Bavaria (1898–1924) Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (as a child known as Eugen) was born on 10 February 1898 in
Augsburg, Germany, the son of Berthold Friedrich Brecht (1869–1939) and his wife Sophie, née Brezing (1871–1920). Brecht's mother was a devout
Protestant and his father a
Roman Catholic (who had been persuaded to have a Protestant wedding). The modest house where he was born is today preserved as a Brecht Museum. His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914. At Augsburg, his maternal grandparents lived in the neighbouring house. They were
Pietists and his grandmother influenced Bertolt Brecht and his brother
Walter considerably during their childhood. Due to his grandmother's and his mother's influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would have a life-long effect on his writing. From his mother came the "dangerous image of the self-denying woman" that recurs in his drama. Brecht's home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied. At school in Augsburg he met
Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a life-long creative partnership. Neher designed many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helped to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their
epic theatre. When Brecht was 16,
World War I broke out. Initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates "swallowed by the army". On his father's recommendation, Brecht sought to avoid being conscripted into the army by exploiting a loophole which allowed for medical students to be deferred. He subsequently registered for a medical course at the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he enrolled in 1917. There he studied drama with
Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and
cabaret star
Frank Wedekind. From July 1916, Brecht's newspaper articles began appearing under the new name "Bert Brecht" (his first theatre criticism for the
Augsburger Volkswille appeared in October 1919). Brecht was
drafted into military service in the autumn of 1918, only to be posted back to Augsburg as a medical orderly in a military
VD clinic; the war ended a month later. In 1920 Brecht's mother died. Some time in either 1920 or 1921, Brecht took a small part in the political cabaret of the Munich comedian
Karl Valentin. Brecht's diaries for the next few years record numerous visits to see Valentin perform. Brecht compared Valentin to
Charlie Chaplin, for his "virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology". Writing in his
Messingkauf Dialogues years later, Brecht identified Valentin, along with Wedekind and
Büchner, as his "chief influences" at that time: Brecht's first full-length play,
Baal (written 1918), arose in response to an argument in one of Kutscher's drama seminars, initiating a trend that persisted throughout his career of creative activity that was generated by a desire to counter another work (both others' and his own, as his many adaptations and re-writes attest). "Anyone can be creative," he quipped, "it's rewriting other people that's a challenge." Brecht completed his second major play,
Drums in the Night, in February 1919. Between November 1921 and April 1922 Brecht made acquaintance with many influential people in the Berlin cultural scene. Amongst them was the playwright
Arnolt Bronnen with whom he established a joint venture, the Arnolt Bronnen / Bertolt Brecht Company. Brecht changed the spelling of his first name to Bertolt to rhyme with Arnolt. In 1922 while still living in Munich, Brecht came to the attention of an influential Berlin critic,
Herbert Ihering: "At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany's literary complexion overnight"—he enthused in his review of Brecht's first play to be produced,
Drums in the Night—"[he] has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision. [...] It is a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column." In November it was announced that Brecht had been awarded the prestigious
Kleist Prize (intended for unestablished writers and probably Germany's most significant literary award, until it was abolished in 1932) for his first three plays (
Baal,
Drums in the Night, and
In the Jungle, although at that point only
Drums had been produced). The citation for the award insisted that: "[Brecht's] language is vivid without being deliberately poetic, symbolical without being over literary. Brecht is a dramatist because his language is felt physically and in the round." That year he married the Viennese opera singer
Marianne Zoff. Their daughter,
Hanne Hiob, born in March 1923, was a successful German actress. That September, a job as assistant
dramaturg at
Max Reinhardt's
Deutsches Theater—at the time one of the leading three or four theatres in the world—brought him to Berlin.
