Half a Brecht

Brecht is hard to understand when translated to English. It’s even harder in German. It’s a lot harder when it’s performed for you so that you can’t read the text. It’s harder still when you completely miss the first act, are jet-lagged, hungry, and tired. But I somehow made it through my first German play – Brecht’s Mutter Courage – and lived to tell about it.

One of the Professors in the program managed to get a few tickets for those interested to see one of Brecht’s classic works. My friend Emily met up with me – we were the only two students willing to try such a tough play – and we set off for the U-bahn. After a quick glance at my ticket, I saw that the play was to start at 8:00. We gave ourselves a good 45 minutes to get there, since the U-bahn – despite its German efficiency – is hard to time plan for. After taking the right train the wrong direction for a couple of stops – too much time chatting, not enough focus on U-bahning – we turned around and headed the right way. On the way to our night in high class entertainment, we were surrounded by German fans just coming back from the fan mile – despite their game against Sweden ending a few hours ago – chanting, singing and swinging their beers in delight.

We finally got to the Ernst Reuter stop – named for the Berlin mayor – and found the theater only to see the concourse surrounding it completely empty. Confused, I looked at my ticket again only to see that the Professor had actually given me a ticket to a completely different play scheduled for next week, not Brecht. Emily had the right ticket, which clearly stated the time of the play as 7 PM. So, there we sat, outside of the theater waiting for intermission to begin, formulating our excuses for when we inevitably ran into the faculty joining us at the play. Luckily before I could even explain the mix up – how I had looked at the time on my ticket without noticing it was for a completely different show – the Professor was incredibly apologetic to me, rather than the other way around. He truly felt bad that by giving me the wrong ticket he had cheated me out of an entire act of Brecht. I tried to tell him it was fine, that he needn’t apologize, but then again I couldn’t let on to the fact that a missed hour of Brecht isn’t exactly an hour I will dwell on in the future over missing.

As we found our seats for the second half, my Professor did a great job explaining some of the plot to me, but regardless by a few lines in I was already lost. The problem is not necessarily the language – if I really focused on individual lines I could usually get the meaning. The problem was that in the time it took me to convert German Brecht to English Brecht, three or four more sentences have been spoken, and I have no chance of catching up to those.

As the play came to a dramatic end, the cast came back on stage for the longest curtain call I’ve ever seen at a play. It wasn’t necessarily as a result of the acting – it was good but not earth shattering – but rather it was the audience continuing to clap until the actors finally stayed off stage. Every single combination of characters came running out, hands locked together, to take a bow at the front of the stage, only to run off again as a new combination came out to replace them. After probably five minutes of mix-and-match actors running on stage, and Pavlovian clapping from the audience, they ran off stage for good, and we – our hands red and sore – headed out of the theater.

Though I hardly understood the play – the words, the plot, the characters, you name it – I’m very glad I stuck it out. After all there aren’t many Americans who can say they’ve seen an entire Brecht play in German (okay, fine, half a Brecht).