Bertolt Brecht

BERTOLT BRECHT (1898-1956) was a German playwright, poet, theorist, and critic. He is considered a pivotal figure in twentieth-century theatre history for his contributions to political theatre, specifically in the form of his "Epic Theatre" model.

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Brecht the Student

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Life in 1920s Berlin was the crucible that melded Brecht’s mind and craft.

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The experience of World War I and the volatile political climate it generated in Germany had deeply formative effects on his thought. He had become a pacifist over the course of "The Great War," and took liberties to mock the "martial ethic" so highly lauded by German conservatives and nationalists during and after the war had ended. His early poem “The Legend of the Dead Soldier” speaks of a dead German solider in WWI that was retrieved from the battlefield, marched through the streets, and sent back to battle again because the War wasn’t ready for him to die just yet. A 1926 play, Man Equals Man, concerns the reconstitution of a civilian, Galy Gay, into the prototype of a soldier. In the aftermath of WWI, Germany was left in a state of economic destitution (thanks in part to a series of punitive economic sanctions placed by the Treaty of Versailles and its infamous "War Guilt" clause) and many factions from all over the political spectrum competed for influence over Weimar Germany.

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This was also a time when German Expressionism was dominating the arts. (Brecht's earliest play from 1918, Baal, has been demonstrated by several scholars to be a mockery of the Expressionists.)

Brecht was an avid reader, and was reading at this time the German classics of Friedrich Schiller, whose writings gave him the notion of a theatre for “moral instruction.” He was also busy reading British detective novels, as well as revisiting the classic English dramatist John Gay’s bourgeois comedy, The Beggar’s Opera (1728).

Upon reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, (a classic of American literature, set in the predatory meat-packing industry of Chicago), Brecht found in the American Dream a symbol by which to compare and contrast Berlin. The Jungle would set the pretext for Brecht’s first play about Chicago, In the Jungle of Cities (1926).

That same year, Brecht was working on another play called Joe Fleischhaker set in the Chicago wheat market. When he could not understand the workings of that market, he put the play to the side and picked up Karl Marx’s Das Kapital Vol. 1. He would later remark,

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"When I read Marx's Kapital I understood my plays... It wasn't of course that I found I had unconsciously written a whole pile of Marxist plays; but this man Marx was the only spectator for my plays I'd ever come across."

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His meeting with Marx defined what he would come to write as much as it defined what he had already written. Taking from Marx the insight that class rule underlies all our other social arrangements, he thereafter took a straightforward interest in analyzing capitalist society- its inner logic, its contradictions, its forms of control, and its impact on the lives of individuals under its reign. He also began to take an interest in history.

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Brecht's work in dramaturgy for the director Erwin Piscator also played a large role in the development of his Epic Theatre. Piscator had previously worked for the Proletarian Theatre producing works with a leftist ideological orientation and the objective of influencing the choices of voters. As a director, he openly experimented with the actor-audience relationship- he would often place actors in the audience space- as well as the use of technology- more specifically, the use of projections to give the audience narrative or statistical data. These techniques eventually made their way into Brecht's own productions.

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Brecht the Teacher

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Virtually all of these points came into convergence in his 1927 The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonney and his 1928 The Threepenny Opera, the latter of which launched him to a position of relative fame. For the moment, Brecht was a premiere young playwright in Berlin.

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It was around this time also that Brecht started writing his Lehrstücke, or "learning plays." These plays were designed to incorporate audience interaction, often in the acting of parts, and were meant to teach working class audiences socialist principles. Brecht would often hand out questionnaires at the conclusion of these performances, evaluate them, and rework the script according to his findings.

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Brecht's time in Berlin came to an abrupt halt in 1933, following the rise of the Nazis to power and the burning of the Reichstag. Coming four weeks to the day after Hitler being sworn in as Chancellor of Germany, the fire was set by the Nazis, and they placed the blame on the Communists as a pretext for the elimination of basic rights and liberties. As a Marxist- and now married to Helene Wiegel, who was Jewish- Brecht and his family took flight from Berlin.

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They lived many years in exile before returning in 1949. They were in Denmark until 1939, and when World War II was inevitable, they moved to Sweden. It was at this time that Brecht began writing Mother Courage; he had a completed draft within five weeks.

Brecht lived in the U.S. for some years, but found little success. It was McCarthyism and HUAAC which drove him back to Europe and eventually East Berlin.

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In his final years in East Berlin, he established the Berliner Ensemble, which would go on to stage many productions of his plays.

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Brecht's legacy is secure in the fields of theatre studies, film theory, and Marxist literary criticism. To date he has had more influence in the American university than the American theatre; perhaps, as we are continuing to register the collapse of capitalist society and the degrading effects of mass production on our ecology, this is a time when interest in Brecht's work will experience a rebirth.

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