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Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage
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As a playwright Brecht's sense of what works led to the writing of scenes where the audience's empathy for the characters on stage is considerable: the heroic self-sacrifice of the dumb Kattrin in Mother Courage is a notorious instance. Martin Esslin (A Choice of Evils, p. 131) points out the psychological flaw in Brecht's reasoning:
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Significantly, Brecht was exposed at a young age to Luther's German translation of the Bible, a text considered instrumental in the development of the modern German language. Quotes from and references to the Bible abound throughout Brecht's work and can be found most particularly in Mother Courage and Her Children in the mouth of the chaplain.
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These plays demonstrate that Brecht's power and depth as a dramatist are to a high degree independent of, and even override, his theoretical principles. They display an astonishing capacity for creating living characters, a moving compassion, technical virtuosity, and parodic wit. Mother Courage, a series of scenes from the life of a camp follower during the Thirty Years War, is often misunderstood because the overwhelmingly vital portrait of the central character arouses the audience's sympathies. But Brecht's actual concern was to demonstrate the self-perpetuating folly of Mother Courage's naive collaboration with the system that exploits her and destroys her family.
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One year before the East German Revolution in 1989 the government built a Brecht monument in front of the Berliner Ensemble. The memorial demonstrates how the East German dictatorship read Brecht. There is a quote from The Mother:
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Mother Courage