think twice drama

theatre art redux

Tag: Georg Buchner

TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PART 4

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he does so or deceives her is in the lap of the gods.”4 If he didn’t return, then Lenz comments that the play could not be published soon enough in order to ruin the man or force him to honor his pledge.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.

Continue reading

TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PART 2

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

[This is the second part of a series that considers the role of Lenz in shaping modern drama.]  

Reception of the dramatic oeuvre of J. M. R. Lenz has been mixed, more often dismissive or negative than positive for more than two hundred years.  Lenz, as a creative artist who parodied Enlightenment society with instinctual playfulness, posed problems for most pre-modern critics, who, as devotees of reason and descendents of Enlightenment thought themselves, leaned toward humorless, overly literal interpretations of his aesthetic intentions. The irrational aspect of the creative process, so important to all makers of art, in Lenz’s work has been trivialized as a sign of his pathology, his inability to repress tokens of his madness. Most damaging of those who perpetuated this trivialization was Goethe who, long after Lenz’s removal from Weimar, remained guarded over the dangers his former friend’s behavior posed to his own long-term reputation. Goethe’s attachment to classicism solidified Lenz’s poor image for decades, as the great man ignored his productivity in Strasbourg and cast him as “whimsical” and ”like a sick child,” someone “whose days were made up of mere nothings, to which he was able to give a meaning by his activity.”26 Since Goethe first applied it, this word “whimsical” has been used by almost every critic and historian who has written about Lenz as a code word for insane. Roy Pascal states that Goethe’s treatment of Lenz in his autobiography Poetry and Truth is “a rare instance of personal injustice.”27

Friend of Lenz, the legendary Goethe

Johann Wolgang Goethe (1749-1832) Sturm und Drang Colleague of Lenz in the 1770s

More prescient is what Goethe has to say about Lenz in this passage:

His talent came from a real depth, from inexhaustible creative power, in which tenderness, versatility, and subtlety rivaled each other, but with all its beauty it was sickly at every point, and it is just these talents which are the most difficult to form a judgment.28

Leidner and Wurst’s book-length study Unpopular Virtues: The Critical Reception of J.M.R. Lenz documents this difficulty of coming to a critical consensus about Lenz and his “sickly beauty” from the 1770s to the close of the twentieth century. The authors point out that Lenz’s unwillingness to flatter audiences by depicting “weak heroes, weak families, and communities out of order” prejudiced reception against him in his time and beyond. “The critical reception of his work is Germany’s abiding inability to turn away from the pleasures of a fictive collective personality.”29

Lenz’s first play The Tutor was published anonymously in 1774 by Christian Friedrich Weygand (1743-1806), who had established himself as the most important publisher of the Sturm und Drang by printing Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Lenz’s play was well reviewed for its bold realism and the author’s attempt to create a German drama distinct from French neoclassicism.   His next two plays, The New Menoza and The Soldiers, were setbacks in his critical reception. Though neither contained anything as graphically disturbing as the castration scene in The Tutor, by the mid 1770s the Sturm und Drang movement had begun to question its own extravagance. Peers and critics who had applauded The Tutor had their doubts about The New Menoza and its spoofing of Enlightenment values. The Soldiers, with its pessimism and barracks-style language, met even greater disfavor. Lenz was a social realist who refused to oblige readers wanting flattering reflections of themselves, and he had begun to alienate the public with his middle class anti-heroes and brutal honesty.

At the turn of the century Lenz’s reception didn’t improve, largely because Romanticism, like Weimar Classicism, avoided the social conditions of its day. Writers such as Clemens Brentano glorified Lenz as a melancholy outsider and misunderstood poet, but this eagerness to sympathize with his personality clouded the Romantic’s understanding of Lenz as a social commentator.

Georg Friedrich Dumpf (1777-1849), a little known scholar and Livonian medical doctor, made the nineteenth century’s first major push toward a Lenz biography. Dumpf gathered critical information regarding his life by writing to his family, his friends at Königsberg, former Stürm-und-Dränger Klinger in St. Petersburg, and even visiting Karamsin in Moscow. In 1820 he wrote to Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) proposing an anthology of Lenz’s work. Eight years later, Tieck, making use of materials that Dumpf had gathered, put together a three-volume edition, an important event in Lenz scholarship. Not the admirer of Lenz that Dumpf was, Tieck had agreed to have this tribute published due to his fascination with Goethe. He believed that exposure to Lenz’s writing would shed new light, through comparison, on Goethe’s genius. The most important effect of this edition is that through it Georg Büchner came to know Lenz’s work.

Inspired by Lenz’s The Land Preacher (1776), Büchner wrote his rebellious pamphlet The Hessian Courier (1834). Later under police interrogation, Büchner was forced to deny authorship of this pamphlet. He then turned to the stage as a means of activism against the reactionary caste system of post-Napoleonic Europe. Lenz the social realist was a natural model for Büchner. His world-acclaimed fragment Woyzeck would have been “unthinkable,” as Helga Madland and Alan Leidner have written, without Lenz’s The Soldiers.30 Büchner, like later writers in the Lenz tradition, demonstrated his affinity for his Sturm-und-Drang predecessor, not by praising him in theoretical writing, but by emulating his dramatic practice.

