Mother Courage and Her Children
Anna Fierling (Mother Courage) enters pulling a cart containing provisions for sale to soldiers, and introduces her children Eilif, Kattrin, and Schweizerkas ("Swiss Cheese").
Swiss Cheese hides the regiment's paybox from invading soldiers, and Mother Courage and companions change their insignia from Protestant to Catholic.
Later, Mother Courage waits outside the General's tent to register a complaint and sings the "Song of Great Capitulation" to a young soldier anxious to complain of inadequate pay.
Mother Courage grows desperate to protect her business, so much so that she refuses to give fabric to treat wounded civilians.
When Catholic General Tilly's funeral approaches, the Chaplain tells Mother Courage that the war will still continue, and she is persuaded to pile up stocks.
Eilif is executed for killing a peasant while stealing livestock, trying to repeat the same act for which he was praised as hero in wartime, but Mother Courage never hears thereof.
The Cook inherits an inn in Utrecht and suggests to Mother Courage that she operate it with him – but he refuses to harbour Kattrin because he fears that her disfigurement will repel potential customers.
As Catholic soldiers force the peasants to guide the army to the city for a sneak attack, Kattrin fetches a drum from the cart and beats it, waking the townspeople, but is herself shot.
In response to the invasion of Poland by the German armies of Adolf Hitler in 1939, Brecht wrote Mother Courage in what writers call a "white heat"—in a little over a month.
[4] As the preface to the Ralph Manheim/John Willett Collected Plays puts it: Mother Courage, with its theme of the devastating effects of a European war and the blindness of anyone hoping to profit by it, is said to have been written in a month; judging by the almost complete absence of drafts or any other evidence of preliminary studies, it must have been an exceptionally direct piece of inspiration.
[5]Following Brecht's own principles for political drama, the play is not set in modern times but during the Thirty Years' War of 1618–1648, which involved all the German states, France and Sweden.
It follows the fortunes of Anna Fierling, nicknamed Mother Courage, a wily canteen woman with the Swedish Army, who is determined to make her living from the war.
His central character in the early short novel, The Runagate Courage,[6] also struggles and connives her way through the Thirty Years' War in Germany and Poland.
For instance, a single tree would be used to convey a whole forest, and the stage is usually flooded with bright white light, whether the scene depicted is a winter's night or a summer's day.
[32] In 1972, Henry Jayasena adapted the play into Sinhalese, under the title Diriya Mawa Saha Agey Daruwo (The Brave Mother and Her Children).
[34] Katie Baker, in a retrospective article about Mother Courage on its 75th anniversary, notes that "[Brecht's audiences] were missing the point of his Verfremdungseffekt, that breaking of the fourth wall which was supposed to make the masses think, not feel, in order to nudge them in a revolutionary direction."
She also quotes Brecht as lamenting: "The (East Berliner) audiences of 1949 did not see Mother Courage's crimes, her participation, her desire to share in the profits of the war business; they saw only her failure, her sufferings.
