Mother Courage and Her Children opens with a recruiting officer and an army sergeant standing together, talking in the freezing snow. This nondescript picture is made specific only by a placard-heading announcement that the scene is in Dalecarlia. The recruiting officer complains bitterly about the difficulties of recruiting an army. Threatening suicide, he tells the sergeant that his difficulty finding honest, willing men to recruit has led to the loss of his faith in humanity. The sergeant explains, at length, that war is the only way of creating order.

To the sound of a jew's-harp, a covered cart rolls onto the stage. It is pulled by Mother Courage's two sons. Mother Courage is sitting aloft with Kattrin, her daughter, as she sings her opening song (note that in Brecht's 1949 production, the song was transposed to the very beginning of the play). The song advertises Mother Courage's wares to the army. Significantly, both verses of the song end with a chorus that describes whatever "has not died out / getting back to its feet again."

Mother Courage, unable to produce a valid set of papers, explains why she is called Courage (her real name is Anna Fierling): she once drove her cart through the bombardment of Riga in order to sell fifty molding loaves of bread. Mother Courage introduces her children (for the sake of exposition as much as for realistic detail) one by one. Eilif Nojocki is the son of a light-fingered soldier; Swiss Cheese, the son of a Swiss fortifications engineer; and Kattrin Haupt, half-German. Mother Courage immediately attempts to make a sale. The recruiting officer, however, is more interested in her son than the belt buckle she tries to sell him. Mother Courage reacts violently, pulling a knife and insisting that the soldiers keep away from her children.

An argument ensues between Mother Courage and the sergeant about the rights and wrongs of Eilif's signing up for service in the war. The sergeant points out that he has had a good life in the army, having joined at seventeen, but Mother Courage dryly comments that he is yet to reach seventy. Claiming a "second sight" which never reappears, Mother Courage then draws black crosses (signifying death) on slips of paper, and she invites the sergeant to select one. He is shaken when he draws a black cross. When Eilif seems keen to enlist, Mother Courage marks up several more black crosses and has each of her children draw one. She obviously has rigged the slips of paper, but in doing so she proves a prophet. All of her children are to die in the war, and Eilif is about to be taken from her under her nose.

Now distracting her by haggling over a belt buckle, the sergeant occupies Mother Courage while the recruiting officer leads Eilif off into the fields. Dumb Kattrin leaps from the cart, making hoarse noises, but Mother Courage is occupied with her trade and pays no heed. By the time she has pocketed her profits, her son is gone. "You"ll have to help pull now, Kattrin," Mother Courage says. Kattrin and Swiss Cheese, harnessed, pull the cart off into the distance as the sergeant speaks a final couplet:

If the war provides, then you

Have got to give it something too.

Analysis

Brecht opens his play with a conversation between two ordinary soldiers, the first of many choices emphasizing that this is a play about the war's effect on the little people. The setting is unglamorous, the soldiers are cold, and the issue they face is organizational and pragmatic. Rather than presenting an active battle, Brecht opens with a recruiting officer moaning about how difficult it is to get people involved in the war. Thus, the army is presented from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.

This first scene is also heavily ironic. That is, Brecht expects his audience to be alienated from the sergeant's hyperbolic stories about the villagers who forgot their names due to the absence of war, thus viewing the opening scene with a suitable degree of ironic detachment. The point is not that war really creates order, but that it is a system by which people and civilizations seem to survive--like capitalism with its markets, war is a system that most people not only accept but depend upon.

These nameless soldiers are universal, part of the trope of war's perpetuity, which runs throughout the play. In the 1949 production, the opening image of the cart revolving into view (actualy before the dialogue between the recruiting officer and the sergeant) was reflected at the end of the play when Mother Courage alone pulled it into the distance. War "gets back to its feet again," it continues, and Brecht is not interested in the specific historic details of the war he depicts. What he underlines is war's omnipresence in capitalist civilization.

The conflict between motherhood and business is immediately brought into focus by the cart. It is both home and a place of business. Mother Courage is distracted by business as Eilif is led away, and we see how her trade and her family life are irresolvably at odds: her interests as a mother and her interests as a businesswoman damage each other. Her children, fathered by a string of military men, might be thought of as "children of the war," and it is to the war that they will eventually succumb.

The flippancy with which Mother Courage cheats in making the black crosses ironically reflects her lack of awareness that the deaths she has predicted will indeed come to each of her children. The foreshadowing is not ominous so much as it is obvious: what Brecht wants us to realize is that Mother Courage does not see how she is tempting fate. She saves her children here only to lose one due to a business deal minutes later. Like the black crosses, her fate is in her own hands, but she does not realize this before having paid the price with Eilif.

There are more subtle foreshadowings in this scene. Mother Courage describes Eilif as so scared he'll "fall over like a chicken," and the recruiting officer adds, "and killing a young bull that happens to be in his way." For Eilif, who later will be commended and then executed for stealing cattle, this comment has an ominous resonance. Yet, even at this level, Brecht's larger themes are threaded into the narrative. Cattle, the spoils of war, are also the object of the market. By trying to feed himself, Eilif later feeds himself to the war. And like his mother's actions, his actions express a failure to see the larger picture. Probably, as the officers at the beginning of the scene seem to realize, the only way to be truly saved from the war is to refuse to participate in it in the first place--neither in its fighting nor in its business.

As in this scene, many scenes end with a character getting into the harness, ready to continue with the journey. At the end of Scene One, the yoke is heavy already.

