The Cart That Could Not Stop

A new staging of Brecht’s Mother Courage in London is being read as a parable of capitalism. It is also, more quietly, a Jewish story, and a warning about the wars we learn to live inside.

A woman drags a cart across a battlefield, selling boots and brandy to whichever army is winning, and one by one the war takes her three children while she haggles. That is Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 drama of the Thirty Years’ War, and this summer Shakespeare’s Globe has staged it for the first time in the playhouse’s history, with the Globe’s own artistic director, Michelle Terry, in the title role. The critics have largely been won over. It is a strange and fitting debut for a Marxist playwright in Shakespeare’s wooden O, an Elizabethan theatre built for a different kind of crowd, now watching a woman refuse to learn the one lesson the play keeps offering her.

The lesson is simple and terrible. “You want the war to work for you?” runs one line in Anna Jordan’s blazing new translation. “You got to feed it something too.” Mother Courage believes she is using the war. The war is using her. She thinks of herself as a trader who happens to operate in a battlefield, and so she keeps moving, keeps haggling, keeps the cart rolling, because to stop is to admit there is nothing left to sell. By the final scene she is alone, still pulling, still convinced the next campaign will set her right. Brecht was famously dismayed that audiences pitied her. He wanted them to judge her, to see that her courage was really a failure of imagination, the inability to picture any life that was not organised around the next contract.

That is the reading London is mostly taking, and it is a true one: war as commerce, profit as the engine that keeps the killing going, the small operator who calls it survival while she sustains the thing that will bury her. The mapping onto our own moment is easy enough that it has become a little cheap. But the play has a second life that the Globe’s staging leaves in shadow, and it is the one an Israeli reader should pull into the light.

The songs that puncture Mother Courage, that stop the audience being swept along and force it to think, were written by Paul Dessau. Brecht wrote the text in exile in 1939; Dessau composed the score that the world now knows after the war, in the second half of the 1940s, by which time both men understood far more about catastrophe than the play’s first draft could have held. Dessau was born in Hamburg into a family of cantors. He fled Germany for France in 1933, the year Hitler took power, and it was from exile that he wrote the score for Avodah, Helmar Lerski’s 1935 documentary made in Palestine, celebrating the labour of the Jewish pioneers and the dream of a socialist Jewish state. Across those years he turned back toward the tradition he had drifted from, composing a Passover oratorio to a Hebrew text by Max Brod, setting the Psalms, arranging Hebrew song. His mother died in Theresienstadt. The man who gave Brecht’s anti-war play its sound was a Jew shaped by exile, by the Jewish material he returned to in his music, and by the murder of European Jewry.

This matters because it complicates the tidy anti-capitalist moral. Mother Courage is usually taught as a play about greed. Through Dessau it is also a play made by someone who knew exactly what it meant to lose everything to a war you did not choose and could not trade your way out of. The songs are not decoration. They are the work of a man who had watched his own world burn and who understood that the difference between the profiteer and the victim is not always a moral chasm. Sometimes it is only luck, or timing, or the side of a border on which you happened to be standing.

For Israel, a state that has never been allowed to treat war as someone else’s story, the play cuts in two directions at once. There is the warning Brecht intended, against the seduction of a war economy, against mistaking endurance for wisdom, against the cart that cannot stop because stopping would mean reckoning with what the journey has cost. The discomfort is that the warning has a local address. A country in its eighth decade of intermittent conflict learns to build an economy, a politics, and finally a self-image around the next operation, until security itself becomes the product that must always be in production. Mother Courage is not destroyed by a single catastrophe. She is destroyed by her competence, by how good she has become at carrying on. That is the version of the warning Israelis are least likely to want from a German Marxist, and the one most worth hearing.

And there is the harder truth that Dessau’s biography presses on us. Mother Courage is not only a fool. She is also a mother trying to keep her children alive in a world that offers her no clean choices. Brecht wanted us to judge her, and we should. But the play survives because we cannot quite manage to, because we recognise in her the impossible arithmetic of survival under conditions no one would choose. That recognition is not weakness. It is the beginning of the only kind of seriousness that might, eventually, let someone put the cart down.

The Globe will close the production on 27 June, and the cart will be wheeled offstage, and Bankside will move on to its summer comedies. But Brecht’s cruelty was to deny his heroine the one scene we keep waiting for, the moment she sets the harness down and walks away. It never comes. By the end she has buried all three of her children, and the play’s final image is not her death but her survival: she straps herself back into the cart, alone, and hauls it on after the army. She cannot imagine herself without it. The play does not ask whether war is terrible; everyone agrees that it is. It asks the harder thing: whether a people who have learned to survive a long war can still picture themselves surviving the peace. Mother Courage could not. Her composer, who buried his world and kept writing music for the living, perhaps believed we still might. The play leaves the question open, which is to say it leaves it to us.