It has been a while since I’ve done a general reading/writing/teaching update post, so this was meant to be one of those, but I wound up talking about the topic of my teaching this week, Bertolt Brecht, at length so I’ll have to put the more general post off for a another day.

In my Humanities class, I am teaching the great play “Mother Courage and Her Children” by Bertolt Brecht. I have been teaching this play for years out of my affection for it and because of how many important issues it raises for my students.

At a purely practical level, the play serves as a midpoint of my drama class, introducing the modern self-consciousness of theater to my students and serving as a backdrop to introducing the idea of political theater to my students. I’m not a theater history expert by any means, but I think Brechtian theory and method are foundational to contemporary theater and film, and I try to show all the ways Brecht’s strategies for “making transparent artifice” inform art and entertainment. In some ways, there is a decayed “consumable” version of Brechtian estrangement techniques almost everywhere in television and film—artists and popstars are always inviting fans to witness a performance of the process, reality television has put on a staged performance of the making of drama, the work of the crew, etc… for well over a decade now. We are very rarely asked to “believe” in our dramas in the old ways of suspension of disbelief, and far more often asked to witness a culture industry’s performance of itself and its work and economies.

Of course, very rarely is there any real Brechtian political edge to this. We are invited into creator economies because we are invited to see all artists as economic creators embodying capitalist rationality with no escape from the rules of the industry. It is an ideological mystification and appropriation of Brechtian techniques. The T.V. show “The Curse” (and Nathan Fielder’s other work) is probably the best exposure of how the making of TV with the tools of demystifying process (how to make a housing market, how to make a show about housing markets) serves status quo oppressive ideologies and economics, rather than critique or deconstruct them. That show almost works as a dialectical inversion of Brechtian techniques that recharges their critical energy through a very un-Brechtian eruption of a fantastic transcendence into the capitalist realism of reality TV. I don’t want to spoil the show if you haven’t seen it, because it is essential viewing. Apologies if this is a bit obscure.

So part of teaching Brecht is recovery of the political possibility of artistic invention from the darkest moments of the 20th century. Brecht’s life story matters quite a bit to me and how I teach his work. A poet first and a playwright and drama theorist later, his work emerges from the chaos and suffering of the masses in the great depression in Wiemer Germany. His dream, like the dream of many, is Communism, and his liberal humanist response to suffering in his early poems develops into a more rigorous radical ethos, and a more sardonic and ironic style that exposes the failures of the economic order to make place for humanity. His “putting the labor of theater” on stage is a natural outflow of this, of his sense of theater as work, as part of an inhuman system, that itself needs to be exposed, not some abstract theorizing (it is only later codified as such). It begins as theatrical and poetic practice, a way of engaging audiences with humor and intelligence rather than condescension and sentimentalism.

When Hitler rises to power, like many other leftist artists and intellectuals he realizes he must flee with his family, or be murdered by the fascists. So he leaves Berlin the day of the Reichstag Fire, initially to Switzerland then Scandinavia, but ultimately crossing the Soviet Union to Shanghai and then taking a boat across the Pacific to Southern California. He settles there with his family for a time, like many German exile dissidents (I.e. the Frankfurt school I mentioned last week), and uses his connections with exiled German film directors like Fritz Lang to get work as an anonymous screenwriter in Hollywood to support his family. Through this, he continues writing plays and poetry, although none is published or performed. It is during this period that he writes Mother Courage as a protest and howl of rage at the war machine of Nazi Germany, and a reflection on the pain and moral compromises of a life in exile during wartime trying to survive by any means necessary. The story is displaced to the 30 Years War and the Canteen Cart of Mother Courage and her three children she desperately tries to keep alive even as she hounds the war front to make a living buying and selling to desperate soldiers and starving villages. What is truly amazing about this play is that it is so profoundly (if darkly) funny. It is Brecht’s voice at his finest, and the biographical interpretation is irresistible, even as the play makes the personal social and political.

After the war, Brecht was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a target of McCarthyism. He was quite literally a communist infiltrator of Hollywood. Controversially, he did testify, although he did not name names, but rather pretended not to understand the questions and put on an extremely evasive performance that you can watch today. Many refused to testify and were blacklisted, Brecht did but then immediately took his family to NYC, got on a transatlantic ship, and returned to a devasted Germany (having had to flee fascists once before). He then began a theater company, the Berliner Ensemble, and staged productions of his plays in post-war Berlin, while writing poetry and documenting his theatrical style into the texts of theory for which he is most well known in the dramaturgical world.

The most famous production of this period is the 1849 production of “Mother Courage” featuring his wife Helene Weigel in the title role. It is probably unimaginable what this play might have meant in a theater surrounded by bombed buildings in a country that had destroyed itself pursuing gangsterism and war. It is a play about how Mother Courage’s dependency on the war economy results in her losing all her children to violence, leaving her in a trudging empty existence among the ruins. It must have been a shot of lightning in 1949 Berlin.

Brecht died in 1956 as a citizen of the German Democratic Republic in East Berlin. He got to see the communist dreams come to failed fruition in the Eastern Block, and controversy has long surrounded this period of his life for his choices in supporting the GDR government and silence about Stalinism. At such a great historical distance, I find it hard to judge this brilliant artist who survived fascism too harshly for hoping against hope the GDR was going to be some better path and blinding himself to the contrary evidence. His work from this period remains vital and much more complex than his public statements. Certainly, there was nothing to celebrate in the conservative Christian capitalism (in which Nazis retained prominent business and political positions) of Adenauer’s West Germany. The stifling conformity, violent imperialism, and relentless culture industries of the U.S. surely offered no solace either.

