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Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage
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Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg. His father, a Catholic, was the director of a paper company and his mother, a Protestant, was the daughter of a civil servant. Brecht began to write poetry as a boy, and had his first poems published in 1914. After finishing elementary school, he was sent to the Königliches Realgymnasium, where he gained fame as an enfant terrible.
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Brecht's four great plays were written between 1938 and 1945. These included, for one, The Life of Galileo, which followed history all too slavishly. It dealt with the protagonist's self-hatred for giving up his convictions in the face of the Inquisition. The others were Mother Courage and Her Children; The Good Person of Sezuan, which in some ways follows from Mother Courage in examining the compatibility of virtue and a capitalist world; and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which introduces questions about power and who is entitled to own things. After this period, Brecht worked on his famous adaptation of Antigone and spent much of his energy recording his theoretical ideas.
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When the Nazis took over in 1933, Brecht and his wife, the actress Helene WEIGEL, left Germany for Denmark, where they lived until the German invasion forced them once again to move. During the period of Scandinavian exile... Brecht composed the great poems of his maturity, collected in the Svendborg Poems (1939). Moreover, he returned to large-scale playwriting with Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), The Life of Galileo (1939), The Good Person of Setzuan (1940), and the Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui (1941).
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Brecht's writings show the profound influence of many varied sources during this time and the remaining years of his life. He studied Chinese, Japanese, and Indian theatre, focused heavily on Shakespeare (adapting, among other plays, Shakespeare's Coriolanus) and other Elizabethans, and was fascinated by Greek tragedy. He found inspiration in other German playwrights, notably Buchner and Wedekind, and he enjoyed the Bavarian folk play. Mother Courage and Her Children arguably owes much to Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy. Brecht had a phenomenal ability to take elements from these seemingly incompatible sources, combine them, and convert them into his own works.
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Renate Rechtien points out that it was not just his theatrical theories that Brecht was concerned with. He was equally political. was understood by Brecht to be more than simply a superstructural affirmation of reality. Brecht defined its role as active and critical appropriation of reality, with the artist confronting, exposing and acting upon real societal contradictions with a view to bringing about social change" (Bertolt Brecht: Centenary Essays) And it is true that, in his resistance against the Nazi and Fascist movements, Brecht wrote his most famous plays: Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, Mr. Puntila and has man Matti, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Good Person of Sezuan, and many others. Astrid Herhoffer agrees that "Brecht commits himself in his work to the cause of the humiliated and the offended, and it is in this political commitment that lies the strength of his literary work" (Bertolt Brecht: Centenary Essays).
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With his plays and songs Brecht was at the very centre of the conflicts in the last years of the Weimar Republic. One month after the premiere of The Mother in 1932, the police ordered that the play could only be recited but not played. The production of another play had to be stopped because the Nazis were beating up actors.
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Mother Courage