Mother Courage And Her Children: A Chronicle Of The Thirty Years’ War – Bertolt Brecht, 1941 [Translation by Eric Bentley] ★★★

How a Character Hijacked a Play

Sometimes a fictional character becomes something bigger than its creator intended. John Milton didn’t want readers coming away from Paradise Lost admiring Satan. Norman Lear expected viewers of “All In The Family” to laugh at Archie Bunker, not sympathize with him.

It is hard to watch a person, however flawed, struggle through life and not feel something akin to affection, even identification.

Bertolt Brecht was annoyed how people took to the main character of this play, Anna Fierling. How could they miss her crass exploitation, her blithe ignorance of war’s cruel folly, her willingness to put her offspring in harm’s way? Instead, they liked her down-to-earth manner and sympathized with her struggle to make ends meet. How bourgeois!

People still like her, more than most of them like her creator.

Amid the intense deprivation of the Thirty Years’ War, Anna makes a living selling food to the troops. Money comes first, even when her children are concerned. She tries looking after them, in a distracted way, but because of her they find themselves facing death on the front lines.

A 2014 Stratford production of the play, with (from left) E. B. Smith as Eilif, Seana McKenna as Mother Courage, Carmen Grant as Kattrin, and Antoine Yared as Swiss Cheese. Behind them is the one family constant, the wagon.
Photo by David Hou from http://jameskarasreviews.blogspot.com/2014/06/mother-courage-and-her-children-review.html

Asked by a soldier in the first scene why she is so far from her actual home, a town called Bamberg in Bavaria, Anna replies: “I can’t wait till the war is good enough to come to Bamberg.”

Anna got the nickname “Mother Courage” by risking her life in a bombardment to cart some bread rolls out of Riga. For Mother Courage, merchandise is life, to be held close at whatever cost. When she first appears on stage, her sons Eilif and Swiss Cheese are yoked to her wagon, symbolizing their dehumanizing service.

Capitalism is in fact the enemy of all mankind in this play, with war as Marx says being its means to an end. In the opening scene, Mother Courage explains her philosophy in the first of her many songs:

MOTHER COURAGE: Cannon is rough on empty bellies:

          First with my meat they should be crammed.

Then let them go and find where hell is

And give my greetings to the damned!

Helene Weigel in costume as Mother Courage with her husband, Bertolt Brecht. Translator Eric Bentley wrote: For whenever anybody says, “Mother Courage is essentially X” it is equally reasonable for someone to retort: “Mother Courage is essentially the exact opposite of X.”
Image from https://www.americantheatre.org/2021/01/21/a-theatre-of-marvels-what-i-learned-from-brecht-and-weigel/

Mother Courage may live and die by this sword, but she also speaks with wry wisdom and sometimes shows humanitarian concern. Brecht himself tells us she is capable of real insight but unwilling to act in any kind of responsible way if it threatens her bottom line.

Pragmatism dominates her thinking, again and again. It is a cold sort of thing, but makes sense whenever she articulates it:

MOTHER COURAGE: How long won’t you stand for injustice? One hour? Or two? You haven’t asked yourself that, have you? And yet it’s the main thing. It’s pure misery to sit in the stocks. Especially if you leave it till then to decide you do stand for injustice.

Yet Mother Courage’s pragmatism is flawed not only morally and ethically but materially as well. Try as she does to make a living, she keeps finding herself ruined in the course of the play by such things as retreats, peace agreements, and disease. Life is pretty awful for her; so why did she choose it?

Because the playwright is making a point, that’s why. Brecht’s doctrinaire socialism will be a sticking point for many readers; at least it was for me. I’m also turned off by the play’s constant black-humored cynicism and the lack of compelling supporting parts.

Modern stagings of the play often push against Brecht's stated principle of alienation. Above is a scene from a 2006 production in Manhattan with Meryl Streep as Mother Courage and Kevin Kline as the cook.
Image from https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/meryl-as-mother-courage/

It is a play populated not by people but philosophical constructs: a venial preacher; a selfish cook; pompous officers; and a pair of sons, one who is unfailingly mercenary like his mother, albeit in a more cruel way; another who is completely, stupidly without guile. In both cases, these solitary characteristics prove their downfalls.

The “wrong-is-right” humor is heavy and on the nose. Near the beginning of Scene 1, a sergeant opines:

SERGEANT: What they could use around here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place?

A couple of scenes later, Mother Courage tries to bribe a judge:

MOTHER COURAGE: Corruption is our only hope. As long as there’s corruption, there’ll be merciful judges and even the innocent may get off.

The Thirty Years’ War pitted Protestants against Catholics in 17^th century Europe; Brecht takes aim at the hypocrisy. Nobody in the play really believes in God; piety is an easy excuse for taking advantage of each other. Mother Courage wants to get while the getting is good.

King Gustavus Adophus of Sweden, whose army Mother Courage follows. It said of him in the play: "For he had one thing in his favor anyway, God's Holy Word, which was all to the good, because otherwise they could have said he did it for profit."
Painting by J. J. Walther from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Breitenfeld_%281631%29

Yet her suffering dominates the play and would become the reason Brecht felt his audience’s take veering off from his intentions. They responded to her wit, toughness, and plight, not her greed.

According to Wikipedia, the play was written in 1939 as a critique of fascism in Brecht’s German homeland. If so, I don’t see it. The warmongers we see in the play are not German but Swedish; those being the forces of King Gustavus Adolphus. That last part of his name does not get much play; maybe if it had I’d sense a connection.

In fact, Brecht was in a tricky place that way in 1939-1941. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had made Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union temporary allies and common aggressors against the West; many communists and fellow travelers in allied or neutral nations (e. g. Brecht in Switzerland) had reason to promote pacifism over an active defense against fascism.

Certainly war’s futility is a common theme throughout the 12 scenes that make up Mother Courage. Both of Anna’s son become victims of the war, as does her only daughter, the mute Kattrin, whose pathetic longing for companionship is the one faint light of humanity bridging the play.

Anna clearly loves her daughter but does her few favors. We are told Kattrin hates the war, and suffers from poor sleep because of it, but her mother keeps bringing her along on her wagon.

A scene from a 2009 London National Theatre production, which in keeping with Brecht's intentions, includes written narration displayed over the stage itself.
Photo by Anthony Luvera from https://www.tompye.com/mother-courage/

Even when Kattrin is raped and brutally scarred, her mother, while clearly upset, shrugs off the obvious need to get her away from the war:

MOTHER COURAGE: Like with trees: the tall, straight ones are cut down for roof timber, and the crooked ones can enjoy life. So this wound here is really a piece of luck.

But being hurt once is of course no proof against being hurt again, which Kattrin’s eventual fate proves. Not that even this registers. The play ends on Mother Courage pulling her wagon alone, exclaiming “I must get back into business.”

If Mother Courage wasn’t so indomitable, it would have been hard to justify her staying with a war that ran for thirty years and killed those closest to her. Her resilience adds to the overall absurdity, yet also makes her a character people would come to identify with and even see as figure worth celebrating. It proved a strange paradox that gave Brecht a hit in theaters he struggled to live down.

For me, the character works much better than the play. But the lovely thing about living in a free society is the ability to choose what you want to take from a work of art, and what you want to leave be.