The scene heading announces that two years have passed and that Mother Courage is about to meet her son Eilif again. The stage is split in two, with on one side the General's tent and, on the other, his kitchen.

In the kitchen we meet General's cook (der Koch), to whom Mother Courage is attempting to sell a capon that she swindled from the peasants in the nearby village. After considerable bargaining, the Cook grudgingly buys the bird at the price of a florin. Mother Courage (along with the audience) is then privy to the scene in the parallel tent, where Eilif, a hero, is invited to dine with the General. He successfully killed some peasants and stolen the oxen they attempted to hide from the General's army. The General, absolutely delighted with Eilif's "heroic deed," pours him expensive wine. This luxury stands in stark contrast to the rotten beef and scrawny capon the Cook is preparing across the stage. The Chaplain, mocked by the General and with little to say about the scene's events, stands sullenly in the background.

Mother Courage, astonished to hear her son's voice again, comments that the General--being obsessed with the heroism of his troops--must be a very poor General. That is, if good battle strategies were in place, there would be no need for heroism.

Eilif sings the song of "The Girl and the Soldier," a grim parable about a soldier who dared to walk across frozen waters, not heeding the warnings of his "girl": he falls in, and, at the end of the song, disappears underneath. Mother Courage joins in with Eilif from the other side of the stage, and the two parties are united for the end of the scene. Mother Courage slaps her son around the face. She does so not, she explains, because he took the oxen, but because he put himself in danger. The scene finishes in the middle of this reprimand, with the General and the Chaplain ominously laughing in the doorway.

Analysis

"War as business idyll" was Brecht's summary of this scene in his summary of the dramaturgy. It is worth noting that, at this early stage of the play, the first military deed the play introduces us to is not really a military conquest but an illegal robbery carried out so that a hungry army could eat.

It is difficult to condemn Eilif for his deed insofar as he helped food go to hungry persons. As for the General, however, he is pompous, jingoistic, and living in luxury while his army eats "moldy bread." This figure of the war is at once ridiculous and morally corrupt. Brecht makes it very clear in his notes on the scene that the General should be played to demonstrate more than simply "rowdy drunkenness," and should display something of the absent obliviousness of the military aristocracy.

To fully understand its implications, one should read this scene in comparison with Scene Eight, where Eilif performs the same deed in peacetime and is executed for his trouble. What Brecht points out is not the criminality of war but the ways (as Scene One sets out) that war creates its own system of order. Eilif's heroic deed in wartime is a crime during peace.

Brecht's theatricality in this scene is also notable: the split stage is a crystal-clear attempt to force the audience to critically compare two realities by placing them literally side by side on the stage. Exactly what Brecht means his juxtaposition here to make us consider could be interpreted several ways: the Cook feeds the war with rotten meat in the kitchen, whereas Eilif "feeds" the war by stealing oxen on the other side of the stage. Mother Courage swindles peasants out of a capon on one side, whereas her son swindles peasants out of their oxen on the other. The basic juxtaposition is between the high-ranking levels of the army (the General is one of the highest-ranking military men to appear in the play) and the peasantry, while the innate capitalism of the war works upon every level of society.

Eilif's song, accompanied with a grotesquely carnivalesque "sword-dance," is a grisly irony .The repugnant celebration of his "peasant-slashing" and the joy taken in the horrific deeds of the war, juxtaposed with Mother Courage's plucking of the capon on the other side of the stage, reflect the surface message of the song itself. That is, the power of war is underestimated and seems to yield no clear winner.

It is three years later. The cart is following a Finnish regiment, and a flagpole flies the regimental flag. The scene begins with another business transaction between Mother Courage and the war. She is trying to haggle down an armorer over the price of a sack of shot. "I'm not buying army goods,, she says at the beginning of the scene, before adding, "well, not at that price." She wins the bargaining and pays a florin and a half.

This is one of the play's more domestic scenes. Swiss Cheese, dressed in a paymaster's uniform, has fallen (like his brother) into the employ of the war. We are introduced to Yvette Pottier, an alcoholic prostitute who is drinking brandy, having set aside her red high-heels, and who sings the "Song of Fraternization" to warn Kattrin about the danger of getting involved with men. The song describes the relationship between Yvette and "Peter the Puff" (named thus because he kept his pipe in his mouth during sex) some years earlier, which culminated in Yvette being left behind as the regiment marched on. The play will later reveal "Peter the Puff" to be none other than the General's Cook. Depressed at the close of her song, Yvette exits, leaving her prostitute's garb behind her.

The Chaplain arrives with a message for Mother Courage from Eilif, and the Cook accompanies him (apparently to try his luck at a sexual relationship with Mother Courage). Mother Courage, the Cook and Chaplain discuss the politics of the war. The Kaiser is discussed in depth: he has followed his conscience but caused much bloodshed in doing what he believes is "the right thing." Mother Courage closes the conversation with the central observation that, though the big shots claim to be waging war for "Almighty God and all things bright and beautiful," they are actually "out for all they can get." During their conversation, Kattrin tries on Yvette's boots and hat and struts around, imitating Yvette.

There is a volley of gunfire, drumming, and explosions, and the armorer returns hurriedly to announce that the Catholics have taken over the regiment. A fast change of loyalty ensues with the Chaplain changing his robes and with Mother Courage changing the regimental flag, smearing Kattrin's face in ashes to make her less attractive to the invading soldiers. Swiss Cheese appears on the scene with the regimental cash box, and his mother is horrified to learn he wants to store it in her cart. The cannonfire intensifies, and there is a scene break.

