Mother Courage and Her Children is a theatre of the absurd canonizing nihilistic expressionism in modern European drama through the nebulous and meteoric phenomenon that crusading battlements feed people better as Marxist dialectics of warfare polity enterprise. Modernist playwright and avant-gardist theatrical theoretician sheds light in the evolution of constant revolutionizing of production, the uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, and the everlasting agitation and agony. Anna Fierling’s femininity, womanhood and motherhood is marred by the deterrent of trauma, violence, famine, poverty, bloodshed and civil wars, massacres and genocides and finally the bereavement of family members to geopolitical crises. Kattrin is a dumb disability rape victim of beleaguered Catholic regiment and her life is doomed to the brink of death at the expanse of messianic heraldry to awaken the Ingolstadt community and Utretch neighbourhood against the impending imperilment.

In context of postmodernism, post marxism, post communism, post stalinism, post fascism, postnazism the post Brechtian epic theatre is a treasure hunt of excavating and critiquing geopolitical tensions and conflicts amid globalization, liberalization, privatization, internationalization and sanction-counter sanction policies. Terrains and frontiers of capitalistic mercenary profiteering warfare politics usher satire of Mother Courage and Her Children to be cornerstone significance in contemporary legacy of Israel and Gaza or Russia and Ukraine. However, Mother Courage’s stony heartedness disentangles and estranges the stance of motherhood for preservation stake of survivalist livelihood; coldheartedness diminishes in grief stricken soul and freezing heart to glimpse the postmortem view of Swiss Cheese’s dead corpse. Resourcefulness, resilience, craftiness, perspicacity and intuitiveness deserves heartfelt kudos and laurel accolades as a gendered quester and displacement refugee of racial and ethnic migrant to spatiotemporal dystopian apocalypse. Exilic Brecht’s rage and fury was subjected to the temperamental vehemence of the then World War II Nazi German Holocaust. Atisemitism forges a cascade of hatred, oppression, antipathy, intolerance, inhumanity and barbarism towards Jewishness. Perpetual horror and terror of Nazi Germany substantively mirrors excruciating endangerment of Mother Courage as foretold by the tragic death chronicles of her Swiss Cheese and Eiliff. In Mother Courage and Her Children, Kattrin symbolically  resurrects the foreshadowing of Anne Frank’s afterthought that “Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude”. Through Kattrin’s heroic demise and sacrificial martyrdom Brecht spotlights the Marxist resistance and Marxist revolution. Her dumbness is transformatively changed to the libertarian human voices from the performativity of forces which render silence. Destruction and desolation of entrenched warfares afterall allegorizes the wartime backdrop of the theatrical production. Furthermore, Mother Courage’s staking of autonomy and individuality vis a-vis establishment and enfranchisement for her labour, worth, power and profit parallels resistance and struggles of the serfs and proletariat of Nazi Germany.  

Audiences and theatre critics speculate anti war play today as a reflection of warzones wherein mother courages are locked into the closets of detention centres throughout certainly. Bold and radical theatres and productions stage the modern European drama Mother Courage and Her Children as theatrical revue. Suffering and survival of the battlefields in the war frontiers of geopolitical disruptions lead to victimhood from war casualties. Dramatis’ personae of Mother Courage’s pragmatism engulfs her sentimentality into obscurity through the let bygones be bygones realism of continuity with the trade. Moreover, the future and safety of Eiliff and Kattrin are of paramount importance as revealed by the brunt of conservancy of the wagon. Mother Courage’s socioeconomic status facilitates her transcendentalist redemption from economic encumbrance and financial bankruptcy. However, “when the war gives you all you earn, one day it may claim something in return” is denunciation of the sergeant starkly apparent in the pawnship of Swiss Cheese’s life. Formidable survivor Anna Fierling is much more a character of the petty bourgeois class evolving into the exemplar premise of socialist realism with the coalescence of the Cold War as anti-capital and anti-war epic theatre. Afterall, Mother Courage’s polarized dual personality as both heartless speculator and tormented maternal figure are entrenched with inexpressibly incompatible paradoxical gulf between herself and the world. Anna Fierling’s modern disfigurement foreshadows the relationships between commodities, money and the marketplace that perverts human relationships and is ultimately inimical to life. Her wagon is a hallmark symbol of profiteering capitalistic enterprise of a doggerel and bloody warfare as well as unfolkloric and unsentimental victimhood of traumatic survival. 

