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ON FEBRUARY 28, 1933, the day after the infamous Reichstag Fire, Brecht left Germany along with his wife, Helene Weigel, and their son, Stefan. They would not return until 1949. During this peripatetic period Brecht would pen his greatest masterpieces: Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

These were what Brecht called "the Dark Times" and he became their designated chronicler, dutifully filling page after page with sobering journal entries, providing an almost day-by-day sense of these most turbulent years. Intriguingly, from September 21 to November 7 of 1939, his otherwise vociferous diary goes silent. It was during this seven-week interlude that Mother Courage and Her Children was written. This was quite unusual for Brecht; almost all of his other plays went through long and protracted gestation processes, followed by equally torturous bouts of revision that often went on for years and continued even after the plays had been performed. It was not so with Mother Courage. It seems to have been miraculously birthed in those seven weeks and remains one of Brecht's least revised works.

Mother Courage also displayed a more classical approach to diction and action, something relatively new for Brecht. Gone was the bold, modernist experimentation found in Brecht's learning plays, like He Who Says Yes, He Who Says No; The Decision; and The Exception and the Rule. Suddenly, character and story returned with strong influence from Renaissance theatre models. At first, Brecht worried about this reliance on a more classical, normative dramaturgy. He wondered what his younger self would make of this: would the younger Brecht see this as a recapitulation of everything that mattered or as a new and fruitful chapter in the life of a maturing dramatist?

Somewhere in Brecht's unconscious there seemed to be the understanding that he must think about writing for a time beyond his own or, even more daringly, for "all time." This slow and brutal realization changed the nature and dynamic of his work. Brecht, in many

ways, went from a modernist to a classicist without completely losing his hard-earned contemporary stance. Underneath the more recognizable characters and situations in Mother Courage, we still find the sly, political agitator and experimenter. Through this "black market" dramaturgy, Brecht became something of a theatrical smuggler, hiding a subversive core beneath otherwise normative storytelling. We feel this transformation at the heart of all of Brecht's works during these years of exile. It is with this shift that Brecht entered his greatest period and penned the works which now make him part of the theatrical pantheon, sitting between other modern masters such as Chekhov and Beckett.

While the conception, style, and execution of Mother Courage are unique among Brecht's writings, the main character is no stranger to his dramatic canon. Brecht has three great types of heroines; the absolute innocents like Shen Tei in The Good Person Of Szechwan and Grusha in The Caucasian Chalk Circle; the visionary, Joan of Arc figures featured prominently in plays like Saint Joan of the Stockyards, The Visions of Simone Machard, and The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen; and the ever-shrewd, ever-hard-hearted, steely business mavens who can be found at the center of two of Brecht's earliest plays, the Widow Begbick in A Man’s A Man and Begbick in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Heroines of this last type are the ultimate, clear-eyed, unsentimental survivors, and I often think of them as Brecht in drag, complete with his ever-present cigar. Mother Courage shares an important part of her dramatic DNA with Widow Begbick. The beautiful variation in this latest iteration of the character is that she is both a businesswoman and a mother. This fundamental contradiction gives Mother Courage her unique dimensionality and is key to Brecht's larger critique of how difficult it is to be both a human being and a capitalist at the same time. The inherent contradiction ultimately undoes characters such as Mother Courage or leads to a schizophrenic breakdown (think of the innocent Shen Tei in The Good Person of Szechwan, who must create the evil alter ego, Shui Ta, in order to survive the cutthroat mercantile world of Szechwan).

FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR:

Brecht would have to wait until after the war for Mother Courage to find its way back to its intended German audiences. It was an immediate success and became the centerpiece of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. Yet Brecht was surprised to find that most of the original audiences found Mother Courage heroic just for carrying on, missing the deeper critique of the play and the character. Those audiences that did understand what Brecht was up to were appalled that Mother Courage seemed to have learned nothing from her suffering. This is perhaps, in many ways, Brecht's most radical move, a move that strikes right at the heart of Aristotelian poetics. For two thousand or so years, audiences have believed in what Aristotle defines as anagnorisis or recognition; the idea that we gain knowledge through suffering. In other words, at the end of the play, the tragic character has a moment—an epiphany of sorts—where he or she has "seen the light" and "learned their lesson." For Brecht, there is no such moment of recognition. Brecht, in his famous essay on Mother Courage renounces this venerated view, insisting, "Misfortune in itself is a poor teacher. Its pupils learn hunger and thirst, but seldom hunger for truth or thirst for knowledge. Suffering does not transform a sick man into a physician.” Mother Courage was meant to have learned nothing from her war. The audience did not see what the playwright was driving at: that war teaches people nothing. In other notes Brecht admittedly insists, "Observers of catastrophes are wrong to imagine the victims will learn from these...they learn no more from the catastrophe than a guinea pig learns from biology." He is ultimately not interested in opening the eyes of Mother Courage but rather the eyes of his audience.

