Brecht, Bertolt (Eugen Berthold Friedrich) (Augsburg, 1898-1956, (East) Berlin), writer, poet, and ‘Stückeschreiber’, as he styled himself, had his schooling at Augsburg. In 1917 he matriculated at Munich University to read medicine and returned in the following year to Augsburg, where he worked as a medical orderly at a military hospital. He became a radical opponent of war and the nationalistic attitudes associated with it, which he saw as capitalism thinly disguised. In the decade up to his marriage with Helene Weigel in 1929, he established himself as a versatile writer of plays and lyric poetry and as a practical man of the theatre who emancipated himself resolutely from Expressionistic trends and experimented with new forms. Baal was written in Augsburg before he moved back to Munich. By 1922, when he was awarded the Kleist Prize, he had added Trommeln in der Nacht and Im Dickicht der Städte. Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England (after Christopher Marlowe, in collaboration with L. Feuchtwanger) and Mann ist Mann followed his removal to Berlin to work for two years under Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater. A new phase in his development began with his study of the ‘political theatre’ of Piscator and the dialectical materialism of Marx. The climax of this decade occurs in his operas Die Dreigroschenoper and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, which he wrote in collaboration with the composer K. Weill. In 1927 he published a cycle of poems, Bertolt Brechts Hauspostille. Its title suggests, like that of the Kalendergeschichten of 1949, a popular anthology in the moralizing tradition of J. P. Hebel. Brecht's Lehrstücke, which result from his extensive studies of Communism, are more radical in their socialistic aim. While all his subsequent plays are in this sense Lehrstücke, the short plays written between 1929 and 1930 differ from his later works in their elimination of the ‘culinary’ (kulinarisch) effect. They include Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis, Der Ozeanflug, Die Maßnahme, Der Jasager und der Neinsager, Ausnahme und die Regel. Der Jasager is indebted to the Nõ play. The best-known play of this time is, however, Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe.
Brecht was fifth on the black list of the NSDAP in 1923. When it came to power in 1933 he went into exile in Switzerland and then Denmark, where he stayed until 1939. He moved on to Finland, but the German occupation forced him to leave for Russia, though he did not settle there, moving to California, where he remained from 1941 to 1947 and worked with Charles Chaplin and Charles Laughton among others. He returned via Zurich to settle in East Berlin in 1949. In 1950 both he and Weigel (born in Vienna), stateless since 1933, were granted Austrian citizenship. A member of the East German Akademie der Künste, he became its vice-president in 1954, was awarded the Nationalpreis I. Klasse in 1951, and received the Stalin Prize in Moscow in 1955. From 1952 he worked in the seclusion of a rented house by a lake in Buckow, while the Chausseestraße became his Berlin address from 1953.
He devoted his remaining years to the Berliner Ensemble, which he founded in 1949 in deliberate contrast to the Weimar theatre of Goethe and Schiller.
Brecht's longer prose works are considerable in bulk, e.g. Dreigroschenroman, 1934; Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar, four of the intended six books of which were completed and published posthumously in (1957; the fragment Der Tui-Roman and the fragment Meti/Buch der Wendungen, 1935-9. His studies of stage techniques, philosophy, and literature of all kinds are contained in the intellectual symposium Der Messingkauf (1937-51). In this lengthy tract the philosopher, the producer, and the actor, striving for the ultimate benefit of the worker, discuss for four nights running the function of the epic theatre (see Episches Theater), its origins, its experimental character, and possible shortcomings, only to stress again and again that what matters in the end is the ‘point of view’ (Standpunkt). Brecht cultivated a lapidary style to stimulate a ‘thinking’ as distinct from an ‘educated’ person.
Brecht wrote some 80 stories, and the Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner, written from 1930 onwards, the shortest of which is some four lines in length. The creation of Herr Keuner (Swabian/Bavarian dialect for keiner, nobody) demonstrates the dual and ‘split’ personality in his portrayal of character (in this case his own) which marks Brecht's dialectics and was second nature to him. The majority of his plays, both completed and projected, are based on models.
Brecht distinguishes sharply between feeling and the psychology of character. Aristotelian drama is didactic in terms of human ethics. Its adaptation by Lessing associated it with the middle class (see Bürgerliches Trauerspiel). For Christian ethics or fate Brecht substituted his Communist commitment. Feeling is subordinated to uncompromisingly revolutionary dialectics, psychology is simplified so as not to interfere with doctrines. For this purpose he favoured remote settings, inducing detachment, arousing curiosity, both of which stimulate thought. After the Lehrstück phase Brecht revised his purely didactic view of the theatre. He wrote his best plays in the conviction that the public will learn more readily if it learns with pleasure, and as long as actor and stage designer (notably Caspar Neher and Teo Otto) promoted his aim he did not hesitate to modify his stage version.
