The key decision in director Lisaboa Houbrechts’s new production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, which showed this June in Paris as part of a European tour, was to replace the play’s famed market cart with a massive ball and chain. In Brecht’s masterpiece, the cart is already intended to be an absurd load — and a character in its own right in this cautionary tale about the perils of war.
Having fled his native Germany in 1933 after the Nazis came to power, Brecht wrote the play from exile in 1939 alongside his frequent collaborator Margarete Steffin. He was then at the height of his poetic and political prowess, spinning out works decrying the imminent dangers of fascism and jackboot militarism. Mother Courage wouldn’t see its first production until 1941 in Switzerland. However, by that point, the march toward war had exploded into yet another world-spanning conflict.
It would be an exaggeration to call Brecht a pacifist. His firsthand awareness of the threat of fascism in his own time was far too acute for that. Brecht’s political and historical frescoes like the Life of Galileo or Fear and Misery of the Third Reich are almost documentaries, with a politically committed and staunchly pedagogical undercurrent. But as Brecht also knew, conflicts tend to take on a life of their own, subsuming the motives of belligerents and imposing their own logics until war becomes an end unto itself.
That’s why Mother Courage and Her Children is so urgent today. Anna Fierling, the eponymous “Mother Courage,” is a petty merchant who hauls her cartload of wares around a Central Europe devastated by the Thirty Years’ War of the early seventeenth century. Determined to stay afloat, Fierling takes her cart in pursuit of any opportunity for profit in a conflict that ultimately crushes everything human she cares about, namely her three children Eilif, Schweizerkas (“Swiss Cheese”), and Kattrin. They all die as ransom for her mother’s opportunistic hawking and huckstering. Fierling is the perennial little person who thinks that, with just a bit of luck and elbow grease, the drama swirling around her might leave someone like her untouched — and maybe even give her a chance to make a buck or two along the way. She is not the only one, after all. War profiteering is a condensation of that far more ubiquitous conceit that something positive might come from military conflict.
But a market cart is tangible — a clear instrument of social forces and relations. It is the vehicle, quite literally, of Fierling’s dreams of survival, but also of her alienation, pushing her forward as her children are swept away. Eilif, her eldest, is executed after robbing and killing a peasant during a pause in hostilities. The bumbling Swiss Cheese is captured by Catholic forces who execute him in search of the coin-filled box abandoned by a routed Protestant detachment. To escape his fate, Fierling must hide her astonishment when the enemy soldiers show her Swiss Cheese’s body. Kattrin, who is mute, sacrifices herself. Mother Courage has left her with the cart and goes to a nearby Protestant town to load up on supplies (during another pause in fighting, prices are low) when a Catholic army approaches. Fearing that the town will stand no chance if taken by surprise, Kattrin grabs a drum and strikes at it from atop the cart to awaken the garrison before being shot by advancing skirmishers.
Through it all, Fierling remains stubbornly, blindly convinced that she is in the proverbial driver’s seat: “Hope I can pull the cart all right by myself. Be all right, nowt much inside it. Got to get back to business again,” she says just before the final curtain, as she accepts to leave Kattrin’s corpse behind and move on: “Take me along!”
Director Houbrechts’s ball and chain, on the other hand, has us on far more essential terrain. You can regret and bemoan war — but it is the tragic lot of mankind, this otherwise convincing production seems to say. It adds an overdose of absurdism that is closer to the imagined worlds of a Samuel Beckett than the Irish playwright’s German, Marxist counterpart. This isn’t an anecdotal decision. Rather, it’s part of the broader choice to de-historicize a play like Mother Courage — which is not the same thing as “modernizing” the work. That war is an inexorable element of human nature is exactly not the conclusion that one should draw from a play like Brecht’s.
Conflict is all-powerful if not hegemonic in Mother Courage, but it remains the endgame of individual decisions and social relations, and not fatally inevitable. It is not some plague caused by a timeless, metaphysical trait. Brecht wants to face his audience with the contrast between the reality of individual agency and the broader, seemingly merciless forces that impinge on and denature it. It’s tragic, but not in the bowdlerized way that word is often employed today to mean just about anything sad or unfortunate that needs to be leveled with.
Amid a growing chorus for rearmament and military preparedness today, Europeans are becoming overly inured to discourses like these. It’s no small irony that a Brecht pushed too far can be made into a token of a cultural climate that his jeremiad against militarism was in fact designed to warn against. A peaceful continent like Europe, we now often hear, is “waking up” to the reality of a world that remains essentially violent. Europe forgot that it was in a “jungle,” the European Union’s then foreign affairs commissioner Josep Borrell said in 2022; it must be able to fight to preserve the “garden” it still represents. French president Emmanuel Macron has taken to wistfully lamenting that the “tragic” in history is back once again.
War “has been discredited for some time to come,” Brecht wrote in a bitingly sardonic 1945 poem. That time seems to be coming to an end, as Europeans are ushered into a new militarism being billed as a burden to be endured, one which we have little choice but to accept and haul along with us. For Brecht, it may take on those features, but only as the senseless aftermath of a great many human choices and forces. And until then, it’s avoidable.
Great Job Harrison Stetler & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
