Gossip, Ghosts, and Memory Mother Courage and the Forging of the Berliner Ensemble Gitta Honegger

Gossip, Ghosts, and Memory Mother Courage and the Forging of the Berliner Ensemble Gitta Honegger Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Plays are magic sites. They hold not only the characters waiting to be brought to life onstage; they are also haunted by their production histories— by their authors, directors, designers, and, most prominently, by the actors, dead or alive, who embodied the roles throughout the centuries. Memories of past performances are passed on through generations. They are refracted, consciously or unconsciously, in the experience of the live production. Any performer taking on the part of Mother Courage takes on not only the ghost of Helene Weigel, whose performance of the role made theatre history, but also the history of the famed Berliner Ensemble with its Weimar Republic roots, which Weigel assembled together with her husband, Bertolt Brecht, under Soviet patronage amidst the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust. Brecht’s definitive production of the play, which he wrote in Denmark in 1939 on the run from the Nazis, opened at Berlin’s historic Deutsches Theater in the Soviet-occupied zone on 10 January 1949. An earlier version of Mother Courage played in Zürich’s Schauspielhaus in 1941, while the Brechts were in exile in California, with Weigel’s good friend Therese Giehse in the title role. Though a great admirer of Giehse, Brecht was concerned about the deeply moved critical responses to the tragedy of the “mother animal” and adjusted the text to avoid Courage’s emotional appeal (Knopf 2001:396–97). (In 1951 he himself directed Giehse in the Munich Kammerspiele production of the play. Weigel detractors claim that he preferred his fellow Bavarian’s cabaret-trained intelligence to his wife’s susceptibility to tearful hyperbole [Lutz 2005]). In any event, it was the Brecht-Weigel production that prepared the ground for the celebrated, if controversial Berliner Ensemble (BE), which was officially founded in April 1949, a few months before the division of Germany into two separate states. The Ensemble was headed by Weigel until her death in 1971. Among the initial company members were returning Jewish and Communist refugees, anti-Fascists who had been imprisoned by the Nazis, Jews who survived in hiding in Germany, young men who were drafted into the FLAK (anti-aircraft units) in their early teens, as well as theatre professionals who continued to work in Nazi Germany and survived the bombings of Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and other major German cities. Their conflicted biographies reflect the traumatizing events of the first half of the 20th century. The forging of a model ensemble from this ragtag assembly of survivors, who would soon be torn apart by the Cold War, is deeply embedded in the play. The company members’ individual and collective histories refract the cataclysms of the 20th century. They are part of the heavy load every Mother Courage drags along in her cart of merchandise. Most prominently, there is Helene Weigel’s own complicated journey from the collapsed Habsburg Empire to Communist East Berlin: born in 1900 in Vienna, the daughter of Czech Jews, Brecht’s much-tested wife, model performer, and tough-assed heir of his estate. Though she did not originate the role, Figure 1. (facing page) Helene Weigel at the May Day parade on Marx-Engels-Platz, East Berlin, 1962. (Photo by Maria Steinfeldt Gitta Honegger is Professor of Theatre at Arizona State University. She received Guggenheim and Fulbright/IFK fellowships for her biography of Helene Weigel, which will be published by Yale Ensemble Berliner The University Press. They will also publish her biography of 2004 Nobel laureate for literature Elfriede Jelinek and her translation of Jelinek’s opus magnum The Children of the Dead. She holds a PhD in Theaterwissenschaft from the University of Vienna and as an actress was a member of the Vienna Burgtheater, the Schauspielhaus Zürich, and several German repertory companies. She served as resident dramaturge of the Yale Repertory Theatre, where she also directed, and as Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama. Her book Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian (Yale University Press, 2001) received the Austrian Cultural Forum’s biannual book award and was published in her German translation by Ullstein/Pantheon, Berlin. TDR: The Drama Review 52:4 (T200) Winter 2008. ©2008 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 99 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Weigel’s Courage has become an icon for the devastation of war and its problematic survival: a small figure towering over her cart as it is pulled by her children; a solitary creature in the end, bent almost to the ground, harnessed to her