The Traffic of War

Mother Courage and her Children is Brecht’s masterpiece and, without doubt, one of the finest works of the modern theatre. Completed in 1939, when World War II was just beginning and Brecht was in exile in Scandinavia, Mother Courage ostensibly deals with the Thirty Years War, that seventeenth-century feast of death, fire, and pestilence. But its real subject is all wars, as seen from the perspective of one who loathes military heroism. Brecht observes the exploits of war, like those of peace, from the underside, examining what Edmund Wilson has called “the self-assertive sounds” that man “utters when fighting and swallowing others.” To achieve his satire on the morality of the military life, Brecht concentrates not on the battles but on the commonplace activities of day-to-day living, as performed by the war’s orphans, truants, and subordinates. In the background of Mother Courage pass the victories, defeats, reversals, sieges, assaults, retreats, and advances which form the substance of history. In the foreground, the private lives of the noncombatants provide a non-heroic contrast. The external course of the conflict is narrated, like the newspaper headlines, in the legends preceding each scene, but it interests Brecht only insofar as it influences local commerce: “General Tilly’s victory at Magdeburg,” the title informs us, “costs Mother Courage four shirts.”

For the real struggle is over money, food, and clothing. Brecht, examining the relationship between Capitalism and crime, applying his Marxist perceptions to the crimes of history itself. If the businessman is identified with the gangster in The Threepenny Opera, then he is identified with the warmaker in Mother Courage. Property is not only theft, but murder, rape, and pillage; war may be the extension of diplomacy but it is also an extension of free enterprise. Religious piety, jingo patriotism, bourgeois respectability, all are merely synonyms for greed, acquisition, and self-advancement. And since war is “just the same as trading,” the morality which justifies it must be considered an evil sanction. Brecht, in short, quarrels with Christianity because its morality has been exploited, its prophecies unfulfilled. The age of miracles is past. Man must now find his own loaves and fishes, and attend to his earthly survival.

Seen from this perspective, heroism looks like a ghastly skeleton, rattling its bones in the wind; and in Mother Courage, heroic actions invariably stem either from stupidity, insanity, brutality, or simple human error. The spokesman for Brecht’s antiheroic point of view is Anna Fierling, the canteen woman known more familiarly as Mother Courage. To this salty, cunning, self-serving woman, the only quality worthy of respect is cowardice; and she commands respect herself because of her consistency – she invariably chooses the most selfish, ignominious, and profitable course. Even her nickname is ironic: her “courageous” breach of the lines during the bombardment at Riga was made to keep some loaves from going moldy. As the supreme advocate of adaptation and acquiescence, Courage is extremely cynical about the motives of others. She attributes the death of General Tilly, for example, to the fact that he got lost in a fog and strayed to the front by mistake. She is probably right; in Brecht’s world, as in our own, there are no more authentic heroes. Courage’s unhesitating assumption about the baseness of human motives belongs to the author; and it is not modified by any contrasting ideal.

Mother Courage’s bitter hostility to heroism has made her, paradoxically, a heroic figure to audiences – an image of the “little people,” beleaguered by forces beyond their control, yet resiliently continuing to make their way. There is no question that Mother Courage – like Falstaff, who was meant to be a Vice figure (Sloth and Vanity) but who somehow transcended his morality play role – got away from the author. And like the rejection of Falstaff, the pathos of Courage does begin to take on larger dimensions. Nevertheless, one must also realize that Brecht does realize his conscious intentions with the character, and that the tragedy he unintentionally created co-exists with the morality plays he designed. Courage may be a victim of war, but she is also an instrument of the war, and the embodiment of its evils. Brecht’s revolt, in short, remains double. Her determination to play it safe makes her the enemy of hypocrisy, but it also makes her cold and grasping. And though her single-minded devotion to survival is sympathetic in relation to her three children, it becomes mere aggrandizement in relation to her fourth child – the wagon. This almost human prop is a constant visual reminder that for Courage the war is “just the same as trading.” Like a stock-market investor, she builds up profits on the fluctuating fortunes of war, buying and selling on the lives of men.

Mother Courage haggles while her children die – this is the spine of the play. For while Courage is pursuing commercial advantage, her family is sacrificed, one by one, to the war. The offspring of three different fathers, Finnish Eilif, Swiss Cheese, and German Kattrin are an international brigade of victims, their fates foretold in the initial scene. The episode of the black crosses, like many of the songs in the play, is prophetic. But it is not a supernatural agent which strikes the children down; it is the cruel hand of man, abetted by their own self-destroying instincts. The dominant qualities of both the great and the common lay them low; virtue doesn’t pay.

