Re-interrogating the ‘Mother’: War and the maternal-commercial conflict in Brecht’s mother courage and her children

This short essay revisits Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children and focuses on how, as the title of the essay indicates, the play’s eponymous mother—Anna Fierling—is characterised by irreconcilable conflicts that ultimately script her personal tragedy against the backdrop of the thirty years’ war. More specifically, this essay examines how, in the character of Mother Courage, the maternal values traditionally associated with the figure of the “Mother” are corrupted by her commercial instincts in the face of the crisis brought about by the war. I also foreground how, in the play, the tragedy of Courage symbolises the futility of individual endeavour to make a profit from the war and how Brecht attempts to convey this sense of futility and tragedy to the spectator through his use of specific theatrical devices such as defamiliarisation.