I find myself strangely haunted by this play. When I finished it about two days ago I knew it was a superb book. But now I have had some more time to think about it the more I must come to the conclusion that it is a deeply profound, extraordinary effecting masterpiece, or war, of human suffering, of the morality (or not) that we can gain from such situations.
But I find myself liking it perhaps against what Brecht intended. Throughout Brecht's notes at the end of my edition (Methuen 1993, which are superb by the way) Brecht keeps noting his annoyance that some of the reviewers and the audience kept misunderstanding what he was trying to convey.
He writes that:
"when the title role is played in the usual way, so as to communicate empathy, the spectator (according to numerous witnesses) experiences extraordinary pleasure; the indestructible vitally of this woman beset by hardships of war leaves him with a sense of triumph…" because "…Courage is represented chiefly as a mother, and like Niobe she is unable to protect her children against fate - in this case, war" (p.145).
And:
"I do not believe, and i did not believe at the time, that the people of Berlin - or of any other city the play were shown - understood the play. They were all convinced that they had learned something from the war; what they failed to grasp was that, in the playwright’s view, Mother Courage was meant to have learned nothing from her war...The audience in 1949 and the ensuring years did not see Mother Courage's crimes, her participation, her desire to share in the profits of the war business; they saw only her failure, her suffering"... (p.146-147).
Now, it seems to me that if time after time audiences and reviewers kept coming away with the conclusion that Brecht did not want it is chiefly because what Brecht wanted to convey was impossible, and that the method he set out to convey his thesis, in the way he did it, could only end in failure. Throughout, he keeps constantly stating the effect of alienation should be at play in all times. The peasants who lose their children should be to have a "certain routine quality about it; it must suggest a 'set of behaviour pattern'”. That the Song of Capitulation scene would be "socially disastrous if by hypnotic action the actress playing Mouther Courage invites the audience to identify with her". The lullaby must be sung "without any sentimentality or desire to provoke sentimentality". And so on.
There's a remarkable coldness about the way Brecht wanted to seemingly convey things. His logic behind it is actually correct, he warned his focal point to be on how war is not a Disney film, it is not a tale of unique impersonal evil crushing the "human spirit" for no reason - indulging in a kind of mawkish sentimentalism and pseudo-romanticism. War, as Brecht was trying to convey, especially one that went on for an agonising thirty fucking years, cannot be some unique form of abstract evil springing up from nowhere. The peasants react with an almost perfunctory nature to the death of their child because "the war has gone on too long. Begging, lamenting, and informing have frozen into fixed forms: they are the things you do when the soldiery arrive". The point Brecht is trying to drive through the moment Mother Courage trundles onto the stage is that the play is about "the connection between war and commerce; the proletariat as a class can do away with the war by doing away with capitalism".
The war, and indeed all wars, are specific acts of class genocide, embodying specific constellations of numerous social actors, of which business is indeed one, and eagerly participates (sometimes eggs on) when it starts, and its consent runs from a multitude of sectors of the elite strata for many reasons. War is not a melodrama, it is a piece of social science amongst a global imperialist elite with the working classes of the world as its pawns.
And yet....a good Marxist theory in a PhD thesis this may be, but this is a human drama, with human beings, about death and war and personal tragedy. It is impossible to convey what Brecht wanted in a medium like this without people sympathising with mother Courage, with people, perhaps against their better natures, unable to damn Mother Courage. For all Brecht might want to see her as just another cog in the machine of war, and a guilty one at that, she is, in the end, an old woman, carrying a cart full of shit, with no more power than anyone else in the end. The background to this play was written during the height of WW2, and its easy to see Brecht had the collaborators to Hitler’s regime in place – the business leaders and royal family members who lined up to praise him for his stern leadership against the communist agitators and would later sell him the gas they needed to make Zyklon-B to gas the Jews and the punchcards to categorise the camp inmates, the ‘guilty men’ of Britain’s ruling class who whitewashed his nature and downplayed his threat, not to mention the hundreds of little people who made sure the numerically small SS operated efficiently by becoming unpaid spies for their neighbours.