Weimar Republic Berlin (1925–1933) In 1923 Brecht's marriage to Zoff began to break down (though they did not divorce until 1927). Brecht had become involved both with
Elisabeth Hauptmann and with Helene Weigel. Brecht and Weigel's son,
Stefan, was born in October 1924. In his role as dramaturg, Brecht had much to stimulate him but little work of his own. Reinhardt staged
Shaw's
Saint Joan,
Goldoni's
Servant of Two Masters (with the improvisational approach of the ''
commedia dell'arte'' in which the actors chatted with the prompter about their roles), and
Pirandello's
Six Characters in Search of an Author in his group of Berlin theatres. A new version of Brecht's third play, now entitled
Jungle: Decline of a Family, opened at the Deutsches Theater in October 1924, but was not a success. {{quote box|bgcolor=#c6dbf7|quote=In the asphalt city I'm at home. From the very start Provided with every last sacrament: With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy To the end mistrustful, lazy and content. At this time Brecht revised his important "transitional poem", "Of Poor BB". In 1925, his publishers provided him with Elisabeth Hauptmann as an assistant for the completion of his collection of poems,
Devotions for the Home (
Hauspostille, eventually published in January 1927). She continued to work with him after the publisher's commission ran out. In 1925 in
Mannheim the artistic exhibition ("
New Objectivity") had given its name to the new post-
Expressionist movement in the German arts. With little to do at the Deutsches Theater, Brecht began to develop his
Man Equals Man project, which was to become the first product of "the 'Brecht collective'—that shifting group of friends and collaborators on whom he henceforward depended". This collaborative approach to artistic production, together with aspects of Brecht's writing and style of theatrical production, mark Brecht's work from this period as part of the movement. The collective's work "mirrored the artistic climate of the middle 1920s",
Willett and
Manheim argue: with their attitude of (or New Matter-of-Factness), their stressing of the
collectivity and downplaying of the individual, and their new cult of
Anglo-Saxon imagery and sport. Together the "collective" would go to fights, not only absorbing their terminology and ethos (which permeates
Man Equals Man) but also drawing those conclusions for the theatre as a whole which Brecht set down in his theoretical essay "Emphasis on Sport" and tried to realise by means of the harsh lighting, the boxing-ring stage and other anti-illusionistic devices that henceforward appeared in his own productions. In 1925, Brecht saw two films which influenced him significantly:
Chaplin's
The Gold Rush and
Eisenstein's
Battleship Potemkin. Brecht had compared
Valentin to Chaplin, and the two of them provided models for Galy Gay in
Man Equals Man. Brecht later wrote that Chaplin "would in many ways come closer to the
epic than to the dramatic theatre's requirements". The two men met several times during Brecht's stay in the United States, and discussed Chaplin's
Monsieur Verdoux project, which it is possible Brecht influenced. In 1926 a series of short stories was published under Brecht's name, though Hauptmann was closely associated with writing them. Following the production of
Man Equals Man in Darmstadt that year, Brecht began studying
Marxism and
socialism in earnest, under the supervision of Hauptmann. "When I read
Marx's
Capital", a note by Brecht reveals, "I understood my plays." Marx was, it continues, "the only spectator for my plays I'd ever come across." Inspired by developments in the
USSR, Brecht wrote a number of
agitprop plays, praising the
bolshevik collectivism (replaceability of each member of the collective in
Man Equals Man) and the
Red Terror (
The Decision). {{quote box|bgcolor=#c6dbf7|width=25%|quote=For us, man portrayed on the stage is significant as a social function. It is not his relationship to himself, nor his relationship to God, but his relationship to society which is central. Whenever he appears, his class or social stratum appears with him. His moral, spiritual or sexual conflicts are conflicts with society. In 1927 Brecht became part of the "
dramaturgical collective" of
Erwin Piscator's first company, which was designed to tackle the problem of finding new plays for the group's "epic, political, confrontational, documentary theatre". Brecht collaborated with Piscator during the period of the latter's landmark productions, ''
Hoppla, We're Alive! (September 1927) by Toller, Rasputin
(November 1927), The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik'' (January 1928), and (April 1928) by
Lania. Brecht's most significant contribution was to the adaptation of
Jaroslav Hašek's unfinished episodic comic novel
