11.
January
Tuesday, January 11, 2022
Author: Katharina Hübel
Speaker: Johannes Hitzelberger
Illustration: Tobias Kubald
Editor: Susi Weichselbaumer
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“You should visit Tehran before it’s bombed”, justified the famous theater director and artistic director Claus Peymann in 2007 when he traveled to Tehran with his Berlin ensemble and wanted to perform Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage” there. A performance that was neither wanted by the federal government nor by the Iranian regime.
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We play!?
People demonstrated against it on Bertolt-Brecht-Platz in Berlin. And yet it took place. For Claus Peymann it was of particular importance “to play an anti-war play in a country threatened by war”. Had Brecht heard these words, almost sixty years after the premiere of his “Mother Courage” at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, on January 11, 1949 – he would have felt understood. The German premiere of his play back then did not need a lot of scenery: Berlin was actually and truly in ruins in 1949, Berlin was already bombed. The audience carried the experiences of the war, the real images of the rubble fields, the wounded and the dead into the theater hall. They were the backdrop in front of which Brecht staged and let his “Mother Courage” pull through with her covered wagon. On the way with her three children, she tries to do her business with the war – to somehow get by. And can only lose.
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Not a happy ending
No matter which side it takes, war only knows destruction. Especially those of the little people who can’t win at all.
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Bertolt Brecht had already written Courage in Scandinavian exile at the end of the 1930s. Hidden in the figure of the sutler, the trader, is an appeal to its host country to become aware of the absurdity of hoping for peaceful trade relations with Hitler.
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But Mother Courage came too late in this respect – she was no longer to be performed in Scandinavian exile. Not until 1941 in Zurich. And there something happened that Brecht really didn’t want: the audience sympathized with Mother Courage, even felt sorry for the character. Until the German premiere in 1949, Bertolt Brecht revised all the lyrics and songs again – the tone became more pungent, cynical, nasty. With this, Brecht founded his “theater of the new age”, his own form of epic theater, full of alienation effects. He did the opposite of what he had experienced in American exile in Hollywood: no tension build-up, no varied dramaturgy, no cheering for the hero, no identification. Bertolt Brecht wanted a theater of reflection. Mother Courage learns nothing in the course of the piece. That shouldn’t happen to the viewer. And yet it hit his audience right in the heart: In front of the rubble landscape of Berlin, “Mother Courage” was a play that had deeply touched people.
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