http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bertolt_Brecht&action=edit Life and career

Natural within Augsburg, Bavaria, Brecht studied medicine & worked briefly as an orderly inside the hospital within Munich during World War I. Fallowing a war he moved to Berlin where an influential critic, Herbert Ihering, brought him to the attention of a public yearning for modern theater. Brecht's 1st both plays, Baal & Drums at night, had already experienced performances inside Munich, & he got to understand Erich Engel, a director world health organization worked by owning him on and off for the rest of his life. Around Berlin, In the Jungle of the Cities, starring Fritz Kortner and directed by Engel, became his first profits.

In a period of the postwar socialist governments and then a Weimar Republic, Brecht met and began to operate by using Hanns Eisler — a composer with whom he shared the nighest friendly relationship throughout his life. He as well met Helene Weigel, who would get his 2nd married woman & accompany him across exile & for the rest of his life. His number one book of verse form, Hauspostille, won the literary prize.

He married a opera singer & actress Marianne Zoff in 1922. Their girl, Hanne Hiob, born within 1923, is a easily-known German actress. Of these seaboy late it experienced the son, Stefan. Within 1930 Brecht married Weigel, and their girl Barbara was born soon fallowing. She besides became an actress & presently holds a right of first publication to completely of Brecht's function.

Brecht formed the writing collective which became prolific & super influential. Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri, Ruth Berlau & others worked with Brecht and produced a multiple Lehrstücke (teaching plays), which attempted the freshly theater for participants like than peaceful audiences. These addressed themselves to the massive worker arts organisation that existed within Germany and Austria in the 1920s. And so did Brecht's foremost peachy play, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, which attempted to portray a drama around fiscal dealing. He too worked in the theaters of Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator.

This collective adapted John Gay's ''The Beggar's Opera'', with Brecht's songs set to music by Kurt Weill. Retitled The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) it was the big hit inside Berlin of the Twenties & the revitalising influence on the musical worldwide. One of its best known lines underscored a hypocrisy of conventional morality imposed per Church, working inside conjunction sustaining a constituted choose, in the face of working-class hunger & deprivation:

A profits of The Threepenny Opera was followed by the quickly thrown together Happy Prevent. It was the home & the commercial failure. A book was so claimed to become per mysterious Dorothy Lane (nowadays known to become Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht's secretary and close collaborator). Brecht exclusively claimed authorship of the song texts. Brecht would late utilize elements of Happy Prevent when a germ for his Saint Joan of the Stockyards, a play that would never look at the stage within Brecht's life-life. Happy Prevent's virtually all delivering quality was its divine score by Weill, producing numerous Brecht/Weill hits such as 'Der Bilbao-Song' & 'Surabaya-Jonny'.

A masterpiece of the Brecht/Weill collaborations, Mahagonny, premiered in 193Around Leipzig with an uproar, having Nazis protesting the opera in the audience. A Mahagonny opera would premier late withinside Berlin in 1931 as a triumphant sensation.

Brecht spent his endure years inside Berlin (1930-1933) working sustaining his ‘collective’ on the Lehrstücke. These were the class action of plays caused by lesson, music & Brecht's budding Epic Theatre. A Lehrstücke typically aimed at educating workers in Socialist issues. A Measures Taken, far & away a virtually all popular and shameful of this series, was scored by Hanns Eisler. Additionally, Brecht worked in a script for the semi-documentary feature just about the man impact of mass unemployment, Kuhle Wampe (1932), which was directed by Slatan Dudow. This striking film is notable for its insurgent humour, spectacular cinematography by Günther Krampf, and Hanns Eisler's dynamic musical contribution. It however will bring a intense insight into Berlin when you took the endure years of the Weimar Republic.

By February 1933, Brecht’s act was eclipsed per rise of Nazi (fascist) rule in Germany.

