First, a brief historical reminiscence: in Johann Rist's drama Irenaromachia of 1630, there is a scene in which Irene, the personification of peace descended from heaven in search of an earthly home, praises the blessings of peace to the farmer Rusticus. The latter responds, however, that in peacetime the authorities are much too unpredictable when they fleece the poor peasants ("Hußlüde"); for that reason, he says, a proper war is much better than such unfavorable peace ("solck böß Frede"). A raid brings in more in a week than half a year's hard work in peacetime. And so peace finds no home on earth. [1]

Growing up in Augsburg, Berthold Eugen Friedrich Brecht [2] passed by the Schwedenstiege every day on his way to school. In that place stands, even today, the "Steinerner Mann," a monument to the baker who tried to save the city from besiegers during the Thirty Years' War. The baker used the loaves of bread baked from the last of the flour as missiles in order to pretend that the citizens of Augsburg were not suffering from hunger. The besiegers killed the man, and the city paid tribute to his deed with the statue. They say that rubbing the statue's nose brings luck, a tradition that has left its mark on the appearance of the nose today.

Thus Brecht - who, we may assume, was acquainted with the significance of the "Steinerner Mann" from earliest childhood - grew up with an almost daily reminder of the Thirty Years' War. The inhabitants of Augsburg even go so far as to say that it was this stone that inspired the figure of the mute Kattrin in the play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and her Children). [3] The title before Scene 11 reads: "The stone begins to speak." [4] As a child, Kattrin lost her voice during a raid; thus she must "speak" with the drum in order to save the children of the city of Halle. And like the baker, she too must pay for her brave deed with her life.

Aside from a fragmentary poem on the body of Tilly preserved in Altötting, [5] a review in verse of Wilhelm Schmidtbonn's play Der Graf von Gleichen, set during the Thirty Years' War, [6] and the tale and later calendar story "Der Augsburger Kreidekreis" with action set against the background of war events in Augsburg between 1635 and ca. 1640, [7] the reception of the Thirty Years' War in the work of Bertolt Brecht is concentrated in the drama Mother Courage and her Children [8] (written 1939-40) and the screenplay "Mutter Courage" [9] for a planned film version of the piece (written between 1949 and 1955). While at first glance the body of evidence may seem small, this paucity is compensated by the fact that in the drama and screenplay, the war is by no means a mere accessory; rather, it stands at the center of the action and constitutes Brecht's primary theme. [10]

In the analysis of poetic works, the goal cannot be to discover whether the author has accurately presented the "facts" in a historiographical sense. In essence, poetry is fiction, and all its facts and personages, even those for which there is historical evidence, receive their meaning not from their status as history, but from the poetic context. This context gives them a significance that transcends their historical fixity. By the same token, the poet should be accused neither of historical "inaccuracy" nor of a lack of historical knowledge; rather, the question is whether he has succeeded in arranging the concrete, historical material in such a way that a "great" and convincing fable can result from it. The fable's historical point of departure should not be arbitrary, but rather should provide a basis from which insights can be applied to other situations (i.e. other wars), and from which a more comprehensive meaning can emerge than that of the mere historical fact. In the following, I will examine Brecht's drama from this perspective, as well as, more briefly, the less-studied screenplay. In so doing, I will address aspects to which little or no attention has been paid in interpretations of the works up to this point. [11]

Brecht subtitled his play A Chronicle of the Thirty Years' War. This label would seem to categorize it as a mere history play, even a dry historical narrative, for the term "chronicle" implies more of a historiographical than a poetic genre. In a conversation with the dramatist Friedrich Wolf in 1949, however, Brecht explained more clearly what he meant by the term. Of course the play "does not constitute an attempt to convince anyone of anything through the exhibition of naked facts"; facts can "only seldom be surprised in a naked condition, and few would be seduced by them." Rather, it is necessary for "chronicles to contain the factual"; they must be "realistic," and thus challenge the viewer to critical evaluation, something that cannot be attained through mere "objectivity." [12]

The fact as such is indeed "given", but not in timeless "objectivity"; rather, it represents a (necessary) challenge to take a critical position - not only from a historical standpoint (which is equally given), but also from the immediate perspective of (subjective) convictions. The latter is all the more necessary when the author's own historical situation - as was the case on the eve of World War II - renders a partisan stance unavoidable.

