Mother Courage and her children (figure analysis)

Data
Title:	Mother Courage and her children
Genus:	Epic theater
Original language:	German
Author:	Bertolt Brecht
Publishing year:	1941
Premiere:	April 19, 1941
Place of premiere:	Schauspielhaus Zurich
Place and time of the action:	Thirty Years War between 1624 and 1636
people
	Mother courage; Kattrin, her silent daughter; Eilif, the older son; Schweizererkas, the younger son; The recruiter; The sergeant; The chef; The field captain; The field preacher; The kit master; Yvette Pottier; The old colonel; A scribe; An elderly soldier; farmers; Peasant women; A young soldier; The ensign; soldiers;

The protagonist Mother Courage from Bertolt Brecht's drama Mother Courage and Her Children is a small trader who tried to do business as a sutler during the Thirty Years' War and lost her three children Kattrin, Eilif and Schweizerkas in the process. The figure exemplifies the way in which Brecht builds complex stage characters dialectically from opposites.

The "mother courage" is not a positive heroine. The audience should view their actions from a distance and draw their conclusions from them. But interest in her also arises from compassion. The mother Courage is not a one-dimensional negative figure, but also a suffering mother, although Brecht tries to keep this aspect small by changing the text and directing the stage. His concept of epic theater seeks to reach the audience through the mind, not through identification and compassion for positive heroes. The courage is "demonstrated", it learns nothing from its mistakes and should thereby initiate learning processes.

The mother Courage stands in the tradition of Brechtian female characters, whose principles fail because of reality and are thus supposed to expose social grievances. Just as Shen Te from Brecht's The Good Man of Sezuan fails because of her virtues, her children lose courage because she naively hopes, as a small trader, to do her business with the war without having to pay a high price for it. Another aspect of their personality is their rebellious attitude against the powerful, against religion and ideology. But courage is also a woman who knows how to enforce her sexual self-determination. Their children are of three different men and were raised by different men. Furthermore, the courage represents the social class of the petty bourgeoisie , which suffers from the raids of the powerful, but still orientates itself on them and despises the lower classes, in part the peasants and soldiers. Ultimately, courage represents capitalism itself through its unscrupulous dealings , from the point of view of Bertolt Brecht, who was influenced by Marxism , a form of struggle of all against all, also outside of open wars.

The extensive documentation of the performance by the Berliner Ensemble in the “Courage Model”, a collection of photos, stage directions and comments, shows how Brecht actually implemented the complexity of the stage figure.

The complexity of the courage figure

Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, poster for the Courage performance 2010

Using the example of the rehearsals for the Caucasian Chalk Circle , John Fuegi shows that Brecht systematically emphasized the contradictions of his figures. If the selflessness of the maid Grusha was worked out in a rehearsal, a negative aspect of her personality was the focus of interest in the continuation, always with the aim of “creating a multi-layered person”. According to Brecht, the way to achieve this is "the conscious application of contradiction." Fuegi considers the statements quoted to be decisive for Brecht's theater:

“This 'conscious application of contradiction' seems to me characteristic of Brecht's directorial work at every point in his career. (…) The contradictions inherent in this method must by no means be resolved. Complex individuals and complex actions in the world of the Brecht stage are built up from diverse and contradicting or opposing layers. (…) One mental image is superimposed on another, a superimposition of poetic, practical and philosophical aspects that together create the impression of spatial (and content-related) depth. "

In 1940, Brecht noted in the typescript "On the Structure of a Person" that the actor first had to develop a "type", provided with appropriate "gestures" and "externalities" that suggested certain behaviors. In order to make a final person out of the type, untypical traits were missing that would open up other possibilities of behavior. That is precisely what distinguishes people: that only the “outlines of the type” shine through through “general”.

In a typescript from 1956, Brecht emphasizes contradictions as a characteristic of literary masterpieces: “The masterpieces live because in them the representation of the world shows all the contradictions of the same, and they live most vigorously where they show the most vigorous life, life, moves of the strongest contradictions. "

In this sense, Kenneth R. Fowler interprets the contradiction as an essential feature of the courage figure and rejects one-sided interpretations of courage as a mother or an unscrupulous trader. She deserves both labels, the “hyena of the battlefield” and the maternal figure.

Brecht built the complexity of Courage out of various elements. Literary models and own texts are processed. He confronts his stage character with various topics and events. Finally, Brecht works out the contradictions of the character specifically in the directorial work.

Literary role models

Johan Ludvig Runeberg, painting by Albert Edelfelt

One of Brecht's methods in the creation of texts and poems is the use of literary material. According to Margarete Steffin's notes , Brecht was inspired to mother courage in Swedish exile by the story of the Nordic sutler Lotta Svärd from Johan Ludvig Runeberg's “ Fähnrich Stahl ”. In Runeberg's ballads we find the type of maternal sutler who takes care of the soldiers in the Finnish-Russian war of 1808/09 . In terms of content, Brecht's drama bears no resemblance to Runeberg's work, which idealistically glorifies Finland's struggle for national autonomy.

Grimmelshausen, literary source of ideas for Courage

Brecht took the name "Courage" from the novel Trutz Simplex : Or detailed and wonderfully strange biography of the Ertz Betrügerin and Landstörtzerin Courasche (1670) by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen , who uses the example of a gypsy woman to describe how the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War became moral and human Lead to neglect.

Grimmelshausen's novels relentlessly portray the horrors of war. However, Brecht took over neither the plot of the Courasche novel nor the character of the title character. At Grimmelshausen, Courasche is a soldier whore with a strong erotic charisma, she is sterile (but has seven different husbands; see the three different fathers of Eilif, Schweizererkas and Kattrin) and is of high birth. The term "courasche" does not mean courage, but the vagina :

"But when the sermon was at its best and he asked me why I had done my opposite in such a horrible way, I replied:" Because he has grabbed my courage where no other man's hands have yet come ""

Nevertheless, there are indirect parallels between the two literary figures. Like Brecht's Courage, Grimmelshausen's “Courasche” also went to war on purpose. In men's clothing, she looks for opportunities to live out her lust for rubbish and greed for money. Neither of them believe in religion. On the other hand, Courasche tries to earn her money as a soldier whore, mainly through a chain of short-lived marriages, an aspect of her personality that Brecht finds in the character of Yvette Pottier.

Courage learns nothing

The Royal Theater in Copenhagen, performed in 1953

“Courage learns nothing,” Brecht writes over a typescript that he wrote in 1953 for a performance of Courage in Copenhagen. Because learning means changing one's behavior - and that is precisely what courage does not. She believes at the beginning of the play that the war will bring her profit, and she also believes it at the end of the play when her three children are already dead.

“Weigel played courage hard and angry; ie not her courage was angry, but she, the actress. It showed a trader, strong and cunning, who loses one by one of her children to the war and yet continues to believe in the profit from the war. "

In the death of her children, Mother Courage only sees the harsh statement of the “Solomon Song” confirmed: Those who fail to shed their virtues will not survive, unlike herself.

"All virtues are dangerous in this world, as the beautiful song proves, it is better not to have them and have a comfortable life and breakfast, let's say a warm soup."

She is and remains a follower who does not lose her hopes until the end; a circumstance that initially brought the piece some criticism: Many would have preferred an ending with a positive solution. Brecht wrote about this in 1949:

“The Courage […] recognizes the purely mercantile nature of war together with its friends and guests and almost everyone: that is precisely what attracts it. She believes in the war to the last. She doesn't even realize that you have to have big scissors to make your cut at war. (...); it learns as little from the catastrophe as the experimental shrimp learns about biology. It is not up to the playwright to make the courage see at the end - she sees a lot towards the middle of the play, at the end of scene 6, and then loses sight again - it is important to him that the viewer sees . "

Courage as a figure of identification

The audience should learn from the fact that courage learns nothing from war. This desired interpretation requires a mental performance and an emotional distancing: the negative traits of the main character must be recognized and condemned against all identification and against the compassion for the suffering mother. Brecht hoped that the play would be “more instructive than reality” “because the war situation appears to be more than an experimental situation, created to provide insight; that is, the viewer gets into the student's attitude - provided the style of play is correct. ”The core goal of the drama, the rejection of war, requires a critical eye.

In order to enable this distant view, Brecht attaches great importance to destroying the sympathetic view of the audience with the means of epic theater . Irritated by the recording of the Zurich premiere as “ Niobe tragedy”, as the tragic fate of the suffering mother, he intensifies the bitter humor and the ruthlessness of Mother Courage by changing the text and staging it. Nevertheless, the audience continues to “sympathize” with the courage. Brecht attributes this primarily to the fact that the audience has not learned anything from their own involvement in the Second World War.

