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TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PT 7

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

[This is the seventh and final part of a seven part series. Included is the bibliography for the entire series.  Please scroll down to read the six previous installments.]

Theme/Lasting Effect

Grim Reaper Courage

Mother Courage as Grim Reaper (art: Franciszek Starowieyski)

Lenz and Brecht shared the goal of building a new national audience for drama, and this goal informed every aspect of their dramaturgy.   By beginning this thesis with “Spectator Effect” and moving inward, I’ve addressed the thematic dimension of The Soldiers and Mother Courage implicitly all along the way. In this section, I will explicitly probe theme as the inward action that holds the plays together, inspiring and activating a hunger for lasting change in the audience.

The goal of both Lenz and Brecht’s theatre is for the audience to develop into a more class-sensitive public better prepared to begin a dialogue with itself. To paraphrase Herbert Blau: Brecht’s aim for the devices of epic form is to raise the consciousness of the spectator to a higher level of criticism.1 Similarly, Lenz’s aim is to create a tragic audience from a comic audience, as he details in his “New Menoza Review.”2 Lenz wished that everyone, the Volk from all walks of life, would grow up. Yet despite the goals of both playwrights to raise audience consciousness, their protagonists don’t learn anything through which the audience can share a transformation.   Both Marie and Mother Courage negotiate their way down unhappy pathways of trial and error and come away no wiser than they were at the beginning of their journeys.

The plays are, in a way, “unfinished.” No hero transformation or direct explanation of theme guides us to unambiguous meaning. The authors’ intents must be deduced. Furthermore, as both playwrights discovered, audience conjecture could contrast sharply with their intents. Even for his well-received The Tutor, Lenz was frustrated by overly literal reactions. He complained that “in some of my comedies people have imputed to me all kinds of moral purposes and philosophical theses.”3   Brecht’s version of this play was seen by East German critics as too negative; and in general his plays, including Mother Courage, were criticized for their pessimistic depictions of reality,4 as The Soldiers was by Enlightenment-era reviewers.    Neither playwright believed in the transformation of protagonists as a means to raise audience consciousness, because hero transformation contradicted their anti-idealistic world views and methodologies. And so they suffered the consequences: thematic misinterpretation and confusion.

The Marie Wesener plot of The Soldiers, once Lenz unmoors it from “the true story,” accelerates with lightning-quick speed. The height of Marie’s fall was much more melodramatic than Cleophe Fibich’s. By Act V, her pathway of self-alienation has put her on the street begging for alms in seeming parody of the bourgeois tragedies of Diderot and Mercier and the bürgerlicher Trauerspiele of Lessing.   The penultimate scene opens with the stage directions: “Wesener walking by the River Lys, lost in thought. Twilight. A female figure wrapped in a cloak plucks at his sleeve.” (p. 51) The meeting is by chance. Not recognizing that she is his daughter, Wesener rebuffs the woman three times, as if she has solicited sex. How easily she is cast as a “wanton strumpet” by her own father, who seems blocked from knowing her by her fallen status in the class structure. This image of an invisible underclass is an echo of an earlier scene when Marie fails to recognize her fiancé Stolzius because he is posing as Officer Mary’s servant.   Marie says: “Tell me, your servant has a strong resemblance to a certain someone I used to know; he wanted to marry me.” (pp. 32-33)

One might well ask whether Wesener ever knew his daughter. In the street scene he is even more deluded by class-oriented assumptions than he is in Acts I and II while placing his trust in the irresponsible Desportes. His third rebuke of Marie contains the play in miniature:

WOMAN: Sir, I’ve gone three days without a bite of bread;

be kind and take me to an Inn where I can have a sip of wine.

