Mother Courage and Her Children Study Guide

The son of a Protestant mother and Catholic father, Brecht was born and raised in Augsburg, a small city near Munich, Germany. Distraught to see his classmates drafted into World War I, he signed up for medical school to avoid the draft. But he fell in love with his theater classes instead and decided to dedicate himself to the artform. He befriended many of Germany’s major directors and performers, then started writing plays, which won him the prestigious Kleist Prize for young writers in 1922. He moved to Berlin in 1925 to work as a dramaturge for the renowned director Max Reinhardt. For the next eight years, he collaborated with a wide variety of political artists, actors, and activists while developing the hallmarks of his style of “epic theater,” including his preference for analysis over entertainment, his frequent use of historical settings as analogies to the present, and his consistent Marxist critiques of capitalism. He first achieved widespread recognition for The Threepenny Opera in 1928, and he married Helene Weigel, an actress and frequent collaborator, in 1930. Brecht left Germany within weeks of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, spending six years in Denmark before continuing on to Sweden, Finland, and eventually the United States, where he briefly worked in Hollywood before being blacklisted for his left-wing views. His best-known works, including Mother Courage and Her Children, are largely his political plays from this period of exile. But after the U.S. government called him to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committees in 1947, he moved back to Europe, where he briefly settled in Zürich and then finally returned to (East) Berlin and set up the Berliner Ensemble, the theater company he would direct for the rest of his life. Although his art advocated for left-wing causes throughout his life, he never joined the Communist Party and was deeply ambivalent about East Germany’s repressive, authoritarian political tactics. He died of a chronic heart condition in 1956, but as of 2023, his Berliner Ensemble is still alive and well.

Mother Courage and Her Children is set over twelve years in the middle of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, a devastating conflict that drew in all of Europe’s major powers and killed as much as half of Central Europe’s population. The Holy Roman Empire, where the war started, was actually a knotty assortment of smaller states, cities, and landholdings whose individual rulers were allowed to set the official religion (either Catholicism or Lutheranism). The war began in Bohemia, the present-day Czech Republic, when the devout, intolerant Catholic Ferdinand II was appointed as king. Protestant nobles revolted and established an opposition government, and other leaders from around Europe began pouring money and soldiers into the conflict, forming complex alliances based on a combination of religion, family relationships, and—above all—political and financial opportunism. After the Catholic alliance secured control of Bohemia and surrounding regions by 1625, Christian IV of Denmark joined the conflict to protect Protestants—and when his intervention failed, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden followed him in 1630. The Swedish intervention turned the war in the Protestants’ favor, but at great cost. Not only did King Gustavus die in battle in 1632, but the 1630s were one of the most miserable periods in history for Europeans, with starvation, plague, and massacres ravaging modern-day Germany in particular. The second half of Brecht’s play focuses on this period, as Mother Courage accompanies the Swedish army around Bavaria. But actually, the first part of the play is set during the last five years of the Polish-Swedish wars of 1600-1629. When the play begins, Mother Courage has been running the Swedish army’s canteen for at least a decade; her children have known nothing but war, and when they move from Poland to Germany in 1630, very little changes. (And when it ends, in 1636, there are still a dozen years left in the war.) Indeed, this is Brecht’s way of emphasizing that war is similar, regardless of the time, place, and formal reason for the conflict. After all, he wrote this play directly after the Nazi invasion of Poland launched World War II.

Bertolt Brecht is remembered as perhaps the most influential playwright of the mid-20th century, and many of his plays are still frequently produced around the world. His major early work was The Threepenny Opera (1928), an adaptation of John Gay’s 1728 ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera and a critique of capitalism set in the London criminal underground. But Brecht undoubtedly wrote his most influential plays during the middle period of his life, particularly the years he spent in exile from the Nazi regime in Scandinavia and the U.S. Besides Mother Courage and Her Children, these works include the biographical Life of Galileo (1938), the antifascist satire The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941), and the ambiguous moral fables The Good Person of Szechwan (1941) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944). Brecht dedicated the last decade of his life mostly to directing plays and mentoring younger dramatists; his most influential work from this period is actually the essay “A Short Organum for the Theatre” (1949), which describes Brecht’s unique approach to the theater and is often considered his manifesto, along with “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre” (1930) and “On Experimental Theatre” (1940). In short, Brecht believed in “epic theater” that inspires audiences to rational analysis and political transformation, rather than just entertaining them.