Schweik (1921-1923), which he later described as a "montage from the novel". The Piscator productions influenced Brecht's ideas about staging and design, and alerted him to the radical potentials offered to the
"epic" playwright by the development of stage technology (particularly projections). What Brecht took from Piscator "is fairly plain, and he acknowledged it" Willett suggests: The emphasis on Reason and didacticism, the sense that the new subject matter demanded a
new dramatic form, the use of songs to
interrupt and comment: all these are found in his notes and essays of the 1920s, and he bolstered them by citing such Piscatorial examples as the step-by-step narrative technique of
Schweik and the oil interests handled in ('Petroleum resists the five-act form'). Brecht was struggling at the time with the question of how to dramatize the complex economic relationships of modern
capitalism in his unfinished project
Joe P. Fleischhacker (which Piscator's theatre announced in its programme for the 1927–28 season). It wasn't until his
Saint Joan of the Stockyards (written between 1929 and 1931) that Brecht solved the problem. In 1928 he discussed with Piscator plans to stage
Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar and Brecht's own
Drums in the Night, but the productions did not materialize. The year 1927 also saw the first collaboration between Brecht and the young composer
Kurt Weill (1900-1950). Together they began to develop Brecht's
Mahagonny project, along thematic lines of the biblical
Cities of the Plain but rendered in terms of the 's , which had informed Brecht's previous work. They produced
The Little Mahagonny for a music festival in July, as what Weill called a "stylistic exercise" in preparation for the large-scale piece. From that point on
Caspar Neher became an integral part of the collaborative effort, with words, music and visuals conceived in relation to one another from the start. The model for their mutual articulation lay in Brecht's newly formulated principle of the "
separation of the elements", which he first outlined in the theoretical notes "
The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre" (1930). The principle, a variety of
montage, proposed by-passing the "great struggle for supremacy between words, music and production" (as Brecht put it) by showing each as self-contained, independent works of art that
adopt attitudes towards one another. In 1930 Brecht married Weigel; their daughter Barbara Brecht was born soon after the wedding. She also became an actress and would later share the
copyrights of Brecht's work with her siblings. Brecht formed a writing-collective which became prolific and very influential.
Elisabeth Hauptmann,
Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri,
Ruth Berlau and others worked with Brecht and produced the multiple
teaching plays (), which attempted to create a new
dramaturgy for participants rather than for passive audiences. The teaching plays addressed themselves to the massive worker-arts organisation that existed in Germany and Austria in the 1920s. So did Brecht's first great play,
Saint Joan of the Stockyards, which attempts to portray the drama involved in financial transactions. The collective adapted
John Gay's ''
The Beggar's Opera'' (1728), with Brecht's lyrics set to music by
Kurt Weill. This work,
The Threepenny Opera (, 1928), became the biggest hit in Berlin of the 1920s and a renewing influence on the
musical worldwide. One of
The Threepenny Opera's most famous lines underscored the hypocrisy of conventional morality imposed by the Church, working in conjunction with the established order, in the face of working-class hunger and deprivation: The success of
The Threepenny Opera was followed by the quickly thrown-together
Happy End (1929). It was a personal and a commercial failure. At the time the book was purported to be by the mysterious Dorothy Lane (now known to be Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht's secretary and close collaborator). Brecht only claimed authorship of the song texts. Brecht would later use elements of
Happy End as the germ for his
Saint Joan of the Stockyards, a play that would never see the stage in Brecht's lifetime.
Happy End's score by Weill produced many Brecht/Weill hits like "Der Bilbao-Song" and "Surabaya-Jonny". The masterpiece of the Brecht/Weill collaborations,
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (), caused an uproar when it premiered in 1930 in Leipzig, with Nazis in the audience protesting. The
Mahagonny opera would premiere later in Berlin in 1931 as a triumphant sensation. Brecht spent the last years (1930–1933) of the
Weimar-era in Berlin working with his "collective" on the . These were a group of plays driven by morals, music and Brecht's budding epic theatre. The often aimed at educating workers on socialist issues.
