Bertolt Brecht

Born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht on February 10, 1898 in Augsburg, Germany, Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose ideas about theatre departed from the conventions of theatrical illusions. He died in August 14, 1956 in East Berlin of a heart attack at age 58.

Young Bertolt Brecht.

Until 1924, Brecht lived in Bavaria, where he was born, and studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Brecht was born to a catholic father and a protestant mother and had a comfortable middle class upbringing with strong religious influences, which made it into his work later in life. Previous to the advent of World War I, young Brecht found himself attracted to the literary arts, writing poetry as a boy and with some early poems published in 1913. However, he was a poor student and was nearly expelled from Augsburg Grammar School as a child.

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

He nearly joined the exodus of young German men who rushed to join the army in 1914, but his father recommended instead that he enroll in medical courses at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He studied medicine at the university from 1917 to 1921, with a brief interruption from 1917 to 1918 when he served as a medical orderly in the German army and at an army hospital.

During his time at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Brecht began writing theatre critic pieces for the school newspaper, and here he began writing his first plays. His first play was written during his attendance of Arthur Kutscher's theatre seminar. Kutscher had a reputation as a theatre guru, but Brecht was not impressed by him, going so far as to criticize one of Kutscher's favorite plays and writing his first play, Baal, on the same subject to prove he could write a better play on the same subject. Kutscher reportedly found the effort vile and nauseating.

From 1919 to 1921, Brecht wrote theatre criticism for a Socialist newspaper and was a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party. By 1922, Brecht began to have success in the theatre, with his second production in 1923 being equally successful.

In part to the deep disappointments brought on in the German youth at the end of the First World War and the country's capitulation, Brecht, along with many of his contemporaries, developed a strong antibourgeois attitude. His friend group further included members of the Dadaist movement, which aimed at destroying what it considered false standards of bourgeois art through derision and iconoclastic satire.

Karl Korsch.

During this time, Brecht is supposed to have also learned many elements of Marxism from Karl Korsch, a Marxist theoretician who had been a Communist member of the Reichstag until he was expelled from the German Communist Party in 1926. This led Bertolt Brecht to study the works of Karl Marx, which further increased his sympathies for the Communist cause and his criticisms of the Weimar Republic. Despite this, Brecht never joined the Communist party. Many of these ideas led to Brecht's theories around how theatre should be produced and viewed.

Many of the theories and ideas developed by Bertolt Brecht, including his directing style, have been considered to have changed theatre, with many of his influences still present in modern theatre. These ideas were drawn from his politics, and his desire for theatre to be highly political. He wanted to use theatre to spark an interest in his audience's perception of the world, rather than have his audience sit passively and get lost in a show's story, leading that same audience to think critically about the play and the world they lived in.

Brecht wanted his audiences to remain objective and unemotional during his plays so they could make rational judgements about the political aspects of his work. To do this, Brecht employed a range of theatrical devices that were come to be known as epic theatre, although later in Brecht's life he preferred to call it dialectical theatre. Epic theatre was an attempt to create a contrast to naturalistic or dramatic theatre, in which the audience is intended to be carried away by the lives and stories of the characters on stage, seeking identity and catharsis through the play.

Instead, in epic theatre, there was no attempt to lay down a tidy plot or story, but it left issues unresolved, in order to confront the audience with uncomfortable questions about he nature of reality and contemporary society. As an individual, Brecht was more interested in facts and reality rather than escapism, and his theatre and theatrical devices echoed this.

Example of techniques used to create verfremdungseffekt.

Usually translated as the alienation effect, or estrangement effect, the concept focuses on creating an estrangement or distance from the audience and the play. He did not want his audience to have any emotional attachment to his characters, and he did various things to break it. This term is usually distinguished from the Hegelian and Marxist notions of alienation (entfremdung) through its focus on theatre and its political and aesthetic impact on roles, actors, and audiences.

As an artist, Brecht was influenced by a range of writers and practitioners, including Chinese theatre, Karl Marx, and Charlie Chaplin. He also faced turmoil and opposition due to the strength of his personal voice in the world of theatre. However, he possessed an original talent and a unique theatrical style in which he expressed those views. Beyond writing his plays, Brecht was also an accomplished director and was influenced in part by fellow German theatre director Erwin Piscator. Both men were the foremost practitioners of epic theatre.

In his early plays, Brecht experimented with Dadaism and expressionism, while his later work developed a style more suited to his individual vision. He detested Aristotelian drama and the attempts to lure spectators into a trance-like state and identification with the hero. This led to the development of many of his techniques and his desire for the audience to retain their critical detachment.

Image from Trommeln in der Nacht.

Bertolt Brecht's first production came in 1922 with his first success for his play Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night). This play, the second Brecht wrote, already showed some of Brecht's later theatrical theories, as banners hung through the auditorium instructing the audience to not become too emotionally involved. The play premiered as the Munich Kammerspiele in 1922, and drew rave reviews culminating in Brecht earning the Kleist Prize, Germany's highest award for dramatic writing.