Three days later, Swiss Cheese laments the fact he has not been able to return the cash box to his sergeant. Mother Courage leaves with the Chaplain to purchase meat (feeding the war again) after discovering Yvette's red high-heeled boots in the cart--Kattrin has stolen them during the Catholic raid.

While Swiss Cheese talks to Kattrin, a man with an eyepatch (a spy searching for Swiss Cheese) appears and asks her if she has seen anyone from the Second Finnish Regimental Headquarters. Swiss Cheese, having decided to find his regiment and return the cashbox, ignores Kattrin's desperate attempts to warn him about the spy, takes the box, and leaves the scene.

As Mother Courage arrives back with the Chaplain, Swiss Cheese is dragged back on by two men and questioned about a sergeant--he hid the cashbox by the river, was followed, and was caught. His mother denies knowing him, and he is led off. There is another scene break.

The Chaplain sings to Kattrin the "song of the Hours," which outlines the Passion of Christ in brief quatrains. Yvette enters with an ancient colonel with whom she is sleeping. She haggles with Mother Courage about buying her cart. Mother Courage is forced to agree since she needs money to bribe the soldiers to spare Swiss Cheese's life. Yvette runs offstage to persuade the soldiers to take the bribe.

Mother Courage intends to use the money from the cashbox to buy her cart back from Yvette once Swiss Cheese has returned. As her plan goes, Swiss Cheese will turn over the cashbox to her. Yet, when Yvette returns, it is to tell her that the soldiers will accept her two hundred florins as a bribe--but that Swiss Cheese, under torture, admitted to throwing the cashbox in the river. Mother Courage now has to choose between her business and her son.

She tells Yvette to return offering one hundred twenty florins, so that she has some money left over with which to continue trading. The soldiers refuse, demanding the full two hundred and refusing to wait. Yvette runs back to offer the full amount, but it is too late. Drums are heard in the distance, and the stage lights darken. Swiss Cheese has been executed.

The soldiers return with Swiss Cheese's body on a stretcher. To save herself and her daughter, Mother Courage again denies knowing him, shaking her head in silence. The sergeant commands his men to throw Swiss Cheese's corpse into the pit since "there ain't nobody here who knows him."

Analysis

As well as being the longest scene, this is one of the key scenes in the play, deserving serious attention. It combines several of the play's key themes and is perhaps the easiest scene to analyze in terms of Brecht's use of dramatic symbolism.

Family vs. business, an irresolvable conflict which is to cost Swiss Cheese his life at the end of the scene, expresses tensions from the start: Mother Courage's washing line is strung from a cannon, a visual symbol of the way Mother Courage's domestic and professional lives are always inextricably linked. Brecht's message is neatly underlined too in the way that Mother Courage attempts to "mortgage," not "sell," her cart to Yvette. But like her own involvement in the war, this bargain too must be an all-or-nothing deal. Even the cart itself, home and business, is caught somewhere between these two poles.

Mother Courage's bargaining for Swiss Cheese's life was much edited by Brecht after the original premiere of the play in order to make Mother Courage seem less sympathetic. From the final text of the play, it is easy to condemn her for, as she herself puts it, "bargaining too long" and thereby bringing about her son's shooting. The paradox here is that Mother Courage herself will starve if she retains no means by which to live--the sale of her cart represents financial ruin for her. Though it is easy to refute, in retrospect, Mother Courage's decision to bargain, Brecht emphasizes that often, for the peasant classes, the choice is often between one dire circumstance and another.

Mother Courage's bargaining highlights what Brecht said was the single most important lesson of the play as a whole: that little people cannot profit from a war which runs only for the profit of the greater authorities. Mother Courage here fails to realize that she will never be able to save Swiss Cheese and keep her cart. There is an opportunity cost either way. According to Brecht, Mother Courage's greatest failing is that although a capitalist, even at the end of the play she remains ignorant of this basic truth about capitalism. (See the section on "Brecht's Intention.")

This scene is also fascinating in terms of its religious symbolism. As well as being the third scene in the play, occurring three years after the second scene, one of its central breaks is for three days. These recurring threes culminate in Mother Courage's denying knowing Swiss Cheese three times. And once we hear the Chaplain's "Song of the Hours," it is hard for anyone with a good education to miss Brecht's comparison of Swiss Cheese's death with the Passion of Jesus. Yet the sergeant's final instruction, to "throw Swiss Cheese in the pit," suggests that Swiss Cheese is no martyr who has died for a good cause. The comparison goes the other way: invoking the suffering and death of Jesus in this way sidelines, in the context of war, the role of religion. The Passion is likened to a minor military execution outside a tiny village--an insignificant act, achieving nothing.

The rejection of a role for religious belief among wartime capitalists is explicit in the scene's action as well. The Chaplain's hypocrisy is clear as day in his bitter line, "All good Catholics here," and it seems not to matter to Mother Courage which religion's flag she flies. The speed with which the Chaplain changes his robes when he learns the Catholics are attacking demonstrates that his religious principles are instantly superseded by his cowardice in the face of danger. At the same time, one might think that the differences between Protestants and Catholics are not so great after all, making it easier for people to switch allegiances for non-religious reasons. "Bribery in humans is like mercy in God," says Mother Courage at one point, and the provocation of this comparison is only one of many points where Brecht forces us to question the value of religious faith in what is, after all, supposed to be a war of religion.

