Who Is Bertolt Brecht's War?

“A visionary, poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer,” that’s what Bertolt Brecht was known for. Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, better known as Bertolot Brecht, was born on February 10th, 1898 in Augsburg, Germany. Brecht was born to a Protestant mother and a Catholic father. While his father worked in a paper mill, his mother made sure that he learned that bible, something that would have a lifelong effect on his writing. The break out of World War I occurred when he was only 16, he became more and more disillusioned with the society believing that empty-headed people could be persuaded to die for their country. It was during this time that he started his movement towards Marxism. Bertolt served in a military hospital in 1918, having …show more content…
The play was performed for the first time in 1941, in the middle of World War II. However Bertolt chose to set the play on another war, one that was rather in a distant historical period, The Thirty Years’ War. The Thirty Years’ War was mainly known for its length (1618-1648), also known for its savagery and believed by many to be morally pointless. The war began as a conflict between Catholics and Protestants, and the sincere religious aims that might have been present in the beginning were lost once the Catholics from France, to further their territorial ambitions, entered on the side of the Protestants. To demonstrate the savagery of this pointless war, Brecht in the introduction to Scene 9, informs the readers and the audience that by the point of the war (1645) Germany had lost half of its population. That in war one is most likely to grind up all who enter. It is foreseen in the first scene, when Mother Courage argues with the sergeant, who tries to convince Eilif to join the war. In that scene, Mother Courage, claims to have the ability to look into the future, not only predicts that the sergeant will soon die but also sees the death of her three