The American Spectator

[Despite its success] I do not believe, and I did not believe at the time [1949], that the people of Berlin — or any other city where the play was shown — understood the play. They were all convinced that they had learned something from the war, what they failed to grasp was that, in the playwright’s view, Mother Courage was meant to have learned nothing from her war. They did not see what the playwright was driving at: that war teaches people nothing…The audiences of 1949 and the ensuing years did not see Mother Courage’s crimes, her participation, her desire to share in the profits of the war business; they saw only her failure, her sufferings. And that was their view of Hitler’s war in which they had participated: it had been a bad war and now they were suffering.

br> And late that night Brecht’s ironic prophecy came true once more. Neither actors nor the audience understood the real meaning of the play. Streep played Mother Courage as the long-suffering indomitable hero as she felt she was in those final moments, left standing alone on the stage triumphantly. And the audience loved her. They stood, shouted, applauded, whooped as though she were Meryl Streep, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother Teresa, and Joan of Arc rolled into one. It was a love fest. It could have been an East German Workers Collective but it was only the Upper West Side of Manhattan joining hands with celebrity to hate war and George W. Bush together.

And was it a trick of my imagination that I thought I saw a figure hovering over the trees of Central Park during the shouts and applause shaking his head and grinning cynically?