Brecht, however, cannot refrain from giving an ironic twist to his already ironic statement – for the “virtues” he describes are all, with the exception of Kattrin’s kindness, highly dubious qualities. Eilif’s bravery, for example, is, at best, impulsive foolishness. While the Sergeant is cunningly distracting Courage’s attention by bargaining with her over a belt, Eilif is off with the Recruiting Officer, pressed into war by his lust for glory. Eilif soon drifts with the tide of death because he ignored his mother’s advice to drift with the tide of life. Having “played the hero in God’s own war” by slaughtering a number of innocent peasants who wished only to protect their cattle (here bravery turns into sadistic brutality), Eilif repeats this heroic exploit during an interlude of peace – and is led off to be shot. Like Chaplin’s Verdoux, he discovers that virtues in wartime are considered crimes in peacetime, and that law and morality shift their ground to accommodate the nation’s needs.

Swiss Cheese, the “honest child,” is another victim of a dubious virtue. As paymaster of a Protestant regiment, he is entrusted with the cash box; and when he is captured by the Catholics, he refuses to surrender it up. This kind of honesty, as Courage observes, is sheer stupidity: Swiss Cheese is too simpleminded to provide for his own safety. Here, however, Courage is in a position to save her child through the exercise of her Solomon-like wisdom: “They’re not wolves,” she observes of his Catholic captors, “they’re human and after money. God is merciful and men are bribable.” Her analysis of motive is perfectly accurate, but it is precisely because of her excessive shrewdness that the device does not work. Forced to pawn her wagon to obtain sufficient bribery money, Courage is anxious to reserve enough for her own security. But the Catholics are in a hurry, and her prolonged bargaining is climaxed by the terrible realization, “I believe – I haggled too long.” Swiss Cheese, the significance of the name finally clear, is carried in on a stretcher riddled by eleven bullets – to be thrown on a garbage heap because his mother is afraid to claim the body. Torn between the contradictory demands of self-survival and mother-love, Courage has, in effect, killed her own child.

Kattrin is Courage’s only truly virtuous child, the soul of kindness and the most positive figure in the play. It is a characteristic of Brecht’s attitude towards positive values that she is a mute; but through her expressive gestures and responses, the cruelty and horror of the war are most eloquently told. Even her dumbness is related to these terrors – “a soldier stuck something in her mouth when she was little” – and when she is attacked and mutilated by some vicious marauders, the war has killed her hopes for a home, a husband, and children, whom she especially loves. Indeed it is her consuming love for these fruits of Peace that finally destroys her.

Once again, the death occurs because the mother is haggling: Courage has left Kattrin with the wagon while she buys stocks cheap from the frightened townspeople. While she is gone, the Catholics capture a farmhouse, preparing for an ambush of the town. The farmers, afraid for their family in the town, appeal to God to save their four grandchildren. But, to their horror, their prayers, for once, are answered. Moved by the mention of children in danger, Kattrin has climbed to the roof of the farmhouse, where she begins to beat her drum. At last, Peace has found a tongue, rhythmically commenting on its ancient, invincible enemy. To smother the sounds of this alarum, the soldiers and peasants try to create their own noises – peaceful ones, they begin to chop wood. Yet Kattrin’s drumming mounts in intensity, and in desperation. When a lieutenant offers to spare her mother if she descends from the roof, Kattrin drums more heatedly; when he backs his promise with his word of honor, she drums most furiously of all. The smashing of the wagon, the knifing of a sympathetic peasant, the threat of her own life – nothing stops this desperate tattoo. She is finally shot off the roof by a hail of musketry; but the town is saved.

Brought on stage for the threnos, Courage witnesses the utter desolation of her hopes. The fault, again, has partially been hers, but she is too dazed now to know it. Thinking that Kattrin is only asleep, she sings her a lullaby; even the lullaby concerns the need for clothing and food. Her sustaining illusion is that Eilif may still be alive. Without this illusion, only nothingness confronts her – the inconsolable blankness of life, induced by a malignant universe, inhuman men, and her own flawed nature. We are out of the world of Falstaffian comedy and into the desolate world of King Lear; but unlike Lear, Brecht’s heroine is denied even the release of death. When the armies move by, singing her song about the certainty of the seasons and the certainty of man’s mortality – the coming of the springtime of life before the winter of death – she cries to them: “Hey, take me with you” – and straps herself to the wagon. She is pulling it alone now, but it is no longer very heavy: supplies and passengers have all been destroyed. Courage and the wagon merge – both bruised and battered by war, both somehow still durable. Courage has dragged it over half of Europe, learning nothing. She will drag it a good deal further before she stops, animated only by that basic life instinct: the need to survive. The smallness and the greatness of this woman are clear at the end, as they are clear throughout this monumental work, where Brecht so angrily takes away from the human race – and gives it back so much.

Excerpted from Robert Brustein’s The Theatre of Revolt (1964).