Lecture Eighty-One

Bertolt Brecht
Scope: Born in the Bavarian city of Augsburg to solidly middle-class parents, Brecht wrote his first play at the age
of 16 and scarcely stopped writing thereafter. His best known works include The Threepenny Opera, which
he wrote in the late 1920s with the composer Kurt Weill, and Mother Courage, which he wrote just after
the Second World War broke out in the fall of 1939. In 12 scenes, this play stages a dozen years sliced
from the middle of the Thirty Years War in the early 17th century, when the Catholic forces of the Holy
Roman Empire fought the Protestant nations of the north. The title figure is a canteen woman named
Mother Courage who profits from the war by selling goods from a covered wagon that she hauls around
behind the troops. But as one after another of her three grown children are drawn into the war and killed,
we see how futile are her hopes of gaining anything but misery from the war. As a confirmed Marxist,
Brecht sought to show not just the folly of trying to profit from small trading during the war but also the
dehumanizing effect of a preoccupation with business.

Outline
I.

In resorting to bribery to save the life of her son, Mother Courage shows that she has the heart of a trader.
A. In this play about the Thirty Years War, Brecht focuses on the characters that history typically overlooks.
1. In the early 17th century, the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire fought the Protestant nations
of the north for 30 years.
2. The title character in Brechts play is a canteen woman who follows the troops with her goods in a
covered wagon and who worries about what the war is doing to her three grown children.
B. Shes torn between running her wagon business and helping her children.
1. She doesnt want the army recruiter to take her two sons.
2. When both of them join anyway and one is captured, she sends another woman to the soldiers to find
out how much shell have to pay to free him and thus save him from execution.
3. She bets her hope on bribery rather than mercy.

II. Brecht made his name as a playwright in his 20s.

A. After writing his first play at age 16, he won a prize for two of his plays at age 24.
1. Born to middle-class parents in the Bavarian city of Augsburg and nurtured by his Protestant mother,
who steeped him and his brother in the Lutheran Bible, Brecht wrote his first play, The Bible, at age
16.
2. In 1922, he won the Kleist Drama Prize for two plays: Baal and Drums in the Night.
B. In the late 1920s, he wrote The Threepenny Opera with the composer Kurt Weill.
1. It was based on The Beggars Opera, an 18th-century English opera by John Gay.
2. First performed in Berlin in 1928, the work made Brecht internationally famous.
III. After Brecht fully embraced communism and the gospel of Marx, his plays came to reflect Marxism, yet also
refract it through his own idiosyncratic imagination.
A. Though Brecht thought epic theater should keep the audience from identifying with the main character,
three of the plays he wrote in the 1930s aim to make us identify with revolutionary heroes fighting
capitalism and fascism.
1. In St. Joan of the Stockyards (19301931), the heroine finally proclaims her faith in the gospel of
violent resistance.
2. In The Mother (1931), set in czarist Russia, the title character undergoes conversion to the
revolutionary cause.
3. In Seora Carrars Rifles, the title character joins the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War of
the late 1930s.
B. But in plays such as A Man Is a Man and Life of Galileo, Brecht creates a new human type who survives
by adapting to circumstance.

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1.
2.

In A Man Is a Man (1925), written before Brecht embraced communism, a wacky Irish porter named
Galy Gay survives by lying and superficially complying, rather than openly resisting oppression.
In Life of Galileo (1938), the title character declines to be a hero, saving his life by pretending to
submit to the authorities while covertly pursuing and disseminating his work.

IV. After fleeing Hitlers Germany in 1933 and learning of the brutality of Soviet communism, Brecht resolved to
write an antiwar play in the fall of 1939, when the Second World War broke out.
A. In the 1930s, Brecht hated Nazi Germany and learned to distrust Soviet Russia.
1. He voiced his hatred of Hitler and the Nazis in such sketches as Fear and Misery in the Third Reich,
written in March of 1938.
2. Though for a time Brecht thought Moscow the only theatrical city in the world, he learned by June
of 1938 that a number of Moscow theater professionals whom he knew had been brutally crushed.
B. As an antiwar play written at the start of World War II, Mother Courage takes its place with two other
pacifist works written in time of war.
1. In Joyces Ulysses, written during the First World War, Leopold Bloom denounces war as the enemy
of life itself.
2. In Camus The Plague, also written during the Second World War, the plague is implicitly compared
to war and fought with nothing but the weapons of healing.
C. In spite of her name, Brechts Mother Courage views death-defying courage as simply foolhardy.
1. She doesnt want her children to fight.
2. When her two sons join the army anyway, she slaps one of them for not surrendering when he was
surrounded by four peasants.
3. She insists that survival is more important than heroism.
V. But as a war profiteer, Mother Courage exemplifies the alienating effect of Brechts epic theater.
A. Mother Courage is a figure we normally detesta war profiteer.
B. But as such, she demonstrates Brechts determination to deflect our sympathy from his main character.
1. Brecht disliked what he called Aristotelian (empathy) drama, which aims to make us identify with
the protagonist.
2. His epic theater seeks to detach us from the emotional life of the main character.
3. Unlike Aristotelian tragedy, wherein the hero discovers his own flaw, Brecht says that Mother
Courage never grasps the lesson of the play because she never stops trying to make money from the
war.
C. In writing about the Thirty Years War, Brecht seeks not only to show that war can devastate Germany but
also to expose the unholy alliance between war and business.
1. Mother Courage herself says that the religious pretexts for the Thirty Years War scarcely hide its
commercial aims.
2. But in commending the intelligence of those who make war for profit, she fails to realize that no
ordinary person can profit from it.
VI. Though Brecht has carefully explained the lesson that he wanted his audiences to take from the play, it moves
us precisely because it fails to do exactly what Brecht said he wanted it to do.
A. Dismayed by reviews of the first (Zurich) production that praised the vitality of Mother Courage, Brecht
himself directed the Berlin production to stress her mercantile craftiness.
1. She blindly believes in the profit to be made from the war.
2. In seeing only her sufferings (according to Brecht), the Berlin audience failed to see her crimesher
participation in war profiteeringand her failure to learn anything from the war.
B. In blaming the audience for misunderstanding his title character, Brecht presses us to adopt the
intentionalist fallacy.
1. This is the belief that we can judge a work of literature according the authors intention.
2. Normally, we have trouble getting access to that intention outside the work itself.
3. Because Brecht wrote at length about his intentions, he challenges us to judge his stated aims against
our own experience of the play.

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C. The sheer complexity of the title character resists any formula that would categorize her as a battlefield
hyena.
1. On the one hand, she deplores peace because it may ruin her business, and she wont give linen to bind
up the wounds of bleeding peasants.
2. On the other hand, shes dismayed by what the war does to her children.
3. On the one hand, she fails to save the life of her son by haggling over the size of the bribe she offers
for him, and she denies that she knows him when his body is brought to her.
4. On the other hand, given that she may be killed if she admits knowing him, must we conclude that her
hardness destroys her humanity, or does it subtly lead us into the unspeakable depths of her
anguish?
VII. In Brechts Mother Courage, the title figure herself becomes a battlefield where the struggle for profit and the
need to survive wage endless war with maternal solicitude.
Essential Reading:
Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays, vol. 5, edited by Ralph Manheim and John Willet.
Ronald Hayman, Brecht: A Biography.
Supplementary Reading:
Eric Bentley, Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht.
Questions to Consider:
1. To what extent do Brechts plays reflect his Marxism?
2. Explain why you agree or disagree with Brechts assessment of Mother Courage.

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