One of Brecht's single most famous pieces of direction, the "silent scream," was included in the first production at the very end of the scene after Swiss Cheese's body is carried away. Helene Weigel, playing Mother Courage, screamed silently. Brecht wrote, "her look of extreme suffering after she has heard the shots, her unscreaming open mouth and backward-bent head probably derived from a press photograph of an Indian woman crouched over the dead body of her son during the shelling of Singapore." Its resonance has indeed proved powerfully timeless, and it is retained in many modern productions (including Stephen Unwin's 2006 ETT staging, which starred Diana Quick). Perhaps it is so powerful because, like Mother Courage herself at that moment, it is painfully ineffective yet intensely personal. A "silent scream" is a paradox understood best by the screamer.

Kattrin's character comes into interesting focus within the spectrum of sexual undercurrents in the relationships in this scene. The Cook, by leaving his pipe (already noted as a sexual symbol by Yvette earlier) with Mother Courage, has thereby declared his sexual interest in her. Yet, though her mother remains sexually desirable, Kattrin's imitation of Yvette's gait and theft of her prostitute's boots is a telling representation of the way her mother represses Kattrin's own burgeoning sexuality. Kattrin's awakening desires in the scene will be another, more subtle, victim of the war.

Mother Courage is discovered waiting outside the captain's tent, intending to complain about the ransacking of her cart. His clerk advises her not to bother complaining.

A young soldier, led by an old soldier, enters--aggressive, swearing, and furiously attempting to make his own complaint. He complains that the captain himself has kept the prize money which he won by swimming the river.

Mother Courage sings to him the "Song of the Great Capitulation." It details the way she, when she was young, had high ideals and aspirations but now, like everyone does, has succumbed to marching in step with the band--a metaphor for willingly participating in the war.

After she has finished the song, Mother Courage advises the young soldier to stick out the wait and complain, but only if his anger is "big enough" to be able to resist such a capitulation. The young soldier shouts, "lick my arse!" and exits.

The clerk pops his head back out of the captain's tent and tells Mother Courage that the captain is now ready to hear her complaint. She tells him she no longer wants to complain.

Analysis

When the young soldier is led by an old soldier, we see this scene's key theme: the passing on of wisdom from the old to the young. Note the reflection of Achilles' anger against Agamemnon (from the Iliad in the young soldier's anger that the captain took the prize that justly belongs to the soldier.

That this scene is considerably shorter than some of the plot-driven scenes in this play points to the scene's function as a parable within the play. The ransacking of Mother Courage's cart is never revisited or even mentioned again. The scene mainly shows Courage capitulating by losing the will to complain. War, in short, crushes the will. "This scene," wrote Brecht, "calls for bitterness at the start and dejection at the end." Thus is the progression of Mother Courage, yet at the play's close, the song's lyrics are recalled when Mother Courage really does march literally "in step with the band" as she makes her final exit.

We might have expected her to mourn for the son she has lost as a result of the Catholic incursion, yet she is more actively concerned with the loss of her trade. And, though Brecht called the song "bitter," he went further in condemning Mother Courage's actions: "in no scene is Courage as depraved as in this one."

This depravity is not, as many interpreters have it, because Courage is advocating capitulation, but because she is blessed in this scene with a rare self-awareness: she knows that her complaining is worthless unless it has the power to result in a change. It is not that Courage should not rock the boat, but rather that there is no point in complaining unless the boat is rocked. She sees the light here, and what Brecht condemns is that she does not act upon it. Sadly, she is condemned in her resignation to the idea that at her level nothing can be done.

Two years later, Mother Courage's cart has stopped in a badly shot-up village--during Tilly's victory at Leipzig (1631). Courage refuses to give a soldier a drink because he cannot pay. The soldier has a fur coat slung over his shoulder, which he has looted from the village.

The Chaplain stumbles on, asking urgently for bandages and linen. He carries in the mother of a peasant's family. They have refused to abandon their farm even during heavy gunfire. Courage tells him she has no bandages and refuses to help.

When the Chaplain asks again and is greeted with blind refusals from Courage, Kattrin attempts to threaten her mother with a plank of wood. Eventually, by lifting her off the steps of the cart, the Chaplain forcefully takes four of Courage's officer's shirts, tearing them into strips to use as bandages.

From the house comes "the pained cry of a child." Kattrin rushes into the fray to rescue a baby, which she brings back into the scene, rocking it in her arms. Courage laments the loss of her expensive shirts and then pounces on the soldier (from the start of the scene) for attempting to steal schnapps. She snatches the looted fur coat from his shoulders.

Analysis

Tilly's sacking of Magdeburg was one of the bloodiest atrocities of the Thirty Years' War. It was unparalleled in the number of civilian casualties. The grimly ironic final sentence of the scene heading tells us that the sacking "costs Mother Courage four officers' shirts." As in Scene Two, the startling comparison forces the audience to critically examine the action. Can the cost to Courage really ever be equated with the lives lost? The paradoxical answer is that, for Courage, everything has a price and can be compared. Besides, Courage's trade--and these shirts in particular--represent her own survival. To make allowances, as she rightly points out, might mean to starve.

This is one of the most revised scenes in the play. Brecht originally had had Courage tear up some of the shirts into bandages herself, but after the unsatisfactory premiere he rewrote the scene to make Courage seem still less sympathetic. In the scene as we have it now, Courage makes no concessions to necessity as far as her officers' shirts are concerned, yielding a far less compassionate portrayal than was originally intended.

