FREE ESSAY ON MOTHER COURAGE

MOTHER COURAGE

In 1939, on the eve of the Nazi Holocaust, the great German playwright Bertolt Brecht
wrote Mother Courage and Her Children. For the setting of his play, he chose the Thirty
Years' War, the senseless 17th century European conflict that pitted Protestants against
Catholics and laid waste to whole lands and peoples. Spanning the years 1618-1648, it was
the most destructive war in European history until modern times. It was a war which
seemingly no one wanted but which no one could stop once it had gained its brutal
momentum. The play came too late to be of consequence in World War Two, but it has played
to great effect on the world stage ever since, becoming Brecht's most popular work after
The Threepenny Opera. Mother Courage herself has become a theatre archetype of the
indomitable, irrepressible human spirit.
For all its epic scope--rolling through Sweden, Poland, Saxony, Bavaria and Alsace--the
play is an intensely personal journey. It centers on a woman, Mother Courage, who owns a
rolling canteen wagon and who follows the war selling victuals and sundries to its
troops. She is an earthy peasant, a hearty cynic who profits from slaughter, and who
actually fears that peace may break out. Mother Courage knows no loyalty but to her
business and to her family whom she tries to protect from the ravages of the carnage.
Eventually, the war exacts its pound of flesh, its payment for her long feeding upon it.
One by one, all her children become fodder for the ravenous maw of the conflict, victims
of the very virtues which she has instilled in them for survival.
This is a deeply human play. Mother Courage embodies the best, and worst, of all of us in
similar circumstances. With a single mindedness that produces real heroism, she
negotiates the wake of the war. Ruthless, fiercely selfish, clever and conniving in
defense of her small moveable turf, she is completely understandable. In her bawdy humor,
tenderness and rue, she is utterly human and sympathetic. In the end, like in any
tragedy, it is her great will and indomitable spirit which is both her ruin and her
triumph.