The fragmentary nature of the evidence makes it impossible to determine exactly when Brecht began writing his play. [13] In the first edition, however, he places considerable emphasis on the fact that "Courage" was written "in Scandinavia before the outbreak of the Second World War" and that the play makes reference to that war. [14] By 1936 at the latest, Brecht was persuaded that Hitler was not only preparing for war, but would indeed wage it, and that this war would be a "great" one. In addition, he observed anxiously that his Scandinavian host countries (Denmark and Sweden) were prepared to profit financially from German rearmament, a concern that was reflected in two one-act plays from the summer of 1939, "Dansen" and "Was kostet das Eisen?" The contemporary situation and the antifascist convictions of the author - who wanted to employ his own weapons in the fight against Hitler and the war - suggested the choice of a historical example that would both warn the host countries against disastrous entanglements and suggest the "greatness" of the coming war. The example Brecht chose was the Thirty Years' War, the war before the two World Wars of the 20th century, a war that had devastated Europe, above all the Germanic lands, and had been of no "use" to any one, to say nothing of the high cost in victims.

Brecht chose the form of the chronicle - which he conceived as the German equivalent to the "history" of Elizabethan theater - in order to focus attention on the historical events themselves and measure the reactions of the figures against them. [15] Like Friedrich Schiller with his "Wallenstein" trilogy, Brecht uses the historical material to mirror the situation of his own time. But unlike Schiller, who treated of the "great objects of humanity" and aimed at a totalizing vision with his monumental tripartite division, Brecht refuses from the beginning to attribute any such "greatness" to his material. The real movers and shakers of history - whether politicians like Axel Graf Oxenstierna, the Swedish imperial chancellor (after 1612) who becomes an army captain in Brecht's play, [16] or war heroes like Johann Tserclaes Graf von Tilly, commander-in-chief of the imperial forces after 1630, who occurs only as a corpse [17] - are absent or play a role only as hearsay. As the subtitle expressly indicates in the original German, it is a chronicle not "of," but rather "from" the Thirty Years' War. [18]

Brecht chooses specific segments which, despite their loosely connected, "epic" arrangement, are united by a thematic thread: on the one hand, the increasing brutalization and impoverishment of the central figures through the events of war, and on the other the focus of action on the clash between the savage Soldateska and the peasants, a conflict that is likewise historically grounded. [19]

The action of the play covers a span of barely twelve years, specifically the period from the spring of 1624 to January 1636. At the end of the play, the war will continue for another twelve years, corresponding to the period of the action. At the beginning, Mother Courage is still relatively prosperous (the loss of her draught-animal is already presupposed) and still has her three children, although Kattrin's muteness is already a result of the war. [20] At the end, she trails along behind "the ever more tattered armies" with an almost empty wagon, her children are dead, and the war "is not yet near its end." Her journey begins in north central Sweden (Dalarna), and takes her to Poland, Moravia, Bavaria, Italy, back to Bavaria, and Magdeburg, coming to a temporary end in Halle. The conclusion of the play - Mother Courage once again joins the troops - seems open, since the action does not end "tragically" with her death. But the historical fact that the war will still continue for many years has implicitly decided her demise: the twelve years of the action have seen drastic losses, and the losses of the next twelve years will be no less great.

Thus history itself decides the end. The seeming omission of the traditional, tragic conclusion serves to transfer the fictive occurrence into historical reality and thus challenges the spectators to form their own judgment. Though the audience is not explicitly addressed, as in "Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan" ("Verehrtes Publikum, los, such dir selbst den Schluß!"), [21] it still should not expect "solutions" from the stage, but should seek them for itself in social reality.

