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Scene 10
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Mother Courage and Her Children, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
War, Failure, and Despair
Profit, Violence, and Power
Love and Nurture
Faith and Identity
Theater, Performance, and History
Summary
Analysis
When Catholics attack the Protestant city of Halle in 1636, the stage directions explain, Kattrin will die, Mother Courage will go on alone, and the war still will not end. It is nighttime, and the tattered wagon is parked next to a farmhouse. Three soldiers and a Lieutenant knock on the farmhouse door, then bring out the family who live there (Old Peasant, Old Peasant Woman, and Young Peasant). They see Kattrin in the wagon and force her to get out of it, too. The Old Peasant Woman explains that Kattrin is mute, and her mother is off doing business in town.
This is the play’s pivotal scene and, curiously, is also the only one in which Mother Courage does not appear. (Yet again, she will miss one of her children’s deaths because she is too busy trading.) Instead, Kattrin steals the show—and while the stage directions give away their fate, what they do not reveal is that she is about to become the play’s only hero. But first, the scene opens with a pattern of events that is now familiar to the audience: passing soldiers abuse innocent peasants simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Themes
The Lieutenant demands that the son (Young Peasant) show the soldiers the way to town, but he refuses, saying he doesn’t know the way and would rather die than help a Catholic. But he finally agrees when the soldiers threaten to kill the family’s cattle, and they leave. The farming couple wonders what the soldiers are doing, and the Old Peasant climbs up on his roof to get a better view. He sees a massive regiment of soldiers moving toward the town and realizes that they are going to attack while everyone is asleep. And the watchman hasn’t blown his horn, which means the soldiers probably killed him.
The soldiers conscript the peasants into their own community’s destruction. The Young Peasant quickly realizes that he will suffer if he doesn’t guide them to town (and that they will probably find their way there regardless). This reflects how, in war, victims can easily become perpetrators, and vice versa. The mention of cattle clearly links this situation to Eilif’s actions in the third scene, when he bragged about murdering a group of peasants to steal their cattle. Put differently, Kattrin is now experiencing the same terror that her brother was inflicting—and she and her mother have been profiting from.
Themes
Terrified, the peasants realize they can’t do anything except pray. They beg Kattrin to join them. They all kneel, and the Old Peasant Woman asks God to wake up the townspeople and to save their son-in-law, grandchildren, and farm. While the woman prays, Kattrin quietly pulls a drum out of the wagon, hides it in her skirt, and then climbs up to the roof. When the farmers finish their prayer, Kattrin starts beating the drum. The farmers panic, try to get Kattrin down, and even threaten to stone her, but she is unfazed—she keeps playing the drum.
By showing how the peasants take recourse to prayer, Brecht suggests that religion is deeply ingrained in rural Germany—and completely useless. Where the peasants’ prayers do nothing, Kattrin takes matters into her own hands: she beats the drum to try and wake up the townspeople before the soldiers arrive and massacre them all. She specifically acts when the peasants mention their grandchildren, which again shows that her concern is specifically about saving children from the horrors of war. Understandably, the peasants fear that the soldiers will turn on them because of Kattrin’s actions. This highlights the extent to which Kattrin’s self-sacrifice is an exception: she’s the only person in the whole play who doesn’t prioritize herself above everyone else.
Themes
Literary Devices
The Lieutenant runs back, threatens to kill the farmers, and demands that Kattrin throw him the drum. But she keeps drumming. A soldier offers to spare Mother Courage, and the Lieutenant offers his sincerest promise as an army officer, but Kattrin ignores them. The Lieutenant proposes making a louder noise to drown out the drum, and the Old Peasant starts chopping wood, but it’s not enough. The Lieutenant considers burning down the farm, but the Old Peasant points out that the townspeople would definitely notice that.
With her drum, Kattrin says everything that she has been unable to say throughout the play: she gives voice to her own pain, stands up against soldiers (who have long coerced and abused her), and lodges a protest against the war’s senseless, inhuman brutality. Against all the odds, she seems to have cultivated a sense of morality and selfless, nurturing certain caregiving instincts that Mother Courage herself lost long ago (if, indeed, she ever had them). And she makes it clear that her purpose is not to save her mother but rather the children of Halle.
Themes
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Kattrin starts to laugh as she drums louder and louder. The Lieutenant demands a musket, and his soldiers go to get one. The Old Peasant Woman suggests threatening to break the wagon—the Lieutenant tries this, and the Young Peasant even hits the wagon with a board. But Kattrin just pauses, makes a pained sound, and keeps drumming. The Lieutenant tells Kattrin he will shoot her and lies that the townspeople can’t hear her drum.
Kattrin continues drumming, desperately and relentlessly, showing that she is willing to die if necessary. Needless to say, her warning to the people of Halle is also Brecht’s warning to the people of Europe in the first days of World War II. This is what makes this scene so haunting: modern audiences can imagine the carnage that is beginning in Halle, as they know all too well about the carnage that followed this play in Europe.
Themes
The Young Peasant finally switches sides and tells Kattrin to keep drumming. In response, the Lieutenant stabs and kills him. Kattrin starts to cry, but continues drumming, even as the soldiers bring the gun, set it up, and fire. She falls over dead. As the Lieutenant says, “So that ends the noise,” cannons and alarm bells sound in the distance. One of the soldiers remarks, “She made it.”
The Young Peasant and Kattrin’s deaths are Brecht’s final and most poignant reminder of the senseless violence of war. Yet again, Mother Courage misses one of her children’s deaths because she is too busy trying to make a profit. But there is one major difference here: unlike her brothers, Kattrin dies a purposeful death. She sacrifices her life in the name of a greater cause—saving others from the war—and in this way she becomes the play’s only hero. This helps explain why the soldier comments that “she made it.” Namely, even if Kattrin doesn’t survive, she made a meaningful impact with her life and took a stand against the war that everyone else just blindly accepted, whether out of fear or weakness.
Themes
