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Bertolt-Brecht-Denkmal by Marek Åšliwecki – Wikimedia Commons

Top 10 Outstanding Facts about Bertolt Brecht

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt.

During the Nazi Germany period, Brecht fled his home country, first to Scandinavia, and during World War II to the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI.  After the war, he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator, actress Helene Weigel.

Here are the top 10 outstanding facts about Bertolt Brecht.

1. Due to his grandmother’s and his mother’s influence, Brecht knew the Bible

This was a familiarity that would have a life-long effect on his writing. From her, too, came the dangerous image of the self-denying woman that recurs in his drama. Brecht’s home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied.

At school in Augsburg, he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a life-long creative partnership. Neher designed many of the sets for Brecht’s dramas and helped to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre.

2. When Brecht was 16, the First World War broke out

Bertolt Brecht b Kolbe, Jörg –

World War I or the First World War, often abbreviated as WWI or WW1, began on 28 July 1914 and ended on 11 November 1918. Referred to by contemporaries as the Great War, its belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fighting also expanding into the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia.

Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates swallowed by the army. Brecht was nearly expelled from school in 1915 for writing an essay in response to the line “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” from the Roman poet Horace, calling it Zweckpropaganda (cheap propaganda for a specific purpose) and arguing that only an empty-headed person could be persuaded to die for their country. His expulsion was only prevented by the intervention of Romuald Sauer, a priest who also served as a substitute teacher at Brecht’s school.

3. Bertolt Brecht registered for a medical course at Munich University

On his father’s recommendation, Brecht sought to avoid being conscripted into the army by exploiting a loophole that allowed for medical students to be deferred. 

He subsequently registered for a medical course at Munich University, where he enrolled in 1917.  There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret star Frank Wedekind.

4.  Brecht wrote his first full-length play, Baal when he was 20 years old

Bertolt Brecht & Hans Eisler – Lieder. Gedichte. Chöre, 1934 by Paul Urban –

Baal was the first full-length play written by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. It concerns a wastrel youth who becomes involved in several sexual affairs and at least one murder. It was written in 1918, when Brecht was a 20-year-old student at Munich University, in response to the expressionist drama The Loner (Der Einsame) by the soon-to-become-Nazi dramatist Hanns Johst. 

The play is written in a form of heightened prose and includes four songs and an introductory choral hymn, set to melodies composed by Brecht himself. Brecht wrote it prior to developing the dramaturgical techniques of epic theatre that characterize his later work, although he did re-work the play in 1926.

5. Brecht was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize 

The Kleist Prize is an annual German literature prize. The prize was first awarded in 1912, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the death of Heinrich von Kleist. The Kleist Prize was the most important literary award of the Weimar Republic but was discontinued in 1933.

Brecht had been awarded for his first three plays; Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle, although at that point only Drums had been produced. The citation for the award insisted that: Brecht’s language is vivid without being deliberately poetic, symbolical without being over literary. Brecht is a dramatist because his language is felt physically and in the round.

6. Brecht’s most significant contribution was to the adaptation of the unfinished episodic comic novel Schweik

Book cover of Bertolt Brecht “Hundert Gedichte” by Bertolt Brecht –

Bertolt later described it as a montage from the novel. The Piscator productions influenced Brecht’s ideas about staging and design and alerted him to the radical potentials offered to the “epic” playwright by the development of stage technology particularly projections. What Brecht took from Piscator “is fairly plain, and he acknowledged it” Willett suggests.

7. Brecht spent the last years of the Weimar-era in Berlin working on the Lehrstücke

These were a group of plays driven by morals, music, and Brecht’s budding epic theatre. The Lehrstücke often aimed at educating workers on Socialist issues. The Measures Taken Die Massnahme was scored by Hanns Eisler. 

In addition, Brecht worked on a script for a semi-documentary feature film about the human impact of mass unemployment, Kuhle Wampe in 1932, which was directed by Slatan Dudow. This striking film is notable for its subversive humour, outstanding cinematography by Günther Krampf, and Hanns Eisler’s dynamic musical contribution. It still provides a vivid insight into Berlin during the last years of the Weimar Republic.

8. Brecht left Nazi Germany in February 1933, just after Hitler took power

Adolf Hitler Berghof by Heinrich Hoffmann –

Fearing persecution, Brecht left Nazi Germany in February 1933, just after Hitler took power. After brief spells in Prague, Zurich, and Â鶹APP, he and Weigel accepted an invitation from journalist and author Karin Michaëlis to move to Denmark. 

The family first stayed with Karin Michaëlis at her house on the small island of Thurø close to the island of Funen. They later bought their own house in Svendborg on Funen. This house located at Skovsbo Strand 8 in Svendborg became the residence of the Brecht family for the next six years, where they often received guests including Walter Benjamin, Hanns Eisler, and Ruth Berlau. During this period Brecht also traveled frequently to Copenhagen, Â鶹APP, Moscow, New York, and London for various projects and collaborations.

9. In the years of the Cold War and “Red Scare”, Brecht was blacklisted by movie studio bosses

Along with about 41 other Hollywood writers, directors, actors, and producers, he was subpoenaed to appear before the HUAC in September 1947. Although he was one of 19 witnesses who declared that they would refuse to appear, Brecht eventually decided to testify. He later explained that he had followed the advice of attorneys and had not wanted to delay a planned trip to Europe. 

On 30 October 1947 Brecht testified that he had never been a member of the Communist Party. He made wry jokes throughout the proceedings, punctuating his inability to speak English well with continuous references to the translators present, who transformed his German statements into English ones unintelligible to himself.

10. Brecht developed the combined theory and practice of his Epic theatre

Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage. Instead, he wanted his audiences to adopt a critical perspective in order to recognize social injustice and exploitation and to be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change in the world outside.

For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience’s reality was equally constructed, and as such, was changeable.