Not only do the historical facts decide the conclusion of the play - by giving the lie to Mother Courage's illusions that she can still continue to take her "cut" - they also determine the course of the action. Brecht prefixes "epic" synopses to each of the scenes; in most cases, they consist of a juxtaposition of events from the history of the Thirty Years' War with events from the private life of Mother Courage: "Spring 1624. In Dalarna, the Swedish commander Oxenstjerna is recruiting for the campaign in Poland. The canteen woman Anne Fierling, commonly known as Mother Courage, loses a son." [22]

The Swedish-Polish war (1621-1629), which preceded Sweden's intervention in the Thirty Years' War, forms the factual, historical basis for the action. The fact that the armies consist of mercenaries becomes the doom of Eilif, Mother Courage's oldest son, inasmuch as the recruiter takes advantage of her business transactions with the captain to acquire Eilif for the Swedish army. The parallel - the wartime trade in humans and the ostensibly peaceful trade of Mother Courage - is clearly accentuated; both tradespeople meet with success. To be sure, Mother Courage's commercial profit is simultaneously her human loss; linguistically, however, this loss is expressed as the loss of a thing: Eilif is "mislaid" ("abhanden gekommen") by his mother like an object. The war degrades the people who "wage" it to the status of "material." In this way, Brecht projects back into the Thirty Years' War an experience that does not occur historically until the so-called "Materialschlachten" of the First World War, battles in which superiority of equipment was decisive. This experience, moreover, is presented as one that is already offered by history, but has not yet been recognized.

Almost all the other scenes follow this pattern: the events of the war determine Mother Courage's itinerary through Europe as well as the entire action of the play. Since Mother Courage is convinced that she can profit from the war, she can only react to the facts that result from it. She never comes to the point of action herself, because she refuses to acknowledge the consequences of her experience. Mother Courage does not act, she is acted upon. The "tattering" of the army of mercenaries runs parallel to that of Mother Courage.

As the reception of the play shows, Brecht was evidently unaware of the danger inherent in this conception of the action. The dominance of facts presents Mother Courage more as the victim of the war than the accomplice Brecht expressly intended her to be: inasmuch as she thinks she can profit from the war, she contributes decisively to its continuation. Brecht carries this theme to the point that the brief "outbreak" of peace [23] seems to Mother Courage to be a professional disaster. Brecht's intent was to show that she learns nothing, in order that the audience might learn all the more from her mistakes. [24]

Another feature of the Thirty Years' War - the fact that here, for the first time, the military campaigns of the "movers and shakers" were more devastating for the civilian population than for the instigators themselves [25] - provides the opportunity to present an unaccustomed view of history. In his poem "Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters" ("A Worker Reads History"), Brecht programmatically develops the "view from below": "Caesar beat the Gauls. / Was there not even a cook in his army?" [26] Although the "monumental" facts of history determine the action, the action itself always remains on the level of the "little people." In the poem, the worker polemically interrogates traditional historiography concerning the role he is assigned in it, namely none. In the play, it is only the little people who play a role at all, namely their own. This experience of modern warfare, as well - the fact the civilian population is the one most strongly affected - could likewise have already been gained from the Thirty Years' War. In this light, Mother Courage's mistaken assumption that she can profit "peacefully" from the war and at the same time protect herself from its results emerges all the more clearly. In this kind of universal war, the one who does not actively resist becomes an accomplice; the "little people," meanwhile, are always destined to become the victims.

An additional theme Brecht was able to develop from the historical material concerns the role of the ideology used to justify the war - in this case, the activity of Sweden. The notion that the Swedish intervention served the establishment of freedom of religion, and that the Thirty Years' War itself was a "religious war", long constituted a historiographical commonplace and is still the subject of discussion today. [27] The play alludes to this topos in the dubious figure of the Chaplain, who in light of military events summarily dismisses the cardinal Christian rule of love of one's neighbor as outdated. [28] At the same time, this perspective is addressed directly in the text. When Eilif has committed his supposedly heroic deed - raiding farmers and stealing their cattle - the captain pronounces him a "happy warrior," who has "served the Lord in his own Holy War." [29] Later, Eilif is court-martialed and shot for a similar deed - committed, however, in peacetime. In another passage, the cook explains that "in one sense it's a war because there's fleecing, bribing, plundering, not to mention a little raping, but it's different from all other wars because it's a war of religion." [30]

The discrepancy between ideological justification and the behavior of the figures in these examples points all too clearly to both the hollow, arbitrary use of the religious topos and the real, material motivations behind it. The Chaplain alludes to the latter in a speech to Mother Courage: "When I see you take peace between finger and thumb like a snotty old hanky, my humanity rebels! It shows that you want war, not peace, for what you get out of it. But don't forget the proverb, he who sups with the devil must use a long spoon." [31]

