Mother Courage Anti-War COMPLETE

Q. Consider Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as an anti-war play.
Mother Courage and Her Children is an anti-war play written by Bertolt Brecht in 1939.
The German playwright and poet wrote the script in resistance to the rise of fascism and Nazism
and as a response to the invasion of Poland by Hitler’s army in 1939.
Brecht’s attitude towards the war is anti-heroic. The effects of the war are seen largely
through the experience of Anna Fierling in the play, nicknamed Mother Courage for her
determination to profit from the war with a mobile canteen she drags around the battlefields.
Each scene presents a variation of anti-war elements as the play is episodic in structure. Over the
course of the play, Courage undergoes many hardships and loses her three children to various
effects of the war.
The fact that each of Courage’s children has a different father from a different country,
shows the moral degradation caused by war. The audience feel that this woman is not chaste
when she refers to her children’s different fathers for, they might not have been her husbands.
From the beginning of the play, the ill-effects of war can be seen in the scene where Courage
loses her son, Eilif to the army, while engaged on a business deal over a belt. Later in the play,
Eilif is executed as a criminal though he had committed no worse a crime that he had been
committing previously, during the course of war. And his career blighted and ended, even before
he had reached the prime of his life.
The death of Swiss Cheese is another poignant tragic element caused by the war. When
Courage was on a business spree, Swiss Cheese was arrested on a charge of having hidden the
cashbox of his regiment and having thus deprived the Catholic conquerors of this booty. He is
then executed because neither the cash-box has been recovered, nor has the Catholic sergeant
been given any bribe for releasing Swiss-Cheese. The end of this promising young man is a
heart-rending event in the play.
A war also creates starvation and feminine. The farmers cannot plough their lands and
consequently, they cannot grow food and the ultimate result of this situation is feminine which
compels the people to face death. In the very play, it is found that Mother Courage is a canteen
woman and in spite of being a supplier of food, she has to suffer from starvation. She along with
her daughter Kattrin and the Cook remain hungry for a long time and become very weak for
want of food. As a result, they beg alms at the personage. The Cook also sings ‘The Song of the
Wise and Good’ in order to attract the attention and sympathy of the inhabitants of it.
In Scene Two, the Swedish commander feels greatly impressed by Eilif’s achievement of
killing some peasants and taking their oxen for the soldiers. Ironically, the same deed is going to
be repeated by Eilif during peace but he will be executed for it. This is part of the paradox of this
war without noble aim or focus. This is also the absurdity of the whole situation that Brecht is
trying to project throughout the tapestry of this play. In this regard Eilif’s execution also points
to the precariousness of actions, deeds, and conducts during war time. It also conversely points to
the fact that everything might be permissible in war time as standards have either collapsed or
are non-existent. This is part of the degeneration of humanity as a consequence of war, be it
secular or religious. As a matter of fact, most of the dramatis personae in Mother Courage are
aware of the war because of its negative impact rather than its openly proclaimed religious
connotation. For example, in a very telling moment the Cook admits that in spite of its religious
dressing, this war is like any other, “because there’s fleecing, bribing, plundering, not to mention
a little raping,”. Through this ironic tone, Brecht is questioning the validity of all wars, whether
secular or religious because they do not yield any good.
War is, among other things, a business, a capitalist venture that actually turns up profit
for people like Yvette, and loss for people like Courage. It is also a business because it is run by
people who are bent on sabotaging its ideals for their own benefit. The soldiers are eager to steal
from their ordnance military supplies including bullets which are the life line of any army. They
will sell these things to Courage who will in turn sell it to the same army at a profit. It is apparent
that the whole system is corrupt from top to bottom as this cycle of corruption becomes the norm
throughout the play. It is instructive to note that in this play corruption is not frowned at, but is
rather considered as a form of salvation. Courage herself is fully aware of this when she says,
“Corruption is our only hope. As long as there is corruption, there’ll be merciful judges and even
the innocent may get off”. Corruption is therefore the engine house of war and business.
However, this does not in any way mean that Courage enjoys corrupt practices. It only means
that she is more concerned with her existential conditions under the harsh realities of the war
with its consequences of hunger, starvation, and destruction.
Kattrin in the play is portrayed as the symbolic figure of suffering and extinction in the
theatre of war. Her heroic sacrifice is the symbol of innocent people suffering at the hands of war
lords who perpetrate war for further egoistic benefits and exhibit their might. In contrast to her
mother, Kattrin feels the agony of the wars and sincerely hopes for peace with normal life and
happiness in all spheres of activities. Her instinctive pity and compassion are not passive
qualities but active virtues which impel to nurse a hurt hedgehog, resume a baby from a burning
cottage and save a city from the enemy’s attack. As an anti-war figure Kattrin prefigures the
young and heroic. The nobleness is lost with her, the most positive and desirable value that the
play posits, hence the poignancy of her martyrdom.
Every moment of the action, mood and passion of this play is tremendously influenced by
the incidents of war and through the representation of these incidents Brecht has summoned the
mankind to establish a warless peaceable world. He wanted that the future world should not
witness a war of any magnitude. He believed in certain idealism in the human social structure
which should be free from mutual hatred and animosity of any kind. If the society frees itself
from the clutches of the war lords, a human society would emerge which will have absolute
humanism and altruism.

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Q. Consider Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as an anti-war play.

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