Mother Courage
Post #16: Alexandre, Glenda, Bertolt Brecht
Alexandre. Post-doctoral fellow. (London, n.d. 1990.) Entering Senate House today with A. to meet his friend B. we cross in front of Jeremy Bentham. As ever, the mummified utilitarian surveys passers-by from his chair within a three-sided cabinet, sporting a wide floppy hat, breeches, morning-coat, and his favourite cane.
In the faculty lounge we join the young Englishman, B., who like A. holds a post-doc at University College London. Perching on the armchair facing me, he listens intently to my findings in Keynes’s papers at the Public Record Office.
Reddish-haired, fleshy, and perspiring, the sole quality B. appears to share with wiry, dark-haired, bespectacled Alexandre is a bristling seriousness that admits no play. In B.’s case it isn’t Marx, or Foucault, but rather Jürgen Habermas.
“Don’t fall for postmodernism,” warns B. “It’s but a lure to tribalism, quietism, and ultimately to a deeper-rooted autocracy. If you must write a history of cultural policies, uncover their impacts on the public sphere, on democracy, or on Enlightenment projects that are genuinely novel in world history, such as the eradication of slavery.”
Alexandre discloses to us that he has suspended studies at UCL. He’s packed lightly, for Kosovo, for an indefinite sojourn among besieged Albanian Muslims.
Glenda. Doctoral student. (Brighton, 2 March 1990.) To the University of Sussex with historian Glenda to hear Jacques Derrida. On the train we discuss her research into Trieste’s surreal conclusion to WWII, culminating in its short-lived non-national existence as a “Free Territory.”
Arriving at the conference we encounter philosopher Slavoj Žižek, now an elected politician. He is attended by Slovenian companions, one of whom announces a strategy she calls ‘failed argument’. Žižek, bearded, raucous, compelling, jabs the air with a pointed finger, exhorts like old Karl himself.
Like us, Stuart Hall has arrived mid-conference. He’s misplaced his speaking notes. No matter, his extemporization is authoritative, spell-binding. Geoff Bennington takes the podium to introduce Jacques Derrida. Dismay ripples the lecture hall as a video monitor is wheeled in. Alas, the French philosopher’s cross-Channel visit will not be in-person as billed but rather en temps différé. Thus explained, the smooth Bennington inserts Derrida’s self-recorded videotape into the player.
...Glenda’s received word from Alexandre. He is underground among Albanians oppressed by the Serbian authority. His hosts have arranged treatment of an abscessed tooth in a clandestine dental surgery.
Bertolt Brecht. Playwright. (11 September 1991, Berlin.) When my friend Doc isn’t labouring his Ph.D. dissertation he is producing excellent guitar method books on styles from Hawaiian to Celtic. An affable companion, his mind-bending thesis explores Brecht-Shakespeare intersections by way of Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’ and the ‘carnivalesque’.
Doc organized Germaine Greer’s recent absorbing talk on Elizabethan playwright Aphra Behn at UCL. Afterwards, he seated me next to the eminent feminist author at the tightly-packed pub table. She showed me hands roughened from cultivating her garden in Cambridge. We discussed my upcoming Berlin trip, but I didn’t name our critical theory reading circle. The ‘not-gardening group’ is hosted by an Australian couple with a distinct aversion to horticulture. (London, 9 September 1991.)
...When Doc asked, “could there be ‘Brecht’ without ‘Shakespeare’ preceding him,” I hesitated an answer, “yes, probably”. Their strong connection wasn’t intuitive, at least not to me. I wondered if Brecht’s wry tempi might at times parody the Bard’s iambic pentameter.
Doc is not here to moot the matter. I’m lying in Berlin’s Hotel Bogota examining my room’s high ceiling, its ornate plaster cornice. A once-ample chamber has been walled down the middle to create this narrow but still pleasant room with a tall mullioned window. How odd that the framed engraving above me reproduces a painting in Ottawa, Benjamin West’s tableau of General Wolfe’s demise on the Plains of Abraham.
...Passing into East Berlin—Checkpoint Charlie was removed barely eleven months ago—to attend the Berliner Ensemble. The Wall, already largely effaced, has left a winding swathe of stubbly earth. The east is still a separate world, with coal heaped on the sidewalks next to cellar gratings, a distinctive ‘putt-putt’ of tiny automobiles. A few spectacularly war-damaged buildings persist, with squatters ensconced in flats bereft of fourth walls.
I had pictured the Berliner Ensemble’s home-base as modern, brutalist, and coolly elegant. Surely Brecht would encase his lapidary aesthetic in cement. Arriving early, entering the auditorium through lobby doors opened to the outdoors, I’m taken aback to find a tiered music hall replete with gilt sconces and cherubs.
Without warning, I’m hustled to one side by an imperious middle-aged woman. I recognize Barbara Brecht-Schall, daughter to Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel. She closes the inner doors herself, perhaps because it’s a cool evening.
I watch her exchange words with an usher as I buy my program. She resembles her famous parents. In my European Theatre seminar, I learned of the turmoil now rampant in East Berlin’s flagship cultural organizations as re-unification dries up the Cold-War subsidies. In all this she is the fierce guardian of her father’s literary and theatrical legacy.
Set models in lobby display cases document Brecht’s legendary mid-century productions. Yet, notwithstanding an alleged creative inertia at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the Ensemble still feels contemporary, not at all museal.
For one thing, the less-expensive seats are packed with high-spirited young (East-) Germans. They giggle when a velvet drape jerkily opens to reveal Paul Dessau’s rag-tag orchestra installed in the loges nearest the proscenium; a levity soon swept away by Brecht’s harsh 1939 anti-war masterpiece. Indeed, Mutter Courage und ihre kinder plays exactly as I had imagined: large, minimal, monochromatic, a veteran acting company wholly embodying epic theatre.
That a staging so faithful to the original should remain ‘contemporary’ suggests that, in defiance of ingenious elaborations, Brecht has not been surpassed. Might Doc agree that this is the most basic homology linking him to Shakespeare? That is, are these two joined in their enduring ‘contemporaneity’, each oeuvre charged with a vitality that resists mummification?
You summoned impressions I had on different trips to Berlin – both before the fall of the Wall and after.
I am wondering what you make right now of these impressions from 1990. What has happened to the reputation and performance of Brecht? You were at An interesting time and place.