WESENER: You wanton creature! Aren’t you ashamed to

make such a proposal to a respectable man? Begone! Run

after your soldiers!     (p. 51)

Wessener’s assumption that she must be a prostitute who has given herself over to soldiers, that only this can explain her begging, is a coda to the philosophical quandary that runs through the play. Who is responsible for a woman keeping her virtue? The woman alone? His travails have hardened Wesener to the cynical view Officer Haudy expresses in the first act: “A whore will always turn out a whore, no matter whose hands she falls into.” (p. 11) “Begone” is also the word Countess uses in Act IV when she too jumps to conclusions about Marie. (p. 43) Then something happens. Timothy Pope suggests that Wesener’s failure to recognize his daughter three times is a biblical allusion, Peter’s three-fold denial of Christ, and that Wesener only comes to discover who she is once he regards her as a human being, not as a morally discounted category.5 Scene Four is short but powerful in its economy, symbolism, and thematic resonance. He asks, “Was your father a jeweler?” (p. 51) This simple question reiterates the dual nature of his identity that has plagued him and Marie, the child who might yet become a lady. At last, when the recognition comes, there is tragic parody and then an active response from a crowd: “The two of them collapse half-dead on the ground. A crowd collects around them, and takes them out.” 6  This odd stage direction gives the example of a pro-active crowd, which is fitting preparation for the closing scene.

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TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PT 5

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

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

A Lenz/Brecht Genre with Origins in Plautus

Brecht’s theatre resembles Lenz’s for its use of dark comedy as a means of conveying social criticism. What concerned Brecht the Communist and Lenz the social reformer, and what guided their choices of genre, was not the exceptional but daily experiences. As comic poets they were less attracted to conflicts between irrepressible foes than to the more nebulous anxiety in comedy, or, as Eric Bentley describes it, “the steady ache of misery which in human life is even more common than crisis and so a more insistent problem.”1 Though tragic violence and death exist in plays like Mother Courage and The Soldiers, the tragic functions as an auxiliary to the comic.   The tragic seems incidental to a larger problem, the nagging sense of something stolen away. “Comedy deals with the itch to own the material world,” Bentley has written.2  His idea that tragedy usually involves murder and comedy theft relates to this discussion because the atmosphere in both plays suggests a thieving away of a central character’s identity, of their humanity, by the ordinary predicament of living in a cruel world. Similarly, Martin Rector sees in Lenz’s Gemälde der menschlichen Gesellschaft (painting of human society) “only the vain attempts of individual figures to establish themselves as freely acting characters in the face of their infelicitous circumstances.”3

Much has been written about Lenz’s theory of genre, deduced from his “Notes on the Theatre.” Given his aversion to rules and systems of thought and his intentionally scattered way of expressing himself, one can assume he would resist scholars pinning down a prescriptive set of comedy statutes from his theoretical writing.   In “Notes” he seems more eager to throw doubt on the established parameters of drama than to overthrow classicism with a system of his own. Karin Wurst has written:

For Lenz’s goal is not to counterpoise or replace traditional

poetics with his own logical, hierarchically organized conceptual

apparatus . . . The new aesthetic territory can merely be sensed

and circumscribed.4

In his comedy The New Menoza, the Prince expresses the author’s view:

. . . he who lives with no goal lives himself to death, while

he who frames a system all alone in his study, and will not

accommodate it to the world, either lives directly at odds

with his system, or does not live at all.5

For the most part, Lenz classified his plays as comedies. Though he mixed elements of tragedy, farce, melodrama, parody, and social drama into his three major works, the main subject matter is the young adult taking on adult responsibilities. In that respect he was working with an aggregate form and it is helpful to turn once more to his thoughts about audience reaction to clarify his intentions. After the poor reception of The New Menoza, in 1775 (Wieland had called the play a Mischspiel or mongrel play 6), a perturbed Lenz wrote in his “Review of The New Menoza, Composed by the Author Himself” that what he calls comedy is “not a performance that simply arouses laughter, but rather one that is for everybody.”7   This “popularity as an aesthetic determinant,”to use Max Spatler’s phrase, came from Lenz’s goal to hold up a mirror to society through drama, so that individual spectators didn’t identify with one character but would respond to the whole network of characters as a representation of the collective self. Unlike tragedy, with its relatively narrow definition and its class-oriented aristocratic or bourgeois tenor, comedy used laughter inspired by daily existence to include and appeal to a full spectrum of society. Then, once this wide audience had been assembled, it could mix in the serious or tragic. In the “Menoza Review” Lenz says that a new style of comedy descended from the past, from one ancient master in particular, could contribute toward building the German audience of the future.

