Bertolt Brecht

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was born on February 10, 1898, in Augsburg, a Bavarian city with a long commercial history, where his father managed a paper mill and his mother, a devout Protestant, raised him on Luther's Bible ^[1]. The household was comfortably middle class, Catholic on the father's side and Protestant on the mother's, and the young Brecht later credited the cadences of the Luther Bible with shaping his German prose more than any literary model ^[2].

At the Augsburg Realgymnasium he was a restless, unimpressed student who began publishing poems and short prose in local papers while still a teenager. In 1916, during the First World War, he nearly faced expulsion after writing a school essay that treated the Horatian line about the sweetness of dying for one's country with open skepticism ^[1]. The war pressed closer as he grew older. Enrolled at Munich University in 1917, nominally to study medicine, he spent more time on theatre criticism and cabaret than on coursework, and in 1918 he served briefly as a medical orderly in an Augsburg military hospital, an experience that hardened his lifelong distrust of patriotic rhetoric ^[2].

During these Augsburg and Munich years he wrote his first full plays, Baal and Drums in the Night, raw and deliberately unheroic works that announced a writer determined to strip the stage of sentiment ^[3].

Recognition came quickly once the war ended. Drums in the Night, staged in Munich in 1922, won Brecht the Kleist Prize, then the most prestigious award available to a young German dramatist, and critics began treating the 24 year old as the loudest new voice in Weimar theatre ^[3]. He moved to Berlin in 1924, worked briefly as a dramaturg for Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater, and gathered around himself a circle of collaborators, among them the writer Elisabeth Hauptmann, who contributed substantially to the work that carried his name ^[2].

The decisive breakthrough arrived on August 31, 1928, when The Threepenny Opera, written with the composer Kurt Weill and adapted from John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, opened at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin. Its jagged songs and cheerful cynicism about crime and respectability made it the biggest theatrical success of the Weimar Republic, and Mack the Knife eventually became one of the most recorded songs of the twentieth century ^[4].

In the same years Brecht was reading Marx seriously for the first time, and his politics moved sharply left. He began writing what he called Lehrstücke, spare teaching plays designed for performers rather than spectators, and with Weill produced the opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in 1930, a work whose Leipzig premiere was disrupted by Nazi protesters ^[3]. Anyone asking who was Bertolt Brecht at the end of the 1920s would have received two answers at once: a commercially triumphant man of the theatre, and a Marxist experimenter increasingly at odds with the society that applauded him.

The day after the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Brecht left Germany with his family. His books were among those burned publicly by the Nazis that May, and his German citizenship was revoked in 1935 ^[1]. There followed fifteen years of movement: Prague, Vienna, Zurich, then a longer stay in Denmark near Svendborg from 1933 to 1939, followed by Sweden and Finland as the German army advanced, and finally a crossing of the Soviet Union by rail to Vladivostok and a ship to California in 1941 ^[2].

Exile, paradoxically, produced his greatest plays. Between 1938 and 1945 he completed The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, works in which his theoretical rigor finally fused with characters of genuine dramatic weight ^[3]. Mother Courage, written in 1939 with the Second World War beginning, follows a canteen woman who lives off war and loses her three children to it, a study of how people fail to learn from catastrophe ^[5].

The American years were frustrating. Settled in Santa Monica among fellow emigres, Brecht sold one story to Hollywood, contributing to Fritz Lang's 1943 film Hangmen Also Die, but found little other film work and no real American audience for his plays ^[2]. In October 1947 he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee during its investigation of communism in Hollywood. He answered the committee's questions with slippery politeness, denied party membership, and flew to Europe the following day ^[1].

Any account of Bertolt Brecht achievements has to begin with epic theatre, the body of theory and practice he developed from the late 1920s onward. Against the tradition descending from Aristotle, in which spectators identify with characters and are carried along emotionally, Brecht wanted an audience that stayed alert, compared what it saw with what it knew, and left the theatre ready to change the world rather than reconciled to it ^[6]. His central technique was the Verfremdungseffekt, usually translated as the alienation or estrangement effect: songs interrupting action, visible lighting rigs, placards announcing what a scene will contain, actors presenting characters rather than disappearing into them ^[6].

The plays themselves are the second achievement. The Threepenny Opera remains in constant production nearly a century after its premiere. Mother Courage and Her Children is widely treated as one of the essential dramas of the twentieth century, and The Life of Galileo, which Brecht revised after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to sharpen its questions about scientists' responsibility, is a fixture of repertories in many languages ^[3][5]. Charles Laughton collaborated with Brecht on an English version of Galileo and played the title role in Los Angeles and New York in 1947 ^[2].

