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

[This is the fourth part of a series.  Please scroll down to read the first three installments.]

Source Materials/Subject

The relationship of The Soldiers and Mother Courage sheds interesting light on Brecht’s practice of creative borrowing.   The sources and settings of the two plays are very different, but they converge through their insights into human behavior. In addition, their opening gambits establish a social dynamic that draws them together from contrasting origins.

The Soldiers is set in Flanders in the 1770s, over a three-year period in Lenz’s own time. Much of the soldier interaction in the play seems inspired by his uneasy affiliation with the Kleist brothers, especially in Strasbourg where Cleophe Fibich the goldsmith’s daughter lived as well. The publication of his semi-autobiographical Tagebuch in 1877 confirmed the author’s assertion that the Marie Wesener/Officer Desportes aspect of the play is based on a true incident in which Lenz played a part. 1  After completing the play Lenz sent it to Johann Herder (1744-1803) with the statement “that it involved half my existence.”2   In a follow-up letter, he wrote:

            It is in the strictest sense a true story, experienced and

            prophesized in the innermost recesses of my soul. But, as

            I hope, masked so that the original, who is no Herder, will

            never recognize himself in it.3

Another letter reveals that Lenz had written the play, documentary-style, as the events of the romantic intrigue were unfolding and didn’t wait for “the true story” to conclude. He had already finished The Soldiers and sent it to Herder when Cleophe Fibich (Marie) was still awaiting the return of her betrothed, Friedrich Georg von Kleist, (Desportes). Lenz wrote, “Whether he does so or deceives her is in the lap of the gods.”4 If he didn’t return, then Lenz comments that the play could not be published soon enough in order to ruin the man or force him to honor his pledge. If he did return, then Lenz fretted that the publication of the play would destroy Cleophe’s good name and happiness. He made attempts to conceal his authorship, suggesting the pseudonym “Steenkirk of Amsterdam” to his publisher. He even tried to convince Klinger to accept responsibility for writing it.5  As Lenz discovered, fidelity to nature had its downside.

Brecht, by contrast, set Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years War three centuries before his time, against a panorama of 17th century history.   Another well-known drama of the same war is Schiller’s trilogy Wallenstein. Though Wallenstein may have influenced Brecht’s writing of Mother Courage, it is likely that, if anything, he was reacting against this German classic. Eric Bentley has written that Brecht at times seemed to think of himself as the Anti-Schiller, someone who opposed the depiction of the Thirty Years War in Wallenstein with his “antiheroic, anticlassical, antiromantic worm’s eye view” of the war in Mother Courage.6   Because of the choices Brecht and Schiller made regarding their chief protagonists—the first a canteen woman and the second a duke and commander in chief of the Imperial Forces—the plays diverge in all but the historical backdrop.

In the case of Mother Courage and Her Children not only is the heroine of “lowly origin,” so is almost all of the cast—with the exception of the General in Scene Two and Yvette’s ancient Colonel in Scene Three. Schiller’s play may have given Brecht the idea of segregating the lowly from the nobly born, rather than integrating characters from all classes through out the play, as in Shakespeare. The first section of the trilogy, Wallenstein’s Camp, involves commoners and soldiers on the war’s sidelines who do not appear in the second and third sections. The Piccolomini and Wallenstein’s Death detail the war politics of the nobility and the tragic demise of the title character. Relevant to the writing of Mother Courage, Wallenstein’s Camp features a canteen woman. In Scene Five, she is asked about the whereabouts of her husband.

CANTEEN WOMAN:

                        The villain! He played me a scoundrelly trick,

                        No words are too strong for the way he behaved,

                        He ran off with every penny I’d saved,    

                        Left me with nothing but his brat!        

BOY [comes running up to her]:

                        Mother, don’t talk of my dad like that!

FIRST TROOPER:

                        Another mouth for the Emperor to feed

                        If the army would keep alive, it must breed!7

This excerpt seems a shadowy prefiguration of Brecht’s play, specifically the opening scene when Courage accounts for the various missing fathers of her three children, while the Recruiter looks out for a war that has its own needs.

