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While discussing the war, Mother Courage asks: “Then don’t you think the war might end?” She is talking to Chaplain in the wagon while the funeral of a fallen commander takes place. At first, Mother Courage’s question might surprise the audience since for the first time in the play she wonders whether there can be a possibility for the war to come to an end. The audience might assume that Mother Courage is finally tired of war time conditions which emotionally impaired her a lot. However, at the next line Mother Courage reveals that “I wasn’t asking for the sake of argument. I was wondering if I should buy up a lot of supplies.” This time, the audience once again distances itself from indentifying with Mother Courage who expresses her wishful thinking not in accordance with “humanly” emotions but for material interests.

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In the following lines, Chaplain’s comments on war happen to be one of the most important statements of the play: “Well, there’ve always been people going around saying some day the war will end. I say, you can’t be sure the war will ever end.” According to Chaplain, the war can pause occasionally due to some accidents, since “nothing in the world is perfect.” When Mother Courage heads for the town in order to buy more supplies, she finds out that the war has ended. When she comes back to her wagon with the supplies, the war restarts. In the meantime, Eilif arrives at the wagon to see his mother for the last time before his execution. The ambiguity of the war prevents Mother Courage to see her son for one last time. The war’s ambiguous condition signifies its imperfectness; although the sergeant claims unlike in peace, in the war there is organization, Brecht’s play underscores that the war contains gaps, accidents, inconsistencies from which either the impossibility or the improperness of mourning arises.
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The ambiguous war brings along the impossibility of witnessing one’s death and even mourning. It is striking that Eilif is executed despite he performed the same action before – robbery and murder of the peasants – in the end of which he was rewarded. In the wartime, Eilif had the right to murder civilians since as he asserts, “necessity knows no law.” In the first crime Eilif’s deed was perceived as a heroic conduct, although in the second, the soldier who detained Eilif says: “Stealing cattle from a peasant. What is brave about that?” The war restarts after the crime and the audience might feel sorry for Eilif since if he were to rob and murder the peasant a while later, that would be a heroic act. Hence, the ambiguity of the war, or what one might call the “state of exception”[1] interprets one’s actions in different ways: At wartime, Eilif’s deed is courageous while at peacetime it is cowardice.
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On the other hand, Brecht implies a didactic message long before Eilif is executed, as Mother Courage states: “In a good country, virtues wouldn’t be necessary.” Her comments imply that society needs some amount of imperfection in terms of courage so that “the virtue of courage” can exist. Besides, one can suggest that the war itself needs imperfection in order to continue its existence. Similar to Eilif’s virtue of courage in the war time, Swiss Cheese’s “virtue of honesty” brings along his death to which Mother Courage cannot bear witness. Swiss Cheese is the victim of the ambiguity of wartime, in which unexpected pauses and attacks take place. While trying to figure out a mediating solution between her material needs and the love for his son, Mother Courage spends too much time in state of indeterminacy. In the most dramatic scene of the play, Mother Courage is obliged to act as if she doesn’t recognize Swiss Cheese’s deceased body. She cannot mourn since Swiss Cheese’s body is thrown in the carrion pit. While even the audience cannot shake off the trauma she should have experienced in this dramatic scene, Mother Courage continues her business transactions afterwards. Then how does Mother Courage mourn? How does she deal with her traumas?
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At this point, one might suggest that Brecht intentionally doesn’t display her act of mourning or the ways in which she deals with her traumas, so that the audience wouldn’t identify him/herself with the protagonist by observing her psychic evolution. In this regard, since there are gaps in the play and we cannot fully observe the ways in which Mother Courage either mourns or deals with her traumas, it is pretty difficult for one to psychoanalyze Mother Courage. In a Brechtian play, whose intention is to distance the audience from the characters on the stage and to prevent identification with the characters on the other, there exists a little room for psychoanalysis, by which one can make sense of characters’ depressions, the ways of mourning and melancholy.