In 1923, Brecht produced his play Baal, and was the director of the play. During its production, Brecht acted in disregard to the original text, often rewriting lines, scenes, acts, and insisted actors learn them immediately. This followed with productions in 1924 of the Im Dickicht der Städte (In the Jungle of Cities) at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater and an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II at the Prussian State Theatre. Following these productions, Brecht moved to Berlin, which he deemed necessary to continue his dramatic career.

Following this, Brecht produced a string of well-received plays, with the most popular being Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) which was adapted from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera with composer Kurt Weill. By the end of the decade, and at the beginning of the second, Brecht's plays became increasingly political, which was in part evidenced by the Brecht and Weill collaboration Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) which was produced in 1930 and, when it premiered in Leipzig, caused an uproar with members of the Nazi party protesting the play in the audience.

Following this, in 1932, Brecht began working on a script for a semi-documentary feature-length film about the suffering caused by the then-rampant mass unemployment that plagued Germany. The film, Kuhle Wampe, was effective in its humor and offered insight into the final years of Weimar Republic. The following year, 1933, the Nazi party was voted into power, and the Reichstag building burnt down. And in this year, Brecht fled Germany and went into exile, in Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, and Finland. His plays were subsequently banned in Germany and the Nazi party formally removed his citizenship, leaving him a stateless citizen.

Image from Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder.

During this early stage of his exile, Brecht wrote a series of plays, including Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo) and Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children). And despite the later popularity and success of these plays, some critics believe it was not until Brecht settled into Santa Monica, California, in 1941 and during his next six years living in America that he wrote some of his most mature works, including Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechwan), and Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle). However, Brecht during this time had no theatre available to him in which to rehearse and perform his plays.

In 1947, after living in America for six years, Bertolt Brecht came to the awareness of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Ostensibly, this committee was against communism and its potential influence on America, but it also targeted intellectuals. The committee used is subpoena power as a weapon and called high-profile hearings of individuals before congress. This committee has been compared to a witch hunt that contributed to the fear, mistrust, and repression that existed during the anticommunist hysteria in the 1940s and 1950s.

Bertolt Brecht at his hearing in September 1947.

During his hearings before HUAC in September 1947, where he was accused of being a communist living in America, Brecht was supposed to have performed some of his best acting during these hearings. He pretended he had poor English-speaking skills, often calling for interpreters to assist him in understanding the questions asked of him, and stumbled his way through deliberately vague responses.

During his time in California, Brecht tried to become a Hollywood screenwriter, but his concepts were usually dismissed by Hollywood producers. His only comparative success came in the Hollywood film Hangmen Also Die in 1943. But, following his hearings, Brecht left the United States for Zurich, where he spent a year, working on his play Die Antigone des Sophokles (Antigone-Modell) which was adapted from Hulderlin's translation of Sophocles. In 1949, Brecht left Zurich for East Berlin. This was initially to stage Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder at Reinhardt's old Deutsches Theater, and after which Brecht formed his own company, the Berliner Ensemble, and signaled his permanent return to Berlin.

Despite being often suspected in eastern Europe due to his unorthodox aesthetic theories and denigrated or boycotted in the West for his Communist opinions, Brecht still enjoyed success, such as at the Paris Theatre des Nations in 1955, and receiving in the same year a Stalin Peace Prize, before dying of a heart attack the next year.

As noted above, Bertolt Brecht began writing poetry as young as fourteen, and theatre reviews once he was in school, before he began writing for theatre. Further, he found influence and had admiration for Wedekind, Rimbaud, Villon, and Kipling. Overall, he wrote a wide variety of poetry, including occasional poems, poems he set to music and performed, songs and poems for his plays, personal poems recording anecdotes and thoughts, and political poems. While Brecht, in his return to Berlin in 1949, slowed his production of plays, he did write some of his most famous poems during these years.

As early as 1917, while at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Bertolt Brecht began writing reviews and criticism of theatre. From 1919 to 1921, he continued to write theatre criticism for a Socialist newspaper. But his most fertile time for most of his theoretical essays and dialogues, and many of his other prose work, came between 1937 and 1941 during his years in exile.

Helen Weigel.

In 1922, Brecht found himself in the spotlight for his first produced play, and he quickly married opera singer and actress Marianne Zoff. In the following year, their daughter, Hanne Hiob was born, and herself would become a famous German actress. In 1924, when Bertolt Brecht moved to Berlin, he was known to have had several romantic affairs, some of which brought him children. By 1927, Brecht and Marianne Zoff were divorced. By 1929, he married Helene Weigel, who had already had a son with Brecht, Stefan. And the new couple followed this with a daughter, Barbara, who was born shortly after the wedding, and who, like Brecht's other daughter, would become an actress. Further, Barbara also inherited all of Brecht's literary work on his death.