Mother Courage and her Children [antikvár]

PrefaceAs we look back today upon the career of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) two periods of maximum creativity define themselves. The first came with the onset of manhood: Brecht had written some of his finest poetry, dramatic and otherwise, before he was twenty-five. The second came when he had perforce to withdraw from the hectic political activity of the Depression Years and lead the life of an exile diiring the later thirties and earlier forties. This is the period of The Good Woman of Setzuan, The Life of Galileo Galilei, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and of what many regard as his masterpiece. Mother Courage and her Children.In this play, and Galileo^ Brecht withdrew, not only from Nazi Germany, but from th^ twentieth century, and it is not without interest that the century he took in exchange was, in both instances, the seventeenth. It is the century of greatness, a century that opens with William Shakespeare and closes with Isaac Newton. Brecht finds in that century the roots of his own philosophy of life, scientific humanism. 'Of all the days,' he writes of the day when Galileo had to decide whether to abjure Copernicus, 'that was the one / An age of reason could have begun.' This at any rate is the 'thesis' in the dialectical process: the 'antithesis' is represented by the Thirty Years War (1618-48).For Germans, this is not 'just another war'. In the way it bore down upon whole cities and populations, it remained unique in German history until 1944-5. Since Brecht's play was finished before World War II began, this 'cross-reference' has a sadly prophetic character.One won iers if some friend mailed Brecht a copy of an English book that came out the year before he wrote Mother Courage, namely. The Thirty Years War by C. V. Wedgwood. Here is Miss Wedgwood's summing-up:V