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).
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
During a 1949 interview Brecht justified the art of borrowing to E. A. Winds, Director of the Wuppertal municipal theatre, who would be using the celebrated Berliner Ensemble production of Mother Courage as model:
We must realize that copying is not so despicable as people think.
It isn’t the ‘easy way out’. It is no disgrace, but an art. Or rather
it needs to be developed into an art, [. . . .] Let me put forward my
own experiences as a copyist: as playwright I have copied the
Japanese, Greek, and Elizabethan drama [ . . . .] 9
That same year, on December 22, 1949, Brecht wrote:
have made a quick adaptation of lenz’s TUTOR for the BERLINER
ENSEMBLE. had the play at the back of my mind for a long time.
it is to my knowledge the earliest depiction of the german misère
and very sharp at that.10
The timing of these statements, falling as they do between the 1949 Berliner Ensemble Mother Courage and the 1950 production of Brecht’s version of The Tutor, suggest that borrowing and Lenz were both prominent in Brecht’s mind at the time.
Later in the same December 22nd journal entry, Brecht indicates that Lenz’s play could be used as “a preliminary study for a new way of doing Shakespeare’s plays.”11 Here it is worth noting that in 1952 Brecht began adapting Shakespeare’s Coriolanus—a play that Lenz had adapted in 1775. John Osborne has written that Lenz’s adaptation is a “complete whole and was presented to the Duke of Weimar as such but only parts of Shakespeare’s text are translated as dramatic dialogue and these scenes and parts of scenes are linked by a narrative text.”12 Lenz’s strategy for adapting Coriolanus, holding together scenes with narration, previews Brecht’s format for epic theatre, in particular his use of historical narrative before each scene of Mother Courage.
In a note in Theaterarbeit, Brecht explains why he chose to adapt The Tutor. He saw it as part of a movement to trace a path back to Shakespeare and a national theatre, implicitly acknowledging the nation-building potential of Lenz’s realistic yet poetic language.
It was partly because the German theatre’s classical repertoire
had shrunk alarmingly during this period of collapse and we
wanted to restock it with plays, but also so as to cut a path
through to Shakespeare (without whom a national theatre is
almost impossible) that we thought it wise to go back to the
dawn of classicism, to the point where it is still realistic, but
at the same time poetical . . . 13
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
This thesis will draw lines of connection between Brecht and Lenz that significantly predate the 1949 Tutor project and focus on the artistic choices behind Mother Courage. My assumption is that copying was a lifelong artistic practice for Brecht, not an occasional habit of his youth that had ceased by the time of Mother Courage. Brecht wrote that adapting The Tutor had been at the back of his mind for a long time. I will demonstrate that he had another Lenz play in mind as well: The Soldiers, whose influence on Mother Courage was plainly strong. The Soldiers may be said to represent the apex of an anti-Aristotelian drama in the German 18th century, as well as a radical plea for a modern theatre far ahead of its time. Büchner and Wedekind both borrowed from and advanced Lenz’s dramaturgy in distinct ways, but it is in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children that the full promise of Lenz’s play was realized.
A Biographical Sketch / Influences on Lenz’s Drama
J. M. R. Lenz was born on January 12, 1751, the fourth of six children to Christian David Lenz (1720-1798) and Dorothea Lenz (née Neoknapp, 1721-1778) in Sesswegen (Livonia). His father was the small town’s pastor, which placed the Lenz family economically at a low rung of the German community. A powerful speaker, the Lutheran pastor and Pietist C.D. Lenz could move his congregation to tears. Much of the son’s antipathy toward verbiage and systematic argument, “Lenz’s fear of being locked in someone else’s rhetoric” as Alan Leidner describes it,stems from his father’s stern parenting and his oratory fervor from the pulpit.14 Later Lenz would refer to listening to systematic discourse as “eine wahre Sklavenkette,” a true slavery.15
In 1759 the Lenz family moved to Dorpat in Estonia where the pastor received a promotion as general superintendent. At the age of fifteen Jacob wrote his first play, The Wounded Bridegroom, a work based on a true incident (after receiving a beating, a servant attempts the murder of his punisher, a nobleman engaged to be married). John Osborne suggests that this early play demonstrates Lenz’s sensitivity to class strife in the feudal-like society of his upbringing and anticipates his long-standing resentment toward the abuses of the aristocracy.16 A precocious adolescent, Lenz authored a series of religious poems in the manner of Friedrich Klopstock (1724-1803). Local Dorpat poet Theodor Oldekop (1724-1806) hailed one poem, “Der Versöhnungtod Jesu Christi,” as the work of a “rare genius” who “deserves every encouragement.”17
These poems excited C. D. Lenz to believe that his brightest child would follow in his footsteps as a minister. While at the University of Königsberg, however, the eighteen-year old Jacob Lenz, dissatisfied with his theology classes, decided against pursuing a religious vocation, a decision his father never forgave. Though religious thought concerned Lenz for his entire life, and faith in God informed his creative practice, the lure of philosophy was stronger. From 1769-1770 he attended the lectures of Immanuel Kant and delivered a poem for the philosopher on the occasion of his inaugural address. Brigitta O’Regan details the influence of Kant’s lectures on Lenz and his formulation of ideas based on the divide between the individual’s sensible and intelligible faculties.18 The unresolved conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical, between desire and moral reasoning, would become a hallmark of Lenz’s dramatic characterizations.