But to be honest, the war she is fighting is more akin to WW1 than 2, were the notions of any moral cause behind the fighting is an obscene joke, where there are no good guys, where everyone's hands are stained in blood and all the victories are Pyrrhic. She is not Krupp of I.G. Farben, or Henry Ford, or Quisling, or Lord Halifax, or the imbeciles in the German Social Democratic party who thought they could manage Hitler by inviting him into power. She is not even the owners of BA Systems or Lockheed Martin, who, like Mother Courage are delighted at the prospect of a new round of Middle Eastern slaughter and who push their paid politicians to cause them, a business model literally unsustainable without mass butchery.
In fact in the context of the play, not to mention the war she is shoved in, she almost become, dare I say, admirable? There is something sort of emboldening, the fact that this little woman is able to sort of fuck the rules of the war these stupid elderly aristocratic degenerates have plundered them all in, she cannot stop it or control it, but she games the system, and in some small, tiny, worthless way, manages to be slightly more in control of her life and retain a little bit more of a sense of dignity than the poor peasants who watch helplessly as their son is killed later on. Sure, she participates in a horrendous war. She is literally profiting from death. She is "guilty". But does she have a choice? Who did in the middle of the Seventieth century? The names mentioned above are especially dammed in history for allowing Hitler to gain power, allowing a totally unnecessary war to start, were either too stupid to see the threat before it came to claim them or eagerly keen to see Hitler turn Europe into a bloodbath for their own despicable reasons.
They all could have made different choices, they all had to knew what they were doing and who they were allowing to be tortured and killed, and each and every one of them had alternatives.
Can we say the same about Mother Courage? I just don't think so. There is no welfare state to survive, no notion of human rights, no notion of political asylum seekers, no body of international laws to appeal to, no vehicle for anyone born outside of nobility to be a political actor. What alternative was there in such a blood-bath of a continent, a continent for which pointless and stupid slaughterfests from which no rhyme or reason can be found were the norm, not the abstract (Charles Tilly estimated that from 1480 to 1800, a significant new international conflict started somewhere every two or three years, a vast majority probably in Europe, the most war-like continent perhaps ever in human history).
So what does Mother Courage become, in my reading, much as Brecht may hate it? She does become a victim, and the entire play becomes a story of what happens when a ruling elite of depraved elites, insane military psychopaths (who praise he son Eilif's crude butchery of peasants is praised by the generals as glorious one moment and then gets him shot in peacetime, as the they change the rules to match their current fit of psychosis). It becomes a story of what happens when a continent, indeed an entire civilisation, sinks in a total barbaric pit of unending horror and internecine bloodletting. The backdrop of the Seventy Years War is a suitably nihilistic, only matched perhaps by WW1 in its senseless and pointless level of killing, in its prolonged destruction of all forms of sanity and civilisation. In such a scene, Mother Courage ends up having to prostitute her morality repeatedly. The Baker resigns himself to the knowledge that her daughter would have to be left to die simply because he knows there is no way they could support three people - it is just brutal necessity. Her son becomes a violent thug – in a society and a system in which that is the required norm. Every part of the moral foundations from which Europe might have pretended to believe in are laid bare to be false, Christian brotherhood, the unique superiority of Western values of Eastern barbarism, its art, its culture. They have been ripped apart like they were flimsy tissue paper; irreverent scraps now fluttering in the winds as the Europeans busily prepare themselves for epic butchery. In such a world Courage appears almost harmless, even somewhat subversive in a sense. And this is because, as Courage does have the paradoxical position of a mother and a profiteer, she is able, actually, to become an astute social critic of their world they live in and the dynamics of war, capable of exposing the hypocrisies the general’s spout and display the inverted morality now required to live in a world this hellish without pretension.
