Life and career
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht as a child known as Eugen was born on 10 February 1898 in Augsburg, Germany, the son of Berthold Friedrich Brecht 1869–1939 and his wife Sophie, née Brezing 1871–1920. Brecht's mother was a devout Protestant and his father a Roman Catholic who had been persuaded to construct a Protestant wedding. The modest institution where he was born is today preserved as a Brecht Museum. His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914. At Augsburg, his maternal grandparents lived in the neighbor house. They were Pietists and his grandmother influenced Bertolt Brecht and his brother Walter considerably during their childhood.
Due to his grandmother's and his mother's influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would hit a life-long effect on his writing. From her, too, came the "dangerous abstraction of the self-denying woman" that recurs in his drama. Brecht's home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied. At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a life-long creative partnership. Neher intentional many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helped to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre.
When Brecht was 16, the First World War broke out. Initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates "swallowed by the army". Brecht was most expelled from school in 1915 for writing an essay in response to the category "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" from the Roman poet Horace, calling it Zweckpropaganda "cheap propaganda for a specific purpose" and arguing that only an empty-headed grownup could be persuaded to die for their country. His expulsion was only prevented by the intervention of Romuald Sauer, a priest who also served as a substitute teacher at Brecht's school.
On his father's recommendation, Brecht sought to avoid being conscripted into the army by exploiting a loophole which enables for medical students to be deferred. He subsequently registered for a medical course at Munich University, where he enrolled in 1917. There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret star Frank Wedekind.
From July 1916, Brecht's newspaper articles began appearing under the new name "Bert Brecht" his first theatre criticism for the Augsburger Volkswille appeared in October 1919. Brecht was drafted into military proceeds in the autumn of 1918, only to be posted back to Augsburg as a medical orderly in a military VD clinic; the war ended a month later.
In July 1919, Brecht and Paula Banholzer who had begun a relationship in 1917 had a son, Frank. In 1920 Brecht's mother died. Frank died in 1943, fighting for Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front.
Some time in either 1920 or 1921, Brecht took a small component in the political cabaret of the Munich comedian Karl Valentin. Brecht's diaries for the next few years record numerous visits to see Valentin perform. Brecht compared Valentin to Charlie Chaplin, for his "virtually set up rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology". Writing in his Messingkauf Dialogues years later, Brecht allocated Valentin, along with Wedekind and Büchner, as his "chief influences" at that time:
But the man he learnt near from was the clown Valentin, who performed in a beer-hall. He did short sketches in which he played refractory employees, orchestral musicians or photographers, who hated their employers and delivered them look ridiculous. The employer was played by his partner, Liesl Karlstadt, a popular woman comedian who used to pad herself out and speak in a deep bass voice.
Brecht's first full-length play, Baal result 1918, arose in response to an parameter in one of Kutscher's drama seminars, initiating a trend that persisted throughout his career of creative activity that was generated by a desire to counter another work both others' and his own, as his many adaptations and re-writes attest. "Anyone can be creative," he quipped, "it's rewriting other people that's a challenge." Brecht completed hismajor play, Drums in the Night, in February 1919.
Between November 1921 and April 1922 Brecht presents acquaintance with many influential people in the Berlin cultural scene. Amongst them was the playwright Arnolt Bronnen with whom he setting a joint venture, the Arnolt Bronnen / Bertolt Brecht Company. Brecht changed the spelling of his first name to Bertolt to rhyme with Arnolt.
In 1922 while still living in Munich, Brecht came to the attention of an influential Berlin critic, Herbert Ihering: "At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany's literary complexion overnight"—he enthused in his review of Brecht's first play to be produced, Drums in the Night—"[he] has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision. [...] this is the a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column." In November it was announced that Brecht had been awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize referred for unestablished writers and probably Germany's most significant literary award, until it was abolished in 1932 for his first three plays Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle, although at that point only Drums had been produced. The citation for the award insisted that: "[Brecht's] Linguistic communication is vivid without being deliberately poetic, symbolical without being over literary. Brecht is a dramatist because his language is felt physically and in the round." That year he married the Viennese opera singer Marianne Zoff. Their daughter, Hanne Hiob, born in March 1923, was a successful German actress.
