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

in production, then, is how to compress the play into a length appropriate to its audience without losing essential elements of so carefully thought-out a mixture. As a reading text it has a balance which needs also to be achieved under the very different conditions of the stage.
    By turning it back, finally, into something of a meditation on the notion of a ‘new time’, Brecht re-emphasised another general theme of particular significance to himself. Between 1929 and 1933 (and even, less pardonably, for two or three years afterwards) the German Communists thought that the Revolution was round the corner, and men like Brecht were stimulated much as he describes in the Foreword on p. 189. At the end of the 1930s, however, when he wrote the poem ‘ToThose Born Later’ (
Poems 1913–1956
, pp. 318–320), their goal
    Lay far in the distance
    It was clearly visible, though I myself
    Was hardly likely to reach it.
    ‘Terrible is the disappointment’, says the Foreword, when the new time fails to arrive and the old times prove stronger than anyone thought. For what had actually arrived was the ‘dark times’ of the first line of ‘To Those Born Later’, and with this the whole concept of ‘old’ and ‘new’ got confused. ‘So the Old strode in disguised as the New’, says the prose poem ‘Parade of the Old New’ which he wrote at the time of the first version as one of five ‘Visions’ foreshadowing the coming war. The temptation was to look nostalgically backwards, as the end of the Foreword suggests:
    Is that why I occupy myself with that epoch of the flowering of the arts and sciences three hundred years ago? I hope not.
    And in this hope he was determined to hold on to his old belief in the New, writing for instance to Karin Michaelis in March 1942, when the war was still going Hitler’s way, that
    the time we live in is an excellent time for fighters. Was there ever a time when Reason had such a chance?
    What is significant in the final version is not just that it reinstates and even extends Galileo’s opening ‘aria’ of 1938 on the new age – that Elizabethan-Jacobean age which always fascinated Brecht, not least because of Germany’s failure to benefit from it. The really crucial remark, rather, comes in the final summing up of the same idea, which differs subtly from one version to another. ‘Reason’, says Galileo in the first version, ‘is not coming to an end but beginning.
    And I still believe that this is a new age. It may look like a blood-stained old harridan, but if so that must be the way new ages look.’
    In the American version, which omits the reference to Reason, Andrea asks Galileo outright if he doesn’t now think that this ‘new age’ was an illusion, and is again given the same answer. In the third version, far more tellingly, he gets the almost indifferent response ‘Doch’ – ‘On the contrary’, almost implying ‘despite all’ – followed by a quick change of subject. And it is this one word, with all its overtones from the history of Brecht’s own time – at once so new and so dark – that wryly wraps up the whole optimistic tragedy, pinning the beginning and the end together with a single jab.

     
MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN
    That Hitler meant war was clear to Brecht by the beginning of 1937. During the previous November the German and Italian fascist regimes had banded together to form the ‘Rome—Berlin axis’; Franco, whose rebellious armies were on the outskirts of Madrid, was recognised by them as the legitimate ruler of Spain; an anti-Comintern alliance was forged between Japan, then on the point of invading China, and the Germans. Hitler, who had already got away with the re-militarisation of the Rhineland in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, henceforward had no reason to moderate his aggressive aims. As Brecht put in one of the ‘German War Primer’ series of ‘Svendborg Poems’ which he wrote on Fünen Island less than fifty miles