“The viewers of 49 and the following years did not see the crimes of courage, their participation, their wanting to earn money in the war business; they only saw their failure, their suffering. And so they looked at the Hitler War, in which they had participated: it had been a bad war, and now they were suffering. In short, it was as the playwright had prophesied to them. The war would bring them not only suffering, but also the inability to learn from it. "

Ingo Breuer suspects another reason for the attraction of courage for the audience. He sees in their subversive speeches and their style of language the critical gaze of the common people, as Jaroslav Hašek described him in his figure of the good soldier Schwejk , a figure that Brecht greatly influenced. Schwejk makes authorities ridiculous with an absurdly exaggerated "fulfillment of duty" and apparently naive, satirical speeches that target the ideals of war and the unreasonableness of its proponents. Courage acts in the same way when it tries to identify itself with a conglomerate of senseless papers or analyzes the concept of soldierly virtue. Sarah Bryant-Bertail sees the parallel to Schweijk in the original adaptation of the characters from a picaresque novel:

"In the first half of the play in particular, the courage figure acts as a commentator on the ideology of domination, while in the second half a kind of peripetia takes place - albeit less in the fable than in the protagonist's ability to cognize, which now serves as the recipient with the previously presented critical ideology Leaving analytical methods alone so that it can now itself increasingly become an object of criticism. "

In part, however, it is precisely the perspective of the trader, the trader who Brecht criticizes, that creates the sober view of courage. It recognizes something, which Brecht also admits, namely “the purely mercantile nature of war” and is thus on this side of all ideology of belief that it can unmask. The fact that she does not recognize the danger that threatens her and her children from this sober point of view is her undoing.

The failure of Brecht's intention to keep the audience at a distance was often discussed in reception. This failure is often interpreted as the quality of the piece. Walter Kaufmann considers the drama to be one of Brecht's best pieces precisely because it unconsciously made it possible to sympathize with courage.

“Not inviting the audience to identify with the hero, not creating a catharsis of affects , but getting people to think about the plot, that had long been one of Brecht's dramatic theorems. But he was an artist as well as a theorist, and his subconscious was involved in his best pieces. Mother Courage scoffs at his theories and rises to a height of pathos seldom reached in the theater of our century ; And it is known that even when Brecht himself staged the play with his wife Helene Weigel in the title role, he was unable to inspire disgust for the heroine in either the critics or the audience, although Brecht repeatedly emphasized that this was his intention. "

The feminist perspective

Brecht's female characters are regularly typed in gender- interested research and linked to the author's biography. The complex figure of courage does not seem to be easily classified into such a pattern.

Sarah Bryant-Bertail sees Courage as one of Brecht's female characters who travel endlessly through the social strata of their society on insecure legs - often walking in the literal sense - and who are exiled in a deep sense . She sees this construct as a chance for Brecht's epic concept, because these marginalized female figures, precisely in their powerlessness, seem better suited than men to make the social system transparent in an ironic way.

According to Sarah Bryant-Bertail, Brecht regularly uses women as didactic objects, rather as fully realized subjects, even if the female figures in Mother Courage are very complex. Some of Brecht's female figures embodied socialist selflessness (The Mother, St. Johanna of the Slaughterhouses, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Good Man of Sezuan). In the tradition of Sturm und Drang and Enlightenment , women appear in Brecht as figures through which ideologies are represented, veiled or conveyed.

Typical female figures at Brecht are the naive girl who is seduced and abandoned, the prostitute who takes revenge by gaining financial advantages, the entrepreneur who becomes unscrupulous through her pursuit of profit and the martyr mother who sacrifices herself for the helpless. Mother Courage goes through various aspects of this typification like the mother in the song of the great surrender. Brecht depicts the path of courage from the seduced and abandoned girl to the increasingly colder businesswoman as a path across the stage, additionally symbolized by the car.

The development of courage is also documented in small, carefully planned details and gestures, for example when she bites into a coin. Other props also symbolically represented the various female roles and their transitions, such as the red high-heeled shoes of the warehouse whore, which Kattrin also tried on.

Fowler sees in the protest against the patriarchal principle a characteristic of the mother courage. Even the names of their children are determined by the mother and her love affairs, not by the biological fathers. When the sergeant asked for “papers” and a “license” from her in the first scene, she pointed to her decent face and set female materialism against male bureaucracy. She countered male demands for discipline and asceticism with pleasure and material goods.

“The advertiser: We need breeding in the camp.

Mother Courage: I thought sausage. "

She demonstrates sexual self-determination and clearly and explicitly demands the freedom to dispose of her body. She confidently chooses her lovers.

"Sergeant: Are you kidding me? (...)

Mother Courage: Talk to me decently and don't tell my teenage children that I want to kid you, that's not proper, I have nothing to do with you. "

Fowler emphasizes her vitality and her self-determined male relationships.

“Here is a woman whose appetite is so great that she doesn't even remember the names of her lovers, of course she's not a woman who lives by the 'model' that her first sexual partner (her husband) is also her last is (until death do you part). This image of a sexuality that is uncontrolled by men, yes, men completely consuming it (because no one has survived it so far), is another reason for the sergeant's criticism: 'A nice family, I have to say.' "

The courage as an unscrupulous trader

"The war is nothing but the business" is the motto of the courage in the 7th scene and she wants to be one of the winners. Fowler therefore considers the crime of courage, their profiteering with the war, to be obvious and can rely on Brecht's interpretation. The figure is drawn as a partner in war and death and thus as a criminal. Fowler points out that she makes her contribution to the war machine consciously, voluntarily, persistently and unreasonably ("deliberate, persistent, and unrepentant"). You act like this, although you see through the war propaganda, not as an innocent victim, not accidentally or fatefully. She knows about the fate of the little people as victims and the hopelessness of their attempt to profit from the war like the big ones. She also knows the price her behavior demands: the death of her children. In addition, Courage consciously chose to participate in the war:

"Sergeant: You are from Bamberg in Bavaria, how did you get here?

Courage: I can't wait for the war to come to Bamberg. "

In the Berlin production of 1951, Brecht put the long path of courage at the beginning of the production in order to work out the voluntary path of courage in the war. Until recently, Courage had the alternative of leaving the war zone, for example going to Utrecht with or without a cook. At various points in the play, her affirmation of war is clearly expressed. She interprets the end of the war as threatening for herself. For courage, peace is not redemption, but a misfortune that “breaks out”.

Fowler believes inhumanity is an integral part of Mother Courage's trade. Their business was based on the principle that advantages for them and their children could only be achieved through disadvantages for others. Fowler gives various examples, such as Courage's business dealings with the city of Halle. Given the danger to the city and the desperation of the residents, Courage hopes for cheap shopping.

"The peasant people: (...) that is a dumb woman, her mother is in town, shopping for her goods trade, because many flee and sell cheaply."

Courage knows no pity, not for the peasant people Eilif robbed, not for the wounded in an attack, to whom she refused bandages. The song of courage at the beginning of the piece already shows her cynicism towards the soldiers:

“Guns on empty stomachs

Your captains, this is not healthy.

But they are full, have my blessing

And leads them into the abyss of hell. "

When in doubt, so Fowler, courage decides for business and war and against saving her children. Whenever it comes down to saving her children, be distracted by business, negotiate too long on the price or absent. This becomes particularly clear in her behavior towards Kattrin. She is jointly responsible for the daughter's injury and disfigurement, because she sends her out on her own to get goods (scene 6). Even more drastically, she leaves Kattrin alone with strangers in the dangerous siege situation in front of Halle (scene 11) and is thus jointly responsible for her death.

"The peasant people: If it hadn't gone into town, made your cut, it might not have happened."

Courage as a mother figure

According to Fowler, the pact with war and death is opposed to a maternal side of courage. She tries to save the lives of her children by doing business in the war because there is no alternative for them. The war appears to be eternal because it lasts longer than the time segment shown by the drama. This impression is recorded in the final song of Courage: "The war, it lasts a hundred years." From their point of view, there is no way to escape the war except an early death.

The inevitability of war is conveyed by the drama by relating war to the forces of nature. In “Song of Woman and Soldier” at the end of scene 3, Courage and Eilif combine war with threatening, icy floods, in “Song of Stay” with “Snow Wind”. Courage's commitment to life becomes evident through her relentless struggle to keep it in a difficult situation. For Fowler, Brecht's Marxism provides further arguments for the fatefulness of the situation of courage: as an expression of certain historical conditions and a representative of the petty-bourgeois class, courage is anything but free. Fowler also sees evidence of the fatefulness of the events in the fact that Brecht himself spoke several times of a Niobe tragedy, which refers to the tragic fate of a mother who loses her children.

Fowler also interprets her rejection of all bureaucratic controls and her vital, promiscuous sexuality as a commitment to life. Her libidinal interest, represented for example by the phallic symbol of the cook's pipe carefully kept by Courage, has never been extinguished.

The incessant search of courage for business opportunities is also an expression of elementary vitality. In addition, the courage appears as a nurturer (“nurturer”), for her children as well as for cooks, sergeants and soldiers.

