Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) by Bertolt Brecht Read Free Book Online

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 anew, 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 powerfulelements 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.
    But it is true