Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)

German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer, one of the most prominent figures in the 20th-century theatre. In his works Brecht have been concerned with encouraging audiences to think rather than becoming too involved in the story and to identify with the characters. In this process he used alienation effects (A Effekts). Brecht developed a form of drama called epic theatre in which ideas or didactic lessons are important. "In order to produce A Effects the actor has to discard whatever means he has learned of persuading the audience to identify itself with the characters which he plays. Aiming not to put his audience into a trance, he must not go into a trance himself. His muscles must remain loose, for a turn of the head, e.g., with tautened neck muscles, will "magically" lead the spectators' eyes and even their heads to turn with it, and this can only detract from any speculation or reaction which the gestures may bring about. His way of speaking has to be free from ecclesiastical singsong and from all those cadences which lull the spectator so that the sense gets lost." (from A Short Organum for the Theatre, 1948)

Bertold Brecht was born in Augsburg. His father, a Catholic, was a director of a paper company and his mother, a Protestant, was a daughter of a civil servant. Brecht began to write poetry as a boy, and had his first poems published in 1914. After finishing elementary school, he was sent to the Königliches Realgymnasium, where he gained fame as an enfant terrible. In 1917 Brecht enrolled as a medical student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After military service as a medical orderly, he returned to his studies, but abandoned them in 1921. During the Bavarian revolutionary turmoil of 1918, Brech wrote his first play, BAAL, which was produced in 1923. The play celebrated life and sexuality and was a great success. Brecht's association with Communism began in 1919, when he joined the Independent Social Democratic party. Friendship with the writer Lion Feuchtwanger was an important literary contact for the young writer. Feuchtwanger advised him on the discipline of playwriting. In 1920 Brecht was named chief adviser on play selection at the Munich Kammerspiele. As a result of a brief affair with a Fräulein Bie, Brecht's son Frank was born and in 1922 he married the actress Marianne Zoff. In 1924 Brecht was appointed a consultant at Max Reinhardt's Deutches Theater in Berlin. Brecht´s

success started with TROMMELN IN DER NACHT (1922), and continued with DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER after John Gay´s The Beggar´s Opera, which he made with the composer Kurt Weil. Gay's play, revived by Sir Nigel Playfair at the Lyric Theatre in London, had been a great success from 1920. Brecht moved the action to Victorian times, and instead of mocking the pretentions of Italian grand opera, he attacked on bourgeois respectability. Although rehearsals were disastrous, the audience wanted to hear over and over again the duet between Macheath and the Police Chief, Tiger Brown. "Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear And he shows them pearly white Just a jackknife has Macheath, dear And he keeps it out of sight." (from The Threepenny Opera, 1928)

Around 1927 Brecht started to study Karl Marx's Das Kapital and by 1929 he had become a Communist. At the Schiffbauerdam Theater he trained many actors who were to become famous on stage and screen, among them Oscar Homolka, Peter Lorre, and the singer Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weil's wife. With Hanns Eisler Brecht worked on a political film, Kuhle Wampe, the name referring to an area of Berlin where the unemployed lived in shacks. The film was released in 1932 and forbidden shortly afterward. Brecht's politcally committed play, DIE MASSNAHME (1930, The Measures Taken) reflected his antisentimentality and directness, which even the Communist Party found hard. In the play a young Communist is murdered by the Party - his sympathy for the poor and their suffering only postpones the day of the showdown. The lesson is that the freedom of the individual must be suppressed today so that in the future mankind will be able to achieve freedom. In the 1930s Brecht´s books and plays were banned in Germany, performances were interrupted by the police or summarily forbidden. He went into exile, first to Denmark, where he lived mostly near Svendborg on the island of Fyn until 1939, and then to Finland, where he lived in Iitti in Villa Marlebäck as a guest of the Finnish author Hella Wuolijoki. The place is in the middle of the countryside, far from the cities, and perhaps boring for a person used to lively surroundings. There Brecht wrote with Wuolijoki the play HERR PUNTILA UND SEIN KNECHT MATTI (1940), and made his admiring "surrogate mother" jealous because rumors of affairs with other women. Brech, who disliked bathing, was