She defends her children again and again, exemplifying the fact that she pulls her knife for Eilif in the first scene to protect the son from the advertiser. Like a tigress she defends her cubs with teeth and claws. The criticism that she haggled too long in the negotiations for the life of her son Schweizererkas can be refuted by the fact that the car she has to sell is the family's livelihood. The denial of the son was only for his protection, otherwise he would have been identified as a Protestant. Her weakest child, Kattrin, defends her courage again and again against the threat from men and against their own sexual desires, which become a danger in war. You forego the escape from the war with the cook for them. Courage also saved others, such as the field preacher when the Catholic League conquered the camp. The courage as an educator and advisor, who repeatedly warned her children of the dangers of war, was also motherly. She gives saving advice to the children and others.

Fowler concludes that courage is difficult to blame for her behavior. Again and again she is faced with the choice between two life-saving principles, trading and protecting her children, but none of the principles alone can save her children. Her situation is hopeless, it resembles that of a she-wolf who is faced with the alternative of staying with her cubs for protection or looking for food for them.

Alvar Cawén (1886–1935), Pietà

The drama pathetically shows the motherliness of courage in the scene with the dead Kattrin. The moving Pietà configuration is reinforced by the lullaby that the courage of her dead daughter sings and that contains the unfulfilled wishes for Kattrin.

“Neighbors go in rags

And you go in Seid

Ausn skirt from an angel

Modified '. "

There are many examples of courage's concern for her children, but it is most evident in the face of her death. The eloquent courage fell silent in the face of Eilif's departure in the first scene and became monosyllabic in view of the shooting of the Schweizererkas and the dead Kattrin.

Brecht himself interprets the situation and the song completely differently: “The lullaby must be performed without any sentimentality and without the desire to arouse sentimentality. (...) The underlying idea behind the song is a murderous one: This mother's child should have it better than other children from other mothers. ”Nevertheless, Brecht praises a very emotional moment that Helene Weigel shows in this scene:“ The Weigel showed an almost animal numbness of courage throughout the entire scene. The deep bow she made when the dead woman was carried away was all the more beautiful. "

In his interpretation, Fowler refers to George Steiner's description of the silent scream of courage in Weigel's portrayal of the dead Swiss cheese being carried away:

"As the body was carried off, Weigel looked the other way and tore her mouth wide open. The shape of the gesture was that of the screaming horse in Picasso 's Guernica . The sound that came out was raw and terrible beyond any description I could give of it. But, in fact, there was no sound. Nothing. The sound was total silence. It was silence which screamed and screamed through the whole theater so that the audience lowered its head as before a gust of wind. "

The courage as a representative of the unity of war and business

Courage introduces herself and her family as "business people" and then shows in her performance song that her business is closely linked to war and death. Through the song - so Fowler - courage becomes a symbol of the unity of war and business. From Brecht's perspective, it shows that a businessman is something like courage: a trader in war.

The courage makes a decision by addressing the "captains" with their song, not the common soldiers who are supposed to march to their deaths with good shoes and fed up. As a sutler, she assumed the perspective of the rulers who, like her, waged the wars for profit. Her drive is solely the profit, she is only interested in the soldiers' money and cynically accepts her death:

“But they are full, have my blessing

And leads them into the abyss of hell. "

Again and again the courage confronts the soldiers as a cold business woman: “No money, no schnapps.” “First money!” Even in view of the plight of the injured farmers, she remains a cold business woman: “I don't give anything. They don't pay, why, they have nothing. ”“ I can't give anything. With all the taxes, duties, interest and bribes! ”The economic view of the world, as represented by Courage, is also documented in its complete indifference to religion and beliefs. Her interest in a continuation of the war is part of her complicity with the powerful. Mennemeier had already worked out this correspondence:

“There is a more or less secret correspondence between big and small people: business. In Brecht's play, 'business' is an expression of the corrupted state of (current) history and of the 'participation' of people in it, whereby it must be added at once that participation has the sign of self-defense and the elementary coping with existence and not moral guilt. "

For Fowler, the close interlinking of war and business is also documented in the suspicious character and anti-social behavior of Courage. They use the misery of others specifically for their business. Hunger increases the price of your capon, fear in Halle makes your purchase cheaper. In addition, she becomes the ideologist of war (“ideologue for this war”). As in the song of the great surrender, it teaches resignation. She preaches renunciation to her children, while her love affairs with soldiers show her erotic ties to the war.

According to Fowler, the thinking of courage and other beneficiaries of war is shaped by numbers, and their values are essentially expressed in money. For the sergeant and the recruiter , war creates “order” through “proper lists and registries” and is synonymous here with the proper bookkeeping of a business. Brecht jokingly refers to the Marxist concept of use value and exchange value in the trade between the courage and the cook for a capon . The animal, whose monetary value is being negotiated between the two, “was able to calculate”. Fowler points out that the monetary value of the children through the association with business is reflected in their departure or death.

For Fowler, one of the essential functions of courage in drama is to represent capitalism as a symbolic figure. From this he draws the conclusion that courage can in no way escape war. Business and war and symbolic figures are so closely linked that they must necessarily be inhuman. This fact requires a critical review of every blame on Courage.

The courage as an anti-authoritarian rebel

Field Captain Tilly

Courage also represents the little people's critical view of the big story. Brecht makes this clear by confronting his main character with historical events, such as the death of Field Captain Tilly .

"The field preacher: Now you are burying the field captain. This is a historic moment.

Mother Courage: It is a historic moment for me that you hit my daughter in the eye. It's already half broken, she can't get a husband anymore (…) I don't see the Swiss cheese anymore, and God knows where the Eilif is. The war is said to be cursed. "

Courage immediately revokes this brief moment of knowledge by doing it on stage. At the same time as her only curse on the war, she inspects the new goods, which Kattrin acquired in defense and whose value depends on the progress of the war. Immediately afterwards, at the beginning of the 7th scene, she sings about the war “as a good breadwinner”.

What remains is the sobering view of the great story. Ingo Breuer comments on this as follows: “This statement does not change the behavior of Courage, but it does point to the historiography of the Thirty Years 'War: The death of Field Captain Tilly went down in history as a turning point in the Thirty Years' War, but hardly the suffering of the simple People (…)"

Courage's comments on the opposing perspective of masters and servants on events are provocative. In his courage model, Brecht points out that the regimental clerk carefully registers her statements in order to prosecute her if necessary. She hides her provocative views behind ironic praise:

"Mother Courage: I feel sorry for such a captain or emperor, maybe he thought he would do something else and what people are talking about in future times, and get a statue, for example conquering the world, that's a big goal for a field captain, he doesn't know any better. In short, he works hard, and then it fails because of the common people, which might want a mug of beer and a bit of company, nothing higher. "

The Berlin production emphasized the effect of the ironic-subversive speech of courage to the death of Tilly by making the pissing scribe stand up to observe the courage more closely. "He sits down disappointed when Courage has spoken in such a way that nothing can be proven."

The subversive expressions of courage are regularly directed against authorities, "against the rulers and their agents in the military and clergy , on the symbolic level against patriarchy and capitalism." Fowler shows that the authorities sense this and see their strategies of justification threatened. Courage attacks the "big men" in three ways:

- through doubts about the historical significance of the "great men",

- by questioning the size of one of the "heroes",

- by ridicule for the alleged goals.

With this criticism, the drama attacks not only classical historiography, but also the fascist leader ideology. Fowler refers to Brecht's poem Questions of a Reading Worker , in which Brecht had already in 1935 emphasized the role of the common people against the explanation of historical events by the achievements of important rulers:

“Who built the seven-door Thebes?

The books contain the names of kings.

Did the kings drag in the boulders? "

Fowler points out that Courage not only unmasked authorities through irony, but also directly names responsibilities for the war disaster:

- “Mother Courage: Last year your field captain ordered you down from the streets and across the fields so that the grain would be trampled down…. He thought he was no longer in the area this year, but now he's still there and the hunger is great. I understand that you are angry. "

In “Song of the Great Surrender” in particular, Fowler sees that courage considers real resistance to be the right thing to do when the anger over injustice is great enough.

“Mother Courage: You're right, but how long? How long can you not stand injustice? An hour or two? (...) Your anger is not long enough, you can't do anything with it, what a shame. If you have a long one, I'd like to stir you up. I would advise you to chop up the dog, but what if you don't chop it up because you can already feel it pulling in its tail. Then I stand there and the Rittmeister holds on to me. "

Fowler sees the long-lasting anger against social injustice as one of Brecht's central motives.

The dialectical unity of courage

For Fowler, the long-lasting anger is the rebellious core of the courage figure. Her character combines opposing aspects, "maternal, nurturing creativity as well as war-friendly, inhuman trade". According to Fowler, the contradictions of the capitalist system and its wars are symbolically captured in the contradiction of courage as the central figure of the drama. In contrast to Kattrin's only short-term revolt, Brecht sees here the self-destructive tendency of the system that represents courage. Nevertheless, with her daughter Kattrin, Courage gave birth to a person who points to future rebellion.