Hence Plautus wrote in a more comic way than Terrence, and Molière

more comically than Destouches and Beaumarchais. Hence our German

writers of comedies have to write comically and tragically simultaneously,

because the people for which they are writing, or at least should be writing,

is such a mishmash of culture and coarseness, manneredness and wildness.

Thus the comic poet creates an audience for the tragic.9

By 1774, still in his early twenties, Lenz had already adapted and published five Plautine comedies—Aulularia, Trucculentus, Miles Gloriosus, Curculio, and Asinaria.10 Another German admirer of Plautus, Lessing, referred to the Roman as the “father of all comedy writers.”11 Clearly Lenz was attracted to the anarchic qualities of Plautine drama, the penchant for social chaos with its masterful slaves who so often take charge. Barbara R. Kes-Costa points out that the plays Lenz chose to adapt from Plautus all question moral values and that his adaptation strategy was to shift the play to his, Lenz’s, own time while maintaining the focus on morality.12

Plautus, Roman Dramatist

Plautus, Bust of Roman Dramatist, c 254 BC – 184 BC

Interestingly, the word “virtue,” connoting an idealized sense of goodness according to ruling-class ethics (which is treated ironically in The Soldiers, Woyzeck, and Mother Courage), has its origin in the Roman word virtus, meaning the glorious defeat of one’s worst enemies.13 This early Roman definition for virtue comes closer to the contemporary English word victory. In Plautus’s time (c. 254-185 BCE), which included the Punic Wars, Rome had gone from a more or less insular republic to a dominant Mediterranean military power. It was a time of fluctuating values for the Roman people. David Konstan has written that virtus during this period signified both great accomplishment and the subjective or ethical qualities by which it was achieved.14 This dual meaning had a profound effect on Plautine drama and those dramatists who have been influenced by his work. Though it is virtue as moral correctness that Plautus targets for his mockery, it is virtus, characters vying with one another for social supremacy, that powers his plays. One of the plays Lenz adapted, Truculentus, portrays, as Konstan puts it, “the uninhibited operation and ultimate triumph of sordid and materialistic passions.”15 Essentially Truculentus, “one of the most remarkable pieces of stark realism in classical drama,”16 details the ruin of three men. One at a time the courtesan Phronesium relieves them of all their worldly goods. In the prologue Plautus warns the audience about the nature of his shocking comedy in which love of capital triumphs over all:

Old-fashioned virtues flourish here, I see—

How fast your Roman tongues say NO to me!17

Plautus, The Dark Comedies

The Dark Comedies of Plautus

Pertinent to the Lenz-Brecht discussion is that the original meaning of virtue was not derived from a religious context, but from a military one. Both The Soldiers and Mother Courage are pervaded by the Roman sense of winning rather than adhering to a moral code, a badness that becomes good due to an altered definition of good. William S. Anderson asserts that the rogue slave in Plautus who uses his wit to triumph over his enemies and makes a virtue of his badness or malitia is Plautus’ unique contribution to the comic genre.18 What Lenz and Brecht both seem to owe Plautus is this abandonment of a moral order, of good versus evil, in favor of game-playing by different types of manipulators, all vying for supremacy or virtus. In a sense the two protagonists, Marie Wesener and Courage, are feminine types of Plautian rogues, courtesans, in their use of wit and language to better themselves financially in a materialistic and militaristic society.
Though neither succeed to the “heroic badness” of the triumphant rogue/courtesan, as exemplified by the slave Pseudolus in the play of the same name or the courtesan Phronesium in Truculentus or the sisters in Bacchides, both Marie and Courage continue the fight to the end of their respective stories. They do their damnedest, as the expression goes. Along these lines, Anderson says about the Plautian rogue what holds true for the success-oriented protagonists of Lenz and Brecht as well:

It is the express emphasis on the dialogue between good and

bad within the rogue, the focus on his Roman virtus, his ‘heroic’

military enterprise and success, that defines the comic invention

of Plautus.19

 

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