Mother Courage and Her Children

The subtitle of Mother Courage and Her Children is "e;A Chronicle of Thirty Years' War"e;, with the background of the German Thirty Years' War in the 17th century. Anna Fierling, known as "e;Mother Courage"e;, 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, "e;Whoever wants to make a living by war must hand over something to it."e; 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, "e;Mother Courage"e;, comes from German novelist Grimmelshausen's tramp novel Die Ertzbetruegerin and Landstoertzerin Courasche. The word, Courasche (Courage), means the "e;schemes"e; that women adopt to seduce men in Baroque times. In Brecht's work, it is the "e;courage"e; of nobodies for survival.