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

work or preparatory reading; there is none of the major rewriting that characterises so many of the other plays; there is for once no mention of any collaborator, nor any element of borrowing or adaptation; there are just two original typescripts, the one a straightforward revise of the other. As a feat of deeply felt anticipation it is amazing. Though there is nothing to bear out Brecht’s claim (p. 321) that the play was written in 1938 or (as the note to the 1949 edition had it) ‘before the outbreak of the Second World War’ it undoubtedly dates from well before the start of any major fighting. This was still the period of ‘We’ll hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’, of the phoney war, what Brecht termed ‘the war that isn’t waged’. At that time some kind of peace seemed quite possible, whether as a return to the prewar policy of appeasement or by means of an appeal to the German people over the heads of their government, as wishfully proposed by the Communists. Few foresaw the mass bombings, the deportations, the torture of resistants, the extermination of the Jews; those vast tragedies which any modern audience tends toassume as the understood background to Brecht’s ‘chronicle play’.
    Where did his vision come from? It is rooted, certainly, in his particular feeling for the seventeenth century, the period in which he had already set
The Life of Galileo
with its proclamation of faith in a ‘new age’ (even if that age might, in the words of its Danish version, look like ‘a blood-stained old harridan’). That last leap forward of the Renaissance – one of whose forms, the Shakespearean History, he adopted for the play – failed in his view to make a modern nation of Germany because of the catastrophic effects of the Thirty Years War, which thus became the natural analogy for his pessimistic warnings. The obvious dramatic precedent here was Schiller’s
Wallenstein’s Camp
with its picture of a mongrel seventeenth-century army milling round the canteen tents; and indeed there are two engravings showing a camp and Wallenstein’s siege of Stralsund in one of the earliest scripts. Stylistically however, and to some extent structurally too, Brecht’s example seems to have been the earlier German writer Grimmelshausen, who himself served in the Thirty Years War before publishing his rambling picaresque novel
Simplicissimus
in 1669. From a lesser offshoot of that wartime saga, published separately as
Die Landestórzerin Courasche
, came the name of the play and of its central figure, though in fact Grimmelshausen’s Amazonian adventuress sprang from a higher social class than Brecht’s canteen woman and enjoyed a career closer to that of Yvette. ‘A horrific picture of war’, the critic Bernhard Diebold termed it, ‘written about with deliberate detachment and seen from
below:
a frog’s-eye view.’ The Swedish actress Naima Wifstrand, whom Brecht wanted to play the leading part, also introduced him to the figure of Lotta Svárd, a canteen woman in Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s early nineteenth-century ballads about the Russian–Swedish war. But she, very unlike Brecht’s character, was ‘a pearl on the pathway of war’, always up with the troops. ‘And the dear young soldiers’ heroic mood / she loved in its full display.’ (Thus G. B. Shaw’s translation.)
    Brueghel, of whom Brecht had two books of reproductions, may have contributed something; his
Dulle Griet
is gummedinto another script. Peter Weiss in his
Asthetik des Wider-standes
describes Brecht speaking of Franco’s victory in summer 1939 and turning to this figure whose ‘devastated world’ was part of what was starting to take place:
    the Fury defending her pathetic household goods with the sword. The world at the end of its tether. Little cruelty, much hypersensitivity.
    Callot too is visually relevant, with his
Miséres de la Guerre
, even though Brecht nowhere mentions them.
    The character of Brecht’s Mother