The Influence of J.M.R. Lenz’s The Soldiers on Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children

Dramatic Effect/ Spectator

Neither Lenz nor Brecht were as interested in advocating a counter-system to Aristotelian poetics as they were in diffusing class distinctions and building a national audience. In a July 1775 letter to Sophie von de le Roche, Lenz described his goal of bridging the gap between the classes as “the whole plan of my life, my existence, my comedy writing, even someday of my death.”1   In the previous year in his lecture “On Götz von Berlichingen,” delivered to a literary society in Strasbourg, Lenz had prioritized weighing drama by its effect over adherence to rules. He condemned the stage of his day as overflowing with “nothing but masterpieces, which however, to be sure, are masterpieces only in the minds of their masters.”2   Humorously stated, this was his aversion for dramatic art as closed form, as exposition with the nothing-left-unsaid that didn’t allow for a spectator’s lasting participation. “For let us adopt another way of judging plays, my brothers,” he argued in the Götz lecture, “let us for a change look at their consequences, at the overall effect they have.”3   This casual statement is at the heart of Lenz’s iconoclasm: not judging plays by their adherence to classical parameters, as laid out by Aristotle or the French neoclassicists who dominated the discussion of drama in 18th century Europe, but by their ability to generate a spark of something new that the audience could carry out into the streets. Regarding the spectator effect, Lenz continued:

Therefore, cui bono? [for whose advantage?] What sort of effect do the products of all the thousand French geniuses have on our spirit, on our heart, on our whole existence? Heaven forbid I should be unjust. We take home with us a beautiful, delightful sweet feeling, as if we had downed a bottle of champagne—but that’s all. Sleep on it for a night and the whole thing’s wiped out again. . . .4

Though he denounces the theatre of feeling, judging emotionalism to be as transient as drinking champagne, he went on to ask for a theater of deeper resonances:

. . . .Where is the living impression, which afterwards mixes itself into attitudes, deeds, and actions, the Promethean spark that has stolen into our innermost soul so unnoticed that it fills our whole life with bliss, if we do not let it die away again by lying completely still.5

Lenz’s preoccupation with dramatic effect is expressed in his play The Soldiers itself. The fourth scene of Act I contains a lively and sexually frank coffeehouse debate between the army chaplain Eisenhardt and the Colonel (Count von Spannheim), Major Haudy, Officer Mary and others about the effects of attending the French theatre on the young military officers stationed in Armentières, Flanders. The chaplain has taken the position that the French theatre corrupts the intentions of the young officers toward the young women of the community. The debate grows heated after Haudy defends the theatre by saying that a single play, even “the worst sort of farce,” benefits not only officers but also the whole nation more than all the sermons the chaplain can preach in a lifetime.6  Eisenhardt responds by asking what, if anything, gentlemen might learn from the theater.    

MARY: Oh, Lord do we always have to be learning something?

We enjoy ourselves, isn’t that enough?

EISENHARDT: Would to God that you did only enjoy yourselves,

that you didn’t learn anything! But in fact you emulate what is

represented on the stage and inflict calamity and blight upon our

families.

COLONEL: My dear Chaplain, your zeal is praiseworthy, but it

smacks of the cassock, if you don’t mind my saying so. What

family has ever been ruined by an officer? No doubt a wench or

two that deserves no better are put in a family way.

HAUDY: A whore will always turn out a whore, no matter whose

hands she falls into; if not a soldier’s whore, then a preacher’s

whore.  (p. 11)

This is the first scene of several that features all men, military officers in a barracks-style discussion of sexuality. Using realistic dialogue unheard of in its day, with different registers of diction corresponding to the personalities of the officers rather than the uniformly elevated language of classicism, Lenz presents a spectrum of attitudes about the effects of the theatre on soldiers and the impact of a theatre-attending military on the community.

