The Final Brecht Blog

Blog 13 - Final blog

Today was the final day of class for this semester.  We had two very nice reports.  First Annaliese taught the class to sing Mack the Knife in German, and Dylan gave a report on Modern Brecht – 1960 to present.  I believe that Dylan is the only person I have ever met who indeed really loves the works of Bertolt Brecht.  I find Brecht interesting as a historical figure and as a part of Germany’s cultural experience, but I am not so sure that he is relevant in German society today.  Therefore everyone who has an interest in Germany and German culture should have been exposed to the writings of Brecht.  Probably every child in German schools is forced to read Brecht, and if you do not know a little bit of Brecht, you cannot be considered an educated person in Germany today.  Still, I do not remember Brecht’s name ever comming up in the recent „deutsche Leitkultur Debatte.”

None the less, it was a great semester and I learned a great deal about Bertolt Brecht and his plays.  For me personally, the high point of the semester was my report on Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder.  Having an entire play to myself to study and report on was a lot of fun (and a lot of work and stress).  Can you imagine what the class would have been like if every student in the class would have had a different Brecht play to study and make a report about… that would have really been schickimicki.

Now I must finish reading The Life of Courage by Grimmelshausen so that I can put together my final report on Brecht’s historical inspiration for his Mutter Courage.  Brecht must have really loved the Thirty Years War because he used that era as the backdrop for Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder as well as his Augsburg Chalk Circle. 

OK, now let's all have a really fun Summer.

Jim Ross

Kein Kölsch für Nazis!

Final Project Quandry

Blog 12

This week has been filled with a quandary:  What to do for the final project on Bertolt Brecht that has not been done already.

I was hoping to get an inspiration from either Frau Wagner or some of my classmates, but that did not work.  It seems that a lot of the theater students want to do a skit or a scene from one of Brecht’s plays.  That is certainly not my style!  One of the German students is going to sing a song.  That is even less my style.  The alternative to doing a final project is to simply write the essay portion of the final exam.

Since last week, I have been more and more fascinated with the works of Grimmelshausen, a 17^th century author whose book Mutter Courage served as  inspiration for Brecht’s play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. (Of course, one should first read Simplicissimus before starting Mutter Courage.) 

Two events during the Thirty Years War are important to understanding Brecht’s play, that is, General Tilly’s sacking of Magdeburg and the death of Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen. 

The death of Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen as shown in this painting by Carl Wahlbom. 

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Mother Courage

Blog 11 

This week was my presentation of Mother Courage and her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years War, a play by Bertolt Brecht which was first produced in 1941 in Switzerland.  That is right!  Not just a single act but the entire play.  But as is often the case, when art is long, time is short.  The class period was only long enough for a very high level presentation of some of the main points of the play.  In reality and entire college course could be built to study the ideas and opinions that Brecht presented in the play.

Simplicissimus is actually a ten book cycle in which Grimmelshausen relates his experiences during the Thirty Years War in a semi-autobiographical fashion, as was the fashion for Baroque literature in Germany.  He was torn from his peasant youth, and for the next 14 years Grimmelshausen was caught up in the war and attained the rank of captain.   During that time he saw all of the horrors of the Thirty Years War and related the absurdity of war in a comical fashion through the character of Simplicissimus.

Brecht had seen already lived through World War I, and had seen the beginnings of World War II when he wrote his Mother Courage and her Children in 1938.  He wrote the play in a “whirlwind,” that is, he wrote the play in the span of one month.  Not only is the play a warning of the coming World War, but also an attack on capitalism.  In Brecht’s version of Marxism, capitalism always leads to war.

Today, in spite of the fall of the Soviet Union and the DDR, Brecht’s Mutter Courage with her anti-war message remains one of Brecht’s most popular plays.  In 2006, Meryl Streep stared in the title role of a new translation of Brecht’s play, with all new music.  It was a great success.  So, it looks like Mother Courage will be around for a long time to come.

As inspiration for his Mutter Courage, Brecht used the novel Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1669) by Hans Jacob Christoph von Grimmelshausen (1621-1676).

Good Bye, Lenin

Blog 10

This week the German Club presented movie was Good bye, Lenin.  I am sure the main character, Alex, who searched everywhere for products from the former East Germany for his sick mother would have enjoyed this website:

http://www.ossiversand.de/product_info.php?cPath=28_35&products_id=906&osCsid=2478b655ad6393980d89fab903fb030c

Though this is a very entertaining movie to watch with lots of comedy and German humor, there is also much to be learned about the culture near the end of the former DDR and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. 

Still, there is one point that I wonder about.  During the movie, there are only color televisions in the DDR.  Is that really true?  I through email correspondence with a couple of ‘Ossies’, I had the impression that most of the East German television sets were only black and white.

Die Dreigroschenoper fängt an

Blog 9

Everyone is happy to be back from Spring Break and ready for more Break… uh no, I meant to say, more Brecht.

For the remainder of the semester we will be examining The Three Penny Opera, which was the first really big success for Brecht’s concept epic theater in 1928.  Last week, we started with a report over act one, which brought up the point of eating a fish with a knife.  Mac reproaches Jake for eating a trout with a knife, saying that anybody who would to that is just a plain swine.  It became clear that Mac could have profited with a few lessons from Uwe Fenner on the proper use of silverware in a formal setting, or by watching "Guter Stil & Etikette mit Uwe Fenner":

http://de.sevenload.com/sendungen/Stil-Etikette/folgen/Pb8r1j9-Stiltipp-Besteck-und-Glaeserkunde

If Mac only spoke English, he could have spent some time with Nancy Mitchel:

http://www.monkeysee.com/play/2246-basic-dining-etiquette

Either way, Mac would have been less likely of looking like a swine himself.

Monday 4/4/11, we watched part of Die Dreigroschenoper on DVD.  There have been several movie versions of Brecht’s play, but the one we are watching is the first – The 1931 version directed by G. W. Pabst, which does not exactly follow the stage play nor Brecht's screenplay a movie.  From a first glance, it appears that many of Weill’s songs have been cut from Pabst's movie.  It has been suggested that Pabst made the cuts to Brecht's screen version in order to improve the flow and continuity of his movie.  As you may suspect, Pabst's changes did not sit well with Bertolt.  In fact, Brecht filed a lawsuit to block the showing of the film.  In the end, the courts judged in favor of Pabst but in 1933, the nazis banned the play, the movie and Bertolt Brecht in Hitler's Germany.

This and that...

After a test on Monday and my report on Brecht and his composers today, there is not much to put on the blog this week.  The report took all class period, and I was pleased that my classmates had questions and seemed interested in what I was saying and wanted to know more.

Frau Wagner reported that the German Department has some money to spend on German films.  I think that she may have wanted suggestions.  OK… Here is a place in America that sells German language films (many have subtitles) that have been difficult to find.

http://www.germanvideo.net/?gclid=CJjc-LWo1KcCFce7KgodCSMHAA

I was happy to see that they have the ‘Sissi’ movies with Romy Schnider.  I am always stunned when a smart, well-educated German student looks  at me with a blank look and states, with total sincerity, that they have never heard of Elisabeth, Sissi, the “Sissi” movies or Romy Schneider.

Here is some for news for Brecht fans… a new photo of Bertolt Brecht dressed in a costume to look like Mozart was in the online newspaper sueddeutsche.de

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/brecht-aufnahme-von-die-dreigroschenfotografie-1.1039502

And oh yes, I wish everyone a happy Spring Break.  :-)