Bertolt Brecht

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known as Bertolt Brecht, was a German playwright and poet born in Augsburg in 1898 and died in East Berlin in 1956. He worked through the Weimar Republic, the years of exile under the Nazis and the postwar period, and he remains one of the most influential theatre makers of the twentieth century, chiefly for developing what he called epic theatre and later preferred to call dialectical theatre.

Brecht grew up in a comfortable middle-class household. His mother was a devout Protestant, and his maternal grandmother, a Pietist, gave him a thorough knowledge of the Bible that shaped his writing for life. As a boy he was something of a rebel, drawn to the unusual and impatient with the rules of his day. At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, who became a lifelong creative partner and designed many of the sets for his plays. When the First World War began he was at first enthusiastic, then changed his mind. He was nearly expelled from school over an essay that questioned the idea that it is sweet and proper to die for one's country. He went on to study medicine in Munich, but left in 1921 without a degree.

In 1918 he moved to Berlin, where he wrote his first play, Baal, and came into contact with the avant-garde. He admired the Munich cabaret performer Karl Valentin and the playwright Frank Wedekind, and he settled early on his subjects: war, poverty, hunger and exploitation. He studied Marxism closely, which seemed to him the most coherent account of the society around him, though he never joined the Communist Party. His epic theatre aimed to keep audiences from simply identifying with characters, encouraging them to watch and judge instead; this is the so-called alienation effect. In 1924 he settled in Berlin, and with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill he wrote The Threepenny Opera, beginning a long partnership with the composer Hanns Eisler.

When the Nazis took power in 1933 he fled Germany, first to Scandinavia and then to the United States, where he worked as a screenwriter while under FBI surveillance. In 1947 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee over alleged Communist links. The day after he testified he returned to Europe and settled in East Berlin, where he founded the Berliner Ensemble with his wife, the actress Helene Weigel.

His legacy is twofold. His ideas about distance and the social role of theatre reshaped European and world drama after the war. His poems and songs, closely tied to his plays, are still performed and read. His work has been staged across the world, and his name is inseparable from the idea of theatre that makes its audience think.