Bertolt Brecht as a precursor of anti war epic theater heralds the harbinger of impending second world war and the dangers associated with victimization in traits of Solomon, Julius Caesar, Socrates and St. Martin. Although these personages are heroically admirable for their humane virtues, however, they are cowardly and despicable for being preys of wartime. The Brechtian epic theatre focuses dialectical social critique rather than tragicomedy to educate critical faculties for the reception of alienated point of view and detached perspectives. Willing suspension of disbelief  is somewhat polar opposites to Brecht’s engendering of illusion.

Further Reading, References, Endnotes and Podcasts

Belvoir 2015 production of Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht Translation Michael Gow Music Composition Stefan Gregory Director Eamon Flack Notes for Teachers, pp: 1-23

https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/mothercourage/historical-context/

Rational Irrationality

Review Paper on Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht

The Death of Tragedy George Steiner pp. 1-40

Konstantin Stanislavski An Actor Prepares pp. 1-20

Mother Courage and Her Children On Stage and Screen by Ralf Remshardt, pp. 1-10

Mother Courage and Her Children Study Guide Bertold Brecht in a new version with Peter Hinton a national Arts Center English Theatre Company Manitoba Theatre Centre (Winnipeg) Coproduction, pp. 1-28

Previously published in Children, Churches and Daddies.

Deb Hatcher

The last day that I saw Debbie Hatcher, she was just 15 years old. Slender and pretty and dressed in a skirt that hugged her hips, she was cute as a button. She had shoulder length light brown hair and a gold herringbone locket she’d received for her fifteenth birthday. She wore it literally everywhere; she was so proud of being in love with a boy who would bestow such a precious gift on her.

We were standing in the school library, in the Ds, somewhere between Durant and Dante, searching for a likely subject for a book report, when, madly impulsive, I approached her as if in a dream and kissed her lips. She was startled at first, but when the shock had disappeared, she let her guard down and kissed me back. I had known Deb since grade school, but only fantasized about her as a sort of forbidden treasure, lovely to admire from a distance, but strictly unapproachable.

Here I was, Tim Meese, not yet 16, and kissing a girl for the first time. And what a girl! I silently congratulated myself for starting at the very top of the social pyramid. She leaned into me and I into her, until we were both quite lost. At length, old, old Mrs. Kroger — she must have been at least 50 — the school librarian, sneaked down the aisle and coughed peremptorily. We instantly separated, embarrassed to have been found out. Although this was my initial foray into kissing, it was clearly not the first time that Deb had been kissed. She was far too expert at it to be a novice.

We glanced at Mrs. Kroger, to assess the level of trouble we were in, but she smiled her secret smile and withdrew. I felt supercharged, and Deb seemed similarly affected. She leaned close and whispered to meet her after school at her house; I hastily agreed. And what of the necklace-giving boyfriend? It turned out that his family had moved to the coast two weeks before and so at least he was no longer in contention for Deb’s affections. But I didn’t know this yet.

After lunch, I spied Deb in the corridor between classes, walking with her friends. I smiled at her, but she looked right through me. I blinked. Weren’t we inexorably linked forever, having tasted one another’s lips and even shared a breath? Had I only imagined our reconnoitering in the library? I shook my head and proceeded on to class.

After school let out, I anxiously plodded the three blocks to Maple Street, where Deb’s house stood. When I arrived, I knocked at the door and Mrs. Hatcher, a stay-at-home mom, which nearly all moms were back in the day, invited me in to wait for her daughter. We engaged in small talk and she plied me with pretzels, chips and Pepsis. Gazing about the living room, I spotted a photo of Deb and Jason, the boy who’d given her the locket. I didn’t know him well and stared at him disconsolately, enviously.

Mrs. Hatcher went on to tell me that Jason’s father had taken a job with an aircraft manufacturer in Los Angeles, and so that was the last they would see of Jason. She didn’t seem at all unhappy at the prospect, condemning him as “too progressive,” whatever that meant. Mrs. Hatcher remembered me from second grade, when her daughter and I had been matched up to perform the minuet in some stale elementary school production of a 200-year-old play. She inquired politely how my dancing was commencing. I told her that I was more into The Twist and The Mashed Potato these days, and she sniffed.

After quite a long time, the telephone jangled off the hook and Mrs. Hatcher snatched it up. She listened for some time, drew a sharp breath and said, “I’ll be there.” She looked stricken and then stared off into space for an interminable moment, and finally turned to me and said, in a choked voice, “You’d better go home, Tim,” and she disappeared into another room. I quietly let myself out.

