Mother Courage and Her Children

Overview

About a hundred and ten pages, twelve scenes, written by Bertolt Brecht in a matter of weeks in the autumn of 1939, in Swedish exile, as Nazi Germany invaded Poland and Europe entered a second general war within Brecht’s own lifetime. It was first performed in Zurich in 1941, with Brecht himself, exiled and separated from most of his usual collaborators, directing only remotely, and it has since become one of the most frequently performed and most studied plays of the twentieth century, generally regarded as Brecht’s masterwork and as the fullest practical demonstration of the theory of epic theater he had been developing across the preceding decade.

The play is set during the Thirty Years’ War, the devastating pan-European conflict fought largely across German territory between 1618 and 1648, and follows Anna Fierling, known as Mother Courage, a canteen woman who travels with the armies, selling food, drink, clothing and supplies to soldiers of whichever side happens to be paying at the moment, across twelve years and a corresponding series of scenes tracking the progressive loss of everything she has, including, over the course of the play, all three of her children.

Brecht’s own theoretical writing on epic theater, developed extensively around this period, explains the play’s distinctive formal techniques: rather than building suspense and inviting emotional identification the way conventional dramatic theater does, epic theater aims to keep the audience in a position of critical, analytical distance, able to observe and judge the social and economic forces driving the action rather than simply losing themselves in sympathetic feeling for the characters.

What happens

The business of war. Mother Courage is introduced in the play’s opening scene bargaining sharply with a recruiting officer and a sergeant, her canteen wagon her whole livelihood, and the scene establishes immediately both her formidable practical skill and the fundamental logic that will govern everything that follows: she needs the war to continue, since it is the war that creates her market, even as the war simultaneously threatens to take from her the three grown children who travel with her and help run the wagon, Eilif, Swiss Cheese and the mute Kattrin.

Even in this first scene, the war’s cost is signaled directly: a recruiting sergeant, while Mother Courage is distracted haggling, recruits her elder son Eilif into the army, the first of the losses that will accumulate across the play’s span.

Eilif’s death. Eilif proves a capable, aggressive soldier, and in one scene is celebrated and rewarded by his commander for a raid on peasants that, in wartime, counts as valor. Later, during a period of temporary peace, he commits essentially the identical act, a similar raid for plunder, and is executed for it, the same action that earned him praise under one set of conditions earning him death under another, a contradiction the play stages without any character remarking on the irony directly, leaving the audience to register it.

Swiss Cheese’s death. The play’s most devastating and most structurally pointed scene involves Mother Courage’s younger son, Swiss Cheese, honest and slow-witted, who has taken a position as an army paymaster and is captured holding the regiment’s cashbox. Mother Courage, informed he will be executed unless a bribe is paid, negotiates over the price of the bribe with real, characteristic shrewdness, trying to get the amount down, haggling exactly as she haggles over goods, and the negotiation takes too long: Swiss Cheese is executed while she is still bargaining. In the scene’s most excruciating moment, his body is brought before her for identification, and she must deny knowing him to avoid implicating herself and losing the wagon that is her only remaining livelihood, denying her own dead son to protect her business.

Kattrin’s death. Mother Courage’s mute daughter Kattrin, disfigured by a soldier’s assault earlier in the play, has been largely silent throughout, communicating through gesture, but in the play’s final major scene, when Mother Courage is away trading, Kattrin discovers that soldiers are about to launch a surprise night attack on a nearby town whose sleeping inhabitants have no warning. Unable to speak and with the soldiers threatening to kill her if she makes noise, Kattrin climbs onto the roof of a farmhouse and begins beating a drum, waking the town and saving its inhabitants at the direct cost of her own life, shot by the soldiers below. It is the play’s only unambiguous act of pure, self-sacrificing heroism, and Brecht gives it, deliberately, to the one character who cannot speak, and who is not, in any conventional sense, the play’s protagonist.

The ending. In the play’s final scene, Mother Courage, having lost all three of her children across twelve years and the whole span of the war, is left alone with the canteen wagon. She has, by this point, no children left to help her pull it. In the play’s closing and most quoted image, she straps herself into the wagon’s harness and pulls it forward alone, continuing to follow the army, continuing the same business that has cost her everything, apparently having learned nothing and changed nothing about the logic that has governed her entire life across the preceding two hours of stage time.

How to read it

Read the play with Brecht’s own theory of epic theater actively in mind. The scene summaries, printed and typically projected or announced before each scene begins in performance, deliberately remove conventional suspense, since the audience already knows in advance roughly what will happen, and this is a deliberate choice meant to redirect attention from what happens to how and why it happens, from plot to social mechanism.

Resist the pull toward simple sympathy for Mother Courage, and notice how carefully Brecht constructs her to resist that simple sympathy. She is genuinely resourceful, often funny, and has real reason for her hard-nosed practicality, and she is also, the play insists without ever quite saying so directly, complicit in a system that destroys her own family, unable or unwilling to recognize that her livelihood depends on the same war that keeps killing her children.

Pay close attention to the songs, particularly the Song of the Great Capitulation in Scene 4, in which Mother Courage sings her own hard philosophy of accommodation to a young soldier who wants to file a complaint against an injustice. These songs interrupt rather than build emotional momentum, a formal choice consistent with Brecht’s epic theater technique, and they often state, in compressed and ironic form, the play’s underlying argument more directly than the dramatic action does.

Notice that Kattrin, the one character who acts with pure, unambiguous heroism, is mute throughout the play and dies in her single decisive act. Consider what it means that Brecht gives genuine, self-sacrificing courage to the character least equipped, by the play’s own logic, to explain or justify it in words, in a play otherwise populated by characters who talk constantly about their own motives and justifications.

Read the ending as a deliberate refusal of conventional dramatic resolution. Mother Courage does not have a final recognition scene, does not renounce her trade, does not learn from her losses in any way the play shows us; she simply continues, and that continuation, rather than any change of heart, is Brecht’s final and most pointed statement about how the economic logic of war reproduces itself regardless of individual suffering.

Questions it raises

• Is Mother Courage a victim of the war economy she participates in, a willing collaborator with it, or does the play refuse that distinction as too simple to capture what she actually is?
• Brecht’s epic theater technique is designed to prevent the audience from simply feeling sympathy for Mother Courage rather than analyzing the system around her. Does the play actually succeed at this, or does its emotional power work against its own stated theory?
• Why does Brecht give the play’s one act of pure heroism to Kattrin, the character who cannot speak, rather than to Mother Courage or to any of the play’s more articulate characters?
• What does Mother Courage’s failure to learn anything from the deaths of all three of her children suggest about the play’s view of whether individual moral awakening can actually resist systemic economic forces?
• Is the haggling scene over Swiss Cheese’s bribe, where Mother Courage’s economic habits directly cause her son’s death, meant to indict her personally, or to indict the broader system that has trained her into those habits in the first place?
• The play ends with Mother Courage continuing exactly as before. Does this refusal of conventional resolution make the play’s political argument stronger, or does it risk suggesting that nothing, including watching the play itself, can actually change anything?