This is also a key scene for Kattrin and her relationship with her mother. Her spontaneous (and deeply felt) attempted assault ties into the way she recklessly risks her own life to save the baby later. Whereas Courage always can put her business sense above her heart, her daughter, it appears, never can. In the original production, at the end of this scene, Courage held high her fur coat on one side of the stage, while Kattrin held high her baby on the other. The contrast between the two priorities (and the two acquisitions) is illuminating and paves the way for Kattrin's death (and Courage's life) at the end of the play. Note whose values win in the end--which might be more a statement of tragedy than of poetic justice.

Mother Courage is enjoying a newfound prosperity, and she undertakes a stock check on the day of the funeral of the fallen general Tilly. She refuses to allow some low-ranking soldiers into her tent, but she happily sells them brandy--they have dodged out of the funeral. Courage feels sorry for the dead general, lamenting the way the common people do not lend their full support to the larger plans.

There is then a long conversation about the duration of the war, with Mother Courage anxiously raising the crucial question of how long it will last. If it is to continue, she can comfortably invest in new goods for the cart. If it will finish soon, she cannot risk investing for fear of being left with unsaleable goods. The Chaplain convinces her that the war will last--there might be a short hiatus, but war always will ultimately continue. The Clerk wants peace to come, but the Chaplain thinks that the Pope and Emperor will contrive to keep the soldiers fighting. Comparing it to love, he seems to see war's continuance as a positive thing. Talking of the redundancy of peace in today's climate, he poses the riddling phrase, "what is the hole once the cheese is eaten?"

Kattrin runs angrily behind the cart at the Chaplain's verdict (her mother has insisted she wait until peacetime before she gets a male friend). She is sent immediately to pick up some merchandise from a nearby camp. "Don't let them take anything" says Courage, and again, playing on her daughter's sexual repression for the good of her business, "think of your dowry."

After Kattrin has left, Courage lights up the Cook's pipe, and the Chaplain converses with her as he chops firewood. He dislikes the Cook, while Courage quite likes him, a foreshadowing of their future sexual partnership. He complains that his clerical talents are being underused, and--with ambiguous motives--suggests a marriage, or at least a closer (perhaps sexual) relationship. She hints that she does not want to take anyone into her business, and when he tries to appeal to her soul, she tells him, "I don't have a soul. I do, however, need firewood." All she wants, she says in this scene, is to "get my kids through this war" (a goal, we will see, that will never be achieved).

Kattrin staggers back in, having been assaulted while bringing the merchandise back to her mother. But she has not, significantly, dropped or disregarded any of the merchandise she was supposed to be carrying. Courage dresses her wound and attempts to comfort her by presenting her with Yvette's red shoes, hidden in the cart. Kattrin rejects them and crawls back into the cart. Courage, examining the merchandise with which Kattrin has returned with, and for the only time in the play, curses the war.

Analysis

Like the fighting, the big event of the war--Tilly's funeral--happens offstage. Again, Brecht keeps the focus on the little people rather than the world-level leaders. The possibility of peace hangs over the scene. Peace actually will ruin Courage's business, but it will delight her daughter. The audience's sympathy, and the moral high ground, is clearly with Kattrin's sexual desires rather than her mother's financial ones.

Yet, the scene brutally cauterizes Kattrin's ambiguous sexual awakening with a brutal attack. Shortly before she goes on her mother's errand, Kattrin's hopes of acquiring a husband are dashed by the Chaplain's forecast of a perpetual war. The scar on her face as a result of the assault will prevent her from ever attaining a husband. This is what Courage suggests, and her idea is supported by the events of the play.

The reason Kattrin rejects the red boots at the end of the scene is not because she is morally superior to the sexual promiscuity that they represent (Yvette, their previous owner, is a prostitute) but because they are no longer of any use. Disfigured, she will never know the joys of a marriage bed, and she will never have the children of her own that she so clearly desires.

The scene's focus on marriage also extends into an unflattering insight into the Chaplain. Watching her smoke the pipe (smoked during intercourse by Yvette's "Peter the Puff") incites a desire for her body and her business. She rejects him in terms of the business. The only attractive morals in this scene are Kattrin's, though the literal disfiguration that the war gives her in this scene destroys the possibility of these morals taking root beyond Kattrin. The role of Kattrin's dumbness is thus neatly underlined.

Business is good. The cart is pulled by Kattrin and the Chaplain (or the "chaplain-potboy," as Brecht has it in his model). Courage sings to the audience cheerily, advertising her wares. She praises the war as a good provider.

Analysis

This very brief scene represents the brevity of good fortunes in times of war. Nevertheless, Mother Courage is "at the height of her business career," appearing to get something good out of the war. No longer is she cursing the war or regretting the pressure it puts on her and her family; no longer does she seem to have as her only desire to "get with my kids, through this war." This momentary prosperity has distracted her from the death of Swiss Cheese, the assault of Kattrin, and the loss of Eilif.

"If there's a war on, I'll get involved," she declares at the end of the song. This is further approval of the capitalist system. In the original production, Brecht had Weigel wearing a necklace of silver talers and rings on her fingers--these, he wrote, show her up for what she is, bribed.

Her claim that the weak lose during times of peace as well as times of war reiterates the Chaplain's argument that peace is simply war undeclared. Capitalism reigns, and as Brecht unrelentingly shows us, the only escape is to opt out altogether. (The alternative is not really given, although the peasants seem to live their lives under some kind of alternative.) In this scene, Courage quite openly opts in.

