Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht, born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht on 10 February 1898 in Augsburg, Germany, was a playwright, poet, and theatre practitioner whose work as a book writer and composer brought him multiple Broadway credits and two Tony Award nominations. He died on 14 August 1956. The modest Augsburg house where he was born is preserved today as a Brecht Museum.

Brecht was the son of Berthold Friedrich Brecht, who worked for a paper mill and became its managing director in 1914, and Sophie Brecht, née Brezing, a devout Protestant. His father was Roman Catholic but agreed to a Protestant wedding. Brecht's grandmother and mother were both religious influences — his grandmother was a Pietist — and their guidance gave him a deep familiarity with the Bible that shaped his writing throughout his life. His mother also contributed what he identified as a recurring dramatic figure: the self-denying woman. During his school years in Augsburg, Brecht met Caspar Neher, a lifelong creative partner who later designed sets for many of his productions and helped define the visual language of their epic theatre work.

At sixteen, Brecht was nearly expelled from school after writing an essay dismissing the Latin phrase Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as cheap propaganda. His expulsion was prevented only through the intervention of a priest and substitute teacher, Romuald Sauer. To avoid military conscription, Brecht enrolled in a medical course at Munich University in 1917, where he studied drama under Arthur Kutscher. Kutscher introduced him to the work of playwright and cabaret performer Frank Wedekind, whom Brecht came to admire. Brecht was eventually drafted in autumn 1918 and served as a medical orderly in a military clinic in Augsburg; the war ended a month after his posting. From July 1916 onward, his writing began appearing under the name Bert Brecht, and his first theatre criticism for the Augsburger Volkswille was published in October 1919.

Brecht's first full-length play, Baal, was written in 1918, followed by Drums in the Night, completed in February 1919. In 1922, Berlin critic Herbert Ihering reviewed the premiere of Drums in the Night and declared that Brecht had changed Germany's literary complexion overnight. That same year, Brecht was awarded the Kleist Prize for his first three plays — Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle — and he married Viennese opera singer Marianne Zoff. Their daughter, Hanne Hiob, born in March 1923, became a successful German actress. Also in 1923, Brecht wrote the scenario for the short slapstick film Mysteries of a Barbershop, directed by Erich Engel and starring Karl Valentin, now regarded as one of the most significant films in German film history. In 1924, Brecht collaborated with novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger on an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, which marked a milestone in his early theatrical development. That year he also moved to Berlin.

During the Weimar Republic period, Brecht collaborated with Elisabeth Hauptmann and composer Kurt Weill on The Threepenny Opera and began a lifelong working relationship with composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought, he wrote didactic works known as Lehrstücke and became a leading theorist of epic theatre, a form he later preferred to call dialectical theatre, developing the concept of the Verfremdungseffekt. Among the figures he identified as chief influences during his formative years were Karl Valentin, Wedekind, and Büchner. He had also spent time in the early 1920s observing Valentin perform political cabaret in Munich, comparing the comedian's rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology to the work of Charlie Chaplin.

When the Nazi party came to power in 1933, Brecht left Germany, relocating first to Scandinavia. During World War II he moved to Southern California, where he worked as a screenwriter while under FBI surveillance. In 1947, he was among the first group of Hollywood film artists subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee over alleged Communist Party affiliations. The day after testifying before the committee, he departed for Europe. He eventually settled in East Berlin, where he and his wife, actress Helene Weigel, co-founded the theatre company Berliner Ensemble.

Brecht's Broadway credits as book writer and composer include The Good Woman of Setzuan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Happy End, Galileo, and Mother Courage and Her Children. His Broadway work earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Play in 1963 and a Tony Award nomination for Best Original Score in 1977.