Mother Courage and Her Children is the story of a clever, foolish woman who loses all three of her children in a war from which she seeks to profit. Anna Fierling, called 'Mother Courage', a canteen woman with a cart full of goods for sale, chases after the war, convinced it can nourish her and her family regardless of which side is winning and what brutalities it inflicts, sure that she can protect her children from its dangers while reaping its benefits. She fails, but she learns nothing. By the end of the play, she does not even fathom all she has lost, believing that her eldest son has survived when the audience knows that in fact he has perished. A grim story, on its face. And yet, alongside being a very sad play, Mother Courage is also a very funny one, thought-provoking and wry. The language, especially in the original German, is vivid, blunt, poetic, and humorous. Courage herself understands quite a lot about the intertwined follies of war, business, religion and society, and delivers a number of insightful commentaries on the subject, as do the ordinary folks around her - an army cook, a chaplain, a camp follower, and various soldiers and officers, all of whom understand something of the nasty, stratified and iniquitous world they inhabit. The trouble is that Courage's understanding is fatally incomplete - she sees the injustice, violence and absurdity of the war, but she persists in thinking she can outsmart it. She can't. The play was conceived and composed around 1939 by the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and a team of co-workers (in German, Mitarbeiter, here referred to as the 'Brecht team'). While Brecht was surely the lead author and in many ways the centre of this team, the work of dramaturg, writer and editor Margarete Steffin (1908-41) must be recognized as absolutely crucial to the development of the text. Brecht's wife, the actor Helene Weigel (1900-71), who would become famous for her portrayal of Courage, was a significant influence as well. Other intellectuals and artists also contributed to the creation of the play in the deeply collaborative style typical of Brecht and his team.
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