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In closing, I want to return for a brief look at the documentation of Brecht’s Antigone production, in the Antigonemodell 1948, drawing attention to the short scene as the "Ode to Man" chorus ends, just before the entrance of Antigone together with the guard who claims he caught her while she was trying to bury her brother Polyneices. According to the explanatory text on page 30 in the first edition of Antigonemodell 1948 (published in 1949) we can see on the Berlau photos the guard at the edge (Bank in German) "belting her with the board", while the chorus goes on to say that "it stands before me now like God’s temptation" – in German Götterversuchung – that "I should know and yet shall say / This is not the child, Antigone / O unhappy girl of the unhappy / Father Oedipus”. 1

It seems to me that this can on the one hand be interpreted to mean that Antigone should not be considered as her own enemy. But at the same time – in the following lines – the chorus asks us to consider where Antigone’s disobedience to the state may lead her. This is when she makes her full entry in order to confront the accusations against her, while she is carrying or ’wearing’ something that looks like a door on her back while her hands are shackled through two holes in this board (fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone (1948) in Chur, Switzerland. Credits: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv Theaterdoku 318/283, © R. Berlau/Hoffmann.

In Neher’s drawing of Antigone for the production she is tied with both head and hands to a board that looks like a pillory or the stocks used for punishment and public humiliation during the Middle Ages that is in front of her. In the performance this board has become much larger and Antigone wears it as a cross, on her back as her hands can be seen in the two holes in the board when seen from behind, like in the photo. When seen from the front in other photos, however, it looks as if her hands are tied behind her back.

Antigone is literally wearing the entrance to the house that will never be hers on her back as a sign of her suffering, metaphorically on her way to the cave of death, signifying Golgotha. This is at the same time also a transformation of the door from the first scene through which she has seen her dead brother hanging on the pole that is his cross. It is the same door through which the SS officer has made his entry asking if they know him, pointing at him through the open door with an ecce homo gesture. And it is interesting to note that in the photo of the Vorspiel (fig. 1) there is also a board covering the window which has been left lying diagonally on the right. Maybe this is the board which Antigone is wearing as she goes to meet her death in the cave.

The door that Antigone is forced to wear on her back after the “The Ode to Man” chorus in Brecht’s production is that liminal space between the security of her home – her Heimat – and the dangers of the outside world. As opposed to Heidegger’s desire to domesticate that outside world, appropriating it by making it homely through violence, Brecht, in the ensuing argument between Creon and Antigone introduces a detailed discussion relating to what in German is a Heimat, which does not appear in Hölderlin’s translation, nor in the original text. Instead, in Brecht’s adaptation, Creon accuses Antigone for slandering the homeland ("schmäh nur die Heimat”) and Antigone answers by defending herself.2

I begin by quoting Antigone’s speech in German:

Falsch ist’s. Erde ist Mühsal. Heimat ist nicht nur

Erde, noch Haus nur. Nicht, wo einer Schweiß vergoß

Nicht das Haus, das hilflos dem Feuer entgegensieht

Nicht, wo er den Nacken gebeugt, nicht das heißt er Heimat.3

In Constantine’s translation this passage is translated as:

Wrong there. The earth is travail. The homeland is not just

Earth, nor the house. Not where a man poured his sweat

Not the house that helplessly watches the coming of fire

Not where he bowed his neck, he does not call that the homeland.4

In Brecht’s subsequent theatre production, Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder, now in Berlin, in 1949, the house with a door has become a wagon moving through the war, ending after Courage, also famously played by Helene Weigel, has lost all her three children, drawing the carriage into total darkness (fig. 3). In the opening scene – at least in the film-version of this production5 – Courage is seated comfortably on the wagon beside Kattrin while her two sons (instead of horses) are drawing the carriage, singing the song with the following refrain:

The spring is come. Christian, revive!

The snowdrifts melt. The dead lie dead.

And if by chance you’re still alive

It’s time to rise and shake a leg.6

Fig. 3

Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1949) in Berlin. Credits: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv Hill 044/045, Hainer Hill.

In the final scene of Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder – as the photo clearly shows – she is both carrying a house (on her back), while she holds the cross – the two poles to which the horses are usually harnessed – under her reclining body. With the rope from the carriage (her house) and the weight of the cross under her, the final scene of the performance shows Mutter Courage on her final steps to some form of redemption.

Even if the Chur performance was not a success, in terms of the reactions of the spectators and the critics, because it was only performed five times, it needs our attention. At the same time as it is unclear if Brecht and Neher had found the way to make "the play to do something for" audiences of their own time, it paved the way for the much more successful production, which changed the course of modern theatre, about Mutter Courage who has lost her three children in the Thirty Years’ War. It is a play that ends with the burial of a young woman, her daughter, who had proven her courage by trying to prevent further bloodshed, and was killed by it, not by military heroism or stealing the money of the Finish Regiment, as her brothers had been. Kattrin had been the true hero of the war.

But Brecht’s Antigone production also needs our attention today as researchers, because of the unique form of documentation, in the form of the first complete Modellbuch it gave rise to (from which the Berlau photos of the production have been reproduced here). It was followed by similar publication projects of the productions of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (published in 1958), of Aufbau einer Rolle (also published in 1958) where the 1947 Laughton production as well as the 1957 Berliner Ensemble production of Das Leben des Galilei, as well as several other such projects, based on photographs, introductory texts as well as explanatory notes. This documentation project, which I have not dealt at all with in this article, still needs to be more fully investigated, as it gives us important insights into the work of Brecht and his many collaborators during the last years of his life as well as its theoretical and ideological basis.7 "A model", Brecht wrote in his introduction to the Antigonemodell 1948,

cannot depend on cadences whose charm is due to particular voices or on gestures and movements whose beauty springs from particular physical characteristics: that sort of thing cannot serve as a model, for it is not exemplary as much as unparalleled. If something is to be usefully copied, it must first be shown. What is actually achieved when the model is put to use can then be a mixture of the exemplary and the unparalleled.8

This "mixture of the exemplary and the unparalleled" – the Beispielhaften and the Beispiellosen in Brecht’s German – is not only something that the theatre can achieve by learning from and developing its own creative resources, but also what the theatre is about when the characters called Antigone and Creon enter the stage, just two years after the end of the Second World War, and this entrance is no doubt still relevant for us today.