While there is still confusion about the exact causes of the Thirty Years' War, everyone can recognize how horrible and devastating it was. Huge numbers of civilians lost their lives in besieged cities like Magdeburg, and those who survived lost everything else. The soldiers who sacked the city, described in the diary of the city mayor Otto von Guericke, completely ignored the suffering of ordinary civilians in an attempt to gain as much wealth and pleasure as possible from pillaging and rape. As Brecht tries to show through his work Mother Courage and Her Children, soldiers are not the only people whose actions based on economic attitudes and self-interest can harm others. Brecht's depiction of the siege in the fifth scene of his play, instead of providing a large-scale picture of the city's destruction, provides a closer example and shows how even the selfish actions of ordinary civilians can be destructive. Brecht is known for “epic theatre,” a didactic form of drama in which the audience is supposed to be aware that they are watching a play. He uses "denaturalization," an element of epic theater that aids his didactic purposes, to call attention to things he sees as unnatural and to distance the audience from the characters so that instead of feeling for them, the audience thinks of the their situation. . Brecht wants the audience to think so that they can understand and apply the message he wants the play to convey. By using his close depiction of the destruction of the siege to focus on the selfish actions of his protagonist, Mother Courage, and by making her selfishness appear unnatural by using elements of epic theatre, Brecht seeks to warn his audience about the destructive consequences of self-interest individual personnel, and influence them to respond to war with a collective effort. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Mother Courage uses her economic attitudes and self-interest to legitimize her incredibly selfish response to the effects of the war around her. Brecht denaturalizes his actions by satirizing his selfishness by exaggerating and juxtaposing his losses with those of other characters. She makes her responses seem absurd, so the audience sees her self-interested actions as unnatural and is therefore unable to sympathize with her. Brecht hopes that if they cannot feel for a character, they will instead think about the character's actions and be able to act on what they learn. Although his actions are very different from those committed by the soldiers described in von Guericke's diary, Courage and the soldiers are both acting out of some form of self-interest, economic or otherwise. Both she and the soldiers see the siege as something to profit from, the soldiers from plundering, and courage from following the fight and selling goods to those who need and can afford them. While Brecht doesn't necessarily compare her directly to the soldiers, he is trying to get his audience to see her in a similar way, as selfish and indifferent to the misfortune of others. After the Catholic army (which Courage followed) wins the siege of Magdeburg, he comes across a ruined house and a dying peasant family. Seeing this, the chaplain she has been traveling with asks her to save linen to help swaddle the family. Starting with a sarcastic refusal to help by saying "What should I do, tear off the good officers' shirts to bandage the farmers?" (Brecht 58), he goes on to explain that it won't helpthe farmers because "they will never pay... because they have nothing" (58). Courage shows that his economic attitude is of extreme self-interest. He will give absolutely nothing if he has nothing to gain from doing so. His selfishness is clearest in the lines "I am giving nothing... I must think of myself" (59) and in his final response: "I have had nothing but losses from your victory" (60). While emphasizing his strong refusal to help, Brecht makes these extreme reactions seem absurd to the audience, considering that Courage's "losses" amount to only four officer's shirts. When compared to farmers' losses, which include their home and business, at least a limb, and perhaps the lives of their family members, Courage's losses seem insignificant. Despite this, she laments more bitterly than the peasants for what she has lost. The only complaint from either is made when the man states the fact that his arm has been torn open. While the farmers bleed to death in front of their ruined house, Courage withholds the shirts needed to make the bandages because it would not be good for business and he would lose half a florin for each shirt. Courage is also shown to be extremely selfish when he forces Kattrin to return the child to his dying mother, telling her to "give him back to his mother... before you get attached and I have to spend hours taking him away from her" (60 ), demonstrating that he only thinks about herself in the face of the misery of others. He shows no sympathy for the child and his family, nor any concern for his well-being. Brecht makes Mother Courage respond to the misfortunes of the defeated civilian family in such an extreme way that it denaturalizes the scene. The goal of denaturalization in epic theater is to make a scene appear unrealistic, and therefore unreliable, so that the audience thinks rather than feels. This is done so that the audience can see