vehicle, which she refuses to give up. Peddling her wares to the soldiers on both sides of the devastating Thirty Years War (1618– 1648) cost her both her sons and their mute sister. As Brecht would have it, the mother’s relentless pursuit of profit on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder stands for the greed that sustains all wars. Weigel's experience when she lived in Santa Monica during the 1940s of “heroes’ mothers” displaying their fallen sons’ Figure 2. The first production ofMother Courage, Zürich Schauspielhaus, medals together with 1941, directed by Leopold Lindtberg. From left: Therese Giehse (Anna Fierling), candles in their windows Erika Pesch (Kattrin), Karl Paryla (Swiss Cheese), Wolfgang Langhoff (Eilif). shaped her critical perspec- (Courtesy of Stadtarchiv Zürich) tive on the role (heightened, no doubt, by the fact that her son Stefan was drafted into the US army in 1944) (Tenschert 1983). A picture in the paper of an Asian mother screaming over her son’s dead body inspired Courage’s legendary silent scream after denying the corpse of her son Swiss Cheese, whose death she had caused by haggling too long over the ransom money requested by the enemy. Brecht’s famous demand for critical distance notwithstanding, audiences everywhere identified with the tragic predicament of women and children during times of war (Hecht 2000:18). As the head of the Berliner Ensemble, Weigel came to personify Mother Courage: the woman who navigated her company through the tempests of East German politics, just as she previously navigated her family on their 14-year odyssey in exile. According to Weigel, or “Helli,” as she was generally called—the name became as iconic for the quasi-intimacy of her management style as “die Weigel” did for her prestige as an actress—it was her husband who told her that she must run the ensemble. The way she organized their complicated moveable household during the ordeals of emigration—which included their two children, Stefan and Barbara, the playwright’s library, correspondence, papers, and works-in-progress, as well as his indispensable mistresses—was in his eyes the best qualification for the job ofIntendantin , the head of the company. (Taking on a leadership position relatively late in life, without training and experience in the field, was something she had in common with the emerging leaders of East Germany.) The story fits Weigel’s dislike of big words and self-important postures. Moreover, it has all the trappings of a Brechtian fable of common sense winning over standardized education. True to the spirit of Brechtian dramaturgy, the motherly image distracted from its strategic advan- GittaHonegger 100 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 tages: The Berliner Ensemble (as a mom and pop shop so to speak) would be represented by two voices. If the GDR had to grudgingly put up with Brecht’s authority based on his international reputation, however uncomfortable they were with his work, they had to also include Weigel as the chief administrator of his theatre. She brilliantly manipulated all levels of the Communist hierarchy with her Mother Courage mystique and people skills, even when Brecht would loose his dialectical cool. Cultivating her Viennese accent, peppered with Yiddish expressions, Helli schmoozed, pestered, or wept, if necessary, to get her way. Most effectively, she fed her targets into submis- sion with her legendary Schnitzel, her Kaiserschmarrn (literally, the Emperor’s mess; thick pancakes torn into pieces and topped with steamed plums), Zwetschenknödel (dumplings filled with plums and rolled in buttered breadcrumbs), cheese crepes, and lemon cakes. In addition, Weigel shared treasured recipes with the wives of cultural apparatchiks who had a special knack for censorship. Weigel’s culinary virtuosity seemed at odds with her petite bony frame and haggard features, which made her Mother Courage a timeless icon for the ravages of war. Her husband’s misunderstood Verfremdungseffekt notwithstanding, Helli might have devel- oped her own existential Verfremdungs technique, an act of containment as a method of surviving and as means to distance herself from both the cataclysmic events of her times, which directly affected her family—her father died in the concentration camp of Lodz in Poland—and the painful demands of her marriage and exile. Only on rare occasions did she reveal her deep, personal pain, as in a conversation with Werner Hecht, former BE dramaturge and head of the Brecht archives: And then there were all these affairs with the women [die Weibergeschichten], they were quite unbearable for me at times, I never understood what he got out of them [. .] What we had between us was a great love relationship. And all of this hurt very, very much! It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t.

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