Bertolt Brecht, original name Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, (born February 10, 1898, Augsburg, Germany—died August 14, 1956, East Berlin), German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theater departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for leftist causes.
Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theater (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theater")
Until 1924 Brecht lived in Bavaria, where he was born, studied medicine (Munich, 1917–21), and served in an army hospital (1918). He left for Berlin in 1924, where with the composer Kurt Weill he wrote the satirical, successful ballad opera The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
During the Nazi Germany period, Bertolt Brecht fled his home country in 1933, first to Scandinavia (1933-41), and during World War II to the United States (1941-47). He lived in Santa Monica and did some film work in Hollywood. In Germany his books were burned, and his citizenship was withdrawn. He was cut off from the German theater; but between 1937 and 1941 he wrote most of his great plays, his major theoretical essays and dialogues, and many of the poems. While in US, he was surveilled by the FBI. After the war he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Many of his best known plays were written in his exile years (1933-1947)
Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theater company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator, actress Helene Weigel.
Brecht's theater has influenced many playwrights such as David Hare, Caryl Churchill, Arthur Miller and Tony Kushner, and film makers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard.
In this SDG, we will read, view, if possible, ten of his most notable plays and discuss the content, as well as the structure and impact of each play and they differ from classical theater.
