Bertolt Brecht

• 1. Introduction

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  Bertolt Brecht walked out of a Congressional hearing in Washington on the 30th of October 1947, thanked by the committee chairman for his cooperation, and boarded a plane for Europe the very next morning. He never returned to the United States. That single day encapsulates something essential about the man: a lifetime of calculated survival, wry deflection, and restless motion across borders, all in service of a theatre he believed could change how audiences understood the world.

  Brecht was born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht on the 10th of February 1898, in Augsburg, Germany. By the time he died on the 14th of August 1956, he had written plays performed on nearly every continent, co-founded one of Europe's most important theatre companies, and developed a theory of drama that is still debated and practiced today. He had also fled two authoritarian governments, been investigated by a third, and spent decades navigating the contradiction between his Marxist convictions and the realities of life in Stalin's orbit.

  How did a middle-class boy from a Bavarian paper-mill family become the most influential playwright in twentieth-century European theatre? What drove him to build a creative method designed not to move audiences emotionally, but to make them think? And how did he manage, simultaneously, to be celebrated in East Berlin, surveilled by the FBI, and recorded by Bob Dylan?

• 2. Augsburg Roots

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  The modest house on Auf dem Rain in Augsburg where Brecht was born is preserved today as a museum. His father managed a paper mill and rose to its directorship in 1914. His mother Sophie was a devout Protestant; his father a Roman Catholic who had agreed to a Protestant wedding. The family home was comfortably middle class, whatever Brecht's later attempts to claim a peasant background implied.

  His grandmother and mother shaped him early. Both were Pietists, and their familiarity with the Bible gave Brecht a literary resource he drew on for the rest of his life. From his mother he absorbed what he later identified as the "dangerous image of the self-denying woman" that would recur across his plays for decades. From his grandmother came an intimacy with biblical cadences that made his language, as a critic would later write, something "you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column."

  At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, who became one of his closest lifelong collaborators, designing sets for many of Brecht's productions and helping build the visual language of epic theatre. Another early influence arrived when World War I broke out while Brecht was sixteen. Initially drawn in by the mood of the moment, he turned sharply against the war after watching his classmates get swallowed by the army. In 1915 he nearly got expelled for writing a school essay that called the Latin phrase Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori cheap propaganda, using the word Zweckpropaganda. A priest named Romuald Sauer intervened and prevented his expulsion.

  To avoid conscription, Brecht enrolled in a medical course at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen in 1917. There he studied drama under Arthur Kutscher, who introduced him to Frank Wedekind, an iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret performer whose influence stayed with Brecht. He was eventually drafted in the autumn of 1918, posted back to Augsburg as a medical orderly in a military clinic treating venereal disease. The war ended a month later.

• 3. Munich and the First Plays

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  Brecht's first full-length play, Baal, was written in 1918 out of an argument in one of Kutscher's drama seminars. That combative origin set a pattern: Brecht worked most productively when responding to, adapting, or contradicting existing material. He captured this himself with a line that became famous: "Anyone can be creative. It's rewriting other people that's a challenge." He completed his second major play, Drums in the Night, in February 1919.

  In 1920 his mother died. Around 1920 or 1921 he began attending the performances of the Munich comedian Karl Valentin, whose beer-hall sketches featured workers playing refractory employees who made their bosses look ridiculous. Valentin's partner, the popular comedian Liesl Karlstadt, padded herself out and spoke in a deep bass voice to play the employer. Brecht compared Valentin directly to Charlie Chaplin, praising his "virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology." Writing years later in his Messingkauf Dialogues, Brecht named Valentin, Wedekind, and Buchner as his chief influences at that time.

  In 1922, the Berlin critic Herbert Ihering wrote a review of Drums in the Night that announced: "At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany's literary complexion overnight." That November, Brecht was awarded the Kleist Prize for his first three plays: Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle. The Kleist Prize was probably Germany's most significant literary award for emerging writers until it was abolished in 1932. Brecht had not yet left Munich.

  He married the Viennese opera singer Marianne Zoff that same year. Their daughter, Hanne Hiob, was born in March 1923 and would grow into a successful German actress. In 1923 Brecht also wrote the scenario for a short slapstick film, Mysteries of a Barbershop, directed by Erich Engel and starring Karl Valentin. Despite little success at the time, it is now considered one of the most significant films in German film history. That May, his play In the Jungle premiered in Munich, also directed by Engel. Opening night became a scandal: Nazis in the audience blew whistles and threw stink bombs at the actors.

