Mother Courage and Her Children

About Mother Courage

Mother Courage and Her Children (1939, premiered 1941) by Bertolt Brecht is the most important Brecht play — the canteen woman Anna Fierling (Mother Courage), who pulls her cart through the Thirty Years War, selling provisions to soldiers on both sides, and loses all three of her children to the war she is profiting from. Written in 1939 as a warning against the coming war; the 1949 Berliner Ensemble production with Helene Weigel as Courage is one of the great theatrical productions of the twentieth century.