Fowler sees the mother courage as a metaphor for belligerent capitalism. As a trader she is a synecdoche for business and capitalism. But in addition, it personifies the world of capitalism because it represents the essential contradictions of the system. This included productivity and destructiveness. They reproduce the ideology of their world by seeking their profit in the exploitation and misery of others. They feed the false hope that the common people could also benefit from the war. At the same time she is one of the great mother figures of Brecht, who embodies the hope for protection and nourishment in the capitalist world. These aspects are inextricably linked. Her social position as a petty bourgeois allows Brecht to show aspects of both the exploiter and the exploited in the courage figure.

Courage as a mediator of Brecht's intention

Brecht has expressed himself several times on the text intention of the drama, particularly succinctly and briefly under the title "What a performance of 'Mother Courage and her children should mainly show'" in the comments on the courage model:

“That the big business that makes war is not done by the little people. That war, which is a continuation of business by other means, makes human virtues deadly, also for their owners. That no sacrifice is too great for fighting war. "

Courage does not recognize this. The viewer should transcend their point of view and realize that there is a historic chance to prevent further wars. The viewer should recognize that “the wars have become avoidable” through “a new, non-warlike social order not based on oppression and exploitation”.

Brecht wants his audience to “instill a real disgust for the war” and in doing so focuses on the development of a socialist society. Behind the big deals, capitalism is to be recognized and fought as the true cause of war:

Defender and critic of courage

In the history of reception, Brecht's view of courage is controversial. Many interpreters defend the courage against criticism and condemnation in the sense of Brecht. Walter Hinck sees courage in the Schwejk tradition as the embodiment of the “wisdom of the people” and doubts the guilt of courage for the death of their children. Other authors like Bernard Fenn emphasize the vital, life-giving side of courage.

The debate about the correct interpretation revolves partly around the question of whether courage should be interpreted exclusively as a symbolic figure, as a representative of the petty bourgeoisie in times of war. According to Bergstedt, for example, Brecht wants to “expose the 'auspicious' participation of the seduced masses in the war business of the fascists and their capitalist backers and show the terrible consequences that this has for the small profit speculators. He individualizes the large number of such selfish 'followers' in the stage figure of a sutler (from the Thirty Years War), by means of which he shows the danger of the imminent 'business venture'. ”From this point of view it seems pointless to discuss the individual guilt of courage .

“As the driving forces of the characters, however individually motivated, reveal themselves as social and find their final explanation in the anachronism of the basic capitalist structure, which is transparent in all recent theatrical works, they cannot be criticized at will, but only with compelling force with the aim of changing the very social conditions in which they are rooted. ”According to Fowler, Bergstedt's analysis contrasts with Brecht's statements, which also attribute individual guilt to courage.

Helmut Jendreiek supports Brecht's condemnation of courage.

“That the mother, who loses her three children to the war, after all the suffering she has experienced, still wants to go to war in the end in order to do her business, cannot be explained by tragic delusion and fateful inevitability, but must be expressed as 'badness' and courage 'Crimes' are culpably imputed, even if wickedness and crime are an expression of the prevailing conditions. "

He sees Kattrin's rebellion as proof that other behavior would have been possible.

"In Kattrin, Brecht shows the other possibility, which is also open to courage: the possibility of a social existence against the bourgeois-capitalist dogma, the existing social order and with it the commercial system and the war are necessary and unalterable."

Despite this moral position, Jendreiek also sees courage less as an individual character than as a representative of the capitalist world order: “If courage wants war because it is 'the best time for trade', then capitalism becomes a world order in it presented, which is shaped by the will to war. The hyena spirit of courage is the spirit of capitalism. Brecht shows that this world order is not life-like in the 'appalling contradiction' between the trader and mother in the courage. "

Interpretations of the courage figure on the stage

The world premiere in Zurich

Therese Giehse in the role of Mother Courage, portrait by Günter Rittner , 1966

The premiere of Mother Courage on April 19, 1941 at the Schauspielhaus Zürich was directed by Leopold Lindtberg , Therese Giehse played the leading role. The Zurich program booklet interpreted Mother Courage as Brecht's return from the didactic pieces to human theater: “The human-compassionate, the spiritual-empathetic is the focus in this poem - when the formal elements of the 'epic' theater are taken up… The characters no longer represent 'Views', no more opinions ... "

Brecht was dissatisfied with the effect of the production because critics like Diebold saw in Courage above all "a warm-blooded mother animal" that had "no choice": "One is unfree like a poor animal."

“But Therese Giehse, with her great mother's heart, stood beyond all historical claims in eternity. No matter how disrespectful she might be, moaning against the “higher” and letting her business acumen play, she never became the “hyena of the battlefield”; and the roughness of the sutler, required by the harsh circumstances, receded almost too much behind the radiation of her feelings and her moving pain when she had to lose the children one after the other. "

Diebold's praise for Therese Giehse's portrayal of Mother Courage may have been one of the reasons why Brecht later emphasized the negative sides of the character through text changes and direction.

Other critics of the time also interpreted the Giehse's courage primarily as a mother figure. The critic of the Baseler National-Zeitung speaks of the “nurturing mother” courage she was for her children as well as for cook and field preacher. "Like the prototype of the primal mother, the mother courage embraces everything that comes near her with maternal care (...)." From this point of view, courage appears as a representation of "millions of mothers of the present" who, despite all adversity, "unbroken ( …) Into the hard life ”.

Fowler shows that from the moment of the premiere in Zurich two competing interpretations pervade the history of reception: the condemnation of courage - in the sense of Brecht - due to her participation in the war and, in contrast, the defense of courage as an innocent victim or a suffering mother.

The performance of the Berliner Ensemble - Helene Weigel as Mother Courage

Helene Weigel 1967

Due to the dissatisfaction with the reception of the premiere in Zurich, Brecht made some text changes for the planned Berlin performance. He made the figure of the mother Courage more negative. Eilif's departure to the soldiers in the first scene is now less due to his own motives, but is caused by the mother's business interests. In the 5th scene she no longer gives out bandages voluntarily, but only under duress. In the 7th scene she still curses the war, but then defends it as a business like others. Brecht wanted to distance himself from Niobe interpretations, which saw in the mother courage only the suffering of the mother who survived her children:

“We have to change the first scene of the» Courage «, since it is already laid out here what allowed the viewers to let themselves be shaken mainly by the durability and carrying capacity of the tortured creature (the eternal mother animal) - where it was but that is not so far away. Courage now loses her first son because she gets caught up in a small business, and only then comes her pity for the superstitious sergeant, who is a softness that comes from business and that she cannot afford. That is a definite improvement. It is suggested by the young Kuckhahn. "

On October 22, 1948, Brecht was back in Berlin with Helene Weigel. Through the artistic director Wolfgang Langhoff , who had played Eilif in Zurich, he found contacts with the Deutsches Theater . Langhoff offered him to stage in his house, also with his own ensemble. In November 1948, Erich Engel came to Berlin, whom Brecht valued as one of the founders of epic theater alongside Piscator. Engel immediately began, in collaboration with Brecht, with the production of Mother Courage at the Deutsches Theater.

The premiere took place on January 11, 1949. Until then, interest in Brecht's entry into the Berlin theater scene was restrained and limited to a few theater experts. The great success of the piece changed this suddenly. Helene Weigel, whose portrayal of Mother Courage was acclaimed by the press and the public, played a major role in this. But it was precisely the figure of courage that was the subject of heated arguments. It did not meet the demands of socialist realism for proletarian hero figures and positive messages.

After the great success of the Berlin performance, Brecht had a “model book” created in the spring of 1949, which was intended to make the Brecht-Engel production a binding model for all further performances by Mother Courage. Photos by Ruth Berlau and Hainer Hill document each image very extensively down to the representational details. Director's notes for the individual scenes, probably made by assistant director Heinz Kuckhahn , with Brecht's corrections, complete the picture.

The main aim of Brecht's theater concept is to prevent the audience from identifying with courage. The main character and their business should be judged critically and not experienced empathetically. The behavior of courage and the loss of their three children should not arouse pity, but trigger learning processes. For this purpose, the events on the stage are "alienated" ( alienation effect - V effect). In his comments on the courage model, Brecht votes against the “business of deception”, the tendency of the theater to “excessively increase the illusion”, against the attempt “of a 'magnetic' way of playing which creates the illusion that one is living in a momentary, accidental, ' real 'process at'. The actor should speak his text from an inner distance, just communicate it, as it were.

Brecht relies on precisely playing out small gestures; during rehearsals he works for courage against the “impatience” of the actors, “who are used to going out for being carried away”. Nevertheless, Brecht also wants to address the emotions of the audience, the fate of courage should not leave indifferent. In a comment on the third scene, for example, he emphasizes the drama of the failure of courage: “What is important is courage's never-ending willingness to work. She is hardly ever seen without her working. It is this ability that makes the piece's unsuccessfulness shocking. "

However, this emotional involvement must by no means lead to permanent identification with Courage if one does not want to misunderstand the piece. Brecht shows this in the 4th scene when Courage convinces a young soldier and, indirectly, himself that any protest against the military is pointless. With the "Song of the Great Surrender ", the courage shows complete resignation towards those in power:

"Mother Courage:

And before the year was over

I learned to swallow my medicine (...)

