Brighton University UK, Feb. 8, 2024, 2-4PM

Note for this publication: 
In the Spring term of this year I was Visiting Fellow at the Center for Memory, Narrative and History of Brighton University, my academic sponsor -- and quite indispensable generous helper -- being Dr Patricia McManus. I had to do three interventions there (by zoom) for an audience consisting of both physical and zoom attendees.

This first presentation was called The Politics of Hope and Indignation: Aeschylus and Brecht. It was also accompanied by Power Point résumés of mine. It generated some good discussion, since we circulated material in January. 

I cannot omit the fact that, soon after my final presentation in early May (but with no causal relationship that I could imagine), the Vice-Chancellor and other decision-makers of the relatively small Brighton University proposed to fire ca. 100 staff members, mainly in the Humanities. A majority of them were persuaded to resign, and after negotiation by the teachers’ Trade Union (which then stayed on strike until the end of September) the number of those "let go" was eventually ca. 80.This meant that practically little organised Humanities teaching and research will be left at that University – who needs it? I was told that a short time before that, the University had found a large sum to buy a new building… 

0. My presentation deals with two famous plays: Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, written and performed when Athenian democracy was being corrupted into empire, and Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (MC&HC), written during the Nazis’ preparation of a new world war and performed after it whenever new wars were being prepared or waged.  Mass murder of people by powerful rulers is the background to both. Aeschylus’s play is in a mythological framework, it functions through head-on conflict and precept, through identification with the larger-than-life protagonist. Brecht’s play is about the survival of little people, it functions by putting the conflict between the lines and events of each scene, by contraries involving a measured sympathetic distance. 

This dossier is for prior reading and information, as well as a few key examples from both plays to be discussed. It should help with the audience’s questions and discussions. I suggest that countering life-denying oppression has to begin with understanding the human position/s involved. And further, that the states of mind proper to understanding are indignation at the dominant forces in our living together and a hope, however far in the future (to be discussed re: Prometheus). 

Part 1. [The Introduction situating Prometheus Bound has by now been published as a full essay: D. Suvin, „A Long Hope: The Prometheus Counter-Project.“ Ilha do desterro 76.2, (2023): 356-86.    

Part 2. SITUATING Mother Courage and Her Children AND BRECHT IN OUR AGE OF NEVER-ENDING WARFARE (War, Capitalism, People: Introductory to MCHC) 

Articulating the past historically … means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger.
		Walter Benjamin, Thesis 6 

	1. Some Presuppositions 
For half a century now, about 2 billion people have been in abject poverty and a majority of the rest is sinking towards it, while growth of millionaires and billionaires as well as environmental destruction are out of control. Globalised financial systems have expanded into the major means of transferring wealth from the population to the super-rich, and classical exploitation of physical work has expanded into dispossession of working creators through biopiracy, patenting, and licensing. Our age is one of upper-class warfare against the great majority leading to deep immiseration and savagery. Mass dying follows not only upon what I call coronisation (the economico-political treatment of the Covid-19 pandemic) but also hunger and other diseases, plus the truly enormous climate-destruction upheavals to come – met often with intensified exploitation and oppression. 

I have studied statistics and believe they speak clearly. The authoritative World Inequality Report 2022 shows that the poorest 50% of the world’s population owns just $4,100 per adult (in purchasing power parity), while the richest 10% owns $771,300 per adult. Income inequality is equally harsh: the richest 10% take 52% of world income, leaving the poorest 50% with merely 8.5% of world income. As to the top 1% of the ultra-rich, by 2021 they had 38% of global wealth while the bottom 50%, almost 4 billion people, had only a frightening 2% of global wealth.  At the same time, the share of global wealth owned by the ultra-rich rose from 70 times to 110 times the average or middle-classes’ share, and is largely untaxed. This obscene wealth entails that the ultra-rich have a decisive  amount of power over economic survival and information, which means millions of preventable deaths among those too poor to survive. 

The unbearable vertical organisation of the world from top down obtains also between countries: the World Bank foresees that 92 of the world’s poorer countries will between 2020 and 2024 suffer a cumulative loss equal to roughly 1/3 of their Gross Domestic Project. Wars thrive amid such desperation, for those in the armed forces usually eat and their commanders have power. 

Thus the contradictions of capitalism, where huge productivity is used for death instead of life, have never been more obvious. They begin with the ecological collapse of our air, water, and soil. Its twin is incessant and ever more destructive global warfare. The destruction of psychic sanity resulting from stunted lives may be less obvious but is worst of all. The present economic crisis arising from the wilful breakdown of health services and peaceful coexistence is cynically manipulated into the coming about of a total surveillance society (I can refer those interested in this section to arguments in my essays on such matters, on my internet sites). 

Contrarywise, an underlying yearning for radical change in human relationships is to my mind also present. So macro-events crucially depend on people's individual and collective understanding (I touch on this in 3.2).