Scene Four is a meta-theatrical discussion that serves as reinforcement to the previous scene. The important Scene Three, already eluded to in regard to Zimmerman’s adaptation, has put forth an example of a theatre-going officer, the Baron Desportes, asking permission of a jeweler Wesener to take his daughter Marie to a see a twin bill of French plays: The Seeker of Wit and The Deserter (by Charles-Simon Favart, 1741; and Louis-Sebastien Mercier, 1770). The titles of the plays themselves, Lenz’s jest, offer commentary on the doomed chemistry of Marie and Desportes. Wesener refuses permission because of his daughter’s youth and because he is concerned with appear-ances. At the time, young women of virtue weren’t seen with military officers at the theater or elsewhere because the military’s ban against soldiers marrying left honorable intentions out of any such arrangement. Furthermore, as the soldier debate of Scene Four reveals, more is at stake for the Wesener family than appearances.

The scenes complement each other with a practical initiation and then a theoretical discussion of a storyline.   Scene Three tugs the spectator inward toward the circumstances of the protagonist Marie Wesener and the main plot, and then Scene Four distances the spectator with the larger picture of the social issue being explored.   This approach to the effects of the theatre, from within the context of a play itself, suggests the influence of the two major playwrights that Lenz translated: Plautus and Shakespeare. From both of these authors Lenz seems to have gleaned the “play within the play” approach of writing characters conscious of performing roles. Through soliloquies and asides, at the expense of theatrical illusion, stage-conscious characters blur the distinction between actor and spectator in order to provoke greater watchfulness.   As the Officers in Scene Four evaluate the experience of theatre-going, the whole scene functions like an aside to the audience, who by attending The Soldiers, are in a similar position to the theorizing characters. Not only is the world a stage but the stage is a world where Lenz, through his layering of perception, abandons the classical justification for drama: Aristotelian catharsis. He substitutes his own justification: circumspection.

Through circumspection and the resulting thoughtfulness, through an “imaginative grasp of reality,” as Roy Pascal calls it,7 will come the action that Lenz rhapsodizes about in the Götz lecture and calls “the soul of the world.”8   It is only through action, in Lenz’s view, that “we come to resemble God who acts without ceasing and without ceasing delights in his works.”9 He called for a radical new theatre practice that forgoes the artificial emotionalism of Aristotelian drama and the pacification of the audience. That Lenz encourages thoughtful activism based on observation speaks to his goal of motivating the spectator to a greater awareness of the deformities of a despotic class structure. His ultimate goal is for audiences to take action against the ills of society as they are demonstrated in his plays. His visual orientation toward perceiving drama is founded in his rejection of the theatrical tradition of hearing plays. However, as Patricia C. McBride indicates, Lenz’s aesthetic strategy for the artist and the audience member is not merely a mechanical observation of reality:

[ . . . ] the linchpin of Lenz’s case for art’s distinctiveness concerns the primacy of the visual sense as the anthropological foundation for the intuitive cognition to which art grants access. It is the optic sense that defines both the synthetic gift of the artist/genius and the mode of drama’s reception, over and against the linear unfolding of conceptual thought.10

Both Lenz and his descendent Brecht wrote pessimistic dramas, made all the more disturbing with their use of humor, not because they couldn’t see anything good in life, but because they wanted to sound the alarm and to motivate a complacent German public against negative social conditions.   Lenz’s potential audience, more than a decade before the French Revolution, was a fragmentary Germany of more than three hundred ducal states and principalities, a public that either didn’t attend plays, as exemplified by Wesener who had no interest in the theatre, or sought frivolous entertainment and an escape from the drudgery of existence. Otherwise they wanted soaring pieces of patriotism that indulged the fantasy of a unified Germany. The communist Brecht wrote Mother Courage on the brink of World War II after much inaction had allowed for the rise of a fascist regime. Regarding these two dramatists, Leidner and Wurst have written:

