Home > Bertolt Brecht

1 His life and career

Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, studied medicine and worked briefly as an orderly in a hospital in Munich during World War I. After the war he moved to Berlin where an influential critic, Herbert Ihering , brought him to the attention of a public longing for modern theater. Already in Munich his first two plays, Baal and Drums in the Night, had been performed, and he got to know Erich Engel , a director who worked with him off and on for the rest of his life. In Berlin, In the Jungle of the Cities starring Fritz Kortner and directed by Engel became his first success.

During the postwar socialistFor information on mainstream political parties using the term "Socialist", see Social democracy and Democratic socialism For the governments of the USSR, the PRC, and others, see: Communist state Other variants of Socialism include Marxism, Communism, an governments and then the Weimar RepublicThe period of German history from 1919 to 1933 is known as the Weimar Republic (in German Weimarer Republik ). It is named after the city of Weimar, where a national assembly convened to produce a new constitution after Germany's defeat in World War I., Brecht met and began to work with Hanns EislerHanns Eisler ( July 6, 1898 September 6, 1962) was a German and Austrian composer. Eisler was born in Leipzig where his father, Rudolf Eisler, was a professor of philosophy. In 1901 the family moved to Vienna. During World War I Eisler served as a front-l -- the composer with whom he shared the closest friendship throughout his life. He also met Helene Weigel , who would become his second wife and accompany him through exile and for the rest of his life. His first book of poems, Hauspostille won a literary prize.

Brecht formed a writing collective which was prolific and very influential. Elisabeth Hauptmann , Margarete Steffin , Emil Burri , Ruth Berlau and others worked with Brecht and produced the multiple Lehrstücke (learning plays) which were an attempt at a new dramaturgy for participants rather than passive audiences. These addressed themselves to the massive worker arts organisation that existed in Germany and AustriaAustria is a landlocked country in Central Europe, a federation of nine states. Austria is bordered by Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the in the 1920sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s Years: 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 Events and trends Technology John Logie Baird invents the first working t. So did his first great play, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, which attempted to portray the drama in financial transactions. He also worked in the theaters of Max ReinhardtMax Reinhardt (born September 9, 1873 in Baden bei Wien; died October 31, 1943 in New York) was an influential Austrian director and actor. His was of jewish ancestry, and his original name was Max Goldmann. From 1902 until the begin of Nazi rule in 1933, and Erwin Piscator .

This collective also created the story for, and Brecht wrote songs and engaged Kurt WeillKurt Weill ( March 2, 1900 April 3, 1950) was a German composer. He was born in Dessau, Germany and died in New York. After growing up in a religious Jewish family in Germany, Weill fled Nazi Germany in March 1933. He was seen as a particular threat by th to compose, The Threepenny OperaThe Threepenny Opera Die Dreigroschenoper was a revolutionary piece of musical theatre written by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht in collaboration with the composer Kurt Weill in 1928. It directly challenges the audience by breaching the " fourth wall -- the largest hit in Berlin of the 1920s and a renewing influence on the musical worldwide. This was followed by Mahagonny, less of a success and eclipsed by the dawn of fascist rule in Germany. After Adolf Hitler won the elections, Brecht was in great danger and left for a long exile — in Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, then England and finally in the United States.

In exile and in active resistance of the Fascist movement, Brecht wrote his most famous plays: Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, Puntila and Matti, his Hired Man, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Good Person of Sezuan, among many other works. He also wrote many poems which have continued to attract notice to this day. He participated some in screenplays for Hollywood, for instance Hangmen also Die, but had no real success or pleasure in this.

After World War II he was hounded by the HUAC ( House Unamerican Activities Committee) and left the United States. He came to Switzerland where he adapted Antigone and then was invited to Berlin by East Germany. Horrified at the reinstatement of Nazis into the government of the western portion of Germany, Brecht made his home in the east. He had not been a member of the communist party, but had been deeply schooled in Marxism by the dissident communist Karl Korsch. He saw the goal of communism as the only reliable antidote to militarist fascism and spoke out against the remilitarisation of the west and the division of Germany.

He was almost as uncomfortable for his East German hosts as for the West Germans across the iron curtain. Brecht was a scruffily dressed person and he invented designer stubble - he always looked as though he had shaved three days earlier. As a result, security guards once excluded him from a reception being given in Berlin in his own honour.

Brecht also found the experience of living in a Stalinist state far different than what he imagined in exile, when he composed works such as Die Massnahmen ["The Measures"] that glorified the self-denying infallible vanguard party [or, more concretely in Die Massnahmen, that justified the stupid political decisions made by the Comintern that resulted in the spectacular failure of the revolution attempted in Shanghai in 1927]. Brecht's showed his more sober appreciation of the impossibility of socialism without democracy in a piece he wrote while living in Berlin in the 1950s, after the state suppressed a workers' revolt in 1953:

Die Lösung

The Solution

Although he lived in the DDR, Brecht's work was never published there - the copyright was held by a Swiss company and he received valuable hard currency remittances. He used to drive around East Berlin in a prewar DKW car - a rare luxury in the austere divided capital.

The Berliner Ensemble, that world famous theater which toured and was the most influential theater of the postwar decades, was given to his wife: the actress Helene Weigel. She ran it as a theater devoted primarily to the plays and praxes developed by Brecht until her death in 1971. Brecht wrote few plays in his last years in Berlin, none of them as famous. Some of his most famous poems though, including the "Buckower Elegies", were from this time.

Brecht died an early death at the age of 58 in 1956 (of a heart attack), leaving a legacy which has been taken up by nearly every country in the world, particularly those where political activity is occurring. One of his wishes for his gravestone was: "He made suggestions; we took them on." In fact, on his grave at the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder Cemetery in Berlin there is only a boulder with his name.

Had he wanted to use it, one of his late poems could have served as a fitting epitaph: