Table of Contents
What does Mother Courage lose?
Over the course of the play, she loses all three of her children, Schweizerkas, Eilif, and Kattrin, to the very war from which she tried to profit.
What does Mother Courage buy from the ordnance officer?
Three years later, Mother Courage and Kattrin fold washing on a cannon. At the same time, Courage bargains with an Ordinance Officer over a bag of bullets. Swiss Cheese, now in a paymaster’s uniform, and Yvette Pottier, the camp prostitute, look on.
How is Eilif taken away?
Eilif, now a richly dressed lieutenant, then enters in fetters followed by two soldiers. The soldiers take him away and the Chaplain follows, instructing the Cook to defer telling Courage for now.
What does Mother Courage run with through the bombardment giving her nickname?
Formerly known as Anna Fierling, Mother Courage got her name from an incident in Riga in which she drove her canteen through a bombardment to sell her bread and came out alive. Mother Courage refuses the Cook’s offer to run an inn with him because he will not allow Kattrin to accompany them.
Who was puffing Piet?
Yvette sings her “Song of Fraternization,” which reveals the backstory of her broken heart because of a man she calls “Puffing Piet,” an army cook who abandoned her on the battlefield when she was 16, essentially forcing her into a life of prostitution. The song also warns Kattrin to stay away from men.
Why is Mother Courage an anti war play?
“Mother Courage and Her Children” is an anti-war play that was written by Bertolt Brecht in 1939. The German playwright and poet wrote the script in resistance to the rise of fascism and nazism and as a response to the invasion of Poland by Hitler’s army in 1939.
How did the protagonist got the nickname Mother Courage?
Mother Courage: Her real name is Anna Fierling. She tells the sergeant and recruiter that she earned her name by breaking through the blockade at Riga, a Latvian city under attack by the Catholics, in order to sell bread to the starving inhabitants.
What is Yvette job Mother Courage?
No one in Mother Courage has a more dramatic change of fortune than Yvette. She starts out as a prostitute and ends up the wealthy widow of an aristocratic military man.
Which character in Mother Courage dies because of a stolen cashbox?
Swiss Cheese’s honesty, alluded to in Scene 1 as the virtue that would lead to his death, prompts him to admit he threw the cash box in the river, forcing Mother Courage to choose between her business and her son’s life.
Who pulls Mother Courage’s cart at the end?
The Sergeant declares that the people could use a good war. Without war, there is no organization. A harmonica is heard, and a canteen wagon appears on stage. The infamous Mother Courage sits on it with her dumb daughter, Kattrin, and her sons, Eilif and Swiss Cheese pull it along.
Why is Kattrin mute in Mother Courage?
From the start of the play, Kattrin has already lost more to the war than any other character in Mother Courage. She has lost her voice. We learn in Scene VI that she was made mute as a child, when a soldier “stuffed something in her mouth,” implying that she was attacked and likely raped (VI, 283).
Why does Swiss cheese get killed?
Swiss Cheese dies because of his naive honesty: he couldn’t lie, even to save his life. In fact Brecht suggests Swiss Cheese is stupid—his mother calls him stupid multiple times in the play—and through the song connection suggests Jesus, or religion in general, is equally useless in war.