Brecht's Life

“I grew up as the son
Of well to do people. My parents
Put a collar round my neck and taught me
The habit of being waited on
And the art of giving orders. But
When I had grown up and looked around me
I did not like the people of my own class.

And I left my own class and joined
The common people ...”

Brecht, 1951

Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898, into a safely middle-class family in Ausburg, Germany. He grew into a young man fascinated by literature and poetry, but enrolled in medicine in order to delay service in WWI. With this war came economic and ideological change and this stood as the backdrop for Brecht’s burgeoning Marxist political and social conscience, and would have a great impact on his development as a theatre practitioner.

By the age of 25, he had emerged as one of the top-ranking German playwrights of his day, working collaboratively with others in the field, most notably Max Reinhardt, a popular Realist director and Erwin Piscator, a leftist director and producer. It was this Marxist political alignment that eventually led to Brecht’s exile from Hitler’s Germany in 1933, when he fled to America. He wrote for Hollywood and Broadway and while he was unsuccessful in both ventures, he continued to theoretically study and develop his style of ‘Epic Theatre’. It was in exile that he did much of his writing on theatre, and wrote his most famous plays, most notably Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944).

His Marxist leanings again got him into trouble, when, in 1947, he fled back to Germany to avoid the investigations and slander caused by the ‘Un-American Activities Committee’. Back in his homeland, he established the Berliner Ensemble where, with his wife Helene Weigel, he finally had the opportunity to put into practice his years of writing and theorizing. Finally, with his death in 1956, he sealed his reputation as Germany’s darling; a playwright beloved by his nation, and one who developed one of the most internationally influential theatre styles of the modern era.

Some research questions for teachers and students

• How has Brecht’s life influenced his theatre; what personal experiences had a direct impact on his theatrical style and political bent?
• What did Brecht think of the dominant theatre styles of the time, when he was a young man developing his own ‘Epic style’? How did he react against them?
• Are there any characters in The Threepenny Opera that share similarities with Brecht himself? In what way?