BERTOLT BRECHT

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht

Introduction

Bertolt Brecht began studying medicine at the University of Munich in 1917, but a year later he was called up for military service as a medical orderly. He married Marianne Zoff in 1922, but they were divorced in 1927. Brecht left Munich for Berlin in 1924 and began an intensive study of economics and Marxism in 1926. After his divorce, he married the actress Helene Weigel, one of the best interpreters of his plays. Because of Nazi resentment against him and his work, Brecht and his family had to leave Germany in 1933, and they lived mostly in Scandinavia until they came to California in 1941. On October 30, 1947, Brecht was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and left the United States for Europe the next day. He settled in East Berlin in 1949 and formed the Berliner Ensemble acting company. Brecht died on August 14, 1956, of coronary thrombosis.

Achievements

Although of necessity outside Germany in exile for sixteen years, it was in Germany, not Scandinavia or the United States, that Bertolt Brecht was best received. In 1922, at the beginning of his career as a writer, he received the Kleist Prize for literature for his drama Trommeln in der Nacht (1922; Drums in the Night, 1961). Later, when he had made his home in what was then East Germany, he received the National Prize of East Germany, First Class, in 1951. His work was recognized again in 1954, when he became a member of the Artistic Advisory Committee of the East German Ministry of Culture. At the same time, he was also vice president of the German Academy of the Arts. In 1954-1955, he was awarded the International Stalin Peace Prize.

Brecht's contribution as a dramatist has been compared to William Shakespeare's. In all of his works, he was a master stylist with a socialist vision, who encouraged his readers and audiences to think with critical distance.

Early Life

Even though Eugen Berthold (later Bertolt) Brecht composed several ballads in his early twenties that told of his having been descended from shrewd, ruthless, guileful peasants, his genealogy was solidly middle-class and could be traced back to the sixteenth century. His father, Berthold Friedrich Brecht, was the managing director of a paper mill in Augsburg, a sleepy town of ninety thousand, forty miles northwest of Munich. He was Catholic, and his wife Sophie was Protestant; both Berthold and his younger brother, Walter, were reared in their mother's faith and primarily by her—the father was a workaholic. Brecht's boyhood and adolescence were marked by self-confidence, quick-mindedness, cunning, and vitality—all characteristics that stood him in good stead throughout his life. His skill in manipulating people and suppleness in pursuing his goals were also evident from his youth.

During World War I, Brecht began medical studies at the University of Munich to delay an early conscription; however, the only medical lectures he attended were those dealing with venereal diseases. Instead, he studied theater history with a Professor Artur Kutscher and ...