Mother Courage and Her Children

Summary

Mother Courage and Her Children follows Anna Fierling, a canteen woman nicknamed Mother Courage, who hauls her covered wagon behind the armies of the Thirty Years' War selling food, drink, boots and belts to soldiers. The play covers twelve years, from 1624 to 1636, in twelve scenes, each introduced by a written caption that tells the audience in advance what will happen. Courage has three children by different fathers: the bold Eilif, the honest and simple Swiss Cheese, and her daughter Kattrin, who is mute. Courage lives off the war and believes she can do business with it without paying its price; one by one, the war takes all three children. In Sweden in 1624 a recruiting officer and a sergeant lure Eilif into the army while Courage is busy haggling over a belt. Two years later, in Poland, she finds him being praised by his commander for killing peasants and seizing their cattle. Swiss Cheese becomes paymaster to a Protestant regiment; when the Catholics overrun the camp he hides the regimental cash box and is captured. Courage tries to raise a bribe by pawning her wagon but bargains too long over the price, and he is shot. When his body is brought to her, she denies knowing him to protect herself and Kattrin. The war moves on through Poland, Bavaria and Saxony. Courage sings a song of the great capitulation to a young soldier, persuading him to give up his complaint against an officer. She refuses to give her linen shirts for bandages after a battle, while Kattrin risks her life to save a baby from a burning house. At the funeral of the imperial general Tilly in 1632, Kattrin is attacked and left scarred. The army chaplain and the cook, Pieter Lamb, travel with the wagon; the camp prostitute Yvette Pottier rises by marrying an elderly colonel. When peace briefly breaks out, Courage fears ruin; in the same short peace Eilif is executed for a raid on peasants that would have been praised in wartime, and Courage is never told. The cook inherits an inn in Utrecht and asks Courage to come with him without Kattrin; she refuses to leave her daughter. Near the Protestant town of Halle in 1636, while Courage is away buying goods, Catholic troops prepare a night attack. Kattrin climbs onto a peasant's roof and beats a drum to wake the town, and is shot as the town's alarm begins to sound. Courage returns, sings a lullaby over the body, pays the peasants to bury her daughter, and harnesses herself alone to the wagon to follow the army. Brecht wrote the play in Swedish exile in 1939. It premiered at the Zürich Schauspielhaus on 19 April 1941, and Brecht's own production at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1949, with Helene Weigel as Courage, became the founding work of the Berliner Ensemble. The play is under copyright, and this record does not include a text.

Top Lessons

• Living off the war

  Courage's livelihood depends on the war continuing, and each of her children dies at a moment when her mind is on business. Brecht built the play to show the cost of trying to profit from violence while staying clear of it.

• Kattrin's drum

  The silent daughter, scarred and ignored, performs the play's one act of complete self-giving when she drums to warn the town of Halle. Brecht gives the most powerful action to the character who cannot speak.

• Virtues in wartime

  Eilif's boldness, Swiss Cheese's honesty and Kattrin's compassion each lead to death. The play's songs suggest that in a corrupt war even virtues become dangerous. Audiences have long debated whether Brecht meant to condemn the virtues or the war that punishes them.

• Epic theatre

  Brecht's scene captions announce what will happen, and the songs interrupt the action, so the audience watches how rather than wondering what. He wanted spectators to judge the action rather than lose themselves in Courage's feelings, though many audiences have still found her deeply moving.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The play shows the medical side of 17th-century war mostly by its absence of care: wounded peasants after a battle need linen for bandages that Courage is reluctant to give, Kattrin is left with a scarred face after an assault, and hunger and plague hang over the later scenes. Kattrin's muteness, which Courage attributes to an early wartime injury, is presented as a social and dramatic fact, not studied medically. Courage's refusal to acknowledge her dead son's body and her lullaby over Kattrin are notable depictions of suppressed and delayed grief.

• Scene 3

  Courage must not show recognition when Swiss Cheese's body is brought before her.

• Scene 5

  After a battle the chaplain demands linen for bandaging wounded peasants.

• Scene 6

  Kattrin returns with a wound over the eye that will leave her disfigured.

• Scenes 9 and 12

  Hunger in the war-ruined countryside; Courage's lullaby over her dead daughter.