Avoiding all celebrations of German Classicism, Brecht insists that precisely those traditions that challenge the unengaged ideology of Goethe and Schiller and draw the public to self-critical discussion are those that deserve attention. Thus he allies himself with the author of Der Hofmeister [The Tutor], his predecessor in an anti-Aristotelian theater, to reject Aristotelian form, heroes designed to be cheered on, and the dangerous momentum that can build in the theater when the audience too easily gets its way and leaps into uncritical emotional indulgence.11

In Brecht’s essay “The Modern Theater Is the Epic Theatre” he includes a table that contrasts the Dramatic Theatre with the Epic Theatre. The most important “change in emphasis” in Brecht’s table is that the spectator becomes an observer. After the first in the list of distinctions—that Dramatic Theatre is held together with a plot and Epic Theatre is arranged through narrative—most other distinctions involve the audience member shifting his position from escaping inward and dissolving into the experience of the central figure to standing back to consider a depiction of reality. Shifting from “feeling” to “reason,” from “experience” to “picture of the world,” from “the human being taken for granted” to “the human being as subject of inquiry,” from “wearing down the capacity for action” to “arousing the capacity for action,” from “eyes on the finish” to “eyes on the course”—through these and other adjustments—Brecht tabulates how in the modern theatre the spectator stands back for an honest appraisal of reality instead of escaping into a paralyzing illusion.12

In the opening scene of Mother Courage and Her Children, the first lines express the difficulty the Recruiter is having enlisting soldiers for the war. The Recruiter says: “How can you muster a unit in a place like this? I’ve been thinking about suicide, Sergeant.”13   The telltale word is the first one, How, for this is a play about how things happen, how events contribute to the destruction of a family and the feeding of war. The Recruiter’s lachrymose remark about killing himself is not to be taken seriously and seems placed in the opening speech to invalidate heavy sentiment from the start. A further distancing technique, similar to Lenz’s coffee house debate on the effects of the French theatre, is the Sergeant’s musings on the benefits of war and the failings of peace. “Takes a war to make order. Peacetime, the human race runs wild.” (p. 3) Conveniently he doesn’t mention the famine, disease, and casualties of war, though the Thirty Years War has been in progress for four years at the play’s outset. He goes on to say that he’s been to places that haven’t seen a war in seventy years and that “folks hadn’t got names to them, couldn’t tell one another apart.”(p. 4) This is another Brechtian irony, in that most of the roles in this wartime play aren’t named either, but given generic titles. Even characters with important parts like Cook and Chaplain are known by their functions. If war creates order, it also dehumanizes people down to what use they are in the grand machinery of devastation. In its cogwheel participants, it creates the partial perspective exemplified by the Sergeant’s love of order, which must have pained the 1949 Berlin audience, survivors of World War II and the nightmare of fascism. The Sergeant’s pro-war fragmented perspective is mirrored by the officers in The Soldiers who believe that women alone are responsible for upholding their virtue.

Mother Courage and her wagon

Helene Wiegel as Mother Courage, legendary performer, wife of Bertolt Brecht

At the beginning of each of the twelve Mother Courage scenes the description at the top of the page, usually printed on placards for the audience to read in production, gives the when, where, and what of the scene, but not how.   Since the suspense of “what next?” is reduced to “how does it happen?”, the spectator is led to scrutinize the material components on stage as the scene unfolds.

                        Spring 1624. The Swedish Commander-in-Chief Count

                        Oxenstierna is raising troops in Dalecarlia for the Polish

                        campaign. The canteen woman Anna Fierling, known

                        under the name of Mother Courage, loses one son.   (p. 3)

Soon after the Courage family and the ubiquitous wagon appear on the roadway, the matriarch greets the military men and tellingly answers the question of who theyare: “Business folk.” Then another of Brecht’s distancing tactics ensues: song. Mother Courage launches into her jingle, which is part Plautine cantica, part musical sales pitch, mixed with gallows humor and a grim refrain. Eleven scenes later the play ends with no end of the war in sight and the same words:

                                  The new year’s come. The watchmen shout.