The Measures Taken (, 1930) was scored by
Hanns Eisler. In addition, Brecht worked on a script for a semi-documentary feature-film about the human impact of mass unemployment,
Kuhle Wampe (1932), which was directed by
Slatan Dudow. This striking film is notable for its subversive humour, outstanding
cinematography by
Günther Krampf, and Hanns Eisler's dynamic musical contribution. It still provides a vivid insight into Berlin during the last years of the
Weimar Republic.
California and World War II (1933–1945) Fearing persecution, Brecht fled
Nazi Germany in February 1933, just after
Hitler took power. Following brief spells in Prague, Zurich and Paris, he and Weigel accepted an invitation from journalist and author
Karin Michaëlis to move to Denmark. The Brechts first stayed with Michaëlis at her house on the small island of
Thurø close to the island of
Funen. They later bought their own house in
Svendborg on Funen. This Svendborg house at Skovsbo Strand 8 became the Brecht family residence for the next six years. They often received guests there including
Walter Benjamin,
Hanns Eisler and
Ruth Berlau. Brecht also travelled frequently to Copenhagen, Paris, Moscow, New York and London for various projects and collaborations. When war seemed imminent in April 1939, he moved to Stockholm, where he remained for a year. After
Germany invaded Norway and
Denmark, Brecht left Sweden for Helsinki, Finland, where he awaited a pending visa to the United States. During this time he co-wrote the play
Mr Puntila and His Man Matti (
Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti) with
Hella Wuolijoki, with whom he lived in the Marlebäck manor house in
Iitti. , 1063 26th Street (2014) Upon receipt of the U.S. visa in May 1941, the Brecht family relocated to
Southern California. By the late 1930s, the West Side of Los Angeles had become a thriving expatriate colony of European intellectuals and artists. Because the colony included so many writers, directors, actors, and composers from German-speaking countries, it has been referred to as "Weimar on the Pacific". At the center of the émigré community was Brecht's old friend
Salka Viertel, whom he had known in the Berlin theatre world of the 1920s. From her house in Santa Monica Canyon, Viertel hosted frequent tea parties and
salons where European intellectuals could mingle with Hollywood luminaries. Brecht first met actor
Charles Laughton at a Viertel party, and it led to the two men collaborating on the English-language version of
Life of Galileo. Although Brecht was not enamored of life in the movie capital, he worked hard to find a place for himself as a screenwriter. For this film, Brecht's fellow expatriate, composer
Hanns Eisler, was nominated for an
Academy Award in the category of
Best Music Score. The fact that three refugee artists from Nazi Germany – Lang, Brecht and Eisler – collaborated to make the film exemplified the influence this generation of German exiles had on American culture.
Hangmen Also Die! turned out to be Brecht's only script that became a Hollywood film. The money he earned from selling the script enabled him to write
The Visions of Simone Machard,
Schweik in the Second World War and an adaptation of
Webster's
The Duchess of Malfi.
Cold War and final years in East Germany (1945–1956) At the onset of the
Cold War and "
Second Red Scare" in the U.S., Brecht was
blacklisted by movie studio bosses and investigated by the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Along with more than 40 other Hollywood writers, directors, actors and producers, he was subpoenaed in September 1947 by the HUAC. Although he was one of the 19 "unfriendly" witnesses who had declared ahead of time they would not cooperate with the House investigation, Brecht eventually decided to go before the committee and answer questions. He later explained he was following the advice of attorneys and did not want to delay his planned trip to Europe. On 30 October 1947, Brecht testified to the HUAC that he had never been a member of the
Communist Party. The remaining unfriendly witnesses who appeared before the HUAC at that time, the so-called
Hollywood Ten, declined on
First Amendment grounds to answer about their Communist Party affiliations and were cited for contempt. Brecht's decision to be a "cooperative" witness—albeit in an evasive way and providing no useful information—led to criticism of him, including accusations of betrayal. The day after his testimony, Brecht fled to Europe and never returned to the U.S. He lived in
Zurich, Switzerland, for a year. In February 1948 in the Swiss town of
Chur, Brecht staged an adaptation of
Sophocles'
Antigone, based on a translation by