But what is it that Brecht wants us to see? That war is bad? We know that, don't we? Brecht never shies away from showing this. But admidst this familar portrait of war is a keen understanding of how no one escapes its impact. We allow our country to go to war, we reap the benefits, and we think the war will never reach us. This is Mother Courage's view. War, for her, is an extension of business. There is profit to be made, which she persues, believing all the while that she can keep her children safe. But

war is insatiable. Early in the play, the Sargeant shares this aphoristic observation: "Like the war to nourish you? Have to feed it something too." And we do. We feed it not only tangible things like our sons and daughters, but also intangibles such as our sense of morality; war takes both and happily devours them. At one point Mother Courage is reminded, “He who would sup with the devil must have a long spoon." Brecht's dramatic injunction is that there is no spoon long enough to protect us from the deeply corrosive effects of this devil called war, and so he patiently shows us all the ways that war contaminates everyone, even those who are the furthest from fighting. In this age of drone warfare and surgical strikes, we cannot help but stop and wonder if our spoon is finally long enough or if the ethical ramifications of our choices will come back to haunt us.

And what about our avoidances? What about those wars, like the Congo, which we believe we have nothing to do with? Is the prolongation of this war the consequence of ancient antagonisms or is it fueled by our modern need for coltan, a rare mineral that keeps our electronic devices humming. David Van Reybrouck writes, "Tear open any cell phone, MP3 player, DVD player, laptop, or gaming console and inside you will find a little green labyrinth. Break [the labyrinth] open and you will be holding a bit of the Congo in your hand." We carry a piece of the Congo with us everyday and yet we remain blind to our inadvertent involvement with its continued devastation. Perhaps the problem today is that our spoon has indeed become so long that we don't see the devil at all, and we now allow him to happily go about his business and 'sup' on whole continents.

- Brian Kulick, Artistic Director

MISFORTUNEIN ITSELF IS A POOR TEACHER

Throughout the writing and subsequent mounting of Mother Courage, Brecht left behind an archive of copious notes and essays on the meaning and manner of his great play. Here is a brief selection of his thoughts and observations.

The Audience gave off the acrid smell of clothing that had not been properly cleaned, but this did not detract from the festive atmosphere. Those who had come to see the play had come from ruins and would be going back to ruins. There was more light on stage than on any square or in any house.

The wise old stage manager from the days of Max Reinhardt had received me like a king, but what gave the production its hard realism was a bitter experience shared by all. The dressmakers in the workshops realized that the costumes had to be richer in the beginning of the play than at the end. The stage hands knew how the canvas over Mother Courage's cart had to be white and new at the beginning, then dirty and patched, then somewhat cleaner, but never again really white, and at the end a rag.

A number of people remarked at the time that Mother Courage learns nothing from her misery, that even at the end she does not understand. Few realized that just this was the bitterest and most meaningful lesson of the play.

Undoubtedly the play was a great success; that is, it made a big impression. People pointed out (the actress) Weigel on the street and said: "Mother Courage!" But I do not believe, and I did not believe at the time, that the people of Berlin—or of any other city where the play was shown—understood the play. They were all convinced that they had learned something from the war; what they failed to grasp was that, in the playwright's view, Mother Courage was meant to have learned nothing from her war. They did

not see what the playwright was driving at: that war teaches people nothing.

Misfortune in itself is a poor teacher. Its pupils learn hunger and thirst, but seldom hunger for truth or thirst for knowledge. Suffering does not transform a sick man into a physician. Neither what he sees from a distance nor what he sees face to face is enough to turn an eyewitness into an expert.

The audiences of 1949 and the ensuing years did not see Mother Courage's crimes, her participation, her desire to share in the profits of the war business; they saw only her failure, her sufferings. War had brought them not only suffering, but also the inability to learn from it.