also famous for his promiscuousness. From Finland Brecht continued with his family through Russia to the United States, settling in Santa Monica. Brecht's travelling companion to America was Ruth Berlau, a Danish actress. Margarete Steffin, a German proletarian writer and another follower, had died in Moscow. In the new country Brecht tried to write for Hollywood, but the only script that found partial acceptance was Hangmen Also Die (1942). "The intellectual isolation here is enormous," Brecht compained. "Compared to Hollywood, Svendborg was a world center." His ideas, such as "the production, distribution and enjoyment of bread," were not taken seriously by movie moguls. In 1947 Brecht was accused of un-American activities, but managed to confuse with half-truths J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, who praised Brecht for being an exemplary witness. However, he flew to Switzerland, without waiting for the opening of his play Galileo in New York. Between the years 1938 and 1945 Brecht wrote his four great plays. LEBEN DES GALILEI (1938-39, The Life og Galileo), which did follow too slavishly the actual historical person, dealt with the hero's selfcondemnation for giving up his heliocentric theory in front of the Inquisition. MUTTER COURAGE UND IHRE KINDER (1939) was an attempt to demonstrate that greedy small entrepreneurs make devastating wars possible. "What they could do with round here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization." DER GUTE MENSCH VON SEZUAN

(1938-40) examined the dilemma of how to be virtuous and at the same time survive in a capitalist world, and DER KAUKASICHE KREIDEKREIS (1944-45), demonstrating that ownership belongs best to those who can make humane use of it. 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 Berliner Ensemble. His second wife, Helene Weigel, whom he had married in 1928, was his chief actress and carried on as a director. Brecht had with the new authorities of DDR his problems, although he wrote prose that pleased the censors. In his verse Brecht cryptically expressed his suspicion about the regime. "What times are these, when / to speak of trees

is almost a crime / because it passes in silence over such infamy!," he wrote. To assure for himself freedom of travel, Brecht took in 1950 Austrian passport. In West as well as in East Germany Brecht became the most popular contemporary poet, outdistanced only by such classics as Shakespeare, Schiller, and Goethe. Jean Vilar's production of Mutter Courage in 1951 secured him a following in France, and the Berliner Ensemble's participation in the Paris International Theatre Festival (1954) further spread his reputation. In 1955 Brecht received the Stalin Peace Prize. Next year he contracted a lung inflammation and died of a coronary thrombosis on August 14, 1956, in East Berlin. Brecht's works have been translated into 42 languages and sold over 70 volumes. He wanted his theater to represent a forum for debate hall rather than a place of illusions. From the Russian and Chinese theaters Brecht derived some of his basic concepts of staging and theatrical stylization. His concept of the Verfremdungseffekt, or V-Effekt (sometimes translated as 'alienation effect') centered on the idea of 'making strange' and thereby making poetic. He aimed to take emotion out of the production, persuade the audience to distance from the make believe characters and make the actors to dissociate from their roles. Then the political truth would be more easy to comprehend. Once he said: "Nothing is more important than learning to think crudely. Crude thinking is the thinking of great men." "His theater of alienation intended to motivate the viewer to think. Brecht's postulate of a thinking comportment converges, strangely enough, with the objective discernment that autonomous artworks presupposes in the viewer, listener, or reader as being adequate to them. His didactic style, however, is intolerant of the ambiguity in which thought originates: It is authoritarian. This may have been Brecht's response to the ineffectuality of his didactic plays: As a virtuoso of manipulative technique, he wanted to coerce the desired effect just as he once planned to organize his rise to fame." ( Theodor Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, 1997)

Brecht formutated his literary theories much in reaction to Georg Lukács (1885-1971), a Hungarian philosopher and Marxist literary theoretician. He disapproved Lukács attempt to distinguish between good realism and bad naturalism. Brecht considered the narrative form of Balzac and Tolstoy limited. He rejected Aristotele's concept of catharsis and plot as a simple story with a beginning and end. From Marx he took the idea of superstructure to which art belongs, but avoided too

