Mother Courage and Her Children: A Critical Look at Capitalism

Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht is a critical look at the evils he sees within Capitalism. He uses the war as an example of how people feed off of each other to obtain their individualistic goals. Mother Courage is his example of how Capitalism can drive people to act in ways they would not if it were not for their drive to obtain money. For Mother Courage nothing is more important than her drive to save and run her business. She even received her name after trying to save her bread during a bombardment so that her business would not be ruined. Capitalism drives her in every decision she makes. Rather than acting like a mother to her children, she is constantly more concerned with being able to complete a sale than her children's' well being.

The play is set in Dalarna, a province of Sweden, in 1624 during the Thirty Year's War. Mother Courage runs a canteen wagon that follows the army and sells the soldiers drinks and clothing. She has two sons, Elif and Swiss Cheese, and a daughter Kattrin. Mother Courage is only concerned with making the next transaction, and loses each of her children to the war by the end of the play. Mother Courage foreshadows her children's deaths in the opening scene while pretending to be able to tell the future. She tells Elif that he will be killed by the age of twenty if he joins the army, that Swiss Cheese will die due to his honesty and that Kattrin will die for not staying quiet.

Her son, Elif, is recruited by the Swedish Army to fight and is later executed for killing peasants for their cattle after the war as ceased even though that behavior was celebrated by his commanders during the war. Although Mother Courage informs the troops in the area that the war is indeed still in effect, it is too late to save her son. Swiss Cheese works for the army as a payroll master. The Catholic army attacks them and finds Swiss Cheese's role, arrests and interrogates him. Mother Courage denies knowing her son, and once he is executed by the Catholic Army, she denies knowing him again for fear of punishment when his body is presented to her. Kattrin is told to keep silent throughout the war by Mother Courage. She is marred by a group of soldiers when going into a town to retrieve goods and her mother is concerned more with the scar than the cruelty her daughter has suffered, saying only that now she will not be likely to marry. When Kattrin beats the drum to warn the city of the impending invasion of forces, her mother does not try to convince her to stop, even when the troops say they will shoot her down. When Kattrin is killed to quiet her efforts, Mother Courage simply pays for her to be buried and leaves to sell more goods. When each of her children die, Mother Courage is away at the market, conducting business. Throughout the play there are examples of how Capitalism drives the war, and in particular, Mother Courage's actions.

One of the best descriptions of Mother Courage is when the Chaplain labels her the "hyena of the battlefield." She is compared here to an animal that lives off of dead carcasses, much like she lives off the death of the war. Although she is trying to profit from the war and take advantage of the situation, the war takes everything but her business from her. Mother Courage is offended by the comment, although she does wish the war would continue so that she can continue to run her business and profit.

In the beginning of the play, we see Mother Courage singing "Come and buy!" to attract customers to her wagon, but this quickly becomes a cry of "Come and die!" Because she is supporting the war in some way by following it from town to town in order to profit from it, and predicts her children's deaths to the war while completing her transactions, the song implies that if you are a soldier and her customer, you will die in the war for participating in the Capitalistic nature of the war. Her song calls people to buy her goods, but also deeper into the war to be killed.

The business deals caused by the war are highlighted in every scene of the play. Elif is killed while Mother Courage haggles over a belt and the peasants are killed by Elif when he pretends to barter with them to get their cattle. This is Brecht's way of showing that if you are doing business with the army, you will either die, or lose all you have to the war. In this way, he casts Capitalism as the main player in causing and perpetuating the war. Brecht points out that no one learns to not do business with the war; the peasants die before they have the opportunity and Mother Courage never learns, even at the end when the war and her drive for business profits has caused her to lose each of her children.

In scene seven, Mother Courage is pulled onstage by the Chaplain and Kattrin wearing silver coins and telling them that war feeds people like herself better than peace. Mother Courage's business is doing better than ever and rather than mourning her son's death, she seems to have forgotten all about Swiss Cheese's sacrifice earlier on due to her current success. She sings a song about how all people end up dying in this scene as well. This seems to be her way of excusing her actions and her Capitalistic nature by saying that no matter what you do, you end up dying for your efforts. This may be why even though Swiss Cheese was killed for being honest, she does not mourn him that much since she simply sees it as his fate to die at that time rather than as his death being forced on him by the corruption of war.

Brecht emphasizes that even though Mother Courage suffered so much loss, she never sees the error in her ways. She is concerned about business and her next transaction rather than about her children, herself or others. She even treats burying her daughter as a business transaction, simply paying for the burial and leaving, without attending the ceremony, saying, "I must get back into business."

Brecht shows Mother Courage in such a negative light that people would not want to be her, and would look at her actions as incorrect and immoral. However, given her situation and the setting of the story, it is easy to see how she would do the things she did. She had to make money to take care of her family, and without focusing on making money would have been unable to do so. Therefore, following the war and going to the market that would give her the best opportunity for success was a good business move. Whether or not she would have lost her children to some other causes of death is unknown, even if they had stayed at home and not followed the war around. Brecht tries to teach a lesson on the dangers of becoming too consumed in Capitalism and money rather than emotion and morality.

He shows the actions of Mother Courage as being ghastly because she is a mother, but it is hard to say if the character would have had the same impact if it had been a man making the same decisions. The use of a woman in this story is also very poignant, since Brecht is so concerned with morality. Women have been looked down on for hundreds of years for being Capitalistic and making their own money versus tending to their children. If a male would have been making the same decisions, he would have been seen as a provider and hero for taking care of his family, however when a mother makes the same decisions and her children lose their lives, which she may not even have been able to save, she is an animal. Brecht emphasizes that ideal in this story by showing an extreme version of what a person would do in order to make the next buck. However, even though Mother Courage was not moral and was Capitalistic, she is the only person in her family who survived the ordeal. This makes the point that only someone who can be that brutal and emotionless can survive in that type of environment.