Waking her from her sleep in the cart, two nameless peasants, an old woman and her son, attempt to sell Mother Courage their father's bedding. They need to get the money because they are so hungry.

Bells begin to ring and voices shout that the Swedish king has been killed--and as a result, peace has broken out. Some Lutherans have ridden into town and brought the news with them. The old woman faints in shock at the news, and her son picks her up, heading for home with the tragicomic line, "Dad'll get his bed back."

The Cook appears, "somewhat bedraggled," having not been paid by the army and therefore wandering unemployed and hungry in search of food. As Scene Two suggested, he has been blamed for the lack of food that has spread across the country. Thus, in line with his name, he has become a sacrificial lamb. His high spirits have been somewhat dampened by the last eight years of war. The Chaplain, on hearing of the peace, changes back into his clerical robes.

The Cook and Courage discuss her decision to buy more wares. Now that peace has broken out, it looks like she will be ruined. The Cook blames the Chaplain for making a bad decision. When the Chaplain returns, now in his robes, an argument ensues during which the Chaplain loses his temper with Courage, blaspheming against peace and calling her a "hyena of the battlefield." He tells her, "you only want war, not peace, because you make a profit from it: in which case you should never forget that he who sups with the devil needs a long spoon."

Courage then tells him that they must go their separate ways. The Cook advises her to get to market to sell her wares, and she immediately gets ready to leave.

Yvette appears, "much older and fatter and heavily powdered," followed by a servant. She married the brother of the Colonel she was with in Scene Three, and she inherited a fortune on his death. She recognizes the Cook as "Peter the Puff" and now stresses her status against him, treating him as a commoner in light of her new noble status. Courage goes off to market with Yvette.

The Chaplain and the Cook have a short conversation. Eilif is brought on, chalk-white and escorted by soldiers with pikes. He is here to see his mother, and he has been arrested for breaking into a peasants' farm. It is exactly the deed he committed in wartime, but it has become a crime when committed during peacetime. Eilif is taken away to be shot, the Chaplain following at his heels.

Courage returns with the news that peacetime is over after all. The Lutherans are involved in a shooting match with the townspeople. As Kattrin and the Cook harness themselves up, Courage sings another business song.

Analysis

Peace is short-lived. The Chaplain seems to be correct to say that peace is just a hiatus between wars. By the time the news of peace travels to the town, it is about time for the peace to be over.

Courage has quite literally bought into the capitalist system of war. She still needs the war to be able to recoup her investment. She keeps to this system despite the fact that, under her nose in the same scene, the war also kills her son.

Eilif's death establishes in the audience's mind that, true to the inevitability of an Aristotelian tragedy, all of Courage's children are to be lost to the war. Kattrin's death now seems only a matter of when: it seems clear now that it will happen. What remains to be seen is whether or not Courage will realize tragically that her own involvement in the war as a business empire is something conducive to the desolation of her family. But the shattering anticlimax of the ending is that she never does. Brecht gives the audience a chance to see and consider this tragic situation ourselves, not distracted by either silent or loud screams.

It is no accident that, even at the very end of the play, Eilif's death remains unknown to Mother Courage. She is trading at the market when it happens. As with Swiss Cheese's death in Scene Three, and like Kattrin's coming death in Scene Eleven, her business distracts her from her family.

The Chaplain's final scene has him launch a rather hypocritical attack on Courage, a failed attempt to take the moral high ground on the premise that she hopes for war rather than peace. His exit with Eilif is unusually anticlimactic. For one of the play's central characters, his story is brought to no real resolution, only an abrupt ending. He has made little difference in the play itself, but he has been exposed repeatedly as a self-seeking hypocrite and turncoat rather than a morally driven man of the cloth. Yet, before he exits, the short conversation between him and the Cook about cabbage and carrots foreshadows Beckett's Waiting for Godot in its representation of the poignant misery that war brings to the human heart. Here is another facet of Brecht's focus on heartbreakingly small details rather than the bigger picture.

The other key entrance in this scene is that of Yvette, who is the only person in the play who profits from the war. She has paid for it with her beauty, needing to wait for an inheritance to find her profit. She is fatter and much older, implying that she has aged past her years. "She has sold herself," Brecht writes in the model, "but for a good price." And, of course, what she really wanted, the love of the Cook or "Peter the Puff," is now farther away than ever. She expresses a genuine bitterness in the way she chastizes him as a commoner. What might have been supposed a recognition or anagnorisis is in fact a non-event: the young, attractive Yvette whom Peter once loved has been traded in the market of the war.

It is the seventeenth year of "the great war of faith," a "grey morning in early winter." Mother Courage and the Cook, dressed in shabby sheepskins, draw the cart. They stop outside a small house, belonging presumably to a parson. They intend to beg for food; they are starving and cold.

The Cook reveals to Courage that he has received a letter from his aunt in Utrecht, telling him that his mother has died and that he has inherited the family inn. He invites Mother Courage to come with him and run the inn. After so many years of war, they are both tired, and as Courage sees, people are desperately poor, having nothing to buy her wares with. "Nothing's growing, except brambles."

She immediately tells Kattrin of the Cook's offer--but he pulls her aside and makes it clear that there is no room at the inn for Kattrin to live as well. If Courage is to accept his offer, Kattrin must remain behind. She will, the Cook thinks, never find a husband with that scar, so she might as well continue to pull the cart. Courage considers.

