Through the Minefield of Ideologies: Brecht and the Staging of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder

Through the Minefield of Ideologies: Brecht and the Staging of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder CHR ISTA HASCHE TRA NS LATED BY JUTTA VON Z ITZ EWITZ It is a widely acknowledged fact that director Wolfgang Langhoff's acceptance of the plan to found a studio theatre - first called "Helene Weigel," later renamed " Berliner Ensemble" - at his Deutsches Theater was a chief rcason for Bertolt Brecht to settle down in Berlin after his years of exile. The Berliner Ensemble provided him with the opportunity to test his theoretical concepts about drama and to experiment with his and other playwrights' plays in the course of theatrical practice. In Berlin. Brecht struck a harsh note in his criticism of the political and historical situation in the post-war Gennany to which he had returned. His main points were "that Germany hard] not yet realized the dimensions of the crisis it finds itself in" and that dialectic was being employed merely as a "magic Jack-in-the-box, a conjuring trick," which "arrests the flow of things, turning them into inflexible matter." In short: "bloody awful times.'" As numerous entries in his workingjoumal show, his working technique at first seemed to comprise a good deal of fieldwork: he aimed at collecting facts about post-war everyday life, gestural material, and attitudes. He even attended university courses and union gatherings, but without making himself known in public: " I don't want to speak myself," he wrote; " I am aiming at orientation, not at public appearance."2 . Like wise, he kept away from the ideological battles that were sparked off by the "formalism debate,"l which were engaged in mainly by his followers (and those who thought they were). It was clearly his theatre work that Brecht considered to be his most substantial contribution to a discussion of major problems of society. The reason he chose Mutter Courage for his first production at the Berliner Ensemble, with co-director Erich Engel, does not have to be dwelt upon here, given the play's contemporary relevance and the fact that it offered a leading role for Helene Weigel (and, indeed, was to be her triumphant return to the stage). Modern Drama, 42 (1999) 185 186 CHRISTA HASCHE What is of interest, however, are the diverse aspects concerning the reception of Ihe play that were central to Brecht's earlier reflections. While he was working on Mutter Courage, observing the ongoing war from his Swedish exile, Brecht increasingly focused on what he conceived as the "pure" structure underneath the ideological veils, a pattern that could open a clear view on the "true nature of things": [T]he war reveals its strangely epic character, it teaches mankind about themselves, so to speak, it gives a lecture, readsa text that ismerely accompanied by the rumbling of guns and shell explosions [...} the ideological veils have become so transparent that they bringout the truenature of things only the more sharply [.. .] the war is indeed meaningless.4 Economic ends are being pursued economically, that is, "shamelessly," without ideological reasons being given, which would be an "uneconomical" method in this respect. With regard to the individual who has to cope in times of war, Brecht - during his exile in Finland - also took Multer Courage as evidence for the failure of established patterns of behaviour and of the historical calculabilities at their core. His work on the text suggested an additional quality: Working my way through Mutter Courage I am quite pleased to see thaL the war appears as a vast field, not unlike those fields of new physics, which cause Objects to deviate so unpredictably. All calculations based on experiences in limes of peace are bound to fail. Neither audacity nor caution, neither sincerity nor fraud, neither brutality nor empathy are adequate strategies, everything means downfall in the end. And yet there also remain those forces which turn peace into war, the unnamable forces.s The collapse of all coordinate systems in times of war, new physics with its discoveries of inexplicable deviations and irregularities, the impossibility of a central perspective on ethical and ideological matters: these subjects were among Brecht's main preoccupations at that time. The theoretical framework he borrowed from...