One of Brecht’s greatest poems “To Those Born After” was written during his exile period, but I think it speaks to the conundrum of his life well, and it certainly speaks to me today for all sorts of reasons. One thing I love about Brecht’s poetry is that it is distinctly readable (in a way much modernist poetry is not) while still achieving a complexity of emotion and morality that places it among the greatest of modern poetry for its power and ambivalence. I am putting the poem in its entirety below because I think it is worth reading and I find transcribing a poem helps me internalize it. This is the version translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine in the recent 2019 publication of Brecht’s collected poems. It contains an opening stanza that is not found in some other versions available online that I think is quite remarkable, but I don’t know the details of the version history or why it is so often omitted.

To those born after

1
Truly, I live in dark times!

A trusting word is folly. A smooth brow
A sign of insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet heard
The terrifying news

What times are these, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it entails silence about so many misdeeds!
That man calmly crossing the street
Is he not beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It is true: I still earn a living
But believe me: that is just good fortune. Nothing
That I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance, I am spared (If my luck runs out
I am lost).

They say to me: eat and drink! Be glad that you have the means!
But how can I eat and drink when
It is from the starving that I wrest my food and
My glass of water is snatched from the thirsty?
Yet I do eat and drink.

I would like to be wise
In ancient books it says what it means to be wise:
To hold yourself above the strife of the world and to live out
That brief compass without fear
And to make your way without violence
To repay evil with good
Not to fulfill your desires, but to forget them
Such things are counted wise.
But all of this I cannot do:
Truly I live in dark times!

2.
I came into the cities at a time of disorder
When hunger was ascendant.
I came amongst mankind at a time of uprising
And I rose up with them.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

All roads let into the mire in my time
My tongue betrayed me to the butchers
There was little I could do. But the powerful
Would sit more securely without me, that was my hope.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

Our powers were feeble. The goal
Lay far in the distance
It was clearly visible even if, for me
Hardly attainable.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

3
You who will emerge again from the flood
In which we have gone under
Think
When you speak our faults
Of the dark times
Which you have escaped.

For we went, changing countries more often than our shoes
Through the wars of the classes, despairing
When there was injustice only, and no indignation.

And yet we know:
Hatred, even of meanness
Makes you ugly.
Anger, even at injustice
Makes your voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

You, however, when the time comes
When mankind is a helper unto mankind
Think on us
With forbearance.

Every word of this speaks to me like it was written yesterday. Which is another way of saying, I take some profound solace in these words as we face our descent into the Trumpian fascist nightmare. For a while when I taught Brecht and Mother Courage, beyond its use introducing modern theater methods and concepts about political theater, the biggest takeaway I had for my students was the profound reflection the play provided on war economies, our own addiction to them in the U.S., and how that stuff all comes home and destroys us.

his lens was provided to me by the first and only time I saw a production of this play when I was in college. The Public Theater in NYC staged Mother Courage at the Shakespeare in the Park summer theater in 2006. This staging was pretty explicitly a protest of the war in Iraq. It was a major event. Tony Kushner, writer of “Angels in America” had done the translation, and Meryl Streep was cast in the title role. Kevin Kline played the cook, and George Wolfe was the director. Tickets were free but hard to get, and I was lucky enough to have close friends in the Fordham University theater program (where I had spent a single year as an undergraduate) who had an extra ticket. At the time, I’m not sure I got it. I think I still wanted the theater to be an emotionally overwhelming spectacle (all the things Brecht consciously eschewed), but in retrospect, it had a profound effect on me (kicking off my annoying Godard fanboy period) and it has stuck with me.

This production has received a wonderful documentary (which also goes into the history the play, Brecht’s life, etc..) called “Theater of War.” Its fascinating, shows the process of staging the play, and I always show my students parts of it. Also, it’s available for free on Vimeo, so I’ll provide the link. I recommend it.

When I teach, I always talk about the length of America’s wars. We were still in Afghanistan when I first taught the play and had been for essentially the entirety of my student’s lives. I talked about the presence of defense contractors in DC, and on campus. I talk about the economic boost we all get from war industries. And I talk about the blowback—the tanks on the streets of Ferguson putting down protests, the dominance of the gun industry and the automatic weapons killing kids at school, the generation of American men poisoned by militaristic fantasies of masculinity, and the untreated PTSD victims bringing the war home in right-wing militias and border patrols. And we deal with how hard it is for Mother Courage to stop living on the war that is destroying her and her family, how her plucky entrepreneurialism is a trap that leads her deeper into her losses, and what we are left with at play’s end—the demand that we collectively insist on a different way to live and break our addiction to war.

I still talk about these things, which certainly had renewed relevance for my students as they become aware of the U.S. defense industry’s imbrication with Israeli apartheid and war crimes, and the refusal of universities to allow protest of their investments in machines of death. But even more so, now, we talk about fascism; about living in dark times and the pain of not seeing ways out, the solace of knowing a great artist has been here before and we are not alone; and the continued hope that we can have spaces and conversations and community and art not captured and dominated by the brutal violent idiocy of Trump’s America (and the betrayal of the Democrats condemning millions to suffering at the border and abroad in hopes of barely getting enough votes to stave off something even worse.)

This is a dark post, we live in dark times. I am so grateful as a teacher and a reader for the legacy of Brecht in this crisis.