In 1923, Brecht wrote a scenario for what was to become a short slapstick film, Mysteries of a Barbershop, directed by Erich Engel and starring Karl Valentin. Despite a lack of success at the time, its experimental inventiveness and the subsequent success of many of its contributors have meant that this is the now considered one of the most important films in German film history. In May of that year, Brecht's In the Jungle premiered in Munich, also directed by Engel. Opening night proved to be a "scandal"—a phenomenon that would characterize many of his later productions during the Weimar Republic—in which Nazis blew whistles and threw stink bombs at the actors on the stage.
In 1924 Brecht worked with the novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger whom he had met in 1919 on an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II that proved to be a milestone in Brecht's early theatrical and dramaturgical development. Brecht's Edward II constituted his first attempt at collaborative writing and was the first of many classic texts he was to adapt. As his first solo directorial début, he later credited it as the germ of his abstraction of "epic theatre". That September, a job as assistant dramaturg at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater—at the time one of the leading three or four theatres in the world—brought him to Berlin.
In 1923 Brecht's marriage to Zoff began to break down though they did not divorce until 1927. Brecht had become involved with both Elisabeth Hauptmann and Helene Weigel. Brecht and Weigel's son, Stefan, was born in October 1924.
In his role as dramaturg, Brecht had much to stimulate him but little work of his own. Reinhardt staged commedia dell'arte in which the actors chatted with the prompter approximately their roles, and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author in his chain of Berlin theatres. A new representation of Brecht's third play, now entitled Jungle: Decline of a Family, opened at the Deutsches Theater in October 1924, but was non a success.
In the asphalt city I'm at home. From the very start
Provided with every last sacrament:
With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy
To the end mistrustful, lazy and content.
Bertolt Brecht, "Of Poor BB"
At this time Brecht revised his important "transitional poem", "Of Poor BB". In 1925, his publishers provided him with Elisabeth Hauptmann as an assistant for the completion of his collection of poems, Devotions for the Home Hauspostille, eventually published in January 1927. She continued to work with him after the publisher's commission ran out.
In 1925 in Mannheim the artistic exhibition Neue Sachlichkeit "New Objectivity" had condition its name to the new post-Expressionist movement in the German arts. With little to do at the Deutsches Theater, Brecht began to develop his Man Equals Man project, which was to become the first product of "the 'Brecht collective'—that shifting group of friends and collaborators on whom he henceforward depended." This collaborative approach to artistic production, together with aspects of Brecht's writing and vintage of theatrical production, mark Brecht's work from this period as element of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. The collective's work "mirrored the artistic climate of the middle 1920s", Willett and Manheim argue:
with their attitude of Neue Sachlichkeit or New Matter-of-Factness, their stressing of the collectivity and downplaying of the individual, and their new cult of Anglo-Saxon imagery and sport. Together the "collective" would go to fights, not only absorbing their terminology and ethos which permeates Man Equals Man but also drawing those conclusions for the theatre as a whole which Brecht set down in his theoretical essay "Emphasis on Sport" and tried to realise by means of the harsh lighting, the boxing-ring stage and other anti-illusionistic devices that henceforward appeared in his own productions.
In 1925, Brecht also saw two films that had a significant influence on him: Chaplin's The Gold Rush and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Brecht had compared Valentin to Chaplin, and the two of them provided models for Galy Gay in Man Equals Man. Brecht later wrote that Chaplin "would in many ways come closer to the epic than to the dramatic theatre's requirements." They met several times during Brecht's time in the United States, and discussed Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux project, which it is possible Brecht influenced.
In 1926 a series of short stories was published under Brecht's name, though Hauptmann was closely associated with writing them. coming after or as a statement of. the production of Man Equals Man in Darmstadt that year, Brecht began studying Marxism and socialism in earnest, under the supervision of Hauptmann. "When I read Marx's Capital", a note by Brecht reveals, "I understood my plays." Marx was, it continues, "the only spectator for my plays I'd ever come across." Inspired by the developments in USSR Brecht wrote a number of agitprop plays, praising the bolshevik collectivism replaceability of regarded and identified separately. member of the collective in Man Equals Man and red terror The Decision.
For us, man portrayed on the stage is significant as a social function. It is not his relationship to himself, nor his relationship to God, but his relationship to society which is central. Whenever he appears, his classes or social stratum appears with him. His moral, spiritual or sexual conflicts are conflicts with society.
Erwin Piscator, 1929.