The main question is: how can the huge trend towards Fascism 2.0 be halted? Politically speaking, this can only be done by a program of radical societal justice, usually called “left.” In his early unflinching verses after the 1933 defeat by Nazism, Brecht wrote a poem “To Him Who  Hesitates“ (An den Schwankenden, GKA 12: 47); here is a fragment:  

Oh we have made mistakes, there’s no denying it. 
Our numbers are dwindling rapidly. 
Our precepts are in confusion. Some of our words 
Have been twisted by the enemy beyond recognition. 

 What is now false of what we once said 
Some of it or all of it? 
		(transl. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine) 


	2. Some Positions 
Thence Brecht attempted to “by indirections find directions out” (Shakespeare). Any position must avoid fake certainties and rosy fantasies by presenting the denial of the worst: war, and common people’s adherence to it out of insecurity, out of fear or -- as Courage does – out of taking a small cut for themselves and their family. The worst, the price of war as it destroys people physically and/or psychically, is counteracted by “an ultimate irreducibility of narrative as such“ (F. Jameson); I believe this is grounded in imagining possible worlds that can be radically different from the dominant norm. This holds in spades for the stage narrative, which is sensually present and exemplary. Art as experiment, testing its own presuppositions by feedback from the effect of its performance in practice, is at its clearest in theatre. Counting on the audience, Brecht wrote optimistically on the occasion of one of his best plays, The Good Person of Szechwan:

The modern audience member does not wish to be the mindless victim of any insinuation …. He does not wish to be patronised and violated but simply to get presented with human material so as to order it herself. (GW 15: 221).

This is a vision akin to Marx's disdain for interpreting the world as something fixed and static, a text to be reproduced by an indifferent actor of the World Play, and Einstein's insistence that, though the universe was not chaotic, there was no absolute perspective from which all events were scaled up or down. One could in Brecht’s generation also use the visions of, say, Picasso or Eisenstein. Seeing the world as sets of changing possibilities, it is a reflection on the possibilities of human nature, developing within history and as history. 

Therefore, a play or dramaturgy should not be looked at “through the eyes of” (by identifying with) its main characters, which assumes the presuppositions of the play are indisputable. On the contrary, a look at all dramaturgic agents from the audience, which oscillates in and out of the play, can lead to the presuppositions of the play being tested. The play sits in judgement on the audience’s age.
I close this section with Brecht’s poem from about 1937, between the World Wars and immediately preceding the play: 

	The Coming War

The war that is coming 
Is not the first one. Before it 
There were other wars. 
When the last one ended 
There were victors and vanquished. 
Among the vanquished, the little people
Hungered. Among the victors,  
The little people also hungered.  
			(transl. DS 2022) 


3.  Notes on Context and Play

3.1.  Personal context: Brecht had at the time of writing the play four children. One, born out of wedlock when BB was young, Frank, was to perish as soldier in the Nazi war on Russia. One daughter survived the bombardment of Germany. A second son and daughter travelled in 1933-41 with Brecht and Helli Weigel from Scandinavia and Russia to the USA.

3.2. General context: It is remarkable how prescient the play seems about the two vaguely science-fictional vogues of the last generation, dominant in mass media: apocalyptic dystopias (e.g. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, 2006, movie 2009) and its twin of clannish wars and court intrigues (e.g. George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, book series 1998 and ongoing, TV series 2011 on, running for years with huge success and spin-offs). Their common denominator is also twofold: we are shown the dominance of perpetual brutal warfare of group against group and often each against each in a precapitalist society, and there are no causalities explaining or even mentioning the collapse or absence of capitalism – these are societies totally frozen in history, their time horizon shrunken to perpetual present. Yet a comparison with MC&HC shows this decisive difference with an earlier highly threatened but hopeful age (as suggested in section 2): Brecht has a strong indignation against the dominant organisation of human life in common. This value-stance (axiology) peeps out here and there in this play but it is seldom formulated and never presented as a conceptual system, rather as a strongly implied and coherent current between the lines, to be integrated into the play’s meaning by the audience. 

A key question: is estrangement of any kind  possible for today's mass audiences, either of the hopeful Brechtian or hopeless Kafkian kind? I'd suspect only with great difficulty: for the contemporary audience member is living in the ever tightening mesh where Walter Benjamin’s favourite maxim from Kafka obtains: “The lie has become the world order.” Therefore, as opposed to the quote from Brecht in Section 2 (please look it up), the spectator is adrift and suspicious about his own rationality and s/he accepts insinuations as the only possible expression of both reason and emotion; the audience wishes to be presented with a tightly ordered series of shocks but doesn’t realise these are at odds with any reality of human justice. The spectator is not only insecure but also bereft of alternatives, thus doesn’t know she/he is patronized and then violated. The everlasting present of both workplace and cellular phones plus endless TV and internet serials overpowers her/him with individual alienation and/or raw murder and sex. This artfully voids reflection between the lines or shots, the precondition for indignation and love to be articulated. The aptly called "consumer" consumes what Walter Benjamin already saw as The-Same-Always-Again (das Immerwiedergleiche), where hope  -- as opposed to care -- cannot intrude, into a craving for violence and competition. Thence wars are normal and not monstrous: a fatal showing (as the Latin religious root of monstrum had it).