simple explanations of ideological world view exemplified in the character of the Good Woman of Setzuan. For further reading: Brecht: A Choise of Evils by M. Esslin (1959); Brecht: The Man and His Work by M. Esslin (1959); Bertold Brecht by R. Gray (1961); The Art of Bertold Brecht by W. Weideli (1963); Bertold Brecht by F. Ewen (1967); Bertold Brecht by W. Haas (1968); Understanding Brecht by W. Benjamin (1973); Brecht as they knew him, ed. by H. Witt (1975); Bertold Brecht in America by James K. Lyon (1981); Brecht in Exile by Bruce Cook (1983); Brecht by R. Hayman (1983); Bertold Brecht by J.Speirs (1987); The Poetry of Brecht, by P.J. Thompson (1989); Postmodern Brecht by E. Wright (1989); Brecht by Hans Mayer (1996); Brecht & Co. by John Fuegi (1997); BrechtChronik by Klaus Völker (1997); Bertold Brecht by G. Berg (1998) - See also: Elias Canetti, Bertold Brecht/Kurt Weil's Alabama Song (Whisky Bar), performed by The Doors "Oh! Moon of Alabama We now must say good-by We've lost our good old mama And must have whiskey Oh, you know why!" ( 'Alabama Song' from Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1931) Mr. Puntila and His Hired Man, Matti (wr. 1940/41, prod. 1948). Based on stories by the Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki. Puntila is a rich farmer, who is generous when drunk and mean and selfish when sober. Puntila wants his daughter Eva to marry a diplomat but his drunk personality sees a better choice in his chauffeur and drinking companion Matti. An party is arranged to celebrate Eva's engagement to a diplomat. When Puntila gets drunk he insults the fiancé, and wants Matti to marry her. Matti puts her to the test. She fails to prove herself to be a good proletarian wife, and Matti leaves Puntila to join his working-class comrades. - Suom.: Brechtiltä on myös suomennettu kirjoituksia Aikamme teatterista sekä Runoja 1914-56. Elämäkerroista mainittakoon Kalervo Haikaran mittava teos Bertold Brechtin aika, elämä ja tuotanto (1992).

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BAAL, 1918 (published 1922) - trans. in 1964 DIE HOCHZEIT, 1919 (published 1953 under the title DIE KLEINBÜRGERHOCHZEIT) - The Petitbourgeois Wedding DER BETTLER, ODER DER TOTE HUND, 1919 (published 1953) - The Beggar, or The Dead Dog ER TREIB EINEN TEUFEL AUS, 1919 (published 1953) - He Exorcises a Devil TROMMELN IN DER NACHT, written 1919 (produced in 1922) - Drums in the Night LUX IN TENEBRIS, 1919 (published 1953) - Light in the Darkness

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IM DICKICHT DE STÄDTE, 1921/1923 (published 1927) In the Jungle of the Cities; In the Swamp LEBENEDUARDS DES ZWEITEN VON ENGLAND, 1923/1924 (with Lion Feuchtwanger, based on Christopher Marlowe's Edward II from 1594 ) - Edward II HAUSPOSTILLE, 1927 - A Manual of Piety MANN IST MANN, 1927 - Mies kuin mies - A Man's a Man DAS ELEFANTENKALB, 1927 - The Elephat Calf KALKUTTA, 4 MAI, 1927 (with Lion Feuchtwanger) Warren Hastings DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER, 1928 (music by Kurt Weil) Kolmen pennin ooppera / Kerjäläisooppera, suom. M. Haavio Three-Penny Opera - film 1931, dir. by G.W. Pabst; film 1963, dir. by Wolfgang Staudte

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HAPPY END, 1929 (with Elisabeth Hauptmann) DER FLUG DER LINDBERGH, 1929 - Lindberg's Flight AUFSTIEG UND FALL DER STADT MAHAGONNY, 1929 - Mahagonnyn kaupungin nousu ja tuho - Ride and Fall of the City Mahagonny DIE HEILIGE JOHANNA DER SCHLACHTHÖFE, 1929-30 - Teurastamojen Pyhä Johanna - Saint Joan of the Stockyards DAS BADENER LEHRSTÜCK VOM EINVERSTÄNDNIS, 1930 - The Didactic Play of Baden DER JASAGER, 1931 - He Who Says Yes DER NEINSAGER, 1931 - He Who Says No DIE MASSNAHME, 1931 - The Measures Taken DIE MUTTER: LEBEN DER REVOLUTIONÄRIN PELEGEA WLASSOWA AUS TWER, 1932 - The Mother: Life of Revolutionary Pelegea Vlassova from Tver DIE SIEBEN TODSÜNDEN DER KLEINBÜRGER, ca.1933 (published 1959) - The Seven Deadly Sins / Anna-Anna VERSUCHE, 1930-1933 (vols. 1-7) DER DREIGROSCHENROMAN, 1934 - The Three-Penny Novel LIEDER, GEDICHTE, CHÖRE, 1934 DIE RUNDKÖPFE UND DIE SPITZKÖPFE, 1936 - The Roundheads and the Peakheads DIE GEWEHRE DR FRAU CARRAR, 1937 - Señora Carrar's Rofles (free adaptation of J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea from 1904) FURCHT UND ELEND DES DRITTEN REICHES, 1935/1938, published 1945 - The Private Life of the Master Race DIE AUSNAHME UND DIE REGEL, 1937 - The Exception and the Rule DIE HORATIER AND DIE KURATIER, 1938 - The Horatians and the Curatians GESAMMELTE WERKE, 1938 (2 vols.) LEBEN DES GALILEI, 1938-39 (published 1955) - Galilein

