Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder at Nationaltheater Mannheim

Brecht wrote his » chronicle from the Thirty Years' War « in 1939, and it received its world première in 1941 at the Züricher Schauspielhaus, just two months before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Between 1624 and 1636, Mutter Courage follows the armies,first the Finnish army, then the Swedish one, as a trader with her three small children through Poland, Bavaria, Italy. She does business, siding alternately with the Protestants and Catholics, and even does quite well from the war. Wary of losing her livelihood, Courage is afraid of peace, although the war ultimately robs her of all her children: recruiting officer takes her son Eilif away, Polish Catholics shoot her son Schweizerkas after he has stolen the,regiment’s cash box and is tried by court-martial, and her mute daughter Kattrin is abused as she tries to defend her mother's goods during a robbery and is later killed when she saves the city of Halle from the attack of imperial soldiers. Right at the end, Courage moves along again all on her own. After 12 years of a wasted life in the war, she joins in with the singing of the soldiers – and she doesn't yet know that during a short »outbreak of peace«, Eilif has been executed because of his war crimes, and she will never see him again. Like Mutter Courage, the Protestant field priests, the cook and the camp whore Yvette also initially benefit from the war. But things get gradually worse for them. They are all lonely people, who in strange times abandon themselves to peculiar, destructive, fatal behaviour, and who, according to Brecht, have to realise » that war, which is a continuation of business by other means, kills off human virtues, even for their owners.«