Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)

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LINKS

International Brecht Society
http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/german/brecht/

Here you will find a comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Brecht, a chronology of the playwright’s life, information on conferences and theater productions, and links to related sites.

Bertolt Brecht Homepage
http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Stage/1052/brecht1.htm

This site features a biography of the famous dramatist, from his childhood years to his adulthood in Nazi Germany to his death.

Books and Writers: Bertolt Brecht
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/brecht.htm

This biography includes commentary on Brecht’s major works, a bibliography, and suggestions for further reading. The Books and Writers Web site, a large database of biographical information on writers, is hosted by the Kuusankoski Public Library in Finland.

Bertolt Brecht Turns One Hundred
http://www.usc.edu/isd/locations/ssh/special/fml/Brecht/

This Web site celebrates the one hundredth birthday of Bertolt Brecht. The online exhibit, maintained by the University of Southern California, offers audio links, essays about the influence of Hollywood and America on Brecht, and a discussion of his play Galileo.

BIOGRAPHY

Among the most inventive and influential of modern playwrights, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) has left a legacy of important plays and theories about how those plays should be produced. Throughout most of his career he felt that drama should inform and awaken sensibilities, not just entertain or anesthetize an audience. Most of his plays concern philosophical and political issues, and some of them so threatened the Nazi regime that his works were burned publicly in Germany during the Third Reich.

At nineteen, Brecht was an orderly in a hospital during the last months of World War I. Seeing so much carnage and misery in the medical wards made him a lifelong pacifist. After the war he began writing plays while a student in Munich. His materialistic attitude (his rejection of spiritual concepts) was influenced by his readings of Hegel and the doctrines of Marx's dialectical materialism. Brecht eventually moved to Berlin, the theatrical center of Germany, and by 1926 was on his way to becoming a communist.

Finding the political pressures in early Nazi Germany too frightening and dangerous for his writing, Brecht went into exile in 1933. After World War II Brecht and his wife returned to Berlin, where, in 1949, he founded the Berliner Ensemble, which produced most of his later work.

Brecht wrote his most popular play in 1928, a musical collaboration with the German composer Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera. The model for this play, the English writer John Gay's 1728 ballad opera The Beggar's Opera, provided Brecht with a perfect platform on which to comment satirically on the political and economic circumstances in Germany two hundred years after Gay wrote.

Brecht's most successful plays are Galileo (1938-1939), Mother Courage (1939), The Good Woman of Setzuan (1943), The Private Lives of the Master Race (1945), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948). But these represent only a tiny fraction of a mass of work, including plays, poetry, criticism, and fiction. His output is extraordinary in volume and quality. It includes plays borrowed not only from Gay but also from Sophocles, Moličre, Gorky, Shakespeare, and John Webster, among others.

Brecht developed a number of theories regarding drama. He defined the concept of epic theater as an alternative to the traditional Aristotelian theory. Brecht wanted his audience to be in a dialectical and sometimes alienated relationship to the drama. He expected his audience to observe but to observe critically, to draw conclusions, and to participate in an intellectual argument with the work at hand. The confrontational relationship he intended was designed to engage the audience in analyzing what they saw rather than in identifying with the main characters or in enjoying a wash of sentimentality or emotion.

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