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

across the Baltic from Germany:
    ON THE CALENDAR THE DAY IS NOT YET SHOWN
    Every month, every day
    Lies open still. One of these days
    Is going to be marked with a cross.
    For him it was the start of ‘the dark times’: a phrase that from now on permeates his poetry. Austria fell in March 1938, the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia that September, Prague and the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Memel in Lithuania the same month, Madrid and the Spanish Republic with it. Then Hitler offered Denmark a non-aggression pact.
    In April 1939, with Fascist Italy in its turn starting to invade Albania, Brecht took advantage of a lecture invitation to move to Sweden, where he was lent a sculptress’s house on the island of Lidingó outside Stockholm. From now on he and hisimmediate entourage were even more isolated than they had been in Denmark; while their object was no longer to await the collapse of the Nazis but to move on to the United States, where Piscator, Fritz Lang and Ferdinand Reyher had already begun working on their behalf. This isolation was also in part political, starting back in 1937 when Brecht largely gave up writing those committed plays and poems which had reflected the day-to-day Communist Party line. Three things then combined to give him a much more sceptical attitude towards the Soviet Union and Stalin’s leadership. The first and most painful was the purges of 1936–39; the second, unpleasantly interwoven with the purges, was the imposition of the Socialist Realist aesthetic preached by his old adversary Georg Lukács, which forbade any kind of ‘formalism’ in the arts; this became a serious factor from 1937 on. Finally there was the switch in foreign policy which led to the Soviet—Nazi pact and the partition of Poland. The Soviet Union, noted Brecht at the time, had thereby saved itself, ‘but at the cost of leaving the workers of the world without slogans, hopes or support’.
    The day marked with a cross proved to be 1 September 1939, when Brecht somewhat uncharacteristically attended a lunch in honour of Thomas Mann at Stockholm Town Hall. That day the Soviet–Nazi pact was announced, and the Nazis invaded Poland; forty-eight hours later Britain and France declared war on Germany. At first Brecht carried on working at his old project
Love is the Goods
, which he had taken up before leaving Denmark and renamed
The Good Person of Szechwan
; he had also brought with him the unfinished Julius Caesar novel and
The Messingkauf Dialogues
, a by-product of the revision of
Galileo
. But within ten days he found work grinding to a halt. The Szechwan play was laid aside; three diary entries comment disillusionedly on the ‘singularly Napoleonic’ Russian invasion of Eastern Poland, with its ‘usurpation of all the Fascist hypocrisy about “blood brotherhood” ‘; then for nearly seven weeks, from 21 September to 7 November, the diary too goes blank.
    During this interval, and in clear reaction to events, Brecht wrote his great play about a war which would range devastatinglyacross great tracts of Europe, creating heroes and profiteers, imposing order and ideologies, and leaving the selfsentimentalising little people’ – particularly of Germany – as blindly unaware as they were at its start.
    * * *
    Mother Courage
was written under pressure. In the words of a later note to Scandinavian audiences,
    As I wrote I imagined that the playwright’s warning voice would be heard from the stages of various great cities, proclaiming that he who would sup with the devil must have a long spoon. This may have been naive of me, but I do not consider being naive a disgrace. Such productions never materialised. Writers cannot write as rapidly as governments can make war, because writing demands hard thought.
    And the effort to speak out quickly made it one of the most spontaneous and, despite its length, most concentrated of all Brecht’s plays. It bears virtually no trace of any preliminary