Georg Buchner

Author of Woyzeck, brilliant practitioner of Lenz style drama and politics

For much of the nineteenth century Lenz’s biographical or historicized reputation as mad poet and doomed lover of Fredericke Brion overshadowed interest in his work. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the dramatists of Naturalism saw an ally in Lenz for his realistic portrayal of everyday life and his combative stance against age-old traditions of the theatre. Karl Bleibtreu (1859-1928) regarded Lenz as “unsurpassed in unmediated truth, the truth of life and character.”31  Max Halbe (1865-1944) praised Lenz for his opposition to the timeless realm of Weimar Classicism. 32

During the twentieth century Lenz’s work was repellent to both the extreme right, as voiced by Adolf Bartels in what would be a preview of the attitude of National Socialism of the 1930s, and the extreme left, as voiced by the utopian Marxist George Lukaćs in the 1950s. Bartels referred to Lenz’s plays as “monstrosities whose attractions lie only in the characterizations, and in individual scenes.”33     Lukaćs criticized Lenz’s plays for their pessimism and embraced the heroic idealism of Goethe’s classicism. Ideological movements such as fascism and communism depended on an idealized notion of the German public evolving from the glorious Volk of the past into a perfect future society. To believers in such totalizing visions, Lenz was not welcome.

Brecht’s adaptation of The Tutor in 1950 instigated a postwar renewal of interest in Lenz. Heiner Müller, the East German playwright and Brecht follower, spoke for many in resisting Lukaćs and supporting a turn away from Weimar Classicism. Müller regretted the neutralization of Sturm und Drang by Weimar Classicism and his view mirrored Lenz’s discomfort with Goethe at the ducal court. Müller described Weimar Classicism as “Literature of a vanquished class, form as adjustment, culture as a set of formal manners for intercourse with the ruling power, and as vehicle for false consciousness.”34 In 1968, in the commentary that appeared with the operatic adaptation of The Soldiers, Heiner Kipphardt wrote of the play as “one of the key works in the history of the German theatre. Its influence can be traced through Büchner, Grabbe, Wedekind, Brecht, Horvath, up to the contemporary German Drama.”35

As the 200th year anniversary of Lenz’s death neared in 1992, Lenz became a subject of lively scholarly interest.   Bicentennial celebrations of Lenz’s death inspired a wealth of new criticism and international symposiums in Oklahoma (1991), Hamburg (1992) and Birmingham, England (1993).

Continue reading

TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PART 1

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

Introduction

Within his rather brief lifetime, Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) faded into obscurity, and would have remained there, the “transient meteor” that his contemporary Goethe predicted he would be, were it not for his influence on German dramatists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 Lenz survived as a literary force for centuries without either popular or critical acclaim, due to being a writer’s writer. Over the past fifty years, a consensus of scholars—particularly specialists in Sturm und Drang and 18th Century German drama—have credited this eccentric genius with founding the modern tradition in German theatre. This tradition includes Georg Büchner (1813-1837) and Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) and culminates in the work of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956).

JMR LENZ STURM UND DRANG Author

STURM UND DRANG AUTHOR JMR LENZ

Brecht scholars and Brecht himself, who was inclined to concede exotic influences, have expressed little on the subject of Lenz.   Certainly Lenz interested Brecht since the late twenties, though in his youth he evidently preferred other German writers such as Büchner, Kleist, Wedekind, Goethe, and Schiller.2 Later, Brecht’s interest in Lenz increased. Elisabeth Hauptmann, his collaborator and life-long friend, recalled in an interview that Brecht spoke in the late twenties about staging Lenz’s play The Tutor, a project he carried out after the war.3

A sonnet Brecht wrote, “On Lenz’s Bourgeois Tragedy The Tutor”—probably written in 1938 because it was discovered in a file of Galileo fragments that were dated that year—addresses The Tutor’s notorious castration scene .4   The poem, like his adaptation of Lenz’s play more than ten years later, alters the rationale of the protagonist unsexing himself, transforming it from a psychological gesture into a sociological or professional one.5   This and another sonnet written in the same period (1933-1938) regarding Lenz’s one-time professor Immanuel Kant, “On Kant’s Definition of Marriage in The Metaphysics of Ethics,” offer evidence that Brecht was preoccupied with J.M.R. Lenz in the year before he wrote Mother Courage and Her Children in 1939.6

It is my contention that Lenz influenced the planning and writing of Mother Courage, a subject on which Brecht was curiously mute. In his journal of the period September 21st to November 7th, 1939—the seven weeks in which he wrote Mother Courage—there are no entries at all.7   This deeply insightful play was Brecht’s reaction to Hitler’s invasion of Poland and an attempt, through its anti-war leitmotif, to stall the outbreak of world war. The editors and translators John Willet and John Manheim maintain that it is one of the most “spontaneous” of all of Brecht’s plays. Moreover, they say that it has “virtually no trace of any preliminary work or preparatory reading” and that “for once no mention of any other collaborator, nor any element of borrowing or adaptation” are evident.8

Continue reading

© 2024 think twice drama

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