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Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956, was one of the greatest dramatists of the 20th century. His first poems were published at 16. Initially a supporter of the Kaiser, he served as an orderly in the German army during the First World War, but by its end was deeply disenchanted, not only with the war, but with the whole of society. In 1924, after his first critical successes, he moved to Berlin, where he continued to write, collaborating, among other projects, with the great German composer, Kurt Weill, on The Threepenny Opera and The Rise & Fall of the City of Mahogonny. In 1933, in disgust at the rise of the Nazis, he moved to Denmark. In 1941, he moved to America, where he worked briefly in Hollywood.
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Bertolt Brecht's dalliance with film is a story of missed opportunity. The self-aggrandizing playwright thought himself too talented for Hollywood, not realizing that if any medium could stimulate the masses, and inoculate them with his radical artistic and political ideas, it was film. Brecht's failed efforts as a moviemaker belie the extent to which his style - of simple stories told complexly, of hybrids of song and melodrama and comedy - was inherently cinematic. "The Threepenny Opera" provides only hints of what might have been had Brecht dedicated himself to the medium he so thoroughly disdained.
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Bertolt Brecht, born on Feb. 10, 1898, died on Aug. 14, 1956, one of the great German poets and playwrights, had a key influence on modern drama. As an innovator he advanced such ideas as the "alienation effect," an attempt to divorce the audience from emotional identification with the play's characters, presumably preventing them from experiencing catharsis, pity or fear - the Aristotelian requirements for dramatic effectiveness. "Gestic" acting, another Brechtian notion, trained actors to distance themselves from their stage characters, emphasizing stylized action, intonation, and facial expression rather than emotional empathy. These ideas were realized in many of Brecht's works, first in plays produced in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s under the generic category of EPIC THEATER, and later in Brecht's own theater in East Berlin.
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In concert with his work as a politically-charged playwright and dramaturge, Bertolt Brecht concerned himself extensively with the theory of drama. He was convinced that the Aristotelian ideal of audience catharsis through identification with a hero and the resultant experience of terror and pity worked against his goal of bettering society. He did not want his audiences to feel, but to think, and his main theoretical thrusts -- Verfremdungseffekte (de-familiarization effects) and epic theater, among others -- were conceived in pursuit of this goal. This is the first detailed study in English of Brecht's writings on the theater to take account of works first made available in the recent German edition of his collected works. It offers in-depth analyses of Brecht's canonical essays on the theater from 1930 to the late 1940s and early GDR years. Close readings of the individual essays are supplemented by surveys of the changing connotations within Brecht's dramaturgical oeuvre of key theoretical terms, including epic and anti-Aristotelian theater, de-familiarization, historicization, and dialectical theater.
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This selection of Bertolt Brecht's critical writing charts the development of his thinking on theatre and aesthetics over four decades. The volume demonstrates how the theories of Epic Theatre and Alienation evolved, and contains notes and essays on the staging of "The Threepenny Opera", "Mahagonny", "Mother Courage", "Puntila", "Galileo" and many others of his plays. Also included is "A Short Organum for the Theatre", Brecht's most complete statement of his revolutionary philosophy of the theatre. With over 32 pages of photographs of Brecht's productions and workshops, this is a key volume for Literature and Theatre Studies alike. "Admirably translated and annotated this book is a source of instruction, enlightenment, even fun" - "New York Times".
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Bertolt Brecht was born on February 10, 1898, in the medieval city of Augsburg, part of the Bavarian section of the German Empire. Married in 1897, his father was a Catholic and his mother a Protestant. Brecht was their first child, baptized as Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht. His father, Bertolt Friedrich Brecht, worked in a paper factory. His mother, Wilhelmine Friederike Sophie Brezing, was ill with breast cancer most of his young life. He had one brother, Walter, who was born in 1900.
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Bertolt Brecht