10 facts about bertolt brecht

Brecht bertolt poems Bertolt Brecht 's status as one of the major playwrights of the twentieth century is largely uncontested. He hoped his plays would instruct as well as entertain. His goal was to make audiences think about what might be, rather than what was. His work, influenced by German social theorist Karl Marx , was often violent and chaotic. In addition to being an influential playwright, Brecht is considered a poet of considerable power and originality.

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Bertolt Brecht was a German playwright, director, and poet in the Weimar Republic period (), where he achieved notoriety through his work in the theater, producing plays that often had a Marxist perspective. He worked primarily in a genre of theater called "epic theater," known for its eschewing of psychological realism in favor of more didactic narrative, in which scenes are interrupted by analysis, argument, or documentation.

Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria in to a Protestant mother and a Catholic father.

His mother was devout and taught Brecht about the Bible, a lasting influence on his work.

Brecht bertolt biography wikipedia The playwright Bertolt Brecht was born in in the German town of Augsburg. After serving as a medical orderly in the First World War and appalled by the effects of the war, he went first to Munich and then to Berlin in pursuit of a career in the theatre. That period of his life came to an end in when the Nazis came to power in Germany. Brecht fled and during this period the Nazis formally removed his citizenship, so he was a stateless citizen. Ostensibly against communism close communism A classless society where all property is owned publicly.

When Brecht was in high school, World War I broke out. While Brecht was initially in favor of the war, he soon criticized it, which led to his near expulsion from school. In college, he studied theater with Arthur Kutscher, who introduced Brecht to the writer Frank Wedekind, author of the "Lulu" cycle and Spring Awakening.

Brecht wrote his first full-length play, Baal, in , followed by Drums in the Night in February Following university, Brecht received attention from critics and audiences alike, writing both plays and the screenplay to the short film Mysteries of a Barbershop.

In , Brecht moved to Berlin, where he carried on a number of romantic affairs, and fathered several children, all while writing new plays.

It was there that he began writing Man Equals Man, inspired by seeing work by Charlie Chaplin, a performer he greatly admired.

Brecht very much wanted to create a new dramatic form, using a more didactic rhetoric and songs which would interrupt the action, writing music himself as well as collaborating with composers like Kurt Weill.

With Weill, Brecht wrote The Little Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera, two of his best-known projects.

Brecht bertolt biography August in Berlin was a German poet and dramatist. Brecht went to school in Augsburg , where his father was the director of a paper factory. He completed his degree in Afterwards he studied sciences, medicine and literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. He had to take a break in his studies because he had to join the army.

Later, they would write Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, an opera which was protested by Nazis at the time of its premiere.

Brecht left Germany during the Nazi period in order to avoid persecution, settling eventually in Denmark. During this time he wrote a great deal of work that protested the National Socialist and Fascist movements, such as Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Fear and Misery of the Third Reich.

Later, during the Cold War, Brecht's career suffered as he was blacklisted in America and questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Though he was never a member of the Communist party, he was an avid student of Marxism.


Study Guides on Works by Bertolt Brecht

The Caucasian Chalk CircleBertolt Brecht

Written in while Brecht was living in America, The Caucasian Chalk Circle was initially intended for Broadway.

Brecht bertolt biography death

As a young man, he studied medicine and served as an orderly in an army hospital, successfully avoiding active duty in World War I. When studying medicine at Munich University, Brecht was introduced to drama for the first time. Brecht soon began writing theatre reviews in newspapers until he completed his first play, Baal , at the age of just twenty. His second play, Drums in the Night , was performed in Munich in Brecht moved to Berlin in to further his career as a dramatist.

It never quite made it there, but was instead premiered by students at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in Brecht's

GalileoBertolt Brecht

Life of Galileo, aka Galileo, is a play by Bertolt Brecht, written in and first performed at the Zurich Schauspielhaus in At the time of its premiere, Brecht, who typically directed his own plays, handed over directorial duties to

The Good Woman of SetzuanBertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht wrote Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (translated literally as “The Good Person of Setzuan”) with Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau between the years of and Steffin was a German actress, writer, and translator, and Brecht's

Jungle of CitiesBertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht wrote Jungle of Cities (Im Dickicht der Staedte) when he was only twenty-three years old.

The play emerged as a brilliant and poetic tribute to his most despairing and nihilistic phase from Set in Chicago, it portrays the

The Measures Taken and Other LehrstuckeBertolt Brecht

The Measures Taken was written between the years of and These moralistic Lehrstücke, or “learning plays,” were written against the Communist backdrop of social, economic, and political turmoil in Germany.

First performed in in

Mother Courage and Her ChildrenBertolt Brecht

Mother Courage and Her Children is set during the Thirty Years' War, but it was written either shortly before or during the early years of the Second World War. Hitler's warmongering intentions had become clear to many Germans by the mids,

The Resistible Rise of Arturo UiBertolt Brecht

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a play that was published in It is subtitled “A parable play” and is a satirical allegory of Hitler and the Nazis rise to power before World War Two.

This play was written by Bertolt Brecht, a German

The Threepenny OperaBertolt Brecht

The Threepenny Opera, written and staged in , soon became Brecht's first and greatest commercial success. Produced only two years after Brecht's famous work Man equals Man, the play represents a new style for Brecht. Whereas Man equals Man has