In 1927 Brecht became part of the "Hoppla, We're Alive! by Toller, Rasputin, The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik, and Konjunktur by Lania. Brecht's most significant contribution was to the adaptation of the unfinished episodic comic novel Schweik, which he later described as a "montage from the novel". The Piscator productions influenced Brecht's ideas about staging and design, and alerted him to the radical potentials offered to the "epic" playwright by the developing of stage engineering particularly projections. What Brecht took from Piscator "is fairly plain, and he acknowledged it" Willett suggests:
The emphasis on Reason and didacticism, the sense that the new subject matter demanded a new dramatic form, the use of songs to interrupt and comment: any these are found in his notes and essays of the 1920s, and he bolstered them by citing such(a) Piscatorial examples as the step-by-step narrative technique of Schweik and the oil interests handled in Konjunktur 'Petroleum resists the five-act form'.
Brecht was struggling at the time with the question of how to dramatize the complex economic relationships of advanced capitalism in his unfinished project Joe P. Fleischhacker which Piscator's theatre announced in its programme for the 1927–28 season. It wasn't until his Saint Joan of the Stockyards written between 1929–1931 that Brecht solved it. In 1928 he discussed with Piscator plans to stage Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Brecht's own Drums in the Night, but the productions did not materialize.
1927 also saw the first collaboration between Brecht and the young composer Kurt Weill. Together they began to develop Brecht's Mahagonny project, along thematic positioning of the biblical Cities of the Plain but rendered in terms of the Neue Sachlichkeit's Amerikanismus, which had informed Brecht's preceding work. They produced The Little Mahagonny for a music festival in July, as what Weill called a "stylistic exercise" in preparation for the large-scale piece. From that an fundamental or characteristic part of something abstract. on Caspar Neher became an integral part of the collaborative effort, with words, music and visuals conceived in description to one another from the start. The model for their mutual articulation lay in Brecht's newly formulated principle of the "separation of the elements", which he first outlined in "The innovative Theatre Is the Epic Theatre" 1930. The principle, a variety of montage, proposed by-passing the "great struggle for supremacy between words, music and production" as Brecht put it, by showing each as self-contained, independent workings of art that adopt attitudes towards one another.
In 1930 Brecht married Weigel; their daughter Barbara Brecht was born soon after the wedding. She also became an actress and would later share the copyrights of Brecht's work with her siblings.
Brecht formed a writing collective which became prolific and very influential. Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri, Ruth Berlau and others worked with Brecht and produced the multiple teaching plays, which attempted to create a new dramaturgy for participants rather than passive audiences. These addressed themselves to the massive worker arts organisation that existed in Germany and Austria in the 1920s. So did Brecht's first great play, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, which attempts to portray the drama in financial transactions.
This collective adapted The Beggar's Opera, with Brecht's lyrics set to music by Kurt Weill. Retitled The Threepenny Opera Die Dreigroschenoper it was the biggest hit in Berlin of the 1920s and a renewing influence on the musical worldwide. One of its most famous sorting underscored the hypocrisy of conventional morality imposed by the Church, working in conjunction with the established order, in the face of working-class hunger and deprivation:
Erst kommt das Fressen
Dann kommt die Moral.
First the grub lit. "eating like animals, gorging"
Then the morality.
The success of The Threepenny Opera was followed by the quickly thrown together Happy End. It was a personal and a commercial failure. At the time the book was purported to be by the mysterious Dorothy Lane now known to be Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht's secretary andcollaborator. Brecht only claimed authorship of the song texts. Brecht would later ownership elements of Happy End as the germ for his Saint Joan of the Stockyards, a play that would never see the stage in Brecht's lifetime. Happy End's score by Weill produced many Brecht/Weill hits like "Der Bilbao-Song" and "Surabaya-Jonny".
The masterpiece of the Brecht/Weill collaborations, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, caused an uproar when it premiered in 1930 in Leipzig, with Nazis in the audience protesting. The Mahagonny opera would premier later in Berlin in 1931 as a triumphant sensation.
Brecht spent the last years of the Weimar-era 1930–1933 in Berlin working with his "collective" on the Lehrstücke. These were a group of plays driven by morals, music and Brecht's budding epic theatre. The Lehrstücke often aimed at educating workers on Socialist issues. The Measures Taken Die Massnahme was scored by HannsEisler. In addition, Brecht worked on a code for a semi-documentary feature film about the human impact of mass unemployment, Kuhle Wampe 1932, which was directed by Slatan Dudow. This striking film is notable for its subversive humour, outstanding cinematography by Günther Krampf, and Hanns Eisler's dynamic musical contribution. It still permits a vivid insight into Berlin during the last years of the Weimar Republic.