Brecht drew more details from the narratives of Johann Grimmelshausen, especially The Life of Courage: The notorious Thief, Whore, and Vagabond, published in 1670. Part folktale, part wartime correspondence renowned for its realism, The Life of Courage is the female counter-narrative to an earlier work by the same author, Simplicissimus (1668). The main character Courage gives a first-person account of her exploits from the age of thirteen at the beginning of the Thirty Years War, which for her is the summer of 1620, until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 when she joins a band of gypsies and disappears into the woods. This Courage has almost supernatural prowess in traditionally male and traditionally female worlds, in both martial and marital arts, one might say. She is expert on horseback and at yielding a musket on the battlefield and at using her beauty to steal a man’s heart and purse in the bedroom, yet this identity-shifting, hermaphrodite quality that is her means of survival is also the cause of her slow descent. Childless, never even pregnant, she marries seven times to military men of declining rank and becomes a canteen woman, and then finally a gypsy. Along with appropriating the name of Courage, Brecht adopts Grimmelhausen’s tone of grim desperation mixed with ribald humor. But The Life of Courage’s heroine, who prides herself on her sexual conquests, is more in keeping with Mother Courage’s army prostitute Yvette; and she tells a lustier, grander story than the more humble existence etched out by Brecht. Underlying both works is sadness for a heroine with pluck and enterprise who competes in a man’s world but ultimately fights a losing battle.

author of Life of Courage

Johann Grimmelshausen (1621-1676), Author of Simplicissimus and Life of Courage

In the narrative’s most disturbing realistic episode, Grimmelshausen’s Courage recounts the gang rape she endures arising from the shame she caused a major from the Duke of Brunswick’s regiment whom she had captured at Höchst on the River Main. The major orders the rape as revenge for being taken prisoner on the battlefield by a woman, an indignity that nearly caused him to be murdered by his own troops. This war within a war as the heroine competes in a military society, this rage against a woman who reigns supreme both in battle and in marriage, is the narrative’s dark undertow. And this unending conflict between genders exacerbated by war, along with the protagonist’s descent from heroism to mere survival, is what Brecht seems to have valued most. With the bluntness characteristic of Grimmelhausen’s tale, Brecht addresses the gender war from the vantage points of Courage and her daughter Kattrin (“dumb from war, soldier stuffed something in her mouth when she was little” p.59) and the army prostitute Yvette.

Sexual combat under the umbrella of The Thirty Years War is responsible for how the original Courage acquires her nickname.   Disguised as the Czech manservant and soldier Janko, she gets into a tavern brawl with a drunken German soldier who, while wrestling with her, reaches inside her breeches with the intention of, as she puts it, “grabbing the very piece of equipment I lacked.”8 Fearful of being revealed as a woman, Courage fights, “almost half-mad with fury” and with such ferocity that her opponent’s face turns out looking more like “a demon’s mask.”9 After she is called before her Captain to explain why she made such a mess of her opponent, she says, wanting to avoid a vulgarity before her superior, whom she has fallen in love with: “Because he tried to grab my courage, which until now no man has touched.”10 At that point she employs one of her spectacular gender shifts and bares herself to the Captain. With feigned reluctance and tears, she allows him to take her virginity and from that moment on the Captain and everyone else call her Courage.

This name-giving anecdote in the tradition of a folktale serves as a template for the way the heroine functions in the narrative, leapfrogging from woman to man, man to woman, and doing whatever it takes both to profit and to survive. Brecht adopts a similar folk hero strategy of name-giving.   How the name of his Courage is won defines her conflicted nature. In the opening scene, soon after she appears on stage and sings her prophetic song, the Sergeant asks for her papers. The younger son (Swiss Cheese) implies that her name is all she needs:

            THE YOUNGER SON: What, mean to say you don’t know Mother Courage?

