TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PT 6

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

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.

The characters of The Soldiers are not quite puppets, but they do push against what Bruce Duncan called the “limits of mechanical response.”⁷ They mostly live up to Duncan’s definition of Sachen, “artificial constructs indistinguishable from the socio-economic forces that mold them.”⁸ They are not just cold objects, however. Even the hardest observer, it seems to me, can’t fail to see what is human in The Soldiers and Lenz’s puppetry-influenced style of character. Lenz was fond of the phrase “plaything of circumstance.” Besides using it in the Götz lecture, he applied the phrase to himself in his essay “On the Nature of Our Mind.” He asked, “What then, I only a plaything of circumstance? I——? I go over my life and find this dismal truth confirmed a hundred times.”⁹  Similarly, in the opening of Götz he said human beings were as unfree as cogs in a machine.   Free will does not seem to exist in his plays, the characters seem controlled by events, but Lenz nevertheless did harbor a cautious optimism. He wrote in “On the Nature of Our Mind”:

Might not it be a hint of the nature of the human soul, that the soul is a substance, though not born independent, but with a movement, an instinct within, to work its way up to independence.¹

This Lenzian attitude toward being, the instinctual striving of the soul to move from dependence to independence, is apparent in the characters of The Soldiers.  Conceding the marionette quality of Lenz’s characters, John Guthrie sees them as more than Sachen because of their “cerebrality” and “self-conscious pleasure of the verbal” and their awareness of playing a role or roles.¹¹ Guthrie points to the recurrent motif of play or playing, as in a child’s game, as a dimension of The Soldiers that is seldom noted.¹²   There are, of course, the sexual pranks and game-playing of the officers in the various subplots. More subtly, Marie plays at: being a lady while trying to write formal letters; being in love with Stolzius; being heart-broken by his angry letter; being as business-like as her father toward marriage; being a soldier in the pen-fight with Desportes; being a repentant daughter while under the care of the Countess; being a drame or Trauerspiel heroine reduced to begging for alms. Her testing out of these roles, as a child puts on adult clothes, is a major factor in the play’s unfolding. Wesener’s prediction that she is a silly child who might become a lady not only doesn’t prove true but testifies to his own naivety. However, Marie is not only a play-acting child. She is vulnerable, as shown in the rough-housing scene with Desportes. The scene concludes with the rebuking song of Marie’s grandmother, delivered in a shriek:

A maiden young is like the dice

And lies as she is tumbled,

The little rose from Hennegau

Goes soon to Our Lord’s table

Why smile you then so gay, my child

The little rose from Hennegau,

They say, is soon to marry.

Oh, child of mine, how sad am I,

While still your eyes are smiling,

For soon a thousand tears you’ll cry,

That stain your cheeks beguiling. (p. 24)

Marionette-like in her movement and utterances, childlike in the confusion of her motives, Marie is a mixture of conflicting impulses of love, guilt, ambition, fear, and morbidity. Madland is correct is asserting that in Lenz’s plays, “be they comedies or tragedies, the characters are of greater interest than the events and have the obvious attention of the dramatist”¹³   Marie’s complex inner state is revealed in the subtle and economical soliloquy by her window that concludes Act I.

Good night, Pappushka! (when her father has gone she

sighs deeply and goes to the window, unlacing her bodice)

My heart is so heavy. I do believe we shall have thunder

tonight. If the lightning were to strike. . . . (casts her eyes

up to heaven, places her hand on her breast) Dear God,

what have I done wrong, then? Stolzius . . . I love you

still . . . but if I can make my fortune . . . and Papa himself

advises me to . . . (pulls the curtain to) If it strikes, then it

strikes: I’d not be sorry to die. (blows out the lamp)   (p.15)

These are the words of a character feeling suffocated by the heaviness of social expectations placed upon her. Notice how her gestures both complement and compete with her faltering speech in front of the window, how her desperation intensifies. In Leidner and Wurst’s words, Marie is “buffeted around by surrounding events”¹⁴ This is Lenz’s desired goal, to produce characters as conflicted within and determined by their environment as we all are in the real world.   In his “Notes” Lenz makes explicit his preference for character as “an accretion of being,” as Pascal puts it.¹⁵

Among the ancient Greeks it was the action that the people gathered together to see. Among us it is the series of actions, one supporting and lifting the others which follow one another like claps of thunder and must coalesce into a large whole that subsequently amounts to nothing more and nothing less than the main character, who, like them, stands out among the entire group of his associates. ¹⁶