The first collection of his works appeared under the title Versuche, which accords with his view that no work is complete without prolonged rehearsals complemented by performances, during which the author can study the reaction of the public. Indispensable for the epic theatre is the Verfremdungseffekt or VEffekt, which Brecht discussed in many of his theoretical writings, the best summary of which is the Kleines Organon für das Theater (1948). Nevertheless his greatest creations, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941), Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943), Leben des Galilei (1943), and Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (1948) have an independent life and can move any audience. Kattrin's death (Mutter Courage) is a conspicuous example of Brecht's power to appeal to the emotions, and so is the creation of his mother figures from Frau Carrar on; this gift became an acknowledged aspect of his technique.
Brecht's work for the theatre (which he viewed as the most effective means of communication) shows his ingenious and versatile use of language and poetic forms. He devised his own form of opera in protest against conventional opera (see Epische Oper). Similarly he adapted the use of the Greek chorus. He used hexameters for Das kommunistische Manifest, and in a number of poems he employed the form of the sonnet in protest against its traditional tone (e.g. Über Shakespeares Stück ‘Hamlet’ and Über Kleists Stück ‘Der Prinz von Homburg’). He used biblical language in a deliberately profane context. He imitated the language of the classics and of Büchner's Woyzeck, as well as that of Der Hofmeister by J. M. R. Lenz, which he adapted for his own play Der Hofmeister (1950). He used the language of the man in the street in Luther's manner, including the adoption of advertising slogans for self-education such as ‘Wissen ist Macht’ ( Turandot). The Straßenszene is the basic scene for his discussion of the epic theatre in Der Messingkauf. He collaborated with composers and himself set some of his songs to music. In his essay Über reimlose Lyrik mit unregelmäßigen Rhythmen (1939) he gave his reasons for changing from his earlier regular and rhyming verse to unrhymed and irregular verse, asserting that dialectics are more stimulating if they are not expressed in smooth language. But because the rhythm of language depends for its full effect on the speaker, Brecht prefers the term ‘Gestus’.
Brecht ranks as one of the greatest 20th c. lyric poets. Versatile in style and temper, his vast output bears the stamp of his own humanity and political commitment. This he has underlined by using the term ‘Gebrauchslyrik’ to which the title of his first major collection, Bertholt Brechts Hauspostille (1927), alludes. The location of his exile in Denmark is reflected in the title of his Svendborger Gedichte (1939), and that of his retreat in East Germany in the title of the predominantly resigned poetry of his Buckower Elegien (1953). In his short, bitterly ironic poem ‘Die Lösung’ Brecht expressed his disillusionment at the unsuccessful workers' rising on 17 June 1953 (see Deutsche Demokratische Republik). Two years later, in a press appeal prompted by the creation of East Germany's new army, he urged both German governments not to introduce compulsory military service without a plebiscite. He produced the Herrnburger Bericht, which includes ten choral songs (music by P. Dessau) for the World Festival of Democratic Youth (1950-1), and published Die Kriegsfibel in the year before his death. The specific ‘point of view’ permeating his work as a whole is no less idealistic than the classical brand of idealism. In objecting to the classical concept of ‘das ewig Menschliche’ he wanted to demonstrate that change was both necessary and possible; this leads him at times to an over-simplification of the world he wishes to change, but his sensitivity to the basic instincts and needs of human nature rises superior to the anti-Aristotelian theorist.
Brecht's belief in collective work, expressed in the stage production of his plays, also extends to their texts, in the writing of which he was heavily dependent on gifted collaborators, notably on Elisabeth Hauptmann (from 1924/5), Margarete Steffin (1931-41, the year of her death in Moscow), and Ruth Berlau (from 1933). After Brecht's death H. Weigel remained in charge of the Berliner Ensemble, while E. Hauptmann devoted herself to the editorial side of his work. She died in 1973.
Other plays, mostly written during and since his exile, include in chronological order of writing: Die Mutter (1931), Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe (1931-4), Die Horatier und die Kuriatier, another didactic play for schools in three episodes (1934), Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (1935-8), Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar (1937), Das Verhör des Lukullus and the opera Die Verurteilung des Lukullus (1939), Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1940), a highly effective example of Brecht's own conception of the Volksstück, Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1941), Die Gesichte der Simone Machard (1941-3), Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg (1943), Die Tage der Commune (1948-9), Die Antigone des Sophokles (1947), Turandot oder der Kongreß der Weißwäscher (1930-54).
Versuche (15 vols.) appeared 1930-57, and Vorläufige Gesamtausgabe in 33 Bänden from 1953: Stücke (12 vols.), Schriften zum Theater (7 vols.), Gedichte (9 vols.), Prosa (5 vols.). In 1967 appeared Gesammelte Werke. werkausgabe edition suhrkamp, edited in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann. Arbeitsjournal 1938-1955 (2 vols.) appeared in 1973, and Werke. Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (30 vols.), ed. W. Hecht et al., 1988 ff.