            SERGEANT: Never heard of her. What’s she called Courage for?

            MOTHER COURAGE: Courage is the name they gave me because I was scared of going broke, sergeant, so I drove me cart right through the bombardment of Riga with fifty loaves of bread aboard. They were going mouldy, it was high time, hadn’t any choice really.

            SERGEANT: Don’t be funny with me. Your papers. (p. 5)

Her efficient accounting of her moniker reveals, as with the other Courage, that the irony of the name is in its inspiration: FEAR. In Mother Courage’s case it’s “scared of going broke.” Grimmelshausen’s Courage described “fearing this evil customer had discovered what sex I was.”11 In both cases fear drives the Courages to survive when everything around them is consumed.

Despite these influences of Grimmelhausen’s narrative and Schiller’s tragedy on Mother Courage and Her Children, the fact is, neither work resembles Brecht’s play as much as Lenz’s The Soldiers does. The Soldiers is not set during the Thirty Years War—like Büchner’s Woyzeck it is not set during wartime at all—but it does focus on class conflict and a business family destroyed by its proximity to the military, the true subject of Mother Courage. The close relationship between the plays on this score becomes clear in the opening gambits of the characters.

After two very short scenes, the cornerstone third scene of The Soldiers puts the main storyline into motion and establishes the flawed nature of the parent/child dynamic that is so important to the play. This scene begins with the dashing officer Desportes who is flirting with Marie in her father’s jewelry shop. “What are you doing there, divine Mademoiselle?” (p. 6) As readers we recognize that this label is a false one, since we have seen this young woman behave childishly in Scene One (she struggled to spell the word “Madam” in the play’s opening lines and then burst into tears after her older sister teased her about her boyfriend Stolzius). In Scene Three, a more composed Marie scribbles on a blank piece of paper and puts her pen behind her ear before speaking. She answers: “Oh, nothing, nothing, sir. (smiling) I’m far too fond of writing.” (p. 6) Here she matches a false compliment with a false sentiment, since it has been demonstrated to us that writing is a struggle for her. Within a few short scenes Lenz has established a motif that will run throughout the play, the use of misleading formal language that betrays those who trust it. Letter-writing in particular functions as a symbol for form without content, or, to use Bruce Duncan’s phrase, “the petrification of language.”12

Throughout the scene, Desportes traffics in empty lies. His seductive falsehoods reach a crescendo with: “I swear to you, never in all my life have I beheld a being more perfect than you, mademoiselle.” (p. 7) This is the language of idealism and the dominant French aristocratic culture that was so distasteful to Lenz and that Georg Büchner would despise. When Marie accuses him of employing “simple empty compliments” (p. 7), he oozes with hyperbole; in fact, his speech confirms that he is a liar because he is deceiving the military about his whereabouts.

Desportes uses courtly language as a cynical tool to take advantage of a daughter of the burgher class. But it is not only Desportes who is guilty of not saying what he means. Marie too uses language to assume different roles for manipulating others. She misleads the spurned Stolzius through letters. Later she plays one officer suitor against another in order to stay informed about Desportes, who has fled from her and his debts. In a variety of situations Marie has a ready answer for advancing her cause.   Despite her reputation as an innocent maiden with the authority figures of the play, as Timothy Pope observes, Marie lies instinctively for her self-interest.13  In the third scene, the reader may believe that the repartee of Marie and Desportes is only the verbal jousting that goes on between love interests. Therefore it is important that Lenz inserts another ingredient: the entrance of Marie’s father Wesener, whose behavior is marked by the same incongruity between form and content, word and gesture.