The historical material also allows Brecht to develop the theme of the reversal of "normal" or "natural" circumstances in wartime. In the play, this reversal occurs not only at the level of the action, but also and above all linguistically, as a kind of "revaluation of values." By virtue of her profession as canteen woman, Mother Courage's family is pieced together haphazardly: each child has a different father. Mother Courage explains this as "natural." [32] War is not disorder, but serves to create order in the first place. As the Sergeant puts it, "I've been in places where they haven't had a war for seventy years and you know what? The people haven't even given names. They don't know who they are! It takes a war to fix that. In a war, every one registers, everyone's name is on a list.... you count it all up - cattle, men, et cetera - and you take it away! That's the story: no organization, no war!" [33] This logic leads inexorably to the conclusion that only war can guarantee orderly coexistence and human self-knowledge. The inhumanity of war is self-evidently reversed into the very quality of humaneness, and has already become so accustomed that it may be considered "natural" and ordained by God.

Corresponding to the reversals in content, Mother Courage likewise manifests an unprecedented abundance of linguistic usages that literally turn everything upside down. The Chaplain, for example, boasts to Mother Courage of his eloquence: "You haven't heard me preach. Why, I can put such spirit into a single sermon that the enemy's a mere flock of sheep to them ... God has given me the gift of tongues. I can preach you out of your senses!" [34] The preacher of the word of God arrogantly unmasks himself as the best propagandist of the war. Mother Courage's well-known exclamation, "Don't tell me peace has broken out," [35] employs normal linguistic usage to combine a noun and a predicate that are mutually exclusive. This oxymoron serves a double purpose. On the one hand, it exposes the normal idiom - war "breaking out" - as euphemistic: wars are not natural events, but are caused by people with their material interests. At the same time, it betrays the speaker: she has purchased new wares and needs the war in order to sell them. When the Swedes invade Poland, Mother Courage reasons that the Poles should not have interfered "in their own affairs" and that they have thus become "guilty of breach of the peace." [36] Brecht uses the linguistic conventions of "justification" to once again convey a fact of the Thirty Years' War, namely the Swedish invasion of Poland with the corresponding religious propaganda. At the same time, however, he also establishes a parallel to the "outbreak" of World War II: Hitler's invasion of Poland supposedly served the "liberation" of Danzig and thus posed as a "German" affair, in which the Poles were kindly to refrain from meddling.

The most extreme formulation, in my opinion, is the metaphor of the cheese. When asked by the clerk what will become of the peace, the Chaplain poses a counter-question: "What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?" [37] In Christian Morgenstern's poem about the picket fence, a similar image appears in a humorous, though not untroubling way ("mit Zwischenraum, hindurchzuschaun"). [38] Brecht's metaphor, on the other hand, carries the satire to its brutal conclusion: war leaves behind nothing that can still be called peace. What is known as "peace" is in reality only the hole around which the next war will once again create the cheese. That cheese, in turn, will extend the illusory promise of another great feast, but will leave behind only another hole.

The cheese metaphor, in fact, represents the very quintessence of the play. As long as the trade that even the little people pursue is not recognized as part of the war itself (though with ostensibly peaceful means), there will be no real peace. It is not war that is the continuation of politics with other means; rather, trade - whether in a feudal or a capitalistic economy - is the temporary continuation of war with "other" (i.e. "peaceful") means. Here, too, Brecht uses the Thirty Years' War as historical evidence. Its inconceivable length - for contemporaries it represented the period of about a generation - and the fact that over the centuries, it was followed by other wars throughout all of Europe, confirm the fact that history does not consist of intervals of war and peace, but rather of a chain of wars, which occasionally, as the play puts it, "pause for breath." [39] As the poem "A Worker Reads History" shows, historiography confirms this state of affairs: "each page a victory" and "every ten years a great man." [40] A similar point is made in the poem "Die Verurteilung des Lukullus": "Immer doch / Schrieb der Sieger die Geschichte des Besiegten. / Dem Erschlagenen entstellt / Der Schläger die Züge." [41]

