Recommendations
Books Like Mother Courage and Her Children
Best books to read after Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht
Readers who love Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht are drawn to its combination of anti-war argument, the portrait of the woman who survives by commercial adaptation, and the structural irony of a person who profits from the war that kills her children — they want plays and novels that deal with commercial complicity in systems of violence, the nature of heroism and survival, and the Brechtian theatrical tradition.
- 1Buy
The Good Woman of Setzuan
by Bertolt Brecht
The companion Brecht play — the good woman Shen Te who must invent a ruthless male cousin to protect her goodness. Companion investigations of the same Brecht question: what does it mean to be good in a bad system? Both plays refuse any comfortable answer
- 2Buy
The Threepenny Opera
by Bertolt Brecht
The earlier companion — Mack the Knife, Polly Peachum, and the London underworld. Companion investigations of the capitalism that Brecht believed organized modern life: in The Threepenny Opera, through the comic-satiric analogy between criminality and business; in Mother Courage, through the catastrophic analogy between commerce and war
- 3Buy
Life of Galileo
by Bertolt Brecht
The companion Brecht play — Galileo's recantation under pressure from the Inquisition. Companion investigations of the same Brecht question: when is self-preservation heroic and when is it complicity? Galileo's recantation is Mother Courage's denial of her son, transposed into the intellectual sphere
- 4Buy
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
The companion anti-war text that refuses to glamorize war — Paul Bäumer's experience in the trenches. Companion investigations of what war actually does to ordinary people, but from different formal positions: Remarque's is the naturalistic first-person account; Brecht's is the epic-theatrical account designed to prevent sympathetic identification
- 5Buy
The Good Soldier Švejk
by Jaroslav Hašek
The companion in the Central European anti-war tradition — the hapless Czech soldier Švejk in the Austro-Hungarian army. Companion investigations of the relationship between the ordinary person and the military system: Hašek's Švejk survives by radical compliance; Brecht's Courage by commercial adaptation; both investigate survival in a system that should be resisted
- 6Buy
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
by Bertolt Brecht
The companion Brecht play — the servant girl Grusha who flees with the governor's baby. The more hopeful companion to Mother Courage: where Mother Courage ends in catastrophe, The Caucasian Chalk Circle ends in a kind of imperfect justice
- 7Buy
Antigone
by Sophocles
The companion in the theatrical tradition of the woman who must choose between the demands of the state and her own moral sense. Brecht made his own adaptation of Antigone (1948) as a direct political statement; the comparison is illuminating: Antigone refuses to survive in the system that would require her complicity; Mother Courage does not refuse, and loses everything anyway
- 8Buy
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's companion in the literary tradition of the anti-war text organized around a character's gradual desertion from the war — Frederic Henry's 'separate peace.' Both A Farewell to Arms and Mother Courage are organized around the question of what it means to withdraw from a war that the surrounding society insists on continuing
More Mother Courage and Her Children Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.