When they were once done

They had me on my ass and on my knees.

(You have to stand with the people, one hand washes them

others, you can't go through the wall with your head. "(4th scene)

Brecht comments that “the scene, played without alienation”, could lead to complete resignation. “Such a scene is socially disastrous if the actress of Courage invites the audience through hypnotic play to get used to it.” What Brecht wants to show in this scene is the resignation of the petty bourgeoisie towards fascism and war. "Because it is not so much the badness of your person as that of your class (...)"

He pays careful attention to distanced play in the staging, wants to "save the scene from a wild excitement on stage". For this purpose, for example, during rehearsals, he has the actors append the following formula to the characters' utterances: "Said the man" or "Said the woman". Other well-known stage directions from Brecht require the statements to be transferred to the third person, into the past, or the stage instructions must be spoken.

By reversing meaning and changing ingrained linguistic expressions and proverbs, Brecht creates irritation and a revealing effect: the ruling thinking is called into question as the thinking of the ruling class. The best-known example in Mother Courage comes from the "Song of the Great Surrender". The automated film forms a well-known medieval quote: "Man thinks, God directs." Brecht reverses the meaning of the proverb that believes in fate and God by inserting a colon: "Man thinks: God directs"

literature

Text output

Pre-print of the 6th scene in: Internationale Literatur (ZS), Moscow December 1940.
Stage manuscript from 1941, Theaterverlag Kurt Reiss , Basel 1941.
English edition, translated by HR Hays: Mother Courage , Norfolk 1941 (first complete edition)
Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage and her children. First printing Suhrkamp, Berlin 1949.
Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage and her children. A chronicle from the Thirty Years War, in: Attempts , Heft 9 [2. Edition] (attempts 20–21), Suhrkamp, Berlin 1950, pp. 3–80 (20th attempt, modified text version).
Mother Courage and her children . Stage version by the Berliner Ensemble, Henschel, Berlin 1968.
Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage and her children. A chronicle from the Thirty Years War , 66th edition, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2010 (first edition 1963), ISBN 978-3-518-10049-3 (edition suhrkamp 49).
Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children , in: BFA (Volume 6): Pieces 6, Suhrkamp, Berlin / Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 978-3-518-40066-1 , pp. 7–86.
Bertolt Brecht; Jan Esper Olsson (Ed.): Mother Courage and Her Children - Historical-Critical Edition , Liber Läromedel, Lund 1981, ISBN 91-40-04767-9 .

Secondary literature

Boeddinghaus, Walter: Beast human in Brecht's mother courage. Acta Germanica 2 (1967), pp. 81-88.
Bertolt Brecht: Texts on pieces, writings 4, in: BFA Vol. 24, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1991
Bertolt Brecht: Couragemodell 1949. in: Schriften 5, BFA Vol. 25, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1994, pp. 169–398
Ingo Breuer: Theatricality and memory: German-language historical drama since Brecht. Cologne u. a. 2004, Dissertation Marburg 2001. Cologne German Studies, NF, 5
Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater: the Brechtian legacy, Columbia, SC: Camden House; Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000, Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture, ISBN 1-57113-186-8
Gerd Eversberg : Bertolt Brecht - Mother Courage and Her Children: Example of Theory and Practice of Epic Theater. Hollfeld (Beyer) 1976
Kenneth R. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars: A Critical Interpretation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. Department of German Studies, McGill University Montreal, August, 1996, A thesis subntitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy [1]
Therese Giehse: I have nothing to say: Conversations with Monika Sperr. Munich (Bertelsmann) 1974
Claire Gleitman: All in the Family: Mother Courage and the Ideology in the Gestus. Comparative drama. 25.2 (1991), pp. 147-67
Wilhelm Große: Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage and her children . King's Explanations: Text Analysis and Interpretation (Vol. 318). C. Bange Verlag, Hollfeld 2011. ISBN 978-3-8044-1924-7
Werner Hecht: Materials on Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children", Frankfurt am Main 1964
Manfred Jäger: On the reception of the playwright Brecht in the GDR. Text + criticism. Special volume Bertolt Brecht 1. (1971), pp. 107–118
Helmut Jendreiek: Bertolt Brecht: Drama of Change, Düsseldorf (Bagel) 1969, ISBN 3-513-02114-3
Kenneth Knight: Simplicissimus and Mother Courage, Daphnis 5 (1976), pp. 699-705
Jan Knopf: Brecht-Handbuch, Theater, Stuttgart (Metzler) 1986, unabridged special edition, ISBN 3-476-00587-9 , comments on Mother Courage pp. 181–195
Joachim Lang: Epic Theater as Film: Bertolt Brecht's Stage Plays in the Audiovisual Media, Königshausen & Neumann 2006, ISBN 3-8260-3496-1 , ISBN 978-3-8260-3496-1
Leopold Lindtberg: Personal memories of Bertolt Brecht. Speeches and essays. Zurich (Atlantis) 1972, pp. 20-124.
Gudrun Loster-Schneider: From women and soldiers: Balladesque text genealogies from Brecht's early war poetry, in: Lars Koch; Marianne Vogel (Ed.): Imaginary worlds in conflict. War and history in German-language literature since 1900, Würzburg (Königshausen and Neumann) 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-3210-3
Karl-Heinz Ludwig: Bertolt Brecht: Activity and reception from returning from exile to the founding of the GDR, Kroberg im Taunus 1976
Marion Luger: 'Mother Courage and her children'. The analysis of the song as a means of alienation, 36 pages, Grin Verlag 2009, ISBN 3-640-42956-7
Krisztina Mannász: The epic theater based on the example of Brecht's mother courage and her children: The epic theater and its elements by Bertolt Brecht, VDM Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-639-21872-5 , 72 pp.
Franz Norbert Mennemeier: Mother Courage and her children. in: Benno von Wiese: The German Drama. Düsseldorf 1962, pp. 383-400
Joachim Müller: Dramatic, epic and dialectical theater. in: Reinhold Grimm: Epic Theater. Cologne (Kiepenheuer & Witsch) 1971, ISBN 3-462-00461-1 , pp. 154-196
Klaus-Detlef Müller: Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children" . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 1982. ISBN 3-518-38516-X (extensive anthology with articles and other materials)
August Obermayer: The dramaturgical function of the songs in Brecht's mother Courage and her children. Commemorative publication for EW Herd. Ed. August Obermayer. Dunedin: University of Otago, 1980. pp. 200-213
Teo Otto: sets for Brecht. Brecht on German stages: Bertolt Brecht's dramatic work on the theater in the Federal Republic of Germany. Bad Godesberg (InterNationes) 1968
Andreas Siekmann: Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage and her children . Klett Verlag, Stuttgart 2000. ISBN 3-12-923262-1
Petra Stuber: Scope and Limits: Studies on GDR Theater. Research on the GDR society, Berlin (left) 2000, 2. durchges. Edition
Dieter Thiele: Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage and her children. Frankfurt (Diesterweg) 1985
Günter Thimm: The chaos was not gone. An adolescent conflict as a structural principle of Brecht's plays. Freiburg Literature Psychological Studies Vol. 7, 2002, ISBN 978-3-8260-2424-5
Friedrich Wölfel: The Song of Mother Courage. Ways to poem. Munich (Schnell and Steiner) 1963. pp. 537-549

