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TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PT 7

September 9, 2016 / / 1 Comment

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 6

May 26, 2016 / / 2 Comments

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

[This is the sixth part of a seven part series.  Please scroll down to read the five previous installments.]

Character and Events

The plot of The Soldiers is supplemented with a maze of subplots dealing with the collision of military officers with the burgher class of Lille. The main story of Marie’s infatuation with Desportes shows a young woman and her family ruined by their misguided attempt to use marriage to advance socially. Wesener allows his mercantile instincts to get the better of him once he believes that it is possible for his daughter to marry up. Desportes, who uses the appearance of sophistication to mask his predatory and juvenile nature, is a case study of an officer who is marginalized and unsexed in the eyes of society, by the military’s law against soldiers marrying. But it becomes clear that this is not a play that rails against a specific law, as many of the characters seem unaware of the military ban on marriage. The café scenes with the officers feature a theoretical layer, discussions about whether the theater is a bad influence on young people and whether a woman can be robbed of her virtue. Marie’s jilted boyfriend Stolzius moves from his clothier business in Armentières to the officer camp where he seeks revenge for the seduction of his fiancé. One low comic subplot involves juvenile pranks played by the officers on another officer, the lascivious Rammler. Another involves the aristocratic Countess de la Roche’s attempt to sequester Marie at her estate where she will be instructed in “sketching, dancing, and singing.” (p. 39) Through this removal of Marie from society, the Countess intends to restore her good name. In other words she attempts to refit Marie into the artificial ideal of maidenhood satirized by the letter-writing scene that opens the play.

The Countess announces in their first meeting, “I love you, you angel!” and swears to have “the most sincere interest in everything that can possibly affect you.” (p. 37) But in Act IV, Scene Three, at the first sign of trouble, she gives Marie up as a degenerate: “I shall never pardon you when you act against your own best interests. Begone!” (p. 43) The Countess subplot accomplishes two objectives. First, it shows an aristocratic mother figure turning against Marie just as absolutely as Desportes did. For Desportes, Marie goes from “Sublimest object of my chastest passion soaring,” in Act I (p. 14) in the poetry he gave her, to a whore in Act V: “I tell you, she was a whore from the start, and she only took up with me because I gave her presents.” (p. 49) Secondly, the Countess subplot ultimately offers a larger perspective and insight regarding Marie’s fate. After she banishes Marie, the Countess realizes her mistake in trying to isolate the young woman in a protected environment.

What charms does life retain if our imagination does not introduce them? Eating, drinking, occupations without future prospects, without pleasures of our own making, this is naught but death delayed. (p. 43)

This remark may seem like mere rationalization, but it reflects the playwright’s belief in the sacredness of all phenomena and human action. Marie has no choice but to move onward in what Timothy Pope calls “Lenz’s principle of trial-and-error.”1 Lenz’s religious conception of action won’t allow for passivity, for a life of aristocratic leisure. In his essay “On Götz von Berlichingen,” Lenz states a similar insight, regarding human value in terms of action and inaction.

[ . . .] only by action do we come to resemble God who acts without ceasing and without ceasing delights in his works. This is what we learn, that the power of action in us is our spirit, our highest faculty, that it alone gives to our body with all its sensuality and sensitivity true life, true consistency, true worth, that without this spirit all our pleasure, all our feelings, all our knowledge are only passivity, only death delayed.2

For Lenz a passive life is an empty preamble to death, or, as he calls it: “only death delayed.” The Prince in The New Menoza also expresses this important motif: “Mere enjoyment seems to me to be the very sickness from which Europe suffers . . . Action makes us happier than enjoyment. Animals enjoy.”3

Lenz on Book Cover

Sketch of JMR Lenz on a collection of essays and readings in German

In Lenz events define character. The unity of action is replaced with diversity of cause, an assortment of happenings held together by a common subject and theme. Therefore the stature of the characters in Lenz’s drama is much smaller than that of most other dramatic characters of his day, including those in other Sturm und Drang plays. He rejected what Leidner calls “the Titan in extenuating circumstances, or any figure whose acts take on a significance only because they are framed within a compliant text.”4 By featuring characters caught up in the day-by-day melee of existence, by going beyond the idealized middle-class heroes of Diderot and Lessing and other practitioners of the bürglicher Trauerspiele, he anticipated the modern anti-hero. Lenz expresses this approach to putting characters on the stage:

According to my feeling, I appreciate the characteristic, even the caricature, ten times more than the ideal, speaking hyperbolically; for it is ten times harder to depict a figure with the accuracy and truth with which a genius recognizes it than to labor for ten years at an ideal of beauty which, in the final analysis, is only such in the brain of the artist who created it.5

Marie is idealized by her father, her boyfriend Stolzius, and the disingenuous Desportes. But she is not all innocence. Her reactions to events reveal her coquettish deceptions. Yet, as Pope has observed, she is the only character who mentions love as a criteria for a match.6   The Countess ignores Marie’s feelings and fails in her aristocratic gesture of benevolence because of false assumptions. She sees Marie as a type, a social climber who will use her good looks and sex appeal to rise as far as she can.   Marie’s actions reveal, however, that she is driven less by the lure of advancement than by puppy love or infatuation. As a jeweler’s daughter and as the child of a man who regards her as a child, she is (like Goethe’s Gretchen) vulnerable to the glittering praise and gifts from an upper class suitor and the fool’s gold promise of love leading to marriage. She is both naïve and manipulative while in pursuit of her false goal. Marie may ply a tragic path, but she is as ordinary as the girl next door.

In the last scene of Act I, Marie convinces her father that Desportes may have good intentions, by showing him the effusive love poetry Desportes has given her, as well as the brooch and a ring with a heart set in stones. Wesener agrees to let Marie see Desportes and go with him to the theatre again as long as they have a chaperon, Madame Weyher. He tells her: “You might end up a real lady yet, you silly child.” (p.15) From these few words can be sensed how unrealistic this vision is, as it is precisely Marie’s immaturity that conflicts with her becoming “a real lady.” Regarding her bourgeois boyfriend Stolzius, the more socially appropriate but less exciting choice of a husband, Wesener says: “You mustn’t scare off Stolzius right away, d’you hear? Now I’ll tell you how to word a letter to him.” (p. 15.) Here his paternal instincts have been swayed by the jeweler’s mercantile instincts and Wesener decides to play a game of chance with his daughter’s fate, gambling with her youth and beauty in the hopes of securing social advancement and the best financial situation for her. Rather than question how she feels about the two men and what her motives for seeming to prefer Desportes are, the role of a wise and sensitive father, Wesener as jeweler holds out for the highest bidder. The father’s misapplied business sense exacerbates the daughter’s inner turmoil.

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TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PT 5

April 3, 2016 / / 0 Comments

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,”8 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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TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, Part 3

March 8, 2016 / / 0 Comments

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.

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TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PART 2

February 29, 2016 / / 0 Comments

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).

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TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PART 1

February 1, 2016 / / 0 Comments

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

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