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Besides there is a further point which needs exploration in terms of identification. Brecht portrays his characters in a way that in course of psychological interpretation of the characters, one has to take into account the social and political conditions displayed throughout the play. Let us say that in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, when Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost, the audience might wonder “if I were Macbeth, I would have experienced the same delusion, since he really suffers a lot from his ferocious deeds.” On the other hand, it is possible that in seeing Mother Courage’s pretention not to recognize his deceased son, the audience might imagine that “if I was living under those social conditions, I might react the same way.”[2] That social conditions point at the imperfections, ambiguities, gaps and inconsistencies of the wartime, which on one hand disable the act of proper mourning and on the other hand prevents Brecht to directly display the psychic evolutions of the characters in the play, unlike Shakespeare whose characters represent the “universality” of emotions, and psychological experiences. However, there is one exception to the non-psychoanalyzation of the play. Briefly I’ll try to explain.
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First of all, Mother Courage can neither mourn for nor bear witness to the deaths of her children due to several kinds of business transactions. Swiss Cheese works as a paymaster, and he was executed because of the cash box in his possession. Mother Courage’s haggle is of no use and he dies. During the later scenes of the play, Mother Courage concentrates more to her business. In the beginning of Scene 7, the foreword declares that she is at the height of her business career. Eventually, one can conclude that Mother Courage commits herself to the business in order to alleviate her psychic depressions and emotional sufferings.
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Secondly in Scene 8, Eilif visits the wagon in order to bid farewell to Mother Courage, who is absent because of another business transaction. Once again Mother Courage cannot mourn; the business, with the aid of which she lessened her sufferings, prevents her from mourning for her son’s death.
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Thirdly in Scene 11, Mother Courage is again absent in the scene of Kattrin’s death. We find out that she is busy with another business transaction, since the one of peasants informs: “Her mother is in town buying up stocks because the shopkeepers are running away and selling cheap.” For the third time, while Mother Courage seeks for the opportunity to improve her business, she suffers a loss. Here, on one hand the business symbolizes the medium by which the pains and the traumas in Mother Courage’s psyche are repressed. On the other hand, it is this same medium in which the repressed experiences reoccur in Mother Courage’s life. Eventually, referring to Freudian Psychoanalysis, one might describe this situation as the “return of the repressed”. Mother Courage devotes herself to her business in order to repress her sufferings. However, the business prevents her from mourning and repeatedly she suffers from the same neurosis.
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In sum, Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect) which on one hand alienates the audience by disabling its identification with Mother Courage, and prevents one to psychoanalyze the characters in the play on the other, points at the imperfections and inconsistencies of a never-ending war by means of distinguishing the humanly emotions from social and political conditions in the play. In the end of the play, although Mother Courage suffers from psychosis when she believes her deceased Kattrin to be sleeping, a little while later she acts out her desire to turn back to business, and continues to repress her neurosis. Hence, the constantly reoccurring war with gaps and inconsistencies continues, as her repression does in her psyche.
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[1] One might refer to this situation as “state of exception”, since first of all there is no precise and definitive law in force during wartime and secondly, the distinction between the peace time and war time is juridicially ambiguous. Eilif believed that his initial crime was heroic, not because it is conducted in the wartime but because it is also heroic in the peace-time. Murdering a peasant on the basis of necessity is an entailment of a soldier, no matter there is war or peace. Agamben analyzes the phrase, “Necessity does not recognize any law” in illustrating “state of exception”. Giorgio Agamben, “State of Exception”, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press (2005). p. 24.
[2] This is a statement from Brecht’s “A Short Organum for the Theater.” Since there wasn’t an English version of the book in the library, I’ll write here the passage in Turkish. “Sahnede kişileri toplumsal çarklar içinden geçirdik de çarkları değişen çağlara gore değişik tuttuk mu, seyircinin bu kişilerle özdeşleşmesi güçleşecektir. Seyirci düpedüz kalkıp “Ben de olsam öyle davranırdım”, demeyecektir örneğin, olsa olsa şöyle söyleyecektir: “Bu koşullarda yaşasaydım ben de öyle davranırdım.” Eğer biz kendi çağımızın oyunlarını da tarihsel oyunlar gibi sergilersek, davranışlarına eşlik eden koşullar da seyircilerimize yine olağan dışı görünebilecektir, bud a işte eleştirel tutumun başlangıcıdır.” Bertolt Brecht, “Sanat Üzerine Yazılar”. trans. Kamuran Şipal. Istanbul: Cem Yayınevi (1990). p. 24. IC Catalog number: PT 2603.R397 S26 1990
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