• 4. Berlin and The Threepenny Opera

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  In September 1924, a job as assistant dramaturg at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater brought Brecht to Berlin. Reinhardt's company was at the time one of the leading three or four theatres in the world. Brecht had little creative work of his own in that role, but the productions he witnessed there, including Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters staged with commedia dell'arte improvisation, fed directly into his developing ideas about anti-illusionistic theatre.

  He had already become involved with Elisabeth Hauptmann and with Helene Weigel, whose son Stefan was born in October 1924. His marriage to Zoff dissolved, though they did not formally divorce until 1927. That same year Brecht became part of Erwin Piscator's dramaturgical collective, working alongside productions of Toller's Hoppla, We're Alive!, and an adaptation of Jaroslav Hasek's comic novel Schweik, which Brecht later described as a "montage from the novel." From Piscator, Brecht took the emphasis on reason and didacticism, the interruption of action by song, and the radical potentials of stage technology, particularly projections.

  Also in 1927, Brecht first collaborated with the young composer Kurt Weill. Together they began developing Brecht's Mahagonny project. They produced a shorter version, The Little Mahagonny, for a music festival that July as what Weill called a "stylistic exercise" in preparation for the larger work. From that point, Caspar Neher became an integral part of the collaboration, with words, music, and visuals conceived together from the start.

  The following year, the collective adapted John Gay's The Beggar's Opera of 1728. With Brecht's lyrics set to Weill's music, the result, The Threepenny Opera of 1928, became the biggest hit in Berlin in the 1920s. It contained what became one of the most quoted lines in modern theatre: "Erst kommt das Fressen / Dann kommt die Moral" ("First the grub / Then the morality"). The opera skewered the hypocrisy of conventional morality enforced by the Church while working people went hungry. The Mahagonny opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, premiered in 1930 in Leipzig, again causing an uproar with Nazis protesting in the audience. It would premiere in Berlin in 1931 as a triumphant sensation.

• 5. Epic Theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt

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  Brecht's theoretical work grew from the same combative energy as his plays. He synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold into what he called epic theatre, a framework for turning the stage into a forum for political ideas and a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. He later preferred the term "dialectical theatre."

  The central principle was the Verfremdungseffekt, a German term that can be translated as defamiliarization effect, distancing effect, or estrangement effect, though it is often mistranslated as alienation effect. Brecht described it as "stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them." The method was a direct challenge to emotional identification. He believed that a climactic catharsis left audiences complacent. Instead he wanted audiences to think critically, recognize social injustice, and act in the world outside the theatre.

  To achieve the Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht employed actors addressing the audience directly, harsh bright stage lighting, songs that interrupted the action, explanatory placards, and in rehearsals, the transposition of text to third person or past tense, or speaking stage directions aloud. He articulated the governing principle of the separation of the elements in his theoretical essay The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre in 1930: rather than fusing words, music, and staging into an emotionally overwhelming whole, each should remain a self-contained, independent work of art that adopts an attitude toward the others.

  Brecht connected epic theatre to parallel modernist innovations in other arts: the divergent chapter structure of James Joyce's Ulysses, Sergei Eisenstein's constructivist montage in cinema, and Pablo Picasso's cubist collage in the visual arts. He was also influenced by Chinese theatre, meeting the famous opera performer Mei Lanfang in 1935, though he was careful to distinguish between borrowing an aesthetic and transplanting a technique. His theoretical debates placed him in dialogue, and sometimes direct conflict, with Theodor W. Adorno, Gyorgy Lukacs, and Ernst Bloch. He developed a close friendship with Walter Benjamin.

• 6. Exile and Hollywood

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  Brecht fled Nazi Germany in February 1933, within weeks of Hitler's rise to power. After brief periods in Prague, Zurich, and Paris, he and Weigel accepted an invitation from the journalist and author Karin Michaels to settle in Denmark. They stayed first at Michaels's house on the small island of Thuro, near Funen, then bought their own home in Svendborg on Funen. The house at Skovsbo Strand 8 was the family's base for six years. Guests there included Walter Benjamin, Hanns Eisler, and Ruth Berlau.

  When war seemed imminent in April 1939 Brecht moved to Stockholm, staying a year before Germany invaded Norway and Denmark. He then moved to Helsinki, Finland, living at the Marlebacke manor house in Iitti with Hella Wuolijoki, with whom he co-wrote Mr Puntila and His Man Matti while awaiting a U.S. visa.

