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

that the point of the play had in some measure changed, and the audiences who saw it in Berlin and Munich (where he re-staged it with Giehse as Courage and a new cast), or during the Berliner Ensemble’s various tours, were very different from that in wartime Zurich. For these people had been through a European war; they did not have to be warned about it; they were actually beginning to experience the consequences, including some which Brecht had not foretold. None the less he remained convinced that his countrymen were a long way from understanding how far they had contributed to the horror, the chaos and the suffering – their own included. Doubtful whether they had learnt anything, he was convinced that it would be misleading to make Courage finish up any less short-sighted than they. In fact the surprising thing, to anyone familiar with Brecht’s restless revaluation of his own plays, is that he did not alter the text more. Perhaps the reason for this is that his chronic itch to revise could in this case be worked out on the (alas, unrealised) film version, whose making by the East German DEFA was decided as early as September 1949.Initially the work on its script was done by Emil Hesse Burri, Brecht’s old collaborator of the mid-i92os, who had been a scriptwriter in Munich under the Nazis; and the intention was that Engel should direct it. When Engel fell out some time during 1951 he was replaced by the forty-five-year-old Wolfgang Staudte, a former Piscator trainee whose DEFA film
Die Morder sind unter uns
had been the first great postwar success. Though Brecht himself did not actually do any of the writing, he was in on the planning, and many of the changes were in line with his suggestions. The film, said his first notes for DEFA, ‘must bring out even more clearly than the play how reality punishes [Mother Courage] for her failure to learn’. The treatment was simplified to distinguish her from the ‘little people’ and show her marked urge to go forward and profit from the war; later the ‘little people’ too were criticised as ‘the worst of the lot. Why? The big shots plan it, and the little people carry it out’. Kattrin in turn was given a lover, a young miller whose vision of popular resistance to the rulers and their foreign mercenaries is echoed during the scene of her death, when the peasants in the besieged town take up improvised arms and drive out the attackers (now made Croats in order to seem more alien). This is clearly in accordance with the criticism made of the play by Wolf and others, who wanted a greater element of optimism at the end; though the old woman herself, her eyes lighting up ‘with an expression of greed and desperate hope’ as she hears the troops marching off, finishes up more incorrigible than ever. After Burri had completed this first script he and Brecht agreed to make the story relevant to the postwar occupation of Germany by stressing the contrast between the German protagonists (Eilif and Yvette were now to be Germans, like Courage and Kattrin) and their motley foreign invaders; there would be control barriers everywhere and a ‘Babylonian’ mixture of strange tongues. Evidence too would be given of persistent foreign attempts to recruit Germans (including the young miller) for continued wars. Brecht’s feelings at this point are well summed up in the poem ‘Germany 1952’ which was worked into the final script, where a group of deserters led by the young miller throw down theirweapons in an abandoned house full of bourgeois comforts and one of them sings:
    O Germany, so torn in pieces
    And never left alone!
    The cold and dark increases
    While each see to his own.
    Such lovely fields you’d have
    Such cities thronged and gay;
    If you’d but trust yourself
    All would be child’s play.
    But this film was never made. The trouble seems to have been that DEFA, instead of setting out from the Brecht—Engel production and the actors associated with it, wished to