The production of Mother Courage and Her Children is now in its sixth year. It is certainly a brilliant production, with great actors. Undoubtedly something has changed. The play is no longer a play that came too late, that is, after a war. Today a new war is threatening with all its horrors. No one speaks of it, but everyone knows. The people are not in favor of war. But life is so full of hardships. Mightn't war do away with these? Didn't people make a very good living in the last war, at any rate till just before the end? And aren't there such things as successful wars?

I am curious to know how many of those who see Mother Courage and Her Children today understand its warning.

- Bertolt Brecht, 1954

Past productions in CSC's Brecht Initiative: Galileo (2012); A Man's A Man (2014); The Caucasian Chalk Circle (2013).

JOA

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"The Congo defies idealists."-Che Guevara

"The Congolese conflict resembles the European Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), in which looting was one of the fundamental activities of the contending armies. Even when they are relatively efficiently used by the state, the combatants devise strategies of economic relevance that turn 'war' into something Western observers cannot recognize as the kind of 'real military conflict' we have been used to identify due to its extensive use in the past three hundred years. Here economic predation, trafficking of all kinds, looting both at the individual and at the collective level become essential features of the conflict because they are essential means of financing it. This has massive consequences on the way the war was fought. Because civilians are the ones from whom the military can take its means of survival, armed violence is more often directed at civilians than at the enemy army. Direct armed confrontation is often avoided, and straightforward military victory is only one of the various options in the field. It is actually this non state, decentralized form of violence that makes the conflicts so murderous and so hard to stop. Looting and its attendant calamities (arson, rape, torture) become routine operations for the combatants, who are soon more akin to vampires than to soldiers."

- From Africa's World War: Congo, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier

"There was good money to be made in the eastern Congo. Westerners have become used to seeing war as exorbitantly expensive, money-guzzling enterprises that are disastrous to the economy. But in Central Africa, exactly the opposite was true: fighting was relatively cheap, especially in light of the magnificent profits to be made from raw materials. This was no high-tech war. The oversupply of light, secondhand firearms, often from post-Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, pushed prices down, and (child) soldiers who were allowed to plunder their own salaries cost

nothing at all. They kept the population cowering, while the ore was there for the taking. War, in other words, became a worthwhile economic alternative. Why would one want to call a halt to such a lucrative business? Under pressure from the people themselves? But that's what the guns were for, right?" The second phase of the war lasted so long because so many profited from it; not just the big multinationals far away, not just the slick traders in their climate-controlled suites, not just the military leaders in the neighboring countries, but everyone at every level of the pyramid. The war had not begun with profit in mind, but now that so many were turning one it simply went on. Commerce and war held each other in a stranglehold."

- From Congo: The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouck

"In the Congo, in order to survive, we all have to be a bit corrupt, a bit ruthless. That's the system here. That's just the reality of things. If you don't bribe a bit and play to people's prejudices, someone else who does will replace you. Even you, if you were thrown into this system, you would do the same. Or sink."

- A Congolese Worker, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason J. Stearns

"The conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has become mainly about access, control and trade of five key mineral resources: coltan, diamonds, copper, cobalt and gold. The wealth of the country is appealing and hard to resist in the context of the lawlessness and the weakness of the central authority."

- U.N. Security Council Report on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo

WAR IN THE CONGO

WAR IN THE CONGO"The Congo became a self-service country. The scramble for Africa was now being organized by Africans themselves with Coltan as its leading export. Coltan comprises Columbium (niobium) and tantalum, two elements that are adjacent in the periodic table. While niobium is used in the production of stainless steel for, among other things, body piercings, tantalum is a metal with an extremely high melting point, which renders it extremely well-suited for superconductors in the aerospace industry and capacitators in electronic equipment. Tear open any cell phone, MP3 player, DVD player, laptop, or gaming console and inside you will find a little green labyrinth. The drop-shaped brightly colored beads are capacitators. Break them open and you will be holding a bit of the Congo in your hand."

- David Van Reybrouck

"Every time you use a cell phone or log onto a computer, you could be contributing to the death toll in the bloodiest, most violent region in the world: the eastern Congo. The loss of life far exceeds deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Yet this is not some distant tragedy, not just another African horror story. The lives and deaths of these millions of Congolese are linked to us all. The mines that scar the verdant hills and mountains of eastern Congo [are] critical to our modern lives. Each time we use a mobile phone, use a video game console, or open a tin can, we hold the lives and deaths of the eastern Congolese in our hands."

- From Consuming the Congo by Peter Eichstaedt

"The Congo problem is a World problem."- Che Guevara

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