Like Brecht’s preceding
Galileo,the play has a seventeenth-century setting. But unlike
Galileoit is situated during the Thirty Years’ War, a gruesomely bloody clash of nations. The protagonist is a rough and ordinary person trying to find her way through the maze of different petty authorities. The profit motive is not the motor of historical progress, but a necessity for continued individual survival – bought with the death of all Mother Courage’s children, a chilling reflection of the destruction wrought on Germany by this war. The structure is devoted to the ruin of a family in particular circumstances, not, as in
Galileo, to the exploration of an exceptional individual. Brecht’s starting-point is not in factual history, but in literature, and he invents most of the events…
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Citation: White, Alfred D.. "Mutter Courage". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 February 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11580, accessed 20 April 2024.]