 Also in his “Notes,” Lenz wrote that the German public required more than one “action” from a play. Moreover, he believed that there was “more divine pleasure to observe the movement of the world than that of a House!”¹⁷ Lenz’s broadening the sense of action to a field of contingency is one of his great contributions to the modern German drama. Free from the constraints of a causal linear plot, characters are as subject to the pressures of the human condition as the audience is—and just as complex and contradictory. Along these lines, Brecht has commented:

Even when a character behaves by contradictions that’s only because nobody can be identically the same at two unidentical moments. Changes in his exterior continually lead to an inner reshuffling. The continuity of the ego is a myth. A man is an atom that perpetually breaks down and forms anew. We have to show how things are.¹⁸

A comparison of the characters in The Soldiers with their counterparts in Mother Courage illustrates Brecht’s borrowing of Lenz’s characterization technique (a series of actions coalescing into a whole that define character).   The main character in Lenz’s play, Marie, could be said to become a supporting character in Brecht’s play, Kattrin.

Speech fails Marie more and more as her plight worsens, as language collapses into near speechlessness when she is begging for alms in the street at the play’s end. For this reason alone, the mute daughter Kattrin of Mother Courage seems a continuation of Marie. The inability to speak is the silent testimony of a young woman surrounded by soldiering. Both plays have a parent/ business owner, but in The Soldiers Wesener’s inner conflict (protective parent versus jeweler) serves as reinforcement to Marie’s identity crisis. Brecht saw the parent role as crucial to his anti-war leitmotif and raised the part of conflicted parent/business owner to the lead role, Mother Courage. Büchner’s Woyzeck may be interpreted this way too, with Desportes parallel to the Drum Major and the jilted ineffectual lover Stolzius parallel to Woyzeck. The character who at first glance seems to be missing from Mother Courage, the Desportes/Drum Major figure, does have a counterpart: the Recruiter.

In Mother Courage’s opening scene the victory of the Recruiter over Courage’s defenses is due to her self-contradictory nature, and this is made more explicit later in the play when the stakes are higher. The court marital of Swiss Cheese could have been prevented by Courage. By haggling over the sale of her wagon as ransom money, she ensures the younger son’s execution. It is the Chaplain who first puts it in Courage’s head that she should offer less for Swiss Cheese’s ransom than the full two hundred florins she can get for her wagon. It is Yvette the prostitute who urges her not to barter with her son’s life. Yvette asks at the critical juncture: “Hadn’t I best pay them the whole two hundred?” (p. 41) Worried about the means of her and Kattrin’s survival without the wagon, Courage decides catastrophically to offer less than the requested ransom.

Thus we have the Chaplain who in Scene Three and elsewhere is more preoccupied with matters of the flesh than those of the spirit. And we have Yvette the prostitute, the only character who speaks of loving someone (the Cook), who does not understand dickering about money when the life of Swiss Cheese is at stake. It was Brecht’s method to make these characters inconsistent to make their inconsistencies define them. In the scene in which Courage loses Swiss Cheese, Yvette and the Chaplain are not only themselves but embodiments of the warring instincts that exist in the title character.

As a protagonist and anti-hero Mother Courage is one of the great creations of 20th century drama. She is an example of Reinhold Grimm’s modern “lowly protagonist” who does not fall from great heights like a queen, and Brecht’s exploration of her fate holds us rapt.¹⁹ Early on she seems to embody the bravado of an outlaw like Karl Moor in Schiller’s The Robbers, but she lacks Moor’s violent intensity and mostly panders from her position of quasi-legality. The layering of her character and the extent to which she draws us closer to an understanding of the human condition is her appeal.

Mother Courage and Her Children is in its intent an anti-war play, but the conflict between a family’s survival and the needs of war, between parent and merchant, played out inside the protagonist, is the principle tension. Just when we think that Mother Courage is merely Mother Coward, a cynic disguised as a hearty maternal figure by her name, her wit and feistiness, we are given cause to reconsider. In Scene Nine emerges another candidate for the Desportes/Drum Major figure of temptation, the Cook. After all, as a young man he was the one who broke Yvette’s heart and set her on her path as a prostitute. “Got more girls in trouble than he has fingers,” Yvette reveals and warns that he is still dangerous even though a “pathetic remnant” on his “last legs.” (p. 67) And she’s right, as Courage soon discovers. The middle-aged seducer/gift giver offers a variant on the younger rake.   In Scene Nine, the Cook receives a letter from Utrecht where he has inherited an inn because his mother has died of cholera. He offers Courage the chance to go to Utrecht and help him run the inn, though there is no room for Kattrin. Courage says that Kattrin might be able to find a husband there, but the Cook laughs this off. “Find a husband, how? Dumb and with that scar on top of it. And at her age?” (p.74) His final insult to Kattrin is that he wouldn’t want the inn’s customers to have to look at her, as this would be bad for business. The opportunity is tempting to Courage. It’s even conceivable that she would accept it because they are all worse off then than at any time in the drama. In his notes on the scene, Brecht indicates “under no circumstances should the Cook be represented as brutal.”²⁰ (One wonders how the actor could pull this off, given the Cook’s lines.) Defying audience expectation, the anti-hero turns him down:

Cooky, how’s she to pull the cart on her own? War scares her.

She’ll never stand it. The dreams she must have. . . I hear her

nights groaning. Mostly after a battle. What’s she seeing in

those dreams, I’d like to know. She’s got a soft heart. Lately

I found she’d got another hedgehog tucked away what we’d

run over. (p. 74.)

Here speaks the contradictory side of Courage the canteen woman; the mother who will not leave her child behind makes a poor survival choice. In this episode she demonstrates filial loyalty and it is up to the Cook to say: “Yes the virtues are dangerous stuff in this world.” (pp. 75-6) Though there isn’t reason to believe that Courage has changed, the scene complicates her identity beyond mere “survivor”. Kattrin’s virtue of kindness, like Eilif’s bravery and Swiss Cheese’s honesty, must have come from somewhere and we see a glimmer of the source in their mother. Kattrin, who has heard the whole humiliating conversation between Cook and her mother, has packed a knapsack and attempts to run off, but Courage won’t allow it. She says she has rejected the Cook’s offer because she can’t bear to give up her wagon, thus easing Kattrin’s guilt and allowing them to exit together harnessed to the cart. Did Brecht honestly expect the audience to believe, as Fredric Jameson’s expresses it, that it is “the terror of losing her modest capital, the wagon” or “hanging on to [her] investment no matter what happens” that motivates her even in this scene?²¹

Mother Courage (Meryl Streep), Katrin and the wagon (Photo: Michael Daniel)

In his introduction to a collection of Brecht’s early plays, Bentley suggests that some of the characters in Brecht travel beyond the duality of innocence and guilt into a third condition, a quality of innocence “on the other side of guilt” that Bentley names innocence². He defines this as a second innocence that comes to the compromised character “as if one were to speak of regained innocence in an old whore.”²²  Mother Courage of Scene Nine falls into this third condition beyond innocence and guilt. The seducer/gift giver doesn’t offer jewelry and admiration in exchange for sex, as in The Soldiers and Woyzeck. He offers rather a home and livelihood in exchange for Courage’s last decency as a mother. The mother love voiced by Yvette in Scene Three and overmatched by the Chaplain’s advice, resurfaces. The Cook is the pure pragmatist that Courage has seemed to be, yet isn’t.

Thus the same force of character and event complication ruins both Courage and Marie. Changes in their exterior worlds lead to inner reshufflings that define them and draw them inevitably to unhappy outcomes.

Notes

1. Pope, Holy Fool, 151.
2. Lenz, “On Götz von Berlichingen,” 193.
3. Lenz, The New Menoza, II.6.96.
4. Leidner, The Impatient Muse, 95.
5. from Lenz “Notes on the Theatre” as quoted by Mark O. Kistler, Drama of the Storm and Stress (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), 40.
6. Pope, 149.
7. Duncan, “The Comic Structure,” 517.
8. Duncan, 519.
9. from Lenz’s “On the Nature of our Mind,” quoted and translated in Pascal, 126.
10. opt cit, Pascal, 126.
11. Guthrie, “Lenz’s Comedy,” 18.
12. Guthrie, 18.
13. Madland, Non-Aristotelian Drama in Eighteenth Century Germany and its Modernity: J.M.R. Lenz (Berne and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, Ltd, 1982),174.
14. Unpopular Virtues, vii.
15. Pascal, 294.
16. Lenz, “Notes,” 22.
17. as in Pascal, 261.
18. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 15
19. Grimm, “The Descent of Hero,” 52
20. Brecht, “Notes and Variants,” 134.
21. Jameson, Fredric, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), 91, 148.
22. Eric Bentley, “Introduction,” Bertolt Brecht, Three Plays: Baal, A Man’s a Man, The Elephant Calf ( New York: Grove Press, 1964), 7.