Oxford Reference. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Here, she functions as witness twice, helplessly watching Swiss Cheese walk off to his demise and standing by her mother when she refuses to identify the body.
In a sense she bears witness to her brother with her silence in a way the garrulous Mother Courage, forced to lie twice for her survival, cannot. Left impotent in her muteness, the innocent Kattrin appears as a sort of horrified bystander, literally silenced by the traumas of war. Raising her voice against the war will ultimately mean her demise, the act of intervention demanding a self-sacrifice that brings the witness to martyrdom.
The play's investment in Kattrin's martyrdom seems strange in its commitment to exploring the social contradictions at the heart of the war, since it remains critical of martyrdom almost everywhere else. The Chaplain's comparison of Swiss Cheese to the crucified Jesus seems awkward and overly pious at best.
Swiss Cheese does not die a noble death, the irony of his demise lying in his stupidly unwavering honesty. Simply put, the audience wonders why he does not let the cash box go.
Interestingly, Brecht's production of Mother Courage underscored the strangeness of the play's music to the action by lowering a musical emblem on- stage whenever a song did not directly arise from action or arose from it but remained clearly apart nevertheless. This unrealistic element intended to break the illusion on-stage and raise the music to its own reality, a reality distinct from the action.
Kattrin wants to find a husband. However, her mother keeps putting it off, insisting that they must wait until peacetime which never arrives during Kattrin's adult life. Kattrin desperately wants a child of her own. When she learns that children might be murdered by soldiers, she sacrifices her life by drumming loudly and waking up the townspeople so they are not caught by surprise.
Although she perishes, the children and many other civilians are saved. Therefore, even without children of her own, Kattrin proves to be far more motherly than the title character.
Bertolt sometimes spelled "Berthold" Brecht lived from to He was raised by a middle-class German family, despite some of his claims that he had an impoverished childhood. Early in his youth, he discovered a love for the theater that would become his means of creative expression as well as a form of political activism.
In , his anti-war play "Mother Courage and Her Children" was performed for the first time, premiering in Switzerland. After the war, Brecht moved to Soviet-occupied East Germany, where he directed a revised production of the same play in Brecht, Bertolt.
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Companions Online. Hello Maria, Your blog is really well done. You did an excellent job of being specific and tying in the eoic theater conventions with Mother Courage as well. I like how you include the video to further substantiate your evidence. This is a really great blog post!
I think you tied in your outside information well and I especially liked how you brought in the video clip. It was a very interesting post.
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