Play: Mother Courage and Her Children

Setting and Premise
Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children follows Anna Fierling, nicknamed Mother Courage, a canteen woman who trundles her wagon through the battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War. She survives by selling goods to soldiers and camp followers, insisting that war feeds her family. With her travel her three children: Eilif, bold and easily flattered; Swiss Cheese, dutiful and honest; and Kattrin, her mute, tender-hearted daughter. Across twelve episodic scenes spanning more than a decade, Brecht shows how a relentless war economy corrodes morals, families, and the value of human life, even for those who believe they can profit from it.

Plot Overview
The play opens with a recruiting drive. As Mother Courage haggles and trades, a sergeant spirits Eilif away into the Swedish army. Courage rails at the war for stealing him but continues to follow the troops, selling food, drink, and clothing wherever battles rage. Eilif’s daring brings him commendations for plundering peasants during wartime, yet Courage’s maternal pride is shaded by worry that bravery and recklessness are twins.

Swiss Cheese becomes a regimental paymaster. When Catholic forces besiege the town the family is in, he hides the cashbox, hoping to return it to his superiors. Captured and threatened with death, he trusts his mother will ransom him. Courage, terrified of losing her wagon and livelihood, bargains desperately for a price she can afford. Stalling and underbidding to save her business, she fails; Swiss Cheese is executed, and to save herself she denies recognizing his corpse. She sings to numb the shock and goes on trading.

The war swings back and forth. A Protestant chaplain attaches himself to the wagon, as does a sardonic cook; Yvette, a camp follower with red boots, drifts in and out, later marrying a wealthy colonel. Kattrin, often the first to pity the vulnerable, is scarred during a raid and grows more resolute in her quiet compassion. At one point Eilif reappears under arrest. The same violent feats that made him a hero in wartime are now crimes in a momentary peace; he is led to execution offstage. Courage is nearby but does not grasp that the prisoner is her son until it is too late, and she hardens herself again.

Mother Courage’s Choices
The chaplain loses his clerical role and becomes a cynical hanger-on; the cook proposes that Courage leave the road to keep an inn, but only if Kattrin is left behind. Courage refuses to abandon her daughter. Poverty and hunger tighten. Each time the war seems to end, it stirs again, and her resolve to keep the wagon rolling becomes both a survival strategy and a trap. She insists that war is business, yet every bargain erodes what she hopes to preserve, and every calculation exacts a personal cost she cannot fully acknowledge.

Final Image and Themes
In the final scene near Halle, Catholic troops prepare a surprise assault on a sleeping town. Kattrin climbs a farmhouse roof, beats a drum to wake the townspeople, and keeps drumming as soldiers threaten and wound her. She is shot, but the alarm saves the town. Mother Courage mourns briefly, pays for a grave, then harnesses herself to the wagon and trudges after the army, alone.

The play’s episodic structure, songs, and stark juxtapositions estrange familiar feelings to expose the market logic of war. Courage tries to live off catastrophe and loses all three children to it. The image of her pulling the wagon into yet another campaign crystallizes Brecht’s indictment: in a world where conflict is an industry, survival and complicity blur, and the price of profit is paid in blood.