It’s the birthday of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht (books by this author), born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht in Augsburg, Bavaria (1898). He studied philosophy, drama and medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he first experimented with writing poetry and plays.
Following the death of his mother in 1920 he began writing plays in earnest. His first major runaway success was The Threepenny Opera (1928), a creative collaboration with composer Kurt Weill. The Threepenny Opera was an adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and it offered a harsh critique of capitalism from a Socialist perspective. It was during this time that Brecht developed his theory of “epic theater” which asks the audience to acknowledge the stage as a stage, the actors as actors, and not some make-believe world of real people.
With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 Brecht sought asylum in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, and journeyed across Russia and Persia. He produced some of his most famous anti-war works during that time, including Mother Courage and Her Children (1941). He eventually settled in Santa Monica where he wrote more than 50 screenplays in six years, but only one of them was accepted: Hangmen Also Die (1943), an anti-Nazi film that came out in the middle of World War II. He later said, “The intellectual isolation [in Hollywood] is enormous. Compared to Hollywood, Svendborg is a world center.”
In 1947 he was blacklisted by the studios when he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which accused him of being a Communist sympathizer. Brecht stated in front of the HUAC:
“We are living in a dangerous world. Our state of civilization is such that mankind already is capable of becoming enormously wealthy but, as a whole, is still poverty-ridden. Great wars have been suffered, greater ones are imminent, we are told. One of them might well wipe out mankind, as a whole. We might be the last generation of the specimen man on this earth. The ideas about how to make use of the new capabilities of production have not been developed much since the days when the horse had to do what man could not do. Do you not think that, in such a predicament, every new idea should be examined carefully and freely? Art can present clear and even make nobler such ideas.”
He made his way to East Germany in 1949 and went on to run the Berliner Ensemble, which soon became the country’s most famous theater company.
Brecht died of a heart attack in 1956 at the age of 58 and is buried in Berlin.
He wrote, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”
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