3.3. Intro to Play (NOT a substitute for reading the scenes suggested; see below for oral supplements as the scenes are shown): This play was written in 1938-39 -- and many details redone 1946-49 -- in the form of an Elisabethan “chronicle play,” yet not about kings and rulers but about the little people. Brecht invented for it a unique popular language composed of everyday dialectal words from various German-speaking regions, often with Biblical allusions and very funny. I am sorry to say that my late friend Willett translated it into a much more furbished stage language, taking especial liberties with the poems in order to keep the rhymes. The basic tension unifying the play is one between two poles: 1/  all the stage agents, in whose magnetic centre is MC (Anna Fierling) herself, a small trader following the armies in Europe’s Thirty-years’ War in order to sell them merchandise; 2/ an audience prepared to be both entertained and enlightened by the ups and downs of people, primarily MC and her 3 children, in a war that uses them. The emblem and sign of this tension is the large covered wagon permanently at center-stage, which is her shop and home, and is supposed to get spick and span when she’s briefly well off and then becomes more and more ruined. As K. Hollander’s introduction to the translation points out, MC is depicted as intelligent and sly in everyday affairs and opinions but also convinced she can take a cut from the war for her small family. At the end, she still believes this, and though her children die, she has learned nothing. The whole play, as seen in Scene 1 with the black crosses of death drawn, is a long descent into death. This is clearly meant to suggest the fate of Germany, whom Brecht in a famous poem called a “pale mother” killing her children – or of any other nation or people not resisting war. 

This play has made theatre history in many languages, and is rediscovered – e.g. in the USA - whenever wars rage. 

	ON BIBLIOGRAPHY 
The literature on Brecht is immense. My preferred book is Jameson’s and the early essays by Benjamin - especially the two on „epic theatre.“ I have also listed my two books with essays on Brecht and his plays (not MC&HC); those interested may ask me for my essays not so collected. On Mother Courage and Her Children I recommend first reading Hollander’s Intro and Notes to the Willett translation, and the golden oldie essays by Barthes and Benjamin. The essay by Farmer uses this play as a springboard from which to discuss US wars up to Iraq. Vork is useful but the revolution in his title is a hyperbole. See also other writings by Brecht on war, e.g. The War Primer, and the critics in Brecht Yearbook (43 issues so far):

Barthes, Roland.  „Seven Photo Models of Mother Courage." Transl. H. Freud Bernays. TDR 12.1 (Autumn 1967): 44-55. 

Benjamin, Walter. Understanding Brecht. Transl. S. Mitchell. NLB, 1973.

Farmer, Paul E. „Mother Courage and the Future of War.“ Social Analysis 52.2 (Summer 2008): 165-184 [issue on An Anthropology of War].

Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method. Verso, 1998. 

Suvin, Darko. To Brecht and Beyond. Harvester P/ Barnes & Noble, 1984. 

---. Darko Suvin: A Life in Letters. Paradoxa, 2011.

Vork, Robert. „Silencing Violence: Repetition and Revolution in Mother Courage and Her Children." Comparative Drama 47.1 (Spring 2013): 31-54.

Willett, John.  Translation of Mother Courage QV 

World Inequality Report 2022. Eds. Th. Picketty et al. Harvard UP, 2022. https://wir2022.wid.world/. Accessed Jan 20, 2023

NOTES FOR DISCUSSION:

WILLETT TRANSLATION + MOVIE by Berliner Ensemble:
--INTRO + SCENE 1: 01. pp. 3-13, the beginning FROM “You captains, stop” (1:25 min.) TO 5 seconds of drumming more after “And shake a leg” (5:01) = ca. 3:40 min. +	INSERT 1-2 SEC. BLACK + 02. FROM “Suppose I could see” (13:00) TO “Don’t get the wind up” (14:20) = ca. 1:20 min., IN ALL SC. 1 = ca. 5 min. 
--SCENE 3: FROM “I think I bargained for too long” (1:15:17) TO FULL END OF THE FAMOUS “SILENT SCREAM” (1:15:44) = ca. 30 sec. 
--SCENE 4. Willett tr. pp. 41-45 “The Long Anger” or Indignation lesson FROM “I’m complaining” (1:19:40) TO “Why dispute what is true” (1:26:09) = ca. 6:30 min. 
-- “Song of Solomon” with Dessau MUSIC –[CUT]
--SCENE 9. Willett tr. Song of Solomon, pp.71-73. [INTERPLAY BETWEEN THE PARTICULAR AND THE GENERAL -- CUT] 
SCENE 11 END + 12. Willett tr. pp. 82-84 (Kattrin killed, Lullaby + Final song, MC still expects Eilif; at the end of play a totally impoverished Courage is hauling the waggon on, still hopeful) 