the message of the work more clearly without their own feelings getting in the way. Brecht also does the same with things that he sees as unnatural and that he wants the audience to see as unnatural. If audience members sympathize with something or see something as normal, he wants them to examine why they feel that way and why they allowed it to become normal. In this scene, Brecht does the same with Courage's responses to the war because he wants the audience to see that reactions like his are not natural ways of reacting. She portrays Courage as unnaturally and incredibly selfish, so the audience is unable to feel sympathy for her. This way, the audience will think about their self-interested actions and learn from their consequences instead of feeling for Courage's "losses". However, since this play was written during World War II and performed in Germany soon after the war ended, there was always a risk that the intended audience, with the war fresh in mind, would still end up relating to the losses of characters such as the farmers and having their thoughts about the play's message muddled with sympathy and emotion. To try to ensure that the audience understands the play's message about self-interest rather than feelings for the characters, Brecht adds further elements of denaturalization to the scene. One thing he does throughout the show to achieve this is add humor or nonsensical statements during sad or serious moments to interrupt the audience's emotions. In this scene, one of the first things a soldier says to Courage is "The general allowed only one hour of plunder... It would be inhuman to allow more, he said" (58), a strange statement that creates a dark sense of humor about the destructive situation, incongruously implying that an hour of looting was insomehow “human”. Its strange logic and inappropriate positioning should surprise audiences. Another darkly humorous and logically nonsensical moment is when the same soldier says "Too bad they don't convert" (59) regarding the dying family, as if conversion would save them. The public should immediately see something wrong with this line and realize that if the peasants had been Catholic, this would not have somehow prevented them from being wounded or their home destroyed by artillery. They were not given the opportunity to convert and so they were attacked because they refused. They were attacked because the army's goal was to conquer their city and they happened to live on that street. The audience may think this, and their concerns are addressed when it is revealed that the farmers are actually Catholic, like the army that attacked them. It obviously didn't help farmers in this situation. Illogical and inappropriately placed jokes like these create a denaturalizing effect in the same way as strangely structured and performed songs in other scenes. They are intended to give the audience a little shock by interrupting the action of the show with absurdity, so that the audience is not lulled into accepting what they see on stage as a true depiction of war. Brecht also upsets the audience's expectations by leaving the fate of the peasants ambiguous. The scene ends and the characters move on while all we know about the family is that their home is destroyed and the Chaplain still hasn't been able to stop their bleeding. The last line of this scene is "Someone's still inside" (60), leaving the scene purposely ambiguous. The public will never know what happened to the person left inside and whether the farmers and their child will live or die. This interrupts the flow of the play and would upset the audience, who expect to know what happens to the characters. Furthermore, by removing the peasants before they can die or be saved, Brecht gives the audience less emotion to sympathize with. Things like this, similar to Courage's satire of selfishness, are supposed to make the show seem unrealistic to remind the audience that they are watching something staged, not an accurate depiction of real events. Brecht provides this highly denaturalized depiction of the siege of Magdeburg to ensure that the message he intended is not lost on the audience due to his feelings. The message Brecht wants the audience to think about in this scene is that there are destructive consequences that come from acting as an individual through self-interest and based on economic attitudes. Working as a collective to respond to war is the best way to help. Von Guericke's diary provides a more general picture of the siege and how personal interests influenced the citizens of Magdeburg. He describes the devastatingly high number of civilian deaths and describes the huge piles of bodies left after the siege and sacking of the city. It tells of the families left in ruins after greedy soldiers took everything they had and of the women the soldiers violated. Von Guericke may not have intended to give this specific message, but his diary shows that soldiers' self-interest has horrible effects on civilian lives. Brecht's depiction of the siege provides a closer example of the damage done to the civilians of Magdeburg with the description of the peasant family. However, the focus of his representation is on the harm that the self-interest of other civilians and their refusal to work collectively can cause, rather than on the harm done by the soldiers. There.