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Bertolt Brecht: Couragemodell 1949. in: Schriften 5, BFA Vol. 25, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1994, pp. 169–398
^ Brecht at the rehearsal on August 26, 1954; quoted from: John Fuegi, Brecht & Co, 1997, p. 815
^ John Fuegi, Brecht & Co, 1997, pp. 815f.
↑ Bertolt Brecht: About the structure of a person. BFA Vol. 22.2, p. 616
↑ Bertolt Brecht: About the structure of a person. BFA Vol. 22.2, p. 616
↑ Bertolt Brecht: The masterpieces are alive. BFA, Vol. 23, Schriften 3, p. 420 (Brecht refers to Goethe's Wanderer's Night Song .)
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars, pp. XXf. ("Contradictions, that constitute her"; "we will see that the contradiction between merchant and mother, at least as it has so far been understood, is a false dichotomy")
↑ Mother Courage, notes p. 377f.
↑ cf. Jan Knopf: Brecht-Handbuch, Theater, S. 183f.
↑ Trutz Simplex, Chapter 3, quoted from: zeno.org http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Grimmelshausen,+Hans+Jakob+Christoffel+von/Romane/Trutz+Simplex/Das+3.+ Chapter? Hl = grabbed + the + courasche +
↑ cf. Klaus-Detlef Müller (Ed.): Brecht's mother Courage and her children, p. 12f.
↑ Courage learns nothing, Notes, p. 537
↑ Courage learns nothing, p. 272
↑ ^a ^b Mother Courage, Scene 9, p. 75
↑ Courage learns nothing, p. 272
↑ Couragemodell 1949, p. 242
↑ Courage learns nothing, p. 273
^ Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater: the Brechtian legacy, Columbia, SC: Camden House; Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000, Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture; “Like Schwejk, the original courage also first appeared as a picaresque character in a novel; Brecht adapted her from the seventeenth-cantury novel by Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Courage, the Adventuress. "
↑ Ingo Breuer: Theatricality and Memory. 2004, p. 115f.
↑ Bertolt Brecht: Note on Mother Courage, in: BGA, Schriften 4, p. 284
^ Walter Arnold Kaufmann: Tragedy and Philosophy. The Unity of Social Sciences, Vol. 26, Tübingen (Mohr) 1980, p. 372
^ Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 64; "Brecht's protagonists are, with few exceptions, exiles, characters who live precariously and travel ceaselessly - often litterally walk - through the social tableaux of their societies, and his woman characters are exiles in an even more profound sense. (...) these characters serve the purpose of epic theater even better than he perhaps realized, because they are in a position to ironically reveal, to a more radical extent than it is possible for male characters, the social systems in which they are relatively powerless . "
↑ cf. Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 64
↑ cf. Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 65
↑ cf. Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 66ff.
↑ cf. Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 69
↑ cf. Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 74
↑ ("PATERNITY DENIED"); see. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 208f.
↑ ^a ^b Mother Courage, 1st scene, p. 11
↑ ("Here is a woman whose appetites are so great that she cannot even remember the names of her consorts, certainly she is no 'model' woman whose first sexual partner (her husband) is also her last (till death do them part) . This image of a sexuality uncontrolled by man, indeed, entirely consuming men (for none till now have survived her), is another reason for the sergeant's censure: 'a nice family, I have to say'. "); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 208f. (Translation Mbdortmund)
↑ Mother Courage, p. 61; probably an alienation of the war analyzes by Carl von Clausewitz
↑ "A sutler who lives from war and feeds its engines, she helps to perpetuate war and its misery. A partner of war, and so of death, she well earns the epithets "criminal" and "hyena of the battlefield". The crime itself, her business with war, cannot be denied, for her participation is there for all to see. "; Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 4
^ Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 4
↑ Fowler refers to the fortune telling scene at the beginning of the play and to her statement to the advertiser that getting too close to war is like walking the lamb to the slaughter
↑ late text variant not included in the complete edition, quoted from Fowler, p. 6
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 8ff. ("Rather, for Courage the end of war means the end of her business, so that her connection with war becomes extremely close, for war is her existence, its end hers."; P. 9)
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 10 ("For Courage peace is no deliverance, but a calamity which" breaks out ".")
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 12 ("Inhumanity is integral to Courage's business.")
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 13 ("Finally, in scene 11 those living in Halle know that the town is in danger and so they try to sell off their possessions before they flee. Courage exploits their fear and desperation to purchase the goods cheaply.")
↑ Mother Courage, p. 79
↑ Mother Courage, p. 10
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 14: "Courage's criminality, her preference for war over peace, death over life, extends even to her own children. Each time that war closes on them she is absent on business, that is to say, she chooses her partnership with war and death over the lives of her children - which puts the lie to her desire to bring her children through the war. "
↑ ^a ^b Mother Courage, p. 85 (scene 12)
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 25ff.
↑ "And those who wade in it eat up the water, What can you do about ice?"; Mother Courage, p. 24 (scene 3)
↑ "Happy those who now have a roof / When such snow winds blow."; Mother Courage, 10th scene, p. 78
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 28 ("Courage's commitment to life is evident from her ceaseless struggle to maintain it in such difficult circumstances.")
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 74 ("Courage is an expression of her historical conditions")
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 77f.
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 28ff. ("For Courage keeps the cook's 'pipe' in her 'pocket' - and, as the shocked chaplain exclaims, she has even used it! ('And smoked out of it!')"; 30)
^ Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 31
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 33 ("Toothed and clawed, she is a tigress protecting her cub.")
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 34f.
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 39 ("These examples show how difficult it is to blame Courage. She is placed in a hopeless situation. She cannot escape the war; she must operate within it and according to its rules. When she is forced to choose between two apparently lifeaffirming principles, nurturing and protection, neither one alone can keep her children alive and her means to life intact, and yet she cannot choose both because they are presented as mutually exclusive possibilities. ")
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 40f.
↑ Mother Courage, p. 84 (scene 12)
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 42
↑ ^a ^b Courage model 1949, p. 238
^ Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 47 after George Steiner: The Death of Tragedy (1961; New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 354; “When the body was being carried away, Weigel looked in the other direction and opened his mouth wide. The shape of the gesture was that of the screaming horse in Picasso's painting Guernica. The sound that came out was raw and terrible, beyond any description I could give of it. But in fact, there was no sound. Nothing. The sound was total silence. There was silence and screamed through the whole theater, so that the audience bowed their heads like before a gust of wind. ”(Translation by Mbdortmund)
↑ ^a ^b ^c Mother Courage, p. 10 (scene 1)
↑ "... which defines Courage as a representative of the unity of business and war."; Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 180
↑ "To be a business person, it says, is to be like Courage: a dealer in war."; Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 181
↑ "Courage's identification with the rulers is only appropriate, for as a sutler, as a businesswoman, she like the rulers, is involved in war only 'for profit'."; Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 182
↑ ^a ^b Mother Courage, p. 51 (scene 5)
↑ Mother Courage, p. 55 (scene 6)
↑ ^a ^b cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 183
^ Franz Norbert Mennemeier: Mother Courage and her children. in: Benno von Wiese: The German Drama. Düsseldorf 1962, p. 393
^ Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 186
↑ ("Courage's involvement with soldiers shows how she is bound - even libidinally - to war."); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 186
↑ Mother Courage, p. 9 (scene 1)
↑ Mother Courage, p. 20 (scene 2)
↑ ("For when, by her hesitations and bargaining, she compares her son's value unfavorably to that of her wagon, a reckoning which ultimately destroys him, we discover that even Schweizererkas is for her" only one money thing "."); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 189
↑ ("That is, Courage is not only a dramatic figure, a representation of a seventeenth-century sutler in the Thirty Years War, she is also a symbolic representation of capitalism."); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 189
↑ (“necessarily inhuman”); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 190
↑ ("She is the Hyena, in other words, because she represents Business as Usual."); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 191
↑ Mother Courage and her children, 6th scene, pp. 60f.
↑ cf. Courage model 1949, p. 216
↑ Mother Courage, 6th scene, p. 61
↑ Ingo Breuer: Theatricality and Memory. 2004, p. 111
↑ ^a ^b cf. Courage Model 1949, p. 214
↑ Mother Courage, 6th scene, p. 54
↑ ("against the rulers and their agents in the military and the clergy, and, on the symbolic level, against the domination of the patriarchy and capitalism"); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 274 (translation: Mbdortmund)
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 275
↑ Bert Brecht, Svendborger Gedichte, Questions of a Reading Worker, Complete Edition Volume 12, Poems 2. P. 29 (Verses 1–3)
↑ Mother Courage, 4th scene, p. 47
↑ Mother Courage, 4th scene, p. 48
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 283ff.
↑ (“maternai, nurturing creativity and her war-mongering, inhuman mercantilism”); see. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 383
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 383ff.
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 392
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 393
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 394
↑ Bertolt Brecht: Courage Model 1949, p 177; also printed as the motto on the first inside page of the Berliner Ensemble's program booklet under the slightly changed title “What a performance of 'Mother Courage and her children should show today'”; the phrase “continuation of business with other means” alludes to a quote from Carl von Clausewitz : “War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.” from “Vom Kriege”, quoted from: Comments on the Courage Model, in : Bertolt Brecht, Berlin and Frankfurt Edition, Writings 5, Vol. 25, p. 523
↑ Bertolt Brecht: Courage Model 1949, p 173
^ Bertolt Brecht: The business of courage, in: BFA, Schriften 4, p. 265
↑ Couragemodell 1949, p. 241f.
↑ Walter Hinck: Mother Courage and Her Children: A critical folk piece. in: ders .: Brechts Dramen, p. 166f .; quoted from: Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 93
^ Bernard Fenn: Characterization of Women in the Plays of Bertolt Brecht. European University Studies, Lang (Peter) GmbH., June 1982, ISBN 3-8204-6865-X , ISBN 978-3-8204-6865-6
↑ Bergstedt: The dialectical principle of representation. P. 141, quoted from: Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 84
↑ Bergstedt: The dialectical principle of representation. P. 287, quoted from: Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 84
↑ cf. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 84f.
↑ Helmut Jendreiek: Bertolt Brecht: Drama der Wandel, Düsseldorf (Bagel) 1969, p. 86, quoted from: Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 84
↑ Helmut Jendreiek: Bertolt Brecht. 1969, p. 192
↑ Jendreiek 1969, p. 172
↑ quoted from: Günther Rühle, The Long Path of Mother Courage. The world premiere in Zurich and its aftermath - Bertolt Brecht between New York, Zurich, Berlin and Munich, Theaterheute, November 2003, p. 30
↑ Bernhard Diebold: 'Mother Courage and Her Children', premiere of Bertolt Brecht's dramatic chronicle. Die Tat, Zurich, April 22, 1941, quoted from: Klaus-Detlef Müller (Ed.): Brecht's mother Courage and her children, 1982, pp. 54f.
↑ Bernhard Diebold: 'Mother Courage and Her Children', premiere of Bertolt Brecht's dramatic chronicle. Die Tat, Zurich, April 22, 1941, quoted from: Klaus-Detlef Müller (Ed.): Brecht's mother Courage and her children, 1982, p. 57
↑ ^a ^b ^c E. Th. (Probably Elisabeth Thommen): A world premiere by Bertolt Brecht, National-Zeitung No. 183, Basel April 22, 1941; quoted from: Klaus-Detlef Müller (ed.): Brecht's mother Courage and her children, 1982, p. 59
^ E. Th. (Probably Elisabeth Thommen): A world premiere by Bertolt Brecht, National-Zeitung No. 183, Basel April 22, 1941; quoted from: Klaus-Detlef Müller (Ed.): Brecht's mother Courage and her children, 1982, p. 58
↑ cf. Fowler, The Mother of all Wars. S. XIX: “The drama had to wait until April 1941 before its world premiere in Zurich (when Brecht was in Finland 1940-1941), but from that moment the lines were drawn for two competing interpretations: one which, like Brecht, blamed the merchant for her participation in war, and one which seemed implicitly to excuse the mother for that same participation. "
↑ cf. Jan Knopf: Brecht-Handbuch, Theater, p. 182
↑ Journale 2, p. 284, entry from November 25, 1948
↑ Werner Mittenzwei: Das Leben des Bertolt Brecht or The handling of the world riddles, vol. 2, p. 281
↑ Werner Mittenzwei: Das Leben des Bertolt Brecht or The handling of the world riddles, Vol. 2, p. 314
↑ Werner Mittenzwei: Das Leben des Bertolt Brecht or The handling of the world riddles, vol. 2, p. 323f.
↑ cf. Werner Mittenzwei: The life of Bertolt Brecht or dealing with the world riddles, vol. 2, p. 326f.
↑ Notes on the Courage model, in: Bertolt Brecht, Berliner and Frankfurter Edition, Schriften 5, Vol. 25, pp. 516f.
↑ all Couragemodell 1949, p. 176
↑ all Bertolt Brecht: Courage Model 1949, p 186
↑ Bertolt Brecht: Couragemodell 1949, p. 198
↑ Mother Courage, p. 49
↑ ^a ^b Bertolt Brecht: Couragemodell 1949, p. 207
↑ Courage Model 1949, p 206
↑ Brecht: Courage Model 1949, p 223
↑ Bertolt Brecht: Courage Model 1949, p 232
↑ cf. Edgar Hein, Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children, Munich 1994, p. 39
↑ Original by Thomas von Kempen : "Homo proponit, sed deus disponit."
↑ Brecht: Mother Courage and her children. P. 49; see also: Wolfgang Mieder, Man thinks: God directs - no word about it! Proverbial alienation in the work of Bertolt Brecht, Peter Lang, Bern, ISBN 978-3-906761-53-4