  Upon receiving that visa in May 1941, the family relocated to Southern California, renting a two-story home in Santa Monica. The West Side of Los Angeles had by then become a dense colony of European exiles. Because so many were from German-speaking countries, it was nicknamed "Weimar on the Pacific." At the center of that community was Salka Viertel, an old friend from Brecht's Berlin years, who hosted tea parties in Santa Monica Canyon where European intellectuals mingled with Hollywood figures. It was at one of Viertel's parties that Brecht first met Charles Laughton, a meeting that led to their collaboration on the English-language version of Life of Galileo.

  Brecht co-wrote the screenplay for Hangmen Also Die!, directed by Fritz Lang and released in 1943, loosely based on the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. For that film, Hanns Eisler was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Music Score. It was the only Brecht screenplay to become a Hollywood film. The money he earned from selling the script funded three more works: The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweik in the Second World War, and an adaptation of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Throughout these years Brecht was also under FBI surveillance.

• 7. HUAC and East Berlin

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  In September 1947, Brecht was among more than forty Hollywood writers, directors, actors, and producers subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Though he was counted among the nineteen "unfriendly" witnesses who had declared they would not cooperate, Brecht chose to testify rather than delay his planned return to Europe.

  On the 30th of October 1947, he appeared before the committee and stated that he had never been a Communist Party member. He made wry jokes throughout the proceedings, repeatedly drawing attention to the translators converting his German answers into English he could not understand back. HUAC vice-chairman Karl Mundt thanked him for his cooperation. The contrast with the so-called Hollywood Ten was stark: those witnesses refused on First Amendment grounds to answer questions about Communist affiliations and were cited for contempt. Brecht's approach drew accusations of betrayal from some contemporaries.

  He left for Europe the next day and never returned. After a year in Zurich, including a 1948 staging of an Antigone adaptation in the Swiss town of Chur, he moved to East Berlin in 1949 and established the Berliner Ensemble theatre company with Weigel. He retained Austrian nationality, granted in 1950, and kept his overseas bank accounts and Swiss copyright arrangements, hedging carefully against the political system he was now embedded in.

  Brecht received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954. But his relationship with the East German state was more fractured than that honor suggested. When Soviet military force crushed the East German uprising of the 17th of June 1953, Brecht initially wrote a letter of support to SED First Secretary Walter Ulbricht. Months later, in a poem called "Die Losung" (The Solution), he asked whether it might not be easier for the government simply to "dissolve the people / And elect another." His friend Fritz Raddatz described his attitude as "broken," watching friends murdered in the USSR and staying silent through show trials such as the Slansky trial. After Khrushchev's Secret Speech exposing Stalinist crimes, Brecht wrote poems critical of Stalin, comparing his terror policies to those of Tsar Nicholas II, but left them unpublished in his lifetime.

• 8. Legacy

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  Brecht died of a heart attack on the 14th of August 1956, at 58. He is buried in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery on Chausseestrase in the Mitte neighbourhood of Berlin, in sight of the residence he shared with Helene Weigel. According to Stephen Parker, who reviewed Brecht's unpublished medical records, Brecht had contracted rheumatic fever as a child, leading to an enlarged heart and lifelong chronic heart failure. A radiograph taken in 1951 showed a badly diseased heart, enlarged to the left. Parker wrote: "What is remarkable is his capacity to turn abject physical weakness into peerless artistic strength, arrhythmia into the rhythms of poetry, chorea into the choreography of drama."

  Helene Weigel continued to manage the Berliner Ensemble until her death in 1971, keeping the company devoted primarily to Brecht's plays. His daughter Barbara Brecht, who had been born shortly after Brecht and Weigel married in 1930, became an actress and eventually shared the copyrights to his work.

  The reach of Brecht's work extended well beyond the stage. The aesthetic theories of his epic theatre became a major influence on radical cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, with Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima, and others often cited as practitioners of Brechtian cinema. Raymond Williams called Brecht's work "the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg." Peter Burger named him "the most important materialist writer of our time."

  The reach into popular music is equally documented. "Alabama Song," originally published as a poem in Brecht's Hauspostille in 1927 and set to music by Weill in Mahagonny, was recorded by The Doors on their debut album, and later by David Bowie, among others. In his memoir, Bob Dylan described hearing "Pirate Jenny" from The Threepenny Opera at a New York theatrical show as an epiphany. Dylan was then performing traditional folk music and had barely begun to write his own songs. The "outrageous power" of "Pirate Jenny" prompted him to start experimenting with storytelling in song.