The telephone call and Mrs. Hatcher’s behavior was a mystery to me, and I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t until the next day at school, when word leaked out. Deb Hatcher was dead. She had copped a ride on an upperclassman’s motorcycle and there had been an accident. Deb, unlike the driver, didn’t have a helmet and had suffered terminal injuries when she fell from the bike and struck her head on the pavement. The driver suffered only minor injuries.

It gave me a weird, eerie, ghostly feeling to know that I was the last boy to ever kiss Deb Hatcher. She’d had her whole life before her: additional boyfriends, a husband, children of her own, a career, perhaps. She was smart; no telling how far she might have gone. And, just maybe, she would have gone there with me. They offered a sort of rudimentary grief counseling at the school and they dedicated the yearbook to Deb and one other boy, who’d died from leukemia. I didn’t see the grief counselor and I didn’t buy the yearbook. I didn’t need the glossy photo to remember Deb. I attended the funeral. They had a closed casket.

Voracious Time

Time is a beast which no one can slay

Time’s moving forward with no delay

Time is a river that cannot be dammed

Time won’t be stayed by the mightiest hand

Time is an appetite always unsated

Time is never destroyed or created

Time is an enemy never defeated 

Time is experience never repeated

Time swallows all and nothing escapes it

Time never changes we cannot erase it

Time is the thing that makes us all equals

Time happens once without any sequels

Topic: “In New Uzbekistan, youth issues have been elevated to the level of state policy”

Author: Abdulaapipov Azamat Abdulazizovich  

Chief Leader of the Tashkent City Branch of the Organization of Children of Uzbekistan  

11th Grade Student of General Education School No. 186,

Shaykhontohur District, Tashkent City.

All over the world, youth are the continuators of all spheres of activity. Currently, the world’s population has exceeded 8 billion people, with about 20% being young people. In Uzbekistan, this figure exceeds 60%.

In 2016, an important document was signed for Uzbek youth. It was the first normative legal act signed by Shavkat Mirziyoyev as President of the Republic of Uzbekistan—the Law on State Youth Policy dated September 14, 2016. This law opened up significant opportunities for all the youth of Uzbekistan. Since more than half of the country’s population consists of young people, the consistent implementation of youth policy has become a crucial factor in Uzbekistan’s entry into the ranks of the most developed countries in the world. This is well understood by the country’s leadership and government.

When talking about attention to youth in our country, one cannot forget the figures of the Jadid movement who lived during the era of Turkestan, such as Gulom Zafarij, Munavvar-kori Abdurashidkhanov, Abdulla Qadiri, Abdurauf Fitrat, Iskhakhan Tura Ibrat, Abdulla Avloni, Abduhamid Chulpon, and Mahmukhodja Behbudi. They promoted knowledge among the youth of Turkestan. Our President speaks about these ancestors as follows:  

«The new schools, theaters, libraries, museums, newspapers, and magazines created by the Jadids, as well as charitable societies that sent children from Turkestan abroad for education, awakened our people from centuries of slumber and gave a powerful impetus to the national liberation movement,» says President Sh. Mirziyoyev.

Today, youth policy, issues concerning youth, protection of their rights and interests, and the upbringing of well-rounded, energetic young people are defined as a priority direction for all state bodies and ministries in Uzbekistan.

In Uzbekistan, based on the principle of «Youth Balance,» youth are divided into three categories: «good,» «average,» and «difficult.» It is important to note that youth from the «difficult» category do not go unnoticed. On the contrary, the state pays special attention to them, providing support and involving heads of ministries, departments, khokims (governors), and leaders of all divisions who are assigned to such young people, treating them as their own children. They listen to their problems and help resolve socio-economic issues.

To raise independent and patriotic young people who can use the internet rationally, training centers for «Digital Technologies» have been established in all regions. The state views the opportunities provided to youth and the funds allocated not as expenses but as investments in the future of the country.

In 2019, the President proposed «5 Initiatives» covering five important areas that played a significant role in the fate of youth. For example, gifted young people receive a car as a presidential prize by winning one of the contests. The implementation of these 5 initiatives marked a new milestone in the history of youth education in Uzbekistan. Additionally, young women have been given opportunities to engage in entrepreneurial activities thanks to financial resources allocated by the state, which has become another incentive for them.