The "realism" inherent in this pessimistic view of historical experience - an experience which once again came to a horrific climax in the European war of the 17th century - was corroborated anew by the beginning of World War II. That war brought with it unprecedented butcheries, and even after its end was far from over, as the ensuing conflicts and the beginning of the "Cold War" showed. When Brecht returned to Europe after his exile - to Switzerland, not yet to Germany - he hoped that now, at least, the play would enable viewers to finally learn with his help from the experiences of the Second World War. After the war, therefore, he made efforts to have Mother Courage performed in Berlin, and on January 11, 1949, the play premiered in the Deutsches Theater. The stated goal was to show "daß die großen Geschäfte in den Kriegen nicht von den kleinen Leuten gemacht werden. Daß der Krieg, der eine Fortführung der Geschäfte mit anderen Mitteln ist, die menschlichen Tugenden tödlich macht, auch für ihre Besitzer. Daß für die Bekämpfung des Krieges kein Opfer zu groß ist." [42] Although the performance was a phenomenal success, the effect was the opposite of what Brecht had intended. The figure of Mother Courage was interpreted as "a humanistic saint from the tribe of Niobe and the Mother of Sorrows," forced to look on helplessly as her children were destroyed. The play showed, according to the critics, "the powerlessness of humanity in the face of historical fate," [43] and thus constituted an expression of "the great capitulation of the people" which subjects itself "without a struggle to an allegedly inexorable historical fate." [44] Brecht had been pigeonholed as a historical fatalist.

Brecht's reaction was to redouble his efforts for a film version of Mother Courage, using this medium to more sharply accentuate his intention. [45] Over a period of five years, until work on the film was discontinued in August 1955, the dramatist occupied himself once again with material which he assessed as follows: "Das Stück Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder zeigt einen Krieg (den Dreißigjährigen Krieg), der offiziell als großer Glaubenskrieg aufgezogen ist, in Wirklichkeit aber für materielle Gewinne, Vorrechte und Machtzuwachs geführt wird. Im Stück wird dies immerfort ausgesprochen, im Film kann es gezeigt werden. [...] Klarer noch als das Stück muß der Film zeigen, daß die Wirklichkeit die Unbelehrbaren bestraft." [46]

In the film version, the role of the title figure is radically curtailed; her large speeches in the play are reduced to a minimum, and she now appears as the "hyena of the battlefield," a designation already employed in the play. [47] Other changes include the further development of the mute Kattrin as a positive counterweight to Mother Courage. Above all, however, Brecht draws the specific events of the war into the center of the action and thus decisively intensifies the representation of the devastating effects of the Thirty Years' War. The time of the action is transferred to the period between 1630 and 1643. At the beginning of the film, Mother Courage is making all possible efforts to reach Usedom, where the Swedes are invading and war profits may be expected. At first on the imperial side, she is captured by the Swedes, only to appear once more on the side of the emperor. She hangs her little flag in the wind of whatever party happens to be victorious, and at the end does not recognize that the peasants' resistance is beginning to yield its first fruits (in the film, Brecht attempts to show the peasants as an opposing force, one that did not exist in this way in historical reality).

Mother Courage encounters the Soldateska as a mixture of many peoples, marked by the "Babylonian confusion of tongues"; its own action is marked by atrocities that reveal the increasing physical brutalization and psychological decay of the soldiers. The orphaned, roaming children, who fight to survive by raiding, likewise receive a scene of their own. These changes are intended to show a broad spectrum of the Thirty Years' War, reviving Grimmelshausen's realistic descriptions of the period in another medium. (Brecht's play was already inspired by Grimmelshausen's novel Courasche and the Simplicissimus; for the film, he wanted to use a daguerreotype effect with sepia-toned black-and-white photography, in order to cinematically evoke the technique of epic theater.) In the film, the external facts that dominated the play recede into the background in favor of the direct portrayal of war atrocities, in which Mother Courage actively participates or which she condones for the sake of business, and for which she is thus partially responsible. The shift of setting to the German war was only logical: the recent effects of a new, "total" war were still clearly visible to the potential audience.

But once again, Brecht refuses to provide solutions for change in the work of art itself. In the film as in the play, Kattrin's active resistance marks the end: with her drum, she awakens the inhabitants of the city of Friedberg and thus prevents the night raid by the marauding Croats. "The stone begins to speak." The linguistic metaphor points once again to social reality: in view of the atrocities and destruction, the only possible alternative is the "language" of active resistance. In comparison, all else, even with the best of intentions, is nothing but idle chatter. At the same time, the poet testifies to his own powerlessness: even his language is useless when reality founders.

FOOTNOTES