only
.
3. [
3
]
The three sub-scenes (divided by the passage of time) are numbered 3, 3 a and 3b, of which only the first has a title. Yvette originally was Jessie Potter, amended on the first typescript to Jeannetté Pottier; she had become Yvette by 1946. The scene started with Mother Courage’s remark to Swiss Cheese ‘Here’s your woollies’, everything to do with the armourer being added to the first typescript (p. 126).
Instead of the ‘Song of Fraternisation’, Jessie ‘
sings the song of Surabaya-Johnny
’ (from
Happy End)
, immediately after the words ‘Then I’ll tell you, get it off my chest’, Courage having just said ‘Just don’t start in on your Johnny’. The text of this song is not reproduced
in the typescript, but a first version of Johnny’s description is inserted, with Jeannette ‘growing up on Batavia’ and the man being a ‘ship’s cook, blond, a Swede, but skinny’. In pen, Batavia is changed to Flanders, ship’s cook to army cook and Swede to Dutchman. A ‘Song of Pipe-and-Drum Henny’ is added, which is a slightly adapted version of ‘Surabaya-Johnny’ in three verses (the refrain appears only in the 1946 script). In the text of this song, which still fits the Weill music, Burma is amended to Utrecht and the fish market (in ‘You were something to do with the fish market / And nothing to do with the army’) to a tulip market. Besides the beginning (’When I was only sixteen’) the second quatrain of the second verse was absorbed in the ‘Song of Fraternisation’, which is substituted in Brecht’s amended copy of the 1946 script. This also adds that the cook was called ‘Pipe-Henny’ because he never took his pipe out of his mouth when he was on the job.