[1] Bertolt Brecht: Couragemodell 1949. in: Schriften 5, BFA Vol. 25, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1994, pp. 169–398

[2] Brecht at the rehearsal on August 26, 1954; quoted from: John Fuegi, Brecht & Co, 1997, p. 815

[3] John Fuegi, Brecht & Co, 1997, pp. 815f.

[4] Bertolt Brecht: About the structure of a person. BFA Vol. 22.2, p. 616

[5] Bertolt Brecht: About the structure of a person. BFA Vol. 22.2, p. 616

[6] Bertolt Brecht: The masterpieces are alive. BFA, Vol. 23, Schriften 3, p. 420 (Brecht refers to Goethe's Wanderer's Night Song .)

[7] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars, pp. XXf. ("Contradictions, that constitute her"; "we will see that the contradiction between merchant and mother, at least as it has so far been understood, is a false dichotomy")

[8] Mother Courage, notes p. 377f.

[9] . Jan Knopf: Brecht-Handbuch, Theater, S. 183f.

[10] Trutz Simplex, Chapter 3, quoted from: zeno.org http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Grimmelshausen,+Hans+Jakob+Christoffel+von/Romane/Trutz+Simplex/Das+3.+ Chapter? Hl = grabbed + the + courasche +

[11] . Klaus-Detlef Müller (Ed.): Brecht's mother Courage and her children, p. 12f.

[12] Courage learns nothing, Notes, p. 537

[13] Courage learns nothing, p. 272

[BBrecht1-14] Mother Courage, Scene 9, p. 75

[15] Courage learns nothing, p. 272

[Brecht1949_242-16] Couragemodell 1949, p. 242

[17] Courage learns nothing, p. 273

[18] Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater: the Brechtian legacy, Columbia, SC: Camden House; Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000, Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture; “Like Schwejk, the original courage also first appeared as a picaresque character in a novel; Brecht adapted her from the seventeenth-cantury novel by Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Courage, the Adventuress. "

[19] Ingo Breuer: Theatricality and Memory. 2004, p. 115f.

[20] Bertolt Brecht: Note on Mother Courage, in: BGA, Schriften 4, p. 284

[21] Walter Arnold Kaufmann: Tragedy and Philosophy. The Unity of Social Sciences, Vol. 26, Tübingen (Mohr) 1980, p. 372

[22] Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 64; "Brecht's protagonists are, with few exceptions, exiles, characters who live precariously and travel ceaselessly - often litterally walk - through the social tableaux of their societies, and his woman characters are exiles in an even more profound sense. (...) these characters serve the purpose of epic theater even better than he perhaps realized, because they are in a position to ironically reveal, to a more radical extent than it is possible for male characters, the social systems in which they are relatively powerless . "

[23] . Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 64

[24] . Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 65

[25] . Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 66ff.

[26] . Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 69

[27] . Sarah Bryant-Bertail: Space and time in epic theater, 2000, p. 74

[28] ("PATERNITY DENIED"); see. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 208f.

[BBrecht2-29] Mother Courage, 1st scene, p. 11

[30] ("Here is a woman whose appetites are so great that she cannot even remember the names of her consorts, certainly she is no 'model' woman whose first sexual partner (her husband) is also her last (till death do them part) . This image of a sexuality uncontrolled by man, indeed, entirely consuming men (for none till now have survived her), is another reason for the sergeant's censure: 'a nice family, I have to say'. "); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 208f. (Translation Mbdortmund)

[31] Mother Courage, p. 61; probably an alienation of the war analyzes by Carl von Clausewitz

[32] "A sutler who lives from war and feeds its engines, she helps to perpetuate war and its misery. A partner of war, and so of death, she well earns the epithets "criminal" and "hyena of the battlefield". The crime itself, her business with war, cannot be denied, for her participation is there for all to see. "; Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 4

[33] Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 4

[34] Fowler refers to the fortune telling scene at the beginning of the play and to her statement to the advertiser that getting too close to war is like walking the lamb to the slaughter

[35] te text variant not included in the complete edition, quoted from Fowler, p. 6

[36] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 8ff. ("Rather, for Courage the end of war means the end of her business, so that her connection with war becomes extremely close, for war is her existence, its end hers."; P. 9)

[37] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 10 ("For Courage peace is no deliverance, but a calamity which" breaks out ".")

[38] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 12 ("Inhumanity is integral to Courage's business.")

[39] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 13 ("Finally, in scene 11 those living in Halle know that the town is in danger and so they try to sell off their possessions before they flee. Courage exploits their fear and desperation to purchase the goods cheaply.")

[40] Mother Courage, p. 79

[41] Mother Courage, p. 10

[42] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 14: "Courage's criminality, her preference for war over peace, death over life, extends even to her own children. Each time that war closes on them she is absent on business, that is to say, she chooses her partnership with war and death over the lives of her children - which puts the lie to her desire to bring her children through the war. "

[BBrecht3-43] Mother Courage, p. 85 (scene 12)

[44] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 25ff.

[45] "And those who wade in it eat up the water, What can you do about ice?"; Mother Courage, p. 24 (scene 3)

[46] "Happy those who now have a roof / When such snow winds blow."; Mother Courage, 10th scene, p. 78

[47] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 28 ("Courage's commitment to life is evident from her ceaseless struggle to maintain it in such difficult circumstances.")

[48] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 74 ("Courage is an expression of her historical conditions")

[49] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 77f.

[50] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 28ff. ("For Courage keeps the cook's 'pipe' in her 'pocket' - and, as the shocked chaplain exclaims, she has even used it! ('And smoked out of it!')"; 30)

[51] Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 31

[52] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 33 ("Toothed and clawed, she is a tigress protecting her cub.")

[53] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 34f.