O’ Regan describes Lenz’s theoretical essays, written from 1770-1776, as revealing again and again “the dissensus between the individual’s sensible and intelligible faculties, diagnosed in Kant’s inaugural dissertation.”19 In his “Essay on the First Principal of Morality” (1772-73) Lenz details the hazards posed by an individual’s devotion to a partial self. Relevant to The Soldiers is an example of the seducer who, as O’Regan puts it, “absorbed in his sensual pursuits, remains ignorant of his non-sensible nature and consequently experiences nothing but his sensuality.”20
Due to the dispute with his father over his area of study, Lenz left Königsberg prior to graduating. He traveled as translator and companion to the Kleist brothers, a pair of Baltic military officers in the French service (no relation to the Prussian playwright). This experience with the Barons von Kleist was grist for the mill of Lenz’s future playwriting. Not only did knowing them reinforce his antipathy to the rhetoric of the petite aristocracy, it provided story content for his dramas, especially The Tutor and The Soldiers. The final stop of their travels in 1771, via Berlin and Leipzig, was Strasbourg, the cultural center of a fragmentary Germany, at the time a province of France.
In Strasbourg, Lenz met Johann Salzmann (1722-1812), friend and mentor to many young writers. He joined the Literary and Philosophical Society of Strasbourg, led by Salzmann. This Tischgesellschaft, or table society, included members that made up the movement known as Sturm und Drang: including Herder, Goethe, Jung-Stilling, Wagner, and Lenz. Sturm und Drang was the label eventually given to a loose confederation of German writers of the 1770s who opposed the confining rationalism of the Enlightenment with works that expressed the pain and angst of the individual in confrontation with society. These writers, taking the lead of Herder and Goethe, sought to break from French Neoclassicism and believed that the aesthetic practice of Shakespeare represented the ultimate in drama. Essentially, the movement began and ended with a pair of first plays from theatre legends: Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1772) and Schiller’s The Robbers (1781). The especially radical nature of his work, combined with his anomalously balanced attitude toward society and its deformities, made Lenz an aberration even within this rebel peer group.
In and around Strasbourg from 1771 until 1776, he worked as a tutor and wrote voluminously: an array of poems, stories, autobiographical sketches, plays and translations; also theological studies and essays on literary theory. Most notable among his works from the time are: The Tutor, Lustspiele nach dem Plautus (adaptations of Plautus), The New Menoza, “Notes on the Theater,” “Opinions of a Layman,” Pandemonium Germanicum, The Soldiers, Das Tagebuch, Friends Make the Philosopher, The Hermit, and “On a Married Soldiery.”
During this Strasbourg period Lenz repeatedly courted erotic failure—that is, he fell in love with unattainable women either engaged to other men, beyond his social station, or connected in some way to Goethe. One was Goethe’s former girlfriend Friederike Brion; another, the genius’s sister Cornelia Schlosser. The most important to this thesis is Cleophe Fibich, daughter of a Strasbourg goldsmith, who was engaged to the oldest von Kleist brother, Friedrich Georg. Lenz fell in love with Cleophe when it became clear Friedrich Georg would not return from Kurland—where he had gone, he said, seeking permission from his parents to marry her. This triangle re-configured as a quadrangle when a third von Kleist, the youngest, became involved. From this erotic geometry The Soldiers was formed, as will be discussed later.
By 1775, due to their camaraderie as poet dramatists and anti-neoclassicists in Strasbourg, Goethe and Lenz had become close friends. Lenz both idolized and envied Goethe, who was two years his senior, more financially secure, and gaining renown as a literary genius. The Livonian wrote two important theoretical essays praising his colleague: “On Götz von Berlichingen” and “Letter on the Morality of The Sorrows of Young Werther.” Lenz himself was so admired by their mutual intellectual circuit that reviewers believed his first play The Tutor (1774) to be the work of Goethe. Having climbed to this literary precipice, in April of 1776 he arrived at the ducal court of Weimar to join an elite society that would never know what hit them. Leidner and Wurst point out that, much like his protagonists Läuffer (The Tutor) and Marie (The Soldiers), Lenz misunderstood that in this elevated and affected aristocratic milieu his personal worth and ethical motives would matter less than his social rank.21
Within this rococo milieu teeming with dilettantes and literary fixtures—Christoph Wieland (1733-1813) and Goethe among them—Lenz attempted to fit in by adopting the role of jester. This was due in part to Goethe’s request that he make peace with Wieland, whose lyrical French style of writing Lenz had campaigned against because he believed it corrupted young women. Thwarted in this moral endeavor, Lenz retreated into his penchant for parody and satire and soon disrupted formal etiquette with madcap behavior. Goethe, a public official, was caught between Lenz’s radical advocacy for a German literature distinct from the aristocratic orientation of France and the reactionary taste of the ducal court, led by Duke Karl August who had invited Goethe to Weimar to guide court entertainment.
