Mother Courage and Her Children

The subtitle of Mother Courage and Her Children is 'A Chronicle of Thirty Years' War', with the background of the German Thirty Years' War in the 17th century. Anna Fierling, known as 'Mother Courage', who pulled a cart to sell provisions to soldiers with two sons and a mute daughter. She depended on war to make a living and regarded war as a source to make a fortune. A soldier looked at her cart and predicted, 'Whoever wants to make a living by war must hand over something to it.' The woman who totally depended her hopes of living on the war ended up with her family broken up. This is a tragedy of a woman who was not afraid of risk and reckless to make a living in war. The appellation, 'Mother Courage', comes from German novelist Grimmelshausen's tramp novel Die Ertzbetruegerin and Landstoertzerin Courasche. The word, Courasche (Courage), means the 'schemes' that women adopt to seduce men in Baroque times. In Brecht's work, it is the 'courage' of nobodies for survival.