[54] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 39 ("These examples show how difficult it is to blame Courage. She is placed in a hopeless situation. She cannot escape the war; she must operate within it and according to its rules. When she is forced to choose between two apparently lifeaffirming principles, nurturing and protection, neither one alone can keep her children alive and her means to life intact, and yet she cannot choose both because they are presented as mutually exclusive possibilities. ")

[55] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 40f.

[56] Mother Courage, p. 84 (scene 12)

[57] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 42

[BBrecht5-58] Courage model 1949, p. 238

[59] Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 47 after George Steiner: The Death of Tragedy (1961; New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 354; “When the body was being carried away, Weigel looked in the other direction and opened his mouth wide. The shape of the gesture was that of the screaming horse in Picasso's painting Guernica. The sound that came out was raw and terrible, beyond any description I could give of it. But in fact, there was no sound. Nothing. The sound was total silence. There was silence and screamed through the whole theater, so that the audience bowed their heads like before a gust of wind. ”(Translation by Mbdortmund)

[BBrecht6-60] Mother Courage, p. 10 (scene 1)

[61] "... which defines Courage as a representative of the unity of business and war."; Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 180

[62] "To be a business person, it says, is to be like Courage: a dealer in war."; Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 181

[63] "Courage's identification with the rulers is only appropriate, for as a sutler, as a businesswoman, she like the rulers, is involved in war only 'for profit'."; Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 182

[BBrecht7-64] Mother Courage, p. 51 (scene 5)

[65] Mother Courage, p. 55 (scene 6)

[R.Fow1-66] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 183

[67] Franz Norbert Mennemeier: Mother Courage and her children. in: Benno von Wiese: The German Drama. Düsseldorf 1962, p. 393

[68] Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 186

[69] ("Courage's involvement with soldiers shows how she is bound - even libidinally - to war."); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 186

[70] Mother Courage, p. 9 (scene 1)

[71] Mother Courage, p. 20 (scene 2)

[72] ("For when, by her hesitations and bargaining, she compares her son's value unfavorably to that of her wagon, a reckoning which ultimately destroys him, we discover that even Schweizererkas is for her" only one money thing "."); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 189

[73] ("That is, Courage is not only a dramatic figure, a representation of a seventeenth-century sutler in the Thirty Years War, she is also a symbolic representation of capitalism."); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 189

[74] (“necessarily inhuman”); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 190

[75] ("She is the Hyena, in other words, because she represents Business as Usual."); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 191

[76] Mother Courage and her children, 6th scene, pp. 60f.

[77] . Courage model 1949, p. 216

[78] Mother Courage, 6th scene, p. 61

[Breuer111-79] Ingo Breuer: Theatricality and Memory. 2004, p. 111

[Brecht49_214-80] . Courage Model 1949, p. 214

[81] Mother Courage, 6th scene, p. 54

[82] ("against the rulers and their agents in the military and the clergy, and, on the symbolic level, against the domination of the patriarchy and capitalism"); Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 274 (translation: Mbdortmund)

[83] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 275

[84] Bert Brecht, Svendborger Gedichte, Questions of a Reading Worker, Complete Edition Volume 12, Poems 2. P. 29 (Verses 1–3)

[85] Mother Courage, 4th scene, p. 47

[86] Mother Courage, 4th scene, p. 48

[87] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 283ff.

[88] (“maternai, nurturing creativity and her war-mongering, inhuman mercantilism”); see. Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 383

[89] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 383ff.

[90] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 392

[91] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 393

[92] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 394

[93] Bertolt Brecht: Courage Model 1949, p 177; also printed as the motto on the first inside page of the Berliner Ensemble's program booklet under the slightly changed title “What a performance of 'Mother Courage and her children should show today'”; the phrase “continuation of business with other means” alludes to a quote from Carl von Clausewitz : “War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.” from “Vom Kriege”, quoted from: Comments on the Courage Model, in : Bertolt Brecht, Berlin and Frankfurt Edition, Writings 5, Vol. 25, p. 523

[Bertolt_Brecht_1949-94] Bertolt Brecht: Courage Model 1949, p 173

[95] Bertolt Brecht: The business of courage, in: BFA, Schriften 4, p. 265

[96] Couragemodell 1949, p. 241f.

[97] Walter Hinck: Mother Courage and Her Children: A critical folk piece. in: ders .: Brechts Dramen, p. 166f .; quoted from: Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 93

[98] Bernard Fenn: Characterization of Women in the Plays of Bertolt Brecht. European University Studies, Lang (Peter) GmbH., June 1982, ISBN 3-8204-6865-X , ISBN 978-3-8204-6865-6

[99] Bergstedt: The dialectical principle of representation. P. 141, quoted from: Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 84

[100] Bergstedt: The dialectical principle of representation. P. 287, quoted from: Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 84

[101] . Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 84f.

[102] Helmut Jendreiek: Bertolt Brecht: Drama der Wandel, Düsseldorf (Bagel) 1969, p. 86, quoted from: Fowler: The Mother of all Wars. P. 84

[103] Helmut Jendreiek: Bertolt Brecht. 1969, p. 192

[104] Jendreiek 1969, p. 172

[105] quoted from: Günther Rühle, The Long Path of Mother Courage. The world premiere in Zurich and its aftermath - Bertolt Brecht between New York, Zurich, Berlin and Munich, Theaterheute, November 2003, p. 30

[106] Bernhard Diebold: 'Mother Courage and Her Children', premiere of Bertolt Brecht's dramatic chronicle. Die Tat, Zurich, April 22, 1941, quoted from: Klaus-Detlef Müller (Ed.): Brecht's mother Courage and her children, 1982, pp. 54f.

[107] Bernhard Diebold: 'Mother Courage and Her Children', premiere of Bertolt Brecht's dramatic chronicle. Die Tat, Zurich, April 22, 1941, quoted from: Klaus-Detlef Müller (Ed.): Brecht's mother Courage and her children, 1982, p. 57

[ReferenceC-108] E. Th. (Probably Elisabeth Thommen): A world premiere by Bertolt Brecht, National-Zeitung No. 183, Basel April 22, 1941; quoted from: Klaus-Detlef Müller (ed.): Brecht's mother Courage and her children, 1982, p. 59

[109] E. Th. (Probably Elisabeth Thommen): A world premiere by Bertolt Brecht, National-Zeitung No. 183, Basel April 22, 1941; quoted from: Klaus-Detlef Müller (Ed.): Brecht's mother Courage and her children, 1982, p. 58

[110] . Fowler, The Mother of all Wars. S. XIX: “The drama had to wait until April 1941 before its world premiere in Zurich (when Brecht was in Finland 1940-1941), but from that moment the lines were drawn for two competing interpretations: one which, like Brecht, blamed the merchant for her participation in war, and one which seemed implicitly to excuse the mother for that same participation. "

[Knopf182-111] . Jan Knopf: Brecht-Handbuch, Theater, p. 182

[112] Journale 2, p. 284, entry from November 25, 1948

[113] Werner Mittenzwei: Das Leben des Bertolt Brecht or The handling of the world riddles, vol. 2, p. 281

[114] Werner Mittenzwei: Das Leben des Bertolt Brecht or The handling of the world riddles, Vol. 2, p. 314

[115] Werner Mittenzwei: Das Leben des Bertolt Brecht or The handling of the world riddles, vol. 2, p. 323f.

[116] . Werner Mittenzwei: The life of Bertolt Brecht or dealing with the world riddles, vol. 2, p. 326f.

[117] Notes on the Courage model, in: Bertolt Brecht, Berliner and Frankfurter Edition, Schriften 5, Vol. 25, pp. 516f.

[118] Couragemodell 1949, p. 176

[119] Bertolt Brecht: Courage Model 1949, p 186

[120] Bertolt Brecht: Couragemodell 1949, p. 198

[121] Mother Courage, p. 49

[B207-122] Bertolt Brecht: Couragemodell 1949, p. 207

[123] Courage Model 1949, p 206

[124] Brecht: Courage Model 1949, p 223

[125] Bertolt Brecht: Courage Model 1949, p 232

[126] . Edgar Hein, Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children, Munich 1994, p. 39

[127] Original by Thomas von Kempen : "Homo proponit, sed deus disponit."

[128] Brecht: Mother Courage and her children. P. 49; see also: Wolfgang Mieder, Man thinks: God directs - no word about it! Proverbial alienation in the work of Bertolt Brecht, Peter Lang, Bern, ISBN 978-3-906761-53-4

Data
Title:	Mother Courage and her children
Genus:	Epic theater
Original language:	German
Author:	Bertolt Brecht
Publishing year:	1941
Premiere:	April 19, 1941
Place of premiere:	Schauspielhaus Zurich
Place and time of the action:	Thirty Years War between 1624 and 1636
people
Mother courage Kattrin, her silent daughter Eilif, the older son Schweizererkas, the younger son The recruiter The sergeant The chef The field captain The field preacher The kit master Yvette Pottier The old colonel A scribe An elderly soldier farmers Peasant women A young soldier The ensign soldiers