He is one of the pioneers who directed the theater of the 20th century. He revolutionized the epic theater concept. He is one of the leading representatives of theatrical writing.
Coming from a wealthy family, Brecht was the son of a paper mill manager from Augsburg.
Augsburg, in which he was born and raised, was a thoroughly bourgeois city with a booming small industry at the beginning of the Kaiser Wilhelm era. Brecht, who published his first poetry and prose in the newspaper Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten in 1914-15, started to study medicine in Munich after graduating from high school in 1917, despite his interest in literature and theatre. When he was enlisted in 1918, he served for a while at the military hospital in Augsburg. His poem "The Story of the Dead Soldier", which he wrote in the same year, was cited as the reason for his expulsion from his German nationality by the Nazis in 1935. Brecht wrote his first play, Baal, in 1918, despite the end of the war, during the ongoing political turmoil in Bavaria. In 1919, he became a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party and the Augsburg Soldiers' Council for a while. The failure of his attempts at revolution inspired his 1922 play Trommeln in der Nacht ("Drums in the Night"). Also during this period, he had a relationship with a girl named Bie Banholzer, from which a son was born out of wedlock. This boy, named Frank, grew up in an orphanage and lived during World War II. He died on the Russian front in World War II. 1919 was a year when Brecht was very productive in the field of poetry. He compiled many of the poems he wrote during this period in his first poetry book, Die Hauspostille ("Book of Prayer").
Upon the death of his mother in 1920, he severed ties with his family and settled in Munich, where he began to make a living as a writer. A year later, he left his medical education, which he had been continuing in an irregular way. Meanwhile, he started to work as a dramaturg at the chamber theater in Munich known as the Kammerspiele, his second play Trommeln in der Nacht was staged in this theater, and on the success of this play, Brecht won the Kleist Prize. In the same year, he married an actress named Marianne Zoff. Born in 1923 from this marriage, Hanne worked as a guest artist in Brecht's Berliner Ensemble theater group years later. His plays Im Dickicht der Stadte (“In the Heather of the Cities”) staged in 1923 and Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England (“Edward II”) staged in 1924 did not receive great attention from the audience and critics, but they revealed the development of Brecht's playwriting. . Moving to Berlin in 1924, Brecht worked as a playwright with Carl Zuckmayer at the Deutsches Theater directed by Max Reinhardt and began to make a name for himself in this city, which has a very rich artistic life. After his first marriage failed, actress Helene He started a relationship with Weigel. They had a son named Stefan in 1926.
His marriage to Weigel, whom he married officially two years later, lasted until the end of his life. Helene Weigel, a convinced communist, was an actress who proved her importance in those years. She later gained international fame by portraying the heroines in Brecht's plays. Brecht also collaborated with the theater director Erwin Piscator, who was working in Berlin at this time and helped him adapt Hasek's novel Aslan Asker Şvayk for the stage. Collaboration with Piscator contributed to the clarity of the "Epic Theater" concept he designed, and he wrote his first play, Mann ist Mann ("Man is a Man") in 1927. Also during this period, he prepared successful musical plays in collaboration with composer Kurt Weill. Of these, Mahagonny was presented to the audience in 1927 by a chamber ensemble in Baden-Baden. Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), which was staged at the Schiffbauerdamm Theater in Berlin in 1928, where he later settled permanently, made both artists known all over the world as the brightest product of this collaboration. This epic opera, adapted by Brecht from the 18th-century English writer John Gay, remained in the theater's repertoire for five years until 1933, when Hitler came to power.
Under the influence of the economic crisis that shook Germany and the whole world in the years following World War I, Brecht devoted a large part of his time to learning Marxist philosophy. Believing that only this teaching would bring a radical solution to the problems that shook the world, he wrote a series of instructive plays he named Lehrstücke. He later collaborated with Hanns Eisler for these plays, which he initially staged to the music of Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith. The first product of this collaborative effort, Die Massnahme (“The Measure”), was staged in 1930. In the same year, his daughter Maria Barbara was born. The film Kuhle Wampe, in which Brecht participated in collaboration with Eisler, began to be shown in 1932 but was soon banned.
With the coming to power of the Nazis, the opportunity for Brecht's plays to be staged in Germany disappeared. Immediately after the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, Brecht secretly left Germany with his family; He lived in Switzerland for a while, then moved to Denmark, settling with the help of the wealthy writer Karin Michaelis, where he remained until 1939. His forced departure from political struggle created a favorable environment for Brecht's creativity, and during these six years in exile, he finished his play Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe (Tak-Tik), which he had begun in Berlin. Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reicbes (Fear and Misery of the Hitler Regime), Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother and Children of Courage), Das Verbör des Lukullus (“The Trial of Lukullus”) and Leben des Galilei (The Life of Galileo). He wrote some of his important plays here, where he began to write Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan (Sezuan's Good Man). When Denmark fell into danger when Hitler entered Poland in 1939, he moved to Stockholm with his family and artist friends, and then to Finland in 1940. The following year he went to the USA with his family and friends. Arriving in San Pedro, California, on June 21, 1941, Brecht soon settled in Santa Monica, near Hollywood, and experimented with writing screenplays for film companies.
Only one of the scripts he wrote was made into a movie, which was released in 1942 as Hangmen Also Die (Executioners Also Die). Brecht found many old friends and made new friends such as Charlie Chaplin and Eric Bentley during the six years of his stay in the United States from Germany. Of these, the theater critic Bentley contributed greatly to his recognition in American and English-speaking circles, with his writings and translations of Brecht's plays. Brecht's plays were not very appealing to the American audience. The reason for this was both the unsettling nature of these plays and the fact that Brecht's understanding of theater was against these people who were conditioned by Hollywood films and Broadway plays. Of these plays, which were received with greater understanding in university theaters, only The Life of Galileo, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Charles Laughton, was met with a positive response, at least among the critics. The play was first staged in Hollywood on July 30, 1947.