Mother Courage and the Cook then sing the "Song of Solomon" outside the parson's house as they beg for food and charity. The song details the way that great virtues do little to save great men from great disaster--examining, in order, Solomon, Julius Caesar, Socrates, and Saint Martin. It closes with a verse that deals with the "respectable folk" who are singing the song. At the close of the song, a voice calls Courage and the Cook into the parsonage for hot soup, and they go in. Courage then refuses to leave her daughter. The Cook accepts her decision with cool logic.

Kattrin, who has overheard much of the conversation about the Inn in Utrecht, emerges with a bundle, intending to run away. She lays out a pair of the cook's trousers and lays them on top of an old skirt of her mother's, but she is caught in the act by her mother. Guiltily, Mother Courage comforts Kattrin, and throwing the Cook's stuff out of the cart, the two of them get back on the road together. When the Cook arrives out of the parsonage with his soup, he looks bleakly at his possessions.

Analysis

By this late stage in the play, the glorious prosperity celebrated in Scene Seven has been lost. Times are hard, the weather is cold, and there is little business for Courage. The little people, in this scene, really cannot make any cut from the war. Nothing is growing, and there is nothing to buy or sell. The brutal message of the play about the war's ravages is now explicit.

Brecht is also moving towards the resolution of the play's plot. When Courage and the Cook have their brutal conversation about Kattrin's chances of marriage, having Kattrin overhear them makes her deeply and immediately sympathetic. Rejected and dejected, Kattrin "decides to spare her mother the need to make a decision" (Couragemodell) and leaves a message, the trousers and skirts, to accuse her mother of being a whore to the war. Courage's lies and comforting do little to lift the uncomfortable resonance of Kattrin's pictorial accusation--both Kattrin and the audience know that Courage was seriously considering the Cook's offer and that her protestations to the contrary are simply lies.

It is important, Brecht wrote, not to represent the Cook as "brutal" in this scene. The fact is that the tavern he has inherited is too small and, of course, the customers cannot be expected to put up with the sight of the disfigured Kattrin. The logic applied is such as might be expected in a business proposition. Here in abundance are the lack of humanity and the lack of compassion that characterize the dealings of the war.

This is the Cook's final scene. Like the Chaplain's in Scene 8, it is another minor exit for a major character. Ernst Busch, the Cook after 1951 in Brecht's production, indicated the sexual nature of this parting of ways by letting his pipe first droop and then fall from his mouth. And, though he has been absent from much of the play, the Cook is notably the play's most humorous character. His blank, silent exit, with his few belongings lying in front of him on an open stage, is a notable sign that there are to be no more laughs. Brecht's play is now moving towards its brutal, unforgiving, pessimistic conclusion.

The scene heading announces that during the year 1635, Mother Courage and Kattrin travel over the high roads of central Germany. As they pull the cart, they pass a peasant's house, out of which a voice sings a song with two short verses. The first describes a garden with roses in it. The voice rather smugly talks of how happy are people with gardens because they can see the lovely flowers. The second describes the coldness of winter before concluding that those with a thatched roof are happy since they have shelter from the cold. Mother Courage and Kattrin pause to listen and then pull the cart off.

Analysis

As in Scene Five, this scene serves more as a parable than as a direct part of the plot. "The Song of Home" was sung in Brecht's original production with "unfeeling, provocative self-assurance. The arrogant pride of possession expressed in the singing turned the listeners on the road into damned souls." It is a momentary, almost grotesque glimpse (which might be compared to that of the General in Scene Two) of life on the other side-this is the attitude of the people who, despite the war, are above the bread line. The audience may be repulsed to hear these words while seeing the poverty personified in Courage and Kattrin. Yet, it is significant that Mother Courage and Kattrin say absolutely nothing. What is going through their minds is left to the imagination. Peter Thomson makes the fascinating observation that "one [or both?] of them is surely thinking of an inn in Utrecht" (See Plays in Production: Mother Courage and her Children.)

It is January 1636. The emperor's troops are threatening the Protestant town of Halle, and the cart stands, much the worse for wear, alongside a peasant's house with a huge thatched roof. It is the middle of the night.

An ensign and three soldiers in heavy armor come out of the wood and drag out a peasant, his son, and his wife. Kattrin is dragged out of the cart. Mother Courage has again, we are told, gone into town to trade. The soldiers need to find a guide to take them into the town in order to besiege it. When they threaten the peasants' oxen, the son agrees and leads them off into the town.

The peasant and his wife conclude that there is nothing to be done to wake up the sleeping people in the town without risking their own lives. With Kattrin, they kneel to pray for God's mercy. Kattrin begins to groan as the peasant's wife, leading the prayer, mentions the "four children of my brother-in-law," who are asleep in their house in the town. When she notes that one child is "not yet two, and the eldest seven," Kattrin stands up, unseen. She takes a drum from the cart, climbs onto the roof, and begins to beat the drum to awaken the sleeping townspeople.

The peasants desperately try to get her to come down. Kattrin pulls the ladder up onto the roof. They threaten to throw stones at her, terrified that the soldiers will return and murder them. The soldiers return and attempt to get her down. They try to muffle the noise of the drum by chopping trees with an axe. They threaten her with the death of her mother and try to smash up the cart. But Kattrin keeps drumming. Eventually they fetch a harquebus and shoot Kattrin, who "slowly crumples," beats the drum a few more times, and then falls dead.

Yet, as Kattrin's body slumps, cannon fire and confused noises are heard from the town. She has succeeded in awaking the townsfolk, though she has given her own life in doing so.