                                    The thaw sets in. The dead remain.

                                    Wherever life has not died out

                                    It staggers to its feet again.  (p. 4)

To open his play the playwright has taken care to keep the audience at a distance and encourage thoughtfulness rather than empathy. The word so commonly associated with Brecht and his distancing techniques, Verfremdung, seems less severe in its application than the usual translations of “alienation” or “estrangement.” The objective is not to turn the audience away but instead throw cold water on their conventional expectations of the stage and build up in their place a fascination for the ordinary.

In the 1949 Winds interview, Brecht complained about the tendency of the theatre of his day to follow the lead of actors and turn inward.

Our theatre is already unrealistic in that it discards observation. Our actors look into themselves instead of the world around them. They treat the happenings between human beings on which all depends simply as vehicles for a display of temperament.14

The primary goal of Brecht, like Lenz, is to create observers in the audience; from observation comes thinking and from thinking comes action. During rehearsals for the Berlin production of Mother Courage, Brecht used his epic or narrative technique of having actors say “he said” or “she said” before reciting their lines. This is his tactic for preventing the actors from merging with their roles, which would only lead to an unwanted audience identification and distract from his goal of working toward “an increasingly precise description of reality.”15  Brecht was battling against a powerful disposition, the tradition by which audiences tap into the emotional continuity of characters and ignore the physical details of the scene. As a part of his morning ritual before Mother Courage rehearsals he reports in his journal studying a large print of Brueghel’s “Peasant Dance” on the wall.16 This, no doubt, was to reinforce his commitment to the visual dimension of the play. During the rehearsals Brecht paid profound attention to actor movement, insisting on carefully orchestrated groups, the kind of grouping strategy he had gleaned from Brueghel’s painting. He permitted movement by an actor away from a group only when there was a compelling reason to do so because he didn’t want to devalue movement. In his notes he explains his strategy for grouping and denying actor movement for the sake of variety because “the consequence is a devaluation of all movement on the stage”; when “the spectator ceases to look for a specific meaning behind each movement, he stops taking movement seriously.”17

The dominant sensual linkage to the theatre of serious intent, from the Greek tragedies to Sturm und Drang, was through the ear, not the eye. This tradition of hearing plays is something both Lenz and Brecht lost patience with. Brecht in his poem “SHOWING HAS TO BE SHOWN” pleads to his audience for greater scrutiny:

‘Now take note, this man is now betraying someone

and this is how he does it.

This is what he is like when jealousy seized him,

and this is how he deals when dealing.’18

 In his satirical sketch Pandemonium Germanica, the character of Lenz says: “Alas I resolved to go down the mountain and become a painter of human society.”19   Lenz’s goal to be interesting and more faithful to an honest depiction of reality, not the blinding emotive quality and ethical bent of classical theatre, led him to his visual orientation.   In his “Notes on the Theater,” he wrote: “With one glance we would like to penetrate the innermost nature of all creatures, receive with sensitivity all the delight that is in nature, and unite it with us . . .”20 He rejected idealism and adherence to a prerequisite moral code as the basis for drama, in favor of, to use the phrase of Barbara R. Kes-Costa, “fidelity to nature on the stage.”21 In his “Notes” he describes his mission to broaden the canvas of theatre beyond qualitative limits, from idealism to the natural.

The true poet does not include in his imagination, according to whim, what gentleman choose to call beautiful nature, which, your leave, is nature gone awry. He takes a position—and must then make the connection accordingly . . . it would be possible to confuse the painting with the thing itself.22

Depicting life as it is and not as it ought to be is the opposite extreme of what Friedrich Schiller mapped out in his “Stage as Moral Institution,” written in 1784. In the opening of this essay, Schiller prescribed a stage that unites with the legal and religious sectors to ennoble and control the masses, to excite the spirit of the public to exercise virtue. Overall Schiller’s style was fluid and controlled in contrast to Lenz’s faltering and self-interrupting prose. Schiller described the theater as a kind of moral tonic and means of escape into a pacifying alternate reality for the human being made exhausted by the demands of his environment.