And in fact throughout the play she almost became to me this kind of bizarre figure of death, and haunted elemental spirit wandering the landscape of a Europe raped by war, her trundling cart rolling into each new scene of becoming a kind of omen of doom (one can imagine, in a stage production, the noise of the cart as it comes out from the wings must become a kind of dreaded sound to indicate some scene of horror is to begin). She with her cart becomes a travelling freak show displaying a concentrated twisted parody of the dynamics of war, imbuing the values of their society in a creaking horse and cart and reflected back onto the world. But to me it also had a doubly ominous notion, as it reminds me of either the carts used to turn out plague ridden bodies in the medieval age, or the tumbrils that were used to send people to their deaths to the guillotine in the French Revolution, the noise of the wooden wheels on the cobblestone indicating to all that a new round of killing was to occur. Her entire presence becomes one of a kind of transcendental figure of death, detached and yet part of the mortal world, contemptuous and derisive of the humans who have voluntarily and without much opposition allowed themselves to be dragged into this morally empty charnel house and yet fundamentally resigned to it all, feeling she might as well join in as there isn’t any real alternative. It is a deeply, darkly pessimistic play in that sense – the absence of any kind of morals is stark.
And yet, whatever Brecht would like to think, that is a sad play, that does make us feel pity that people, in many ways quite good people. Mother Courage herself is deeply ambiguous. It’s hard for us to despise her when she clearly does care so much for her children, does try and form friendships, look after people from danger. But that’s the point too me, it’s not it’s the fact she isn’t an angel. It’s not the fact she’s a devil either. The play is full of moments of genuine humanity. Moments where genuine human love, of understanding, or an attempt to reach across and bond desperately with another human soul (between Courage and the prostitute Yvette, between the doomed pseudo-love of The Chef and Mother Courage), to salvage some tiny little bits of kindness in a world gone mad (in the priest’s attempts to help a wounded man). And yet they are fleeting, and like flowers trying to bloom under a car-park they can only slither weakly in tiny little cracks, never able to fully flower into their true beauty as they are repeatedly oppressed by the nature of their surroundings. War is tragic, as it crushes the potential of flawed, silly little people to ever become fully human, only mutilated half-finished clay figures, lumbering around a broken landscape, who try to mould themselves into something better but fail. War robs that ability from people, by either killing the young before they have even grown, or turning the surrounding players into collaborators and criminals just for survival.
So it is odd, and frankly slightly misgiving to me Brecht would be so harsh on this kind of a view. There’s a bizarre kind of distant disdain given to any kind of expression of human sorrow or despair in this play. He seems to have wanted actors to act this in no way an actor ever could do. Which I guess he’d say “duh! That’s the point of alienation techniques!” but I don’t think a drama this war could ever be conveyed that way without seeming almost sociopathic in its uninterest in human suffering. He wants us to see it in the abstract, like a good Marxist, as a tale of classes bouncing around each other in a grand arena table of imperialist power plays. We can’t. It’s impossible. We can only see the humans on the stage, and their raw powerful struggles in front us, and we can only sigh at them.
And so we leave Mother Courage, as she trundles on, learning nothing, gaining barely anything, ready to continue the cycle all over again. What do we sense from the end of this play? In one sense then, the play is a failure. And yet in another perhaps Brecht (without him even realising maybe), because he wrote such a powerful piece of drama, his descriptions and his dialogue such pieces of stark, brutal poetry, his use of characters and scenarios to convey points so well, in his use of a deliberately spoiler-laden stage title sequences, which robs us of the potential of vesting any hope in Mother Courage’s life before we have even begun reading, in his beautiful depiction of human interactions, and how human beings try to operate as humanity in a world divorced of it, created something that can transgress his own intentions and still become something truly amazing. Is Mother Courage to blame? Is she amoral? Guilty? Careless? Yes. And yet, do we still pity her for trying to play by the rules of a society geared against humanity, tries to retain little slices of morality in a world geared up totally to destroy it? I think we do. Because of these contradictions, it becomes to me a true masterpiece, a haunting depiction of human frailty in its all grandeur and monstrosity.