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elämä - The Life of Galileo - film Galileo 1974, dir. by Joseph Losey DER GUTE MENCH VON SEZUAN, 1938-39 (published 1953) - Setsuanin hyvä ihminen - The Good Woman of Setzuan SVENDBORGER GEDICHTE, 1939 MUTTER COURAGE UND IHRE KINDER, 1939 (published 1949) - Äiti Peloton ja hänen lapsensa - Mother Courage and Her Children (based on Hans Jakob Grimmelshausen's novel Simplicissimus from 1669) - film 1961, Berliner Ensemble, dir. by Peter Palitzsch & Manfred Wekwerth

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DAS VERHÖR DES LUKULLUS, 1940 - The Trial of Lucullus HERR PUNTILA UND SEIN KNECHT MATTI, 1940 - Herra Puntila ja hänen renkinsä Matti (with Hella Wuolijoki) - Herr Puntila and His Man Matti - film 1957, dir. by Alberto Cavalcanti ; film 1979, dir. by Ralf Långbacka, starring Lasse Pöysti, Pekka Laiho, Arja Saijonmaa

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DER AUFHALTSAME AUFSTEIG DES ARTURO UI, 1941 (published 1957) - The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui DIE GESICHTE DER SIMONE MACHARD, 1941/43 (published 1956) - The Visions of Simome Machard SCHWEYK IM ZWEITEN WELTKRIEG, 1941/43 (published 1956) - Shvejk toisessa maailmansodassa Schweyk in the Second World War (based on Jaroslav Hašek's novel The Good Soldier Schweik from 1920-23) LEBEN DES KONFUTSE, written before 1944 (published 1958) - The Ginger Jar DER KAUKASISCHE KREIDENKREIS, 1944-45 (published 1949) - Kaukaasialainen liitupiiri - The Caucasian Chalk Circle (based on the Chinese play The Circle of Chalk) Selected Poems, 1947 DIE ANTIGONE DES SOPHOKLES, 1947/48 (published 1948) - The Antigone of Sophocles (based on Friedrich Hölderlin's translation of Sophocles' drama) KALENDERGESCHICHTEN, 1948 - Tales From the Calendar KLEINES ORGANON FÜR DAS THEATER, 1949 - A Little Organum for the Theatre VERSUCHE, 1949-1957 (vols. 7-15) DIE TAGE DER COMMUNE, 1948/1949 (published 1957) The Days of the Commune (based on Nordahl Grieg's The Defeat) DER HOFMEISTER, 1951 - The Private Tutor (adaptation of Jakob Lenz's Der Hofmeister from 1778) HERRNBURGER BERICHT, 1951 - Report from Herrnburger DER PROZESS DER JEANNE D'ARC ZU ROUEN 1431, 1952 (published 1959) - The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen, 1431 (from Anna Segher's version) DON JUAN, 1952 (published 1959, based on Moliere's Don

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Juan from 1665) CORIOLAN, 1952/53 (published 1959) - Coriolanus (adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolianus) STÜCKE, 1953-1966 (13 vols.) TURANDOT ODER DER KONGRESS DER WEISSWÄSCHER, 1950-54 - Turandot, or The Congress of Whitewashers PAUKEN UND TROMPETEN, 1955 (with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Benne Besson) - Trumpets and Drums (adaptation of George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer from 1706) STÜCKE, 1956-59 (12 vols.) GESCHICHTEN VOM HERRN KEUNER, 1958 FLÜHTLINGSGESPRÄCHE, 1961 - Pakolaiskeskusteluja, suom. Pentti Saarikoski Poems of the Theatre, 1961 Baal and Other Plays, 1964 Brecht on Theatre, 1964 The Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays, 1965 GESAMMELTE WERKE, 1967 (20 vols.) Collected Plays, 1971 ARBEITSJOURNAL, 1973 Diaries 1920-1922, 1979 Collected Poems 1913-1956, 1980 Short Stories 1921-46, 1983 Letters 1913-1956, 1990 Poems and Songs from the Plays, 1990 GROSSE KOMMENTIERTE BERLINER UND FRANKFURTER AUSGABE, BRIEFE 3, 1998 ÜBER VERFÜRUNG, EROTISCHE GEDICHTE MIT RADIERUNGEN VON PABLO PICASSO, 1998