Schiller, author of The Robbers

Friedrich von Schiller {1759 -1805) Antagonist to Lenz Brecht drama

When melancholy gnaws at the heart, when trouble poisons our solitude, when we are disgusted with the world, and a thousand worries oppress us, or when our energies are destroyed by over-exercise, the stage revives us, we dream of another sphere, we recover ourselves, our torpid nature is roused by noble passions, our blood circulates more healthily.23

By forgetting and arriving at Schiller’s “heavenly destination,” by surrendering to a pre-ordained “general ecstasy” of the playwright’s devising, the individual is inspired to conform.24   This is a perfect description of what Lenz and Brecht deplored about the stage’s effect on the spectator. To induce a forgetting of the world through theatrical illusion is contrary to their intentions to increase the public’s sociological awareness. It is Schiller’s stage that Brecht disparages in his poems about the theatre. In “The Theatre Home of Dreams,” he attacks illusion-based drama as “A place where one learns how to/ Bear our ignominious and uniform Life.”25   In “The Theatre of Emotions,” he writes of the actors that “the poisoned audience follows your exhibitions.”26   In “The Play Is Over,” he mocks actor declamation.

                      The play is over. The performance committed. Slowly

                        The theatre, a sagging intestine, empties. In the dressing

                                    rooms

                        The nimble salesmen of hotchpotch mimicry, of rancid

                                    rhetoric

                        Wash off make-up and sweat. At last

                        The lights go down which showed up the miserable

                        Botched job; twilight falls on

                        The lovely nothingness of the misused stage . . .27

As long as the theatre was used to placate the spectator, to aid him in forgetting, to assist in an escape and to inspire participation with an idealized reality, social change would never occur.   Rather than escapism, Lenz and Brecht sought to embrace ordinary experience, “the unpopular virtues, the ones everyone treads on,” as Lenz states it in The Little Men (Die Kleinen).28 Brecht, commenting on the difference between his theatre and Schiller’s “Stage as Moral Institution,” acknowledges his own pedagogical tendencies and then states: “Yet in the epic theatre moral arguments only took second place. Its aim was less to moralize than to observe.”29  Here it is important to note that both Brecht and Lenz, whose goal through their work was the betterment of society, didn’t abandon morality, only its explicit instruction, in favor of a heightened under-standing of what was best for a society as a whole. What may seem like Lenz’s call for an amoral reportage actually stems from his faith in God. In his “Notes” he dismisses the Aristotelian credo of three unities, saying that he could name a hundred unities that are all combined in the one true unity, God’s.30  In his view the job of the dramatic poet is not to create a picture of the world, but to faithfully recreate the picture as it has already been given to us as divine creation. The shift from imitation to creation that Lenz endorsed is, in effect, re-creating what has already been put before us. Timothy Pope, who has written extensively about Lenz from the theological standpoint, gathering much of his insight from the poet’s theological essays and letters to friends, sees in the soldier scenes of The Soldiers a faithfulness toward “life as it is, a respect that has strong religious roots in Lenz’s belief in the sacredness of all phenomena and all human action.”31

In fact Lenz challenged the whole classical obsession with unity and replaced it with a call for diversity or variety, Mannigfeltigkeit.   His call for diversity, for the cogitation of the whole realm of human existence, is the opposite of Schiller’s demand, in his “On Bürger’s Poems,” for idealization and ennoblement, for the poet “to free what is excellent in his subject [ . . .] from coarser, at least alien admixtures, to gather in a single object the beams of perfection scattered among several objects, . . .”32 Instead of the narrowing down of reality to this single perfect object, the job of Lenz’s poet is to draw into his soul his view of the entire world.

Going further McBride sees in the aesthetic theory of Lenz’s “Notes” an expectation for the dramatic artist to deliver divine insight.