WESENER (enters): Well, well, look who’s here! Your

                        humble servant, Baron. How come we have the honor of

                        your presence once again? (embraces him)       (p. 7)

Is Wesener a humble servant who acknowledges the honor of the Baron’s presence? Or is he the equal that his gesture of embrace implies? Servants don’t embrace their masters like equals and equals don’t use submissive class-oriented language toward one another. It is precisely these conflicting identities residing in the father that have been shown to co-exist in the daughter. Both characters want to believe that they can rise up to the aristocratic plateau inhabited by Desportes, while knowing in their hearts they are from the burgher class. The key moment in the scene and in Lenz’s psychological insight occurs after Wesener has denied Desportes’ request to escort his daughter to the theater, saying that she is too young and it would be improper for her to be seen with a member of the military. Just as the battle seems won, Wesener the parent reverts back to Wesener the merchant and says: “Your pardon, Baron, gladly as I’d do you the favor . . . in all other matters I am at your service.” (p. 8)

This servility for the cause of his business is a cue that the slick Desportes does not miss. Neither was it missed by the adaptor of The Tutor, Brecht, who while reading the play must have recognized in Wesener the same German Misère that he recognized in Läuffer’s involuntary bowing and overall sycophantic behavior. Desportes responds with: “By the way, my dear Wesener, won’t you show me some of your brooches?” (p. 8)—and at this, the father instantly becomes the jeweler and exits (bowing out of the scene like Läuffer). With Wesener out of the way, Marie and Desportes arrange for a secret theatre date. Even after Wesener returns, his daughter twice gestures privately to Desportes while her father is preoccupied with displaying the brooches. (p. 9)

In the opening scene of Mother Courage and Her Children another sort of documentation occupies the same symbolic place that letter-writing does in The Soldiers. After the Sergeant’s demand for papers, Courage can produce only the pages of a prayer book used for wrapping gherkins, a road map to Moravia, and a stamped certificate that states that their dead horse doesn’t have foot-and-mouth disease. In other words, her notion of a business license is as void of meaning as the letters are in Lenz’s play. They speak, comically, to the same inability to answer to the aristocratic code.

Finally, Courage supplies her “honest face” as the only license she needs. (p. 6) Brecht puts a nice twist on the satirical documentation theme by having the seemingly irrelevant horse document remind the Recruiter that Courage’s sons have taken the place of the horse and are no more than work animals. Brecht, in his notes for Scene One, indicates that at this point the military men should regard the two sons as if they were livestock.14  But just as in Lenz’s play Wesener defends Marie against the advances of Desportes by pointing out her youth and innocence, Courage disqualifies Eilif from military service with “He’s nowt but a child. You want to take him off to the slaughterhouse, I know you lot.” (p. 8) She defends against his kidnapping by drawing a knife, the threatening gesture at first reinforcing her words, then exposing the incongruity of her dual role as mother and canteen woman.

            Let’s both go fishing, said angler to worm. To Swiss Cheese:

            Run off, call out they’re trying to kidnap your brother. She

            pulls a knife: Go on, you kidnap him, just try. I’ll slit you open,

            trash. I’ll teach you to make war with him. We’re doing an

            honest trade in ham and linen, and we’re peaceable folk.   (p. 8)

The merchant in her serves up the phrase “peaceable folk” as a means of softening the mother threatening them with a knife, a humorous contradiction. The Sergeant diffuses this with his insight that Courage and her family live off the war and the war needs soldiers to continue—suggesting that the Courage family profits from war but contributes nothing toward it. Courage attempts to counter this with a prophecy of doom for the Sergeant and by having each of her children draw slips of marked paper from her hat. Each time one of them chooses a slip with the mark of “X” it means death in the war if they don’t avoid it, her trick and excuse for sending the Recruiter off empty-handed. But, of course, the black-marked bits of paper prove prophetic, as her children are each fated to be casualties.

In his notes Brecht says that a critical line in the first scene comes at the midway point when Courage first mentions the sale of a belt buckle.15 After Eilif asks permission to “clobber” the Recruiter for referring to him and his brother as oxen, Mother Courage shifts from parent to merchant, echoing the “humble servant” speech of Wesener’s. The shift of address from her son to the two military men is instantaneous and unthinking, so deeply ingrained is her dual nature. The bracketed text is mine.