The common assumption is that Lenz’s antics in Weimar were symptoms of the mental instability that would lead to madness. Timothy Pope theorizes, however, that his playing the fool was his conscious attempt to gain the duke’s ear via humor, so that once trusted “the holy fool” could introduce his elaborate and detailed reform proposals on behalf of the abused military personnel. He had translated his “On a Married Soldiery” into French and his ultimate goal was to have the Duke of Weimar assist him in presenting the proposals to the king of France.22
In December of 1776, for reasons that remain a historical mystery, Lenz was banished from Weimar and forever cut-off from that vital center of culture. (This fate he shared with Friedrich Klinger (1752-1831), expelled four months earlier.) Goethe reveals only that Lenz committed an Eseley, a stupidity. As to what he actually did, theories range from his embarrassing the duchess or one of the ladies at court with his over-familiarity to his delivering one “home truth” too many, to use Timothy Pope’s vocabulary, at Goethe’s or another dignitary’s expense in the sketches he wrote for courtly amusement.23 It seems likely that Lenz’s chagrin at Goethe’s acquiescence to the artistic standards of the ducal court, as satirized in the playlet The Death of Dido and through the character of Rothe in his novella Der Waldbruder (The Hermit), contributed to the breach that would nullify Lenz as a literary force in his own lifetime.
Less than a year later, in November of 1777, the wandering poet suffered a nervous breakdown while visiting a friend in Switzerland; the breakdown lapsed into depression and mental confusion. In early 1778 he was taken care of by Pastor Jean Frédéric Oberlin (1740-1826) for three weeks. Oberlin’s diary of this time would become the basis for the psychological novella written by Georg Büchner, Lenz (1839). Until July of 1779 Lenz was confused and forlorn, and Goethe’s brother-in-law Johann Georg Schlosser (1739-1799) cared for him until he resolved to have him interned at the Frankfurter Tollhaus, a sanitarium known for its progressive treatment of the mentally ill. Lenz seems to have recovered, however, when Schlosser found him manual labor in the service of a shoemaker.24 During this time an attempt by Schlosser and Lenz to make peace with the minister C. D. Lenz was rejected.
The last eleven years of Lenz’s life were spent in Moscow where he earned a living teaching and became active in several literary societies, as he had been in Strasbourg. Through one of these groups he befriended a young writer named Nicolai Karamsin (1766-1826). Little is known about this period. As far as Europe was concerned Lenz had died, as reported in a mistaken obituary by a German newspaper. Karamsin attests that Lenz’s writing at this time suggested what a great genius he had been. Forgotten by the world, physically and mentally damaged by years of poverty, Lenz was found dead on a Moscow street in May of 1792.
To me, a fitting epitaph for Lenz is rival Wieland’s characterization from their days together in Weimar: “One can not like the lad enough. Such a strange mixture of genius and childishness!”25
[This is the first part of a series that will explore in depth the creative origins of MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN]
Notes
1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Autobiography: Poetry and Truth from my own Life, trans. R. O. Moon (Washington D.C.: Public Affairs, 1949), 533.
2. Laurence P. A. Kitching, Der Hofmeister: A Critical Analysis of Bertolt Brecht’s Adaptation of Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s Drama (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1976), 19.
3. Kitching, Der Hofmeister, 18.
4. Kitching, 19-20.
5. Kitching, 19.
6. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht Poems: 1913-1956 (New York: Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1980), 312.
7. Bertolt Brecht, Journals: 1934-1955, editors John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York: Routledge/Theatre Arts Books, 1996), 37.
8. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. and intro. John Willet (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1994), ix.
9. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 224.
10. Brecht, Journals, 425.
11. Brecht, Journals, 425.
12. John Osborne, J. M. R. Lenz: The Renunciation of Heroism, (Göttengen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Reprecht, 1973), 45.
13. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 229.
14. Alan C. Leidner, The Impatient Muse: Germany and the Sturm und Drang (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 101-102.
15. quoted in Norman R. Diffey “Language and Liberation in Lenz,” Space to Act: The Theater of J. M. R. Lenz, eds. Alan C. Leidner and Helga S. Madland (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1993), 1.
16. Osborne, Renunciation of Heroism, 16-17.
17. Alan C. Leidner and Karin A. Wurst, Unpopular Virtues: The Critical Reception of J.M.R. Lenz (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1999), 3.
18. Brigitta O’Regan, Self and Existence: J.M.R. Lenz’s Subjective Point of View (NewYork: Peter Lang Publishing, 1994), 31.
19. O’Regan, Self and Existence, 31.
20. O’Regan, 32.
21. Leidner and Wurst, Unpopular Virtues, 16.
22. Timothy Pope, The Holy Fool: Christian Faith and Theology in J.M.R. Lenz, (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 13-15.
23. Pope, Holy Fool, 15.
24. Osborne, 11.
25. Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester: The University Press, 1953), 33.
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