Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
	Brecht in 1954
Born	Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht; 10 February 1898; Augsburg, Bavaria, German Empire
Died	14 August 1956 (aged 58); East Berlin, East Germany
Occupation	Playwright; theatre director; poet;
Genre	Epic theatre; non-Aristotelian drama;
Literary movement	Non-Aristotelian drama
Notable works	The Threepenny Opera; Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children; The Good Person of Szechwan; The Caucasian Chalk Circle; Mr Puntila and his Man Matti; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui;
Spouses	; Marianne Zoff (m. 1922; div. 1927) Helene Weigel (m. 1930)
Children	Frank Banholzer; Hanne Hiob; Stefan Brecht; Barbara Brecht-Schall;
Relatives	Walter Brecht (younger brother)
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Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), 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 (which he later preferred to call "dialectical 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.

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