What the artist is called upon to imitate is not an external picture of the world, but rather the internal images reality summons in his soul . . . an all-encompassing grasp of reality, a penetrating insight which is equated with the gaze of God.33

Lenz remained true to this proto-Romantic, modern approach to art. He paid the price as an impoverished outcast, unlike Goethe and Schiller who retreated from the Sturm und Drang of their first plays. One wonders what kind of plays Schiller would have written had he continued the proto-Romantic notions he began in The Robbers. In a way Lenz’s first play The Tutor and Schiller’s first play The Robbers are different sides of the same coin. Brecht observed that in Schiller’s play, a man if he is to remain a man must turn robber; while in Lenz’s play, if a man is to remain socially acceptable, he must emasculate himself.34   If fate had dealt Schiller and Lenz different hands, they may have worked together to raise the social consciousness of the German public.

[This is the third part of a series that considers the role of Lenz in shaping modern drama.]
Endnotes
  1. Herbort, Die Soldaten, 51.
  2. J.M.R. Lenz, “On Götz von Berlichingen,” In Eighteenth Century German Criticism: Herder, Lenz, Lessing, and others, The German Library Volume 11, ed. Timothy J. Chamberlain (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1992), 194.
  3. Lenz, “On Götz,” 194.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Ibid.  
  6. J.M.R. Lenz, Sturm und Drang: The Soldiers, The Childmurderess, Storm and Stress, and The Robbers, The German Library Volume 14, ed., Alan C. Leidner, trans. William E. Yuill, (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1992), 11. Unless specified citations from The Soldiers are from this edition.
  7. Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang, 277.
  8. Lenz, “On Götz,” 193.
  9. Ibid.
  10. Patricia C. McBride, “The Paradox of Aesthetic Discourse: J.M.R. Lenz’s ‘Anmerkungen übers Theater,’” German Studies Review 22, 3 (October 1999): 400.
  11. Unpopular Virtues, 77.
  12. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 37.
  13. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. and intro. John Willet (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1994), 3. All citations from M.C. are from this edition unless otherwise specified.
  1. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 224.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Brecht, Journals, 411.
  4. Brecht, “Notes and Variants,” Mother Courage, 106.
  5. Brecht, Poems, 341.
  6. Pandemonium Germanica quoted in Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Volume I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 154.
  7. J. M. R. Lenz, “Notes on the Theater,” In Essays on German Theatre: Lessing, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and others, The German Library Volume 83, ed. Margaret Herzfeld-Sander (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1985), 20.
  8. Barbara R. Kes-Costa, “Freundschaft geht über Natur: On Lenz’s Rediscovered Adaptation of Plautus,” Space to Act: The Theater of J. M. R. Lenz, eds. Alan C. Leidner and Helga S. Madland (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1993), 163.
  9. Lenz, “Notes,” 20-21.
  10. Friedrich Schiller: “The Stage as a Moral Institution,” In Theatre Theory Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel, ed. Daniel Gerould, (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2000), 254.
  11. Schiller, “Moral Institution,” 254.
  12. Brecht, Poems, 340.
  13. Brecht, Poems, 309.
  14. Brecht, Poems, 342-343.
  15. Unpopular Virtues, v.
  16. Bertolt Brecht, “Is the Epic Theatre Some Kind of ‘Moral Institution?’”, In Essays on German Theatre: Lessing, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and others, The German Library Volume 83, ed. Margaret Herzfeld-Sander (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1985), 201.
  17. Lenz, “Notes,” 21.
  18. Pope, The Holy Fool, 144-145.
  19. Friedrich Schiller, “On Bürger’s Poems,” In Eighteenth Century German Criticism: Herder, Lenz, Lessing, and others, The German Library Volume 11, ed. Timothy J. Chamberlain (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1992), 268.
  20. McBride, “Paradox,” German Studies Review, 400.
  21. Brecht, Journals, 425.