At the initiative of the President, children of law enforcement officers can enter universities on state grants without entrance exams and are provided with all necessary conditions.

A fund called «Youth – Our Future» has been established to finance youth business initiatives, startups, ideas, and projects.

To support people with disabilities and low-income families in need, a system called «Unified Social Protection Registry» has been created. Additionally, «National Agency for Social Protection,» «Iron Book,» and «Women’s Book» have been introduced to address the problems faced by needy families.

Youth who are unemployed receive financial support through the «Youth Book» program to acquire desired professions. It should be noted that in the «Action Strategy» for five priority areas of development of the Republic of Uzbekistan from 2017 to 2021, special attention was given to youth issues. In particular, the protection of youth rights was designated as one of the main tasks.

In Uzbekistan, youth is viewed not as a «problem» of society but as a powerful force driving the country’s development, a strategic resource for the state. As a result, today educated, progressive-thinking, principled young people are becoming an increasingly important driving force for the future of the country.

An Agency for Youth Affairs has been established in the republic to develop and implement youth policy. This agency actively works on and develops new projects and initiatives aimed at benefiting the youth. It has become a support system for young people living in the country. Today, the agency sets ambitious goals and, with the trust of the state, works at the grassroots level—in villages, towns, districts, and regions. Now, advisors to khokims and youth leaders in mahallas provide support for their development.

In the modern era, the youth of Uzbekistan can read books online, learn foreign languages remotely, and acquire professions through online courses. The Children’s Organization of Uzbekistan is engaged in activities aimed at the active participation of children in public life, despite their young age. Members of this organization, known as leaders, can hold positions at the level of class, school, district, region, city, and republic. School students can become leaders, which allows them to grow as future political figures and gain deep knowledge. Leadership is an important process. Students who go through leadership activities can occupy high state positions in the future.

On the international stage, Uzbekistan is recognized as one of the fastest-growing countries in the field of youth policy. The country has entered the top ten states participating in the implementation of the UN strategy «Youth Strategy – 2030.» Furthermore, Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, has been declared the youth capital for the first time in the CIS.

Thus, the youth of New Uzbekistan continues to inherit the strength, knowledge, and initiative of their ancestors, such as the great mathematician al-Khwarizmi, scholar and engineer Ahmad al-Fergani, hadith scholar al-Bukhari, philosopher al-Farabi, encyclopedic scholar al-Biruni, physician Avicenna, poet Alisher Navoi, statesman Amir Timur, and many others. The youth of New Uzbekistan continues to strive for development and the construction of a prosperous future for the country.

We are ready to celebrate DYLAN THOMAS’ DAY again.
Here is the link to DYLAN THOMAS’ new website for the 2025 celebration.
https://shininglanternsfordylanday2025.jimdofree.com/

In the section GENERAL INFORMATION-CONTACTS you can find all you need to know. Starting from the text of Dylan Thomas’ poem SHOULD LANTERNS SHINE, this year’s suggested themes are 2:-LIGHT CAN WIN DARKNESS-NOSTALGIA FOR CHILDHOOD TIME LONG GONE. You can choose one of these themes or you can send your works as “responses” to the Poet’s words:

https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/dylan-thomas-245.php

Please send your contributions with your 4 lines biography to:

immagine.poesia@gmail.com

Date limit: MAY 10.

Filling the Hollow

resonator grotto

pushing headline disinfectants

devised a renewed pastiche

liminal fury for taint collectors

brought a binge pot dilemma 

its crude invective 

untamed the clot’s brand name

ghost fangs mental vending

threshed spotless reverb egress

past sound regrets tangled dry

as a flattened root 

plying the sharpened tonic grab

contortion clangs against vibrato

trembling with a haunted verbatim

in search of a breaking tremolo

to gambol freely

against the chamber’s echo points

Below the Land’s Bottom

pealing at robotic speed

the stranger left a missing hieroglyph

sleeping under the sinkhole

swamping the mendicant 

sporting a bearded vantage boast

where street invention

gaped a landmark palpitation

                     2.

verbal carnage soaring

vigil haze fattened the coming 

joggle a rough descent

retread derision encased 

any sidewalk dream plots worn

to comfort the decimation

with a congregation of friction studios

                 3.

lout fight a slow obstacle 

included fans of glower problems

fighting apprehension daze

reprobate misses figurine

torpedo grieving well black ending

rapier predispositions stick

bygones target simulacrum remover