Mother Courage and Her Children

Our son used the book this summer to become familiar with the play. He was selected to be one of the characters and the book helped him.

In what appears to be a permanent war in Iraq it is not untimely to address the question posed by Bertolt Brecht of how individuals caught up on the margins of warfare cope, for good or evil, with the traumas, unappetiting personal decisions and unmitigated horror of it. Brecht, the master Communist playwright, has taken a story of a working mother's struggle to survive as a camp following petty merchant in the Thirty Years War of the 17th century in Germany as his backdrop to investigate one aspect of that phenomena- the elemental struggle for individual survival. And it is not pretty. This mother is not the mother who gains increased political consciousness in another Brecht classic-The Mother. Far from it. If the simple moral of the story is that war does nothing to elevate the human spirit or bring out the better instincts of our nature Brecht has made his point in rather stark terms. The struggle of Mother Courage to keep her `mom and pop' business going at the cost of the lives of her children may not go down well with today's more squeamish audiences but the unfortunate fact is that all over the world, and most notably in today's Iraq, those very same kind of cold, calculating decisions are being made by families in order to survive. The fact that it is a mother, the source of life and supposed nurturer-in-chief, who is sacrificing her children only makes that observation more compelling. Brecht wants us to see that, while greed and acquisitiveness may not be eternal human characteristics, under conditions of scarcity that have dominated most of human history the struggle has led to some very strange behavior. In the end his play is not only a cry against war but the economic conditions that engender war as well. That would require some mighty big changes. But we better think about it.

Saying that Brecht didn't want his plays to evoke an emotional response is an extreme oversimplification of his theories. He just didn't want the emotional response to overwhelm the intellectual response and remove the audience's capacity to judge the work objectively. In this play, we have a heroine who is not a heroine. We understand her, but we never empathize with her. Consequently, the interdependence of war and economy is illuminated without making the reader wallow in excessive emotion. Yes, we do feel strongly when Kattrin is beathing her drum, but that feeling is not what the audience leaves with at the end of the play.

Brecht doesn't want emotion because that is Brechtian theater. He thought that in order for a play to invoke social change, it needed to be clear to the audience, that the audience needed to learn something. Emotions, Brecht felt, clog the mind and only feed the brain sentiment, not rational thought. Mother Courage and Her Children is, quite obviously, an anti-war play. Brecht wants you to see that war makes criminals out of everyone, even mothers. He wants you to love Mother Courage while you hate her so that the emotion is cancelled out and you are only left with the thoughts of her actions and why they were wrong. If you want a play to read or perform that is challenging, amazing, and intellectual all at once, this is the way to go. I performed this and I was forever changed.

I had to read this for my English/Theater class, and I found it to be extremely compelling and profound. Our teacher told us that Brecht doesn't want to evoke an emotional response, but even so, I was strongly moved by the events that transpire, and Kattrin's ultimate sacrifice. I also had to compare David Hare's version with the translations of Manheim and Bentley, and I found that Hare's was the sharpest because of the way he distills the dialogue down to its core. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in theater, literature, or life.