Brecht was also a major poet, something readers outside Germany often discover late. From the early Manual of Piety of 1927 to the Svendborg Poems written in Danish exile and the late Buckow Elegies, he produced a body of verse, terse, ironic, and musical, that some German critics rank above his plays ^[3]. Finally, the Berliner Ensemble, the company he founded in 1949, became a working laboratory for his methods; its touring productions in the 1950s, especially the London visits, reshaped the ambitions of directors and playwrights across Europe ^[7].

Brecht's private life was tangled and has been examined closely by biographers. In 1922 he married the opera singer Marianne Zoff, with whom he had a daughter, Hanne. The marriage ended in divorce in 1927, and in 1929 he married the actress Helene Weigel, already the mother of his son Stefan; their daughter Barbara followed in 1930 ^[1]. He also had a son, Frank, born in 1919 to Paula Banholzer, an Augsburg girlfriend of his youth; Frank was killed serving in the German army on the Eastern Front in 1943 ^[2].

Weigel was far more than a spouse. One of the great stage actresses of her era, she created the role of Mother Courage in Brecht's own Berlin production of 1949, and her silent scream on hearing of her son's death became one of the most described moments in twentieth century theatre ^[5]. After Brecht died she ran the Berliner Ensemble until her own death in 1971 ^[7].

Brecht worked collaboratively to a degree unusual among canonical authors, and several of his closest collaborators were women with whom he was also romantically involved, including Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, who died in Moscow in 1941 during the flight to America, and the Danish actress Ruth Berlau. Scholars continue to argue about how credit for the plays should be divided, a debate John Fuegi's 1994 biography pushed into public view, though many specialists judged his conclusions overstated ^[2].

After leaving the United States, Brecht spent a year in Zurich, where Swiss theatres had premiered several of his exile plays during the war, before accepting an invitation to East Berlin in 1948 ^[1]. There, in January 1949, his production of Mother Courage at the Deutsches Theater, with Weigel in the lead, established him at the center of theatrical life in the new East German state, and later that year he and Weigel founded the Berliner Ensemble ^[7]. From 1954 the company had its own home in the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the house where The Threepenny Opera had triumphed a quarter century earlier.

His position in the German Democratic Republic was carefully hedged. He kept an Austrian passport, obtained in 1950, held the copyright to his works with a West German publisher, and maintained a bank account in Switzerland ^[2]. When workers rose against the government in June 1953, Brecht sent the regime a letter of qualified support, though his private notebooks and the sardonic late poem about the government dissolving the people and electing another show a far more skeptical mind ^[3]. In 1954 he accepted the Stalin Peace Prize from Moscow, and in 1955 he traveled there to receive it ^[1].

His health declined through the mid 1950s. While rehearsing Galileo for a planned London tour, Brecht died of a heart attack in East Berlin on August 14, 1956, at the age of 58. He was buried, as he wished, in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery, within sight of the window of his last apartment and near the grave of the philosopher Hegel ^[1].

Few dramatists of any era have exerted comparable influence on how theatre is made. The techniques of epic theatre passed into the common vocabulary of the stage, absorbed by directors and companies who share none of Brecht's politics, and the word Brechtian is now applied to any performance that admits its own artifice ^[6]. Playwrights as different as Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, Augusto Boal, and Heiner Müller worked in his shadow, and Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed built directly on Brechtian foundations ^[7].

The plays keep their place in the repertoire because they outrun the theory. Mother Courage returns to stages in every decade of war, Galileo is revived whenever science and power collide, and The Threepenny Opera survives translation into nearly every theatrical culture ^[5]. His poetry, meanwhile, has steadily gained standing in English through translations by Michael Hofmann, Tom Kuhn, and David Constantine, whose collected edition appeared in 2018 ^[3].

A Bertolt Brecht biography also has institutional monuments. The Berliner Ensemble still performs at the Schiffbauerdamm, the Brecht Weigel Museum preserves his final Berlin home, and his native Augsburg maintains his birth house as a memorial and hosts a recurring Brecht festival ^[8]. Among the basic Bertolt Brecht facts, perhaps the most telling is this: a writer who demanded that audiences never be comfortable has been made a classic, studied in schools worldwide, and argued over as fiercely as when he lived.