Mother Courage Map

Bertolt Brecht Himself

(1898 - 1956)

• A German poet, playwright, theater director
• Marxist - interested in how capitalism affects workers and the power structures of society
• His Marxist view put him at odd with the Nazis (National Socialism)
• Fled Germany in 1933
• Worked on Mother Courage in Sweden in 1939 during the first few months of the Second World War
• Lived in the U.S. before returning to Berlin in 1947 after being questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee for suspected Communist activity

His Purpose

Brecht

Didactic playwright - He felt it was his “moral and artistic duty to encourage the audience to remedy social ills.”

Wanted to reflect reality and help to change it

He charged his audience to reflect on their own social responsibility

His “alienating strategies” cause the audience to think about the “world of the play”

Setting

• Thirty Years War
• religious wars across Central and Northern Europe from 1618 to 1648
• First scene takes place during the Polish-Swedish war (separate from thirty years war)
• Journey—Sweden, Bavaria, Bohemia, Moravia, Saxony, Brandenburg, Italy, back to Sweden
• Mother Courage changes sides—Protestant Swedish army to Catholic of Holy Roman Empire and back again
• Brecht “creates the illusion of an entire world, caught in a terrifying and endless struggle between two sets of interchangeable masters, disguising themselves as different religions, but supported by the very people whose participation—and suffering—keep the war going

Setting

Themes

• Capitalism in war
• Social institutions—lower classes lose in war
• Virtue in wartime
• Religion
• Silence in wartime
• Maternal responsibility

Themes

Characters

• Brecht focuses in detail on real people trying to survive the insanity which surrounds them
• Characters are often distorted or dehumanized by the world in which they live
• Examples?
• Brecht and Tragic Virtue

Character

Songs

• Actors often not in character when they sang
• Brecht wanted songs to be obvious interruptions. (part of the alienation)

Songs

EPIC THEATER

• Appeals to reason rather than emotions
• Often focuses on plight of the working class
• Stories are told through a collage of contrasting scenes, whose content, style, and approach are deliberately incongruous
• Each scene exists for itself and carries a different message
• Took much of his inspiration from Shakespeare (scenes jump from location to location)

EPIC THEATER

Everything Else

Marxism

Marx took a materialist perspective that the world is made of natural, physical things

Class struggle

& Shakespeare

Marxism often judges a literary work by the attitude it displays towards classes

Marxists praise him for depicting tyrannical noblemen and honest workmen

Denounced him for depictions of ignorant plebeians

The Verfremdungseffekt

Brecht wanted to alienate and estrange the audience to make them make conclusions about their society, especially new conclusions re-examining their old ones (unlike Aristotelian/dramatic theater)

Resisted the idea of the “suspension of disbelief”

New style of acting called the alienation effect

Interpellation is the process of being passively, unconsciously drawn into dominant social assumptions

Everything Else

Everything else else

Gestus

The physical embodiment of the relationships between people and society

Supertask

Actors are tasked with more than just acting, to illustrate the purpose and educate the audience

Structure

Characters are at the mercy of external circumstances. The relentless logic of universal socio-economic-historical law

Contradictions

Conflict of opposites

Brecht felt identifying such contradictions was an essential part of theater’s role

Mother Courage

The titular character of the play who journeys across many nations during the Thirty Years War seeks to profit off of it, but as it turns out in the end, loses the people she relied on, her children, and becomes alone in her venture and pulls the cart all by herself

Kattrin

Kattrin is the mute daughter of Mother Courage

Her "tragic virtue" is kindness and her final moments have her beating a drum, sounding the alarm to a city about to be under siege

It is hinted that her current disability was caused by past trauma

Eilif

The oldest son of Mother Courage

His "tragic virtue" is bravery and his enlistment into the military have him pillage peseant towns which once there is a brief period of peace, he gets executed for

Swiss Cheese

The youngest son of Mother Courage

His "tragic virtue" is honesty and he was executed for hiding the treasury of the Swedish.

Swiss Cheese

The Cook

He is very consious of the powers at play in the war and interest they hold in profiting and gaining power rather than a simple war of religion

Turns out to be the "Pete the Pipe" described by Yvette

The Chaplain

The Chaplain

Initially dismisses the horrors of the war saying that if it is a war of religion, then God approves of it

Misquotes the Bible all the time, in line with every other character who quotes it as well

After a battle in Magdeburg, he desperately helps the wounded, but Mother Courage with her usual stingy self refuses to help and rip her shirts into bandages

Yvette Pottier

Yvette

Appears as a camp prostitute and tells Kattrin about Pete the Pipe to "harden her against love"

She goes on to marry a Colonel, inherits his estate, and she ends up being the only one in the play to profit from the war