[to Eilif] And I says you can’t; just stop where you are.

[to the men] And now two fine officers like you, I bet

you could use a good pistol, or a belt buckle, yours is on

its last legs, sergeant.   (p. 7)

At the scene’s end, Courage has climbed up into the cart and it appears she will get away with her family intact, just as in the other play Wesener seems to prevail in blocking Desportes. At this critical juncture the Recruiter feigns giving into Courage’s sales pitch and says:

            Might as well look at that belt-buckle sergeant. After all, our

            friends here have to live by their business. Hey, you people,

            the sergeant wants to buy that belt buckle. (p. 12)  

Mother Courage takes the bait. Once again, as swiftly as Wesener, she shifts from parent to business owner. She shows the Sergeant the belt buckle at the back of the wagon where they are out of the wind (because the Sergeant has complained about not feeling well). While distracted with the sale, she is unaware of Eilif being led away by the Recruiter. This divide-and-conquer strategy, used to separate the business owner from the parent as well as the parent from the child, is Lenz’s play-defining insight and Brecht, through his sense of creative borrowing, makes it his own.   Mercantile instincts, the pursuit of a sale, in each case blinds a parent to his or her more primal loyalties. By thus concluding the opening scene of Mother Courage, Brecht created a scene that is an autonomous miniature of the whole play, just as Lenz did in Act I, Scene Three of The Soldiers.

Significantly, it must be stated that the sale of the belt buckle is not in the 1939 draft of Mother Courage. In that early version Eilif is led away by the Recruiter while Courage attends to the Sergeant with brandy because he says he isn’t feeling well. This version is much less damaging to the portrait of the anti-heroine, who, as the audience of the Zurich production verified, seemed to be acting out of misguided maternal instincts. During rehearsals for the 1949 Berliner Ensemble production, Brecht commented:

            we have to alter the first scene of COURAGE, since it has in it the seeds of what enabled the audience at the zurich production to be moved mainly by the persistence and resilience of a being in torment (the eternal mother creature)—which is not really the point. now courage loses her first son because she lets herself be drawn into a little deal, [. . . ]. this is a distinct improvement, it was suggested by kuckhahn.16

Though Brecht credits his assistant Kuckhahn with this vital change in the dynamic of the opening scene, one that resonates throughout the remainder of the play, it is clearly a psychological insight mined from Lenz’s The Soldiers. As Brecht admits, the play’s opening doesn’t work without “the little deal.” As it stands the first scene establishes the pattern of how the heroine will lose each of her three children, each in their turn executed for violating the ethics of war while she is attending, in one way or another, to her business interests.

Endnotes

  1. Roman Graf, “Male Homosocial Desire in Die Soldaten,” Space to Act: The Theater of J. M. R. Lenz, eds. Alan C. Leidner and Helga S. Madland (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1993), 41.
  2. William E. Yuill, “Introduction,” J. M. R. Lenz: The Tutor and The Soldiers, J.M.R. Lenz, trans.William E. Yuill (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), xxi.
  3. Yuill, “Introduction,”xxi.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Eric Bentley, The Brecht Commentaries (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1981), 101.
  7. Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers and Wallenstein, trans. F. J. Lamport, (London: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1979), 181.
  8. Johann Grimmelshausen, The Life of Courage: The notorious Thief, Whore, and Vagabond, trans. Mike Mitchell, (Sawtry, Cambs, UK: Dedalus Ltd., 2001), 33-34.
  9. Grimmelshausen, Courage, 33-34.
  10. Grimmelshausen, 33-34.
  11. Ibid.
  12. Bruce Duncan, “The Comic Structure of Lenz’s Die Soldaten,” MLN, 91, 3, German Issue (Johns Hopkins University Press: April 1976): 517.
  13. Pope, 147.
  14. Brecht, “Notes and Variants,” Mother Courage, 107.
  15. Brecht, “Notes and Variants, 108.
  16. Brecht, Journals, 404.