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Bertolt Brecht: East Berlin
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In 1924, after receiving productions of The Jungle of Cities at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater and Edward II at the Prussian State Theatre, Brecht moved to Berlin, a move he deemed necessary to continue his dramatic career. During the next few years, Brecht produced a string of well-received plays, the most popular of which was probably The Threepenny Opera, which he adapted from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera along with composer Kurt Weill. In fact, The Threepenny Opera would go on to become the biggest theatrical hit in Berlin during the 1920s and helped lead the way in a worldwide resurgence of the popularities of musicals in general. (It would ... do much to fatten the playwright's checkbook!) Brecht also published his first book of poems, Hauspostille (Domestic Breviary), which won a literary prize. However, even as his literary fame was soaring, Brecht found his interests shifting towards politics. In 1927, he had begun to study Karl Marx's Das Kapital, and by 1929 he had embraced Communism.
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Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Germany, in 1898 and died in Berlin in 1956. With plays such as The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage, Life of Galileo, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, he cemented his reputation as one of the most modern and innovative of twentieth century dramatists.
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In 1948 Brecht settled in East Berlin, where he remained until his death. He and his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, founded the Berliner Ensemble in September 1949 with ample financial support from the state. This group became the most famous theater company in East Germany and the foremost interpreter of Brecht. He himself devoted much of his time to directing. He wrote no new plays except Die Tage der Commune (1949; The Days of the Commune) but adapted several - among them Molière's Don Juan and Shakespeare's Coriolanus. There is some evidence that he modified his austere conception of the function of drama and conceded the importance of the theater as a vehicle for entertainment.
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After 15 years of exile Brecht returned to Germany in 1948 and spend a year in Zürich working on Sophocles’ Antigone (trans. by Friedrich Hölderin) and on his major theoretical work A Little Organum for the Theatre. After Zürich, Brech moved in 1949 to Berlin where he founded his own Marxist theater, the Berliner Ensemble. Its first production at the Stadttheater was Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti. Brecht’s second wife, Helene Weigel, whom he had married in 1928, was his chief actress and carried on as a director. With the new authorities of DDR Brecht had some problems, although he wrote prose that pleased the censors.
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Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria. Raised in a comfortable middle-class home, he attended secondary school in Augsburg and studied briefly at the University of Munich. In 1924 he gained a foothold in the cultural metropolis of Berlin as an assistant dramaturge (drama specialist) at the Deutsches Theater. He achieved enormous popular success following the 1928 premiere of his collaborative effort with German composer Kurt Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper (published 1928; translated as The Threepenny Opera, 1964). Forced to flee Germany in 1933 because of his leftist political beliefs (he had become a convert to the socioeconomic theories of Karl Marx) and opposition to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, Brecht and his family spent 14 years in exile in Scandinavia and the United States. Although he tried hard to become established in the United States, Brecht failed to make a breakthrough either as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, California, or as a playwright on Broadway.
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While Germany descended into Nazism, Brecht fled to the west. The would-be man of the people became the favourite of western liberal intellectuals. After the war Brecht was able to work freely in East Germany, to which he returned. But he was never wholly accepted by the communist establishment which saw, better than he did, that his work might provoke thoughts dangerous to Marxism. Moreover as the Russian establishment had fostered the Stanislavskian tradition after Lenin came to power, it had become the dominant form of theatre in the Eastern bloc. Non-naturalistic theatre might, therefore, be seen as the work of a dissident, and subversive of the new revolutionary establishment.
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