Hölderlin. The play was published under the title
Antigonemodell 1948, accompanied by an essay on the importance of creating a "
non-Aristotelian" form of theatre. In 1949 he moved to
East Berlin and established his theatre company there, the
Berliner Ensemble. He retained
Austrian nationality which was granted in 1950, and his overseas bank accounts from which he received valuable hard currency remittances. The copyrights on his writings were held by a Swiss company. during the
International Workers' Day demonstrations in 1954 Though he was never a member of the Communist Party, Brecht had been schooled in
Marxism by the dissident communist
Karl Korsch. Korsch's version of the
Marxist dialectic influenced Brecht greatly, both his aesthetic theory and theatrical practice. Brecht received the
Stalin Peace Prize in 1954. His proximity to Marxist thought made him controversial in Austria, where his plays were
boycotted by directors and not performed for more than ten years. Brecht wrote very few plays in his final years in East Berlin, none of them as famous as his previous works. He dedicated himself to directing plays and developing the talents of the next generation of young directors and dramaturgs, such as Manfred Wekwerth,
Benno Besson and
Carl Weber. At this time he wrote some of his most celebrated poems, including the
Buckow Elegies. At first, Brecht apparently supported the measures taken by the East German government against the
East German uprising of 1953, which included the use of Soviet military force. In a letter from the day of the uprising to
SED First Secretary
Walter Ulbricht, Brecht wrote: "History will pay its respects to the revolutionary impatience of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The great discussion [exchange] with the masses about the speed of socialist construction will lead to a viewing and safeguarding of the socialist achievements. At this moment I must assure you of my allegiance to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany." Brecht's subsequent commentary on those events, however, offered a very different assessment. In one of the poems in the
Elegies, "
Die Lösung" (The Solution), a disillusioned Brecht wrote a few months later: After the uprising of the
17th of June The Secretary of the
Writers Union Had leaflets distributed in the
Stalinallee Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By increased work quotas. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?Brecht's involvement in
agitprop and his lack of clear condemnation of purges resulted in criticism from many contemporaries who became disillusioned with communism earlier.
Fritz Raddatz, who knew Brecht for a long time, described his friend's attitude as "broken", "escaping the problem of Stalinism", ignoring his friends being murdered in the USSR, and keeping silent during
show trials such as the
Slánský trial. After Khrushchev's "
Secret Speech"—the report read on the 20th Congress of the CPSU, which brought the crimes of Stalinism to the public—Brecht wrote poems critical of Stalin and his cult, unpublished during Brecht's lifetime. In the best-known of them, "The Tsar Spoke to Them" (
Der Zar hat mit ihnen gesprochen), Brecht mocked the epithets applied to Stalin as "the honoured murderer of the people" and compared his state terror policies with the ones of the Russian Tsar
Nicholas II, famous for violent suppression of a peaceful demonstration on "
Bloody Sunday" and later protests which resulted in the
Russian Revolution of 1905.
Death Brecht died on 14 August 1956 of a heart attack at the age of 58. He is buried in the
Dorotheenstadt Cemetery on
Chausseestraße in the
Mitte neighbourhood of Berlin, overlooked by the residence he shared with Helene Weigel. According to Stephen Parker, who reviewed Brecht's writings and unpublished medical records, Brecht contracted
rheumatic fever as a child, which led to an
enlarged heart, followed by life-long chronic heart failure and
Sydenham's chorea. A report of a
radiograph taken of Brecht in 1951 describes a badly diseased heart, enlarged to the left with a protruding
aortic knob and with seriously impaired pumping. Brecht's colleagues characterized him as being very nervous, and sometimes shaking his head or moving his hands erratically. This can be reasonably attributed to Sydenham's chorea, which is also associated with
emotional lability, personality changes,
obsessive-compulsive behavior, and
hyperactivity, which matched Brecht's behavior. "What is remarkable," wrote Parker, "is his capacity to turn abject physical weakness into peerless artistic strength,
arrhythmia into the rhythms of poetry, chorea into the choreography of drama." == Theory and practice of theatre ==