Nazi Germany and World War II
Fallowing Adolf Hitler won the election inside 1933, Brecht perceived a great danger to himself & left for exile—to Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, then England, and eventually in the United States. Within his trend lines toward a Nazi & Fascistic movements, Brecht wrote his best known plays: Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, Puntila and Matti, his Hired Man, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Good Person of Sezuan, and several others. Brecht too wrote poetry which continues to attract attention & respect. He worked in two or three screenplays for Hollywood, like Hangmen Also Die, though he had there is no really profits or even pleasure in that.

Cold War and East Germany
In the years of the Cold War and "red scare", the recently U.S. House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hounded Brecht for his communist allegiances, & he was before long blacklisted by movie studio bosses. Brecht, along by using astir Xxx more Hollywood writers, directors, actors & producers, was subpoenaed to pop up prior to a HUAC inside November of 1947. He experienced pledged does'nt to testify however did soh anyway. Unlike a 10 others world health organization went prior to him, he was non cited for contempt. He testified that he was non the member of the communist person on text or even overseas, & was thanked per Vice Chairman Karl Mundt for cooperating. By this instance, Brecht experienced left a a states & was going the Berliner Ensemble theatre inside East Berlin. Fallowing testifying, he left a U.s.a. a next day for Europe. He experienced lived for numbers of years around Moscow when 1933, but not in the more countries mentioned. Around April of 1941, he acquired a visa at the U.s. consulate within Finland to are to the America. He so traveled through a USSR by rail to Vladivostok in the period of June. He was allowed to travel in a Soviet Union when officially an enemy alien from either Germany spell Germany was attacking the USSR that equivalent year. Citizens of the Soviet Union may not travel when freely. He arrived inside the Usthe within July of 1941 & took out papers to be a citizen in December, however never acted in the children. He was regularly within touch by owning a Soviet Vice Counseling on top a next Septet years. His talent was as a playwright/poet & a single would require him to own worked withwithin Just released York, however instead he stayed in Hollywood. He got couple of notable accomplishments there.

Allowing a United States for Europe, Brecht come to Switzerland where he adapted Sophocles' Antigone, and then was invited to Berlin by East Germany. Horror-struck at a reinstatement of previous Nazis into West Germany's government, Brecht accepted the offer & mass produced East Berlin his at home.

When Brecht's communistic sympathies were the curse in the United States, East German officials sought to produce him their hero. Though he experienced non been the member of the communist person, he got been deeply schooled within Marxism by the dissident communistic Karl Korsch, and his communistic allegiances were earnest. He claimed communism appeared to become a simply dependable counterpoison to militarist fascism & spoke out against a remilitarisation of a West and the division of Germany.

However Brecht proved to exist when just about when pinching for his East German hosts as for a West Germans through the "iron curtain". Brecht did non keep higher appearances —he was scruffily dressed & universally experienced the bestubbled, unshaved face. East German watcher another time excluded him from either the Berlinside reception existence given in his have honor.

He as well observed the personal experience of sleep in a Stalinist state far different from what he got imagined within exile, whenever he composed works like Die Massnahme ("The Measure"), which glorified a self-denying infallible vanguard person, or even, extra concretely, inside "Die Massnahmen", which justified a political decisions manufactured per Comintern that resulted inside the spectacular failure of the revolution attempted in Shanghai in 1927.

Brecht showed his further sober appreciation of the impossibility of socialism when forgoing democracy around the piece he wrote while sleep in Berlin in the 1950s, called "Die Lösung", or even "The Solution". This plan the state suppressed a workers' uprising inside 1953.

Later life
Although Brecht sleep in East Germany, the right of first publicatiin on his writings was held by a Swiss company & he received worthful tough currency remitment. He utilized to cause around East Berlin in the pre-war DKW car — a uncommon luxury in the austere divided capital.

Brecht wrote super couple of plays inside his endure years inside Berlin, none of the children when famed when his last works. A bit of of his best known verse form, yet, including a "Buckower Elegies", were from this period. Brecht died around 1956 of a heart attack at the age of 58. |}

Impact
Brecht left the lasting literary & political bequest which has experienced influence wordwide — particularly at days of political vary & upheaval. Brecht left a Berliner Ensemble to his wife, a actress Helene Weigel, which she ran until her death inside 1971. Mayhap a best known German touring theater of the postwar era, it was primarily devoted to performing Brecht plays.

