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, 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

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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