Brecht's Life 1

BERTOLT BRECHT 1898 - 1956

Bertolt Brecht was born in the city of Augsburg, Germany in 1898; his home life was comfortable and middle-class. His mother was a devout Protestant and the Bible was a significant influence in his young life.  He was not a strong or healthy child and so at the start of World War I he avoided being sent into the army but served in a local military hospital where he witnessed terrible suffering and human misery.

Along with many others, he was unhappy with the political system in post-war Germany and became interested in the works of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his ideas of socialism and communism. During this period he developed a strongly anti-bourgeois attitude that reflected his generation's disappointment in the values of the current German society that had been responsible for the war and for the turmoil that followed it.  At university, Brecht lost interest in his medical studies and turned towards drama and began writing his own plays dealing with political issues.

Brecht’s early career as a dramatist developed alongside the period of the Weimar Republic in Germany, when politics became more and more extreme between the left and the right.  When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, because Brecht was seen as a dangerous communist supporter, his works were publicly burned and he was forced to go into exile in Denmark to protect his family.  During the early years of World War II he continued to remain in Europe and moved to Sweden and then Finland - until 1941 when he went to the United States.

In the US he continued to oppose Hitler and the Nazis until their defeat in 1945.  However, following the war, a communist scare swept the US and Brecht was a well-known communist sympathiser.  In October 1947 he was forced to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, even though he was not an official member of the American communist party. Brecht left the United States the very next day.

He soon travelled to East Berlin, now under the control of Joseph Stalin and the USSR and in 1949 set up the Berliner Ensemble with full support from the communist government.  His play Mother Courage and Her Children was the Berliner Ensemble's inaugural production. Brecht died of a heart attack in August 1956.