The recommended scenes for our discussion (see also the Willett translation of Mother Courage), selected parts of which I returned to in my oral comments, were: 

Beginning: Mother Courage’s initial march song + beginning of Scene 1 (“war is order”), in Willett transl. pp. 3-13; Scene 3, second half leading to M.C’s famous “silent scream”; Scene 4, in Willett transl. pp. 41-45, leading up to The Song of the Great Capitulation (“The Long Anger” or Indignation  lesson); Scene 10, in Willett transl. pp. 75-84 “The Stone Begins To Speak” (Kattrin killed, when tol use empathy); Scenes 11 and 12, the ending (lullaby + final song, a totally impoverished Courage hauling the cart on, still hopeful…)

Discuss orally before film
--3 points about method:

1/ Günther Anders, the great philosopher of our atom-bomb age who knew Brecht in California, talks in his famous Man without World [Mensch ohne Welt, Beck, 1993, p. 142] about BB’s Ausgesprochenheit, i.e. pronouncedness. To my mind almost all works by BB are a very personal fusion of the pronouncedness or directness, which means a horizon of clear and often explicit judgments, presented pleasurably but indirectly and usually comical (and in this play in an invented plebeian language based on various Southern German dialects). For ex. Scene 1 where the Sergeant and the Recruiter praise War as the Great Order should produce a clear antiwar effect, but it does so by making the military interlocutors – low on the scale of power – comical if also threatening. 

2/ On BB’s distance and interruption: In the best early essay on BB, Walter Benjamin talks of interruption as his dramaturgic method. This creates a series of pauses which make possible a precise psychological distance between spectators and stage agents-cum-events. The various scenes, which are in a way independent episodes, converge toward the horror of full degradation and loneliness at the end; they are connected by chronology and then by a common meaning of “war brings death to all you value”. The time between the scenes, and often between their inner divisions, is aided by the devices of “songs” with music and episode titles onstage; all of this should create possibilities of a spectatorial stance “above the flow of events”, to be subtly melded “with” the flow of events. The interrupting durations should prevent uncritical empathy into the protagonists, here a mother and her 3 children. The audience must care about the protagonists, or why see the play? But it ought not to disregard the protagonists’ weak aspects when they surface, and especially not in Courage herself. Empathy means for Brecht a lack of possibilities for agreement or disagreement with the stage agents’ actions; to the contrary, sympathy allows for modulating the distance from very near -- as in Courage’s silent scream or her daughter’s drumming to save a city -- to very far -- as when Courage’s continues to haggle about giving up her cart in order to save Swiss Cheese and he is shot.

3/ There is also an allegorical element of death which scansions the play. Courage’s comical fakery with black crosses to be drawn as your destiny is on the allegorical level fully serious. not too far from the horizon of tragedy. The children in all B’s plays are an embodiment of future possibilities, a radical but concrete mini-utopia. Each has a particular virtue; courage, honesty or love for children. In the Song of Solomon this is allegorically generalised -- they are associated with the great men of the past by the virtues they possess: Eilif is courageous like Caesar, and so on (see Willett tr. pp. 71-73. Song of Solomon, and record, music by P. Dessau, sung by Gisela May).  Except that virtues in a war for plunder, a world upside down, bring about premature death.

[Here I omit the notes for my oral introductions to Scenes 1, 3, and 4 – DS]

Discuss after final scene

It is not the death of Mother Courage but it is her death as a mother of any possibly future – in rags but willingly yoked to the war. 

So finally, the death of the 3 children, which is the “epic” backbone to the play, signifies that in the stage universe the possibilities of life are preempted by death. In the life of the little people, the MC family this is a result of her trying to live by profiting from the war. BB’s friend Benjamin phrased this as “the end [or telos] of bourgeois society is death”: not that they always consciously wish it but that its innermost workings must bring premature – that is, unnatural -- death.

The final scene loops the loop back to the first one (Willett transl pp. 3-13) where the Recruiter and the Sergeant’s explicitly praise war as the father of order. They seem like descendants of Hobbes, who had argued that the State’s sovereign power can be hurtful but “not so hurtful as the want of it.” But we shouldn’t forget that Hobbes also depicts the perpetual state of war as both miserable and ignominious. As he famously put it, people in that situation will have “no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society, and which is worst of all continual fear, and danger of violent death . . . .” They will lack exactly what Prometheus gave the human species. 
[(Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Michael Oakeshott ed. Collier Books, 1962, p. 100)].