Vagabond Footnotes

This addresses a request in the comments to this post. This Brecht passage comes from his notes at the end of Mother Courage, the Eric Bentley translation, which is the best of the 3-4 versions I've read. I've bolded my favorite bit, which I think serves as quite the aphorism:

Of the Peasant's War, which was the greatest misfortune of German history, one may say that, socially considered, it pulled the teeth of the Reformation. Its legacy was cynicism and business as usual. Mother Courage (let it be said to help performances in the theatre) recognizes, as do her friends and guests and nearly everyone, the purely commercial character of the war: this is precisely what attracts her. She believes in the war to the end. It never occurs to her that one must have a big pair of scissors to take one's cut out of a war. Those who look on at catastrophes wrongly expect those involved to learn something. So long as the masses are the object of politics they cannot regard what happens to them as an experiment but only as a fate. They learn as little from catastrophe as a scientist's rabbit learns of biology. It is not incumbent on the playwright to give Mother Courage insight at the end – she sees something, around the middle of the play, at the close of the sixth scene, then loses again what she has seen – his concern is that the spectator should see.

Actually, finding those lines was one of the reasons I came to adore Brecht. They deserve their own post at some point, if not a permanent part of the masthead.