Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht (February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956) was an influential German dramatist, stage director, and poet of the 20th century.

His life and career

Born in Augsburg, Bavaria, Brecht 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 had performances, 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 socialist governments and then the Weimar Republic, Brecht met and began to work with Hanns Eisler — 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 became prolific and very influential. Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri, Ruth Berlau and others worked with Brecht and produced the multiple Lehrstücke (teaching plays), which attempted a new dramaturgy for participants rather than passive audiences. These addressed themselves to the massive worker arts organisation that existed in Germany and Austria in the 1920s. 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 Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator.

This collective also created the story for, and Brecht wrote songs and engaged Kurt Weill to compose, The Threepenny Opera — 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 the HUAC (House Unamerican Activities Committee) hounded Brecht. As a result, he was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses and he 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 from what he imagined in exile, when he composed works such as Die Massnahme (The Measure), which glorified the self-denying infallible vanguard party, or, more concretely, in Die Massnahmen, which justified the political decisions made by the Comintern that resulted in the spectacular failure of the revolution attempted in Shanghai in 1927. Brecht 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"

Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni

Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands

In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen

Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk

Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe

Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit

Zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da

Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung

Löste das Volk auf und

Wählte ein anderes?

"The Solution"

After the uprising on June 17th

The Secretary of the Writers Union

Had flyers distributed in Stalin Way that said

That the People had frivolously

Thrown away the Government's Confidence

And that they could only regain it

Through Redoubled Work. But wouldn't it be

Simpler if the Government

Simply dissolved the People

And elected another?

Although he lived in the DDR, a copyright on his writings 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. In one of his last poems he ironically suggested that inscribing "He made suggestions; we took them on" on his gravestone would be "a way to honour everyone". 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:

Und ich dachte immer, die allereinfachsten Worte

Müssen genügen. Wenn ich sage, was ist

Muß jedem das Herz zerfleischt sein.

Daß du untergehst, wenn du dich nicht wehrst.

Das wirst du doch einsehn.

And I always thought that the simplest words

Must be enough. That when I say how things are

Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.

That you'll go down if you don't stand up.

Surely you see that.

Theory of theatre

Brecht created an influential theory of theatre, the so-called epic theatre: a play should, in his opinion, not cause the spectator to emotionally identify with the action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the actions on the stage. For this purpose, he employed the Verfremdungseffekt (often translated as alienation effect, but distancing effect is a more helpful parallel), the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. Such techniques including the direct address by actors to the audience, exaggerated, unnatural stage lighting, the use of song, and explanatory placards. He was famous for putting up signs with the writing "Glotzt nicht so romantisch!" ("Don't stare so romantically!") in one of his first stagings. This manner of production has proven both fruitful and confusing to those who try to produce his works or works in his style, and his theory of theatre has heavily influenced modern theatre, although it is believed that the effect of the epic theatre wears off after watching a few plays of this style. Some of his innovations, though, have become so commonly taken on that one hardly remembers the lack of them before him.

Another useful translation of Verfremdungseffekt is estrangement effect. This translation places an emphasis on how Brecht tried to make situations strange in order to distance the audience from the play.

Although Brecht's work and ideas about theatre are generally thought of as belonging to modernism, there is recent thought that he is the forerunner of contemporary postmodern theatre practice. This is particularly so because he questioned and dissolved many of the accepted practices of the theatre of his time and created a uniquely political theatre that involved the audience in meaning-making. Moreover, he was one of the first theatre practitioners to incorporate multimedia into the semiotics of theatre.

Major works

Because several Brecht works were not performed until long after they were written, the dates below show both the year they were written, followed by the year they were first produced.

• The Threepenny Opera (1928)
• He Who Says Yes (1929)
• Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1929/1959)
• He Who Says No (1930)
• The Measures Taken (1930)
• The Mother (Die Mutter) (1930/1932)
• Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930)
• The Exception and the Rule (1938)
  • The exeption and the rule is a short play about the exploitation of men. The characters undergo harsh treatment from a wealthy merchant with a lucrative interest in the imaginary deserts of Yahi.
• Galileo (Leben des Galilei) (1938/1943)
• Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) (1939/1941)
• The Good Person of Sezuan (1940)
• Puntila and His Man Matti (1941)
• The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941/1961)
• Caucasian Chalk Circle (Der kaukasische Kreidekreis) (1945)

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