Analysis

This scene is one of the most dramatic in the play. It was criticized by many of Brecht's contemporaries for being more of the "Dramatic Theater" than of the "Epic Theater." It is indeed a danger of the scene that the dynamism and excitement of its events might prevent the audience from critically viewing it. Yet, Brecht's point is to illustrate the importance of acting versus not action. He noted that it was essential that the peasants' justification of their failure to act must be presented so as to make it obvious that prayer is the final point in a line of argument which justifies their "not acting." Kattrin, in contrast, is not praying but is taking matters into her own hands. Her action is praised while religion is demeaned in this period of wartime.

The scene heading contains the strangely figurative line, "The stone speaks." The "stone" must be Kattrin (influenced, perhaps, by Shakespeare's line "dumb breathing stones" in Richard III, or by the Biblical idea of the stones crying out for justice). Thus, her actions in this scene might be considered the most eloquent in the play. It is highly ironic that it is by making noise that the silent (dumb) Kattrin finally achieves this eloquence. She has been silent throughout the play, yet it is the sound she creates now that will save lives. Kattrin sacrifices herself to save a town of people. Whether or not she is successful, we are never told, but Brecht clearly intends the attempt to be seen as noble.

Nevertheless, criticism is divided on the issue of Kattrin's sainthood. Many commentators have suggested that she only takes action because of the mention of the children who will die in the siege. If Kattrin is obsessed with babies and childhood, does this make her deed less noble? That is, how aware is she of the magnitude of her deed-is she doing it for the whole town or just for the children? These questions make for interesting discussion when analyzing Kattrin's character. Even so, in the spectrum of main characters in this play, Kattrin's actions here make her character the most praiseworthy. She gives her own life for a noble cause.

Kattrin's death represents the emotional climax of the play. It is the death of Courage's final child and the culmination of the play's growing focus on Kattrin's character. At the same time, the high drama of the scene becomes almost comedic: the soldiers are presented as fatally stupid, and their attempts to drown out Kattrin's drumming by chopping wood are risible-they just add noise that will awaken the town. Symbolically, is Kattrin a tree that needs to be chopped down in this time of war?

Mother Courage sings a lullaby over Kattrin's dead body. It is time for her to get back on the road. The peasants advise her to follow the regiment immediately. Fetching a tarpaulin from her cart, she covers Kattrin's body. She pays the peasants to bury her. Mother Courage harnesses herself to the cart, hoping that she can pull it alone. The noise of a regiment passes by, and Courage follows along with it, pulling the cart. From offstage, the song that introduced Courage in Scene One is repeated to end the play.

Analysis

The lullaby, according to Brecht, was to be sung "without any sentimentality or desire to provoke sentimentality." Its innate materialism must be made clear. The lullaby itself sets the extraordinary prosperity of a child in competition with that of other children. This child, Courage's child, must be the best. Even in mourning her last child, Courage is unable to separate herself from the cut-and-thrust of the competitive capitalist market. Courage's way of life, even her means of discourse, is her trade. To illustrate this point, which has become rather obvious by this scene, many productions have adopted Brecht's choice in the original production whereby Courage, in paying the peasants for Kattrin's burial, extracts three coins from her purse, but hands over only two, putting one back.

Weigel's portrayal of Courage in the original production made her seem eighty years old in this scene, according to Brecht. The war has wearied her, her business is depleted by it, and her children (though she still does not know about Eilif) have all been killed at its hands. Yet, she has learned nothing. She and her cart will continue. The final line she speaks is, "I've got to get back into business." She has not learned Brecht's lesson that "those who will make their cut from the war need a very big pair of scissors." In this play, war is a capitalist system that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.

This scene can be a stumbling block for actors who play Courage. If they get involved in the scene rather than maintaining their consistent "attitude" toward it (a basic premise of Brecht's "epic" acting style), the audience will leave the theater with the impression that this indefatigable woman has endured the worst and has still come through, that is, her aim of "coming through the war" has been achieved. But this is not at all what Brecht desired, and this interpretation would undermine the play's aim as a whole. Remember that peace is fleeting. If Mother Courage represents a system that is problematic by nature, it makes sense that she does not change her nature despite all of the problems she faces. One reconciles oneself to the war and to what one finds in the world; if one wants to change it, one needs a very big mechanism for change.

The final image of the play reiterates the words of the song that accompanies it and which began the play. As the Chaplain suggested, war does not die, but rests; what is not yet dead gets back onto its feet for the next round. The cart's rolling around the stage (often accomplished in modern productions using a revolve) represents the perpetuity of war. From the play's setting in the Thirty Years' War to its composition during the Second World War (and to our own time), we remain war-torn and in need of Brecht's timeless lessons.

• Biography of Bertolt Brecht
• About Mother Courage and Her Children
• Character List
• Major Themes
• Glossary of Terms
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Scene One
• Summary and Analysis of Scene Two
• Summary and Analysis of Scene Three
• Summary and Analysis of Scene Four
• Summary and Analysis of Scene Five
• Summary and Analysis of Scene Six
• Summary and Analysis of Scene Seven
• Summary and Analysis of Scene Eight
• Summary and Analysis of Scene Nine
• Summary and Analysis of Scene Ten
• Summary and Analysis of Scene Eleven
• Summary and Analysis of Scene Twelve
• Related Links on Mother Courage and Her Children
• Suggested Essay Questions
• About "Epic Theater"
• Brecht's Intention
• A Stage History
• Author of ClassicNote and Sources
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