Mother Courage and Her Children Study Guide

Mother Courage and Her Children is set during the Thirty Years' War,

but it was written either shortly before or during the early years of the
Second World War. Hitler's warmongering intentions had become clear to
many Germans by the mid-1930s, and Brecht himself, already opposed to
the man he called "the great bandit," had repeatedly emigrated so as to
escape the rise of fascism. "The dark times" was how Brecht referred to this
era in his writing, and it is against the backdrop of the rise of Hitler that the
play was written.
Brecht lived until April 1939 in Denmark, where in 1938 he had written Fear
and Misery in the Third Reich, a series of short scenes which
demonstrated without restraint the degree of horror that would ensue, so he
prophesied, should the Nazis come to power. Today, they serve as a
blistering warning which all too obviously fell on deaf ears. After Denmark,
Brecht moved to Sweden. This is whereMother Courage and Her Children
was first drafted. The decision to write the play was taken after Hitler and
Stalin had signed their rather improbable pact. Brecht wrote that

this pact makes the air clearer. what we have is a war between
imperialist states. we have germany as the aggressor and
warmonger. we have aggressive capitalism against defensive
capitalism.
We can see clearly from these lines the impetus for the play's war of religion
that actually has nothing to do with religion.
The play was written with the intention that Naima Wifstrand, a Swedish
actress, would play Mother Courage, and his wife Helene Weigel would
be Kattrin (since she spoke no Swedish). Although it was written in Sweden,
the play is set in the Germany of the past, and it is concerned with the
Germany of Brecht's present. Brecht's decision to set his play in the Germany
of the past, the Thirty Years' War, underlines several of the impulses behind
his writing the play itself. The Thirty Years' War remains one of the most
significant conflicts in German history.

Brecht's staging techniques similarly aimed at such alienation,

the epic theater making frequent use of unfamiliar settings, the interruption of
action and dialogue, unsettling music, the use of banners to mark scene
changes, and playing spaces divided by half-drawn curtains.