Brecht's influence may be seen in the cinema. Such filmmakers when Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard were influenced by Brecht and a Verfremdungseffekt.

Theory of theatre
Brecht created an influential theory of theatre, a then-alleged epic theatre, wherein the play should non reason a spectator even to emotionally identify sustaining a action prior to him or her, however should instead provoke rational self-reflection & a critical watch of the actions on the stage.

For this purpose, Brecht listed a utilise of techniques that remind a spectator that a play occurs as representation of reality & non reality itself, which he known as a Verfremdungseffekt (translated as distancing symptom, estrangement outcome, or even alienation burden). Such techniques involved a straight location by actors to a audience, exaggerated, monstrous stage lighting, the apply of song, & explanatory posting.

Inside one of his foremost productions, Brecht famously put higher signs that said "Glotzt nicht so romantisch!" ("Don't stare so romantically!"). His manner of stagecraft has proven two profitable & confusing to victims world health organization try to make his works or even works inside his style. His theory of theatre has heavy influenced modern theatre, though these are believed that a burden of the larger-than-life theatre wears off when watching two or three similar plays. A few of his innovations, though, keep around get thus most common that it've be theatrical canon.

Although Brecht's operate & idewhen all about theatre come usually thought of as belonging to modernism, there is recent thought that he is the forerunner of contemporary postmodern theatre practice. This is particularly therefore because he questioned & dissolved several of the accepted practices of the theatre of his instance & created the unambiguously political theatre, that involved a audience within understanding its meaning. What is more, he was one of a number one theatre practician to incorporate multimedia system into a semiotics of theatre.

Major works
Because many Brecht works were non performed until yearn when it were written, a dates in a image below indicate two the season it were written, followed per season it were foremost produced. Baal (1918/1926) Drums in the Night (1918-20) In the Jungle of the Cities/ In the Swamp (1921-23) Man is Man (1924-25) The Threepenny Opera (1928) Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1928-29)/(1930) The Baden Lehrstück on Consent (1928-29) He Who Says Yes (1929) Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1929/1959) He Who Says No (1930) The Measures Taken (1930) The Mother (Die Mutter) (1930/1932) The Exception and the Rule (1930-31)/(1936) A short play all about a exploitation of men. the characters undergo coarse coarse of action from either the moneyed merchandiser sustaining a remunerative interest in the notional deserts of Yahi. The Seven Deadly Sins (1933) The Roundheads and the Peakheads (1931-36) Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1935-38) ''Señora Carrara's Rifles (Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar'') (1937/1937) based loosely on J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea, but relocated by Brecht in the Spanish Civil War Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) (1939/1941) The Trial of Lucullus(1939) Galileo (Leben des Galilei) (1938/1943) The Good Woman of Setzuan (1940) Puntila and His Man Matti (1941) The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941/1961) Schweik in the Second World War (1941-44) The Visions of Simone Machard (1941-44) with Lion Feuchtwanger Caucasian Chalk Circle (Der kaukasische Kreidekreis) (1944-45) The Days of the Commune (1948-49) The Tutor (1950)

Quotations

"Unhappy is the land that is in need of heroes." "If all people want is to see something they understand, they shouldn't go to the theater. They should go to the bathroom." "What if they held a war, and no one came? Why then, the war would come to you."

Links

[http://german.lss.wisc.edu/brecht International Brecht Society] [http://eislermusic.com Brecht's friendship with Hanns Eisler] [http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/BrechtGuide Brecht's Works in English: A Bibliography]: This Bibliography of Bertolt Brecht's Works inside English Translation occurs as cooperative plan of a International Brecht Society & the Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv (Akademie five hundred Künste, Berlin). the design strives to turn into a comprehensive list of Brecht's works published inside English translation.