In October 1947, Brecht was questioned by the Committee on Anti-American Activities in Washington about his relations with the Communist Party on his return. With his clever responses, he denied the charges against him. The following month, he left the United States without waiting for Galileo's debut in New York. He waited for a while in Zurich, where he stopped as his first stop, to decide where to settle and work in Europe. He staged his own adaptation of Antigone and some other plays with the decorations of one of his old friends, Caspar Neher, at the Zurich City Theatre, which had staged three of Brecht's plays during the war years. II. At the end of World War II, Germany was divided in two. While Brecht was determined to return to his homeland, he wanted to evaluate the circumstances of where to settle. After the directors of the German Democratic Republic offered him a theater where he could work and unlimited funds, Brecht settled in East Berlin and founded the Berliner Ensemble, which included talented actors such as Helene Weigel, Therese Giehse, Angelika Hursvicz, and Ekkehard Schall. At the head of this group was Helene Weigel. But the real director of the theater was Brecht himself, who took on the role of dramaturgist. Beginning in October 1948, the Berliner Ensemble exhibited Mother Courage and Her Children, directed by Erich Engel, at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin on January 11, 1949. The ensemble, which formed a limited part of the large staff of this theater for a while, moved to its own theater in Schiffbauerdamm in 1954. After the play Die Tage Der Commune (The Days of the Commune), which he wrote in 1948-1949, Brecht gave up writing new plays and devoted all his time to play management and theoretical writings. Kleines Organon für das Theater (Small Vehicle for Theatre), which contained his views on theatrical art, and his unfinished Gescbafte des Herrn Julius Casar (Mr. Julius Caesar's Works) were published in 1949. On the same date, the Suhrkamp Publishing House in the Federal Republic resumed the work of publishing Brecht's collective works, which he had abandoned in 1933.
The Berliner Ensemble was quick to evaluate the favorable working conditions provided to it. Theoretical discussions, long and fruitful works as an exemplary theater troupe, first to the Berlin audience, then to the Parisians at the International Theater Festival, which he participated in Paris in June 1955, and to a wider and international audience with his performances in Paris and London the following year. made himself accepted by the masses. Although Brecht's value was appreciated in Western countries, albeit late, and he created great admiration, especially in intellectual circles, his not being well known in the USSR and other socialist countries is due to the fact that party leaders on artistic issues accused him of a kind of formalism. During the political tensions in his own country, although he did not openly oppose the rulers, he did not hesitate to warn them about this issue. Towards the end of his life, his fame reached international dimensions and in 1955 he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union. The speech he gave in Moscow while receiving the award was translated into Russian at his own request by Boris Pasternak. He fell ill with his lungs in the spring of 1956 and died in Berlin on 14 August 1956 from atherosclerosis.
Brecht is considered not only an artist who wrote a few of the most successful plays of the 20th century, but also an important pioneer who changed the theater of the age with his theoretical writings and innovations in practice by almost everyone who is interested in theater in the world today. While giving a new direction to the contemporary theater with forty plays he wrote, numerous essays, and theoretical writings, he set out from a certain point and made the necessary intellectual preparations before giving their final form to the works of art he wanted to realize.
Its development can be considered in three stages. In the first stage, knowing that Brecht was a German citizen who was born in imperial Germany and experienced the First World War, the unsuccessful 1918-1919 Revolution, and the Weimar Republic, he recognized the middle-class culture of the environment in which he grew up and he was disgusted with bourgeois values. is the determining factor in his poems and plays written in the 1920s. While Brecht opposed an outdated theater understanding that repeated stereotypical bourgeois values, he was also inspired by writers such as Büchner, Wedekind, Kaiser, and Toller who had rebelled against the same understanding before him. The plays he wrote during this period, such as Baal, Trommeln in der Nacht, and I'm Dickicbt der Stadte, are plays that contain harsh criticism, are sometimes political in nature, and always attack bourgeois values. But there is no coherent theatrical theory or a distinct political philosophy behind them.
Epic theater After reading Marx in the 1930s, Brecht explicitly conceives of the theoretical foundations of political theater and puts them into practice. In this second stage, he tries to create a theater worthy of the "age of science" by subordinating himself to an intellectual discipline. Among the theoretical concepts that Brecht put forward, the most emphasized ones are "Epic theater" and "alienation" or "the factor of strangeness". Epic theater is an instructive theater genre that incorporates the technical innovations Brecht learned from Piscator. In the playground of this theater, the events are not portrayed dramatically, they are told and the information about what is happening is transferred to the audience. According to this understanding, human is a research subject and is handled in their formation. The audience watches what is going on on the stage as an observer, but it is ensured that they make a judgment and take an action against what they see. In epic theatre, the audience understands that the world can be changed, not interpreted. To reach this conclusion, the epic playwright puts aside the linear development of events and brings together the scenes that have unity in themselves. It is emphasized that social reality determines thought, not the existence of thought. The audience is not fascinated by the identity of emotions but is brought into action by the ruling power of thought and reason. The most important element in the success of such a theatrical form is the "strange factor". For this, Epic theater uses naked light. Clothes, decorations, and music are not used to create an illusion, but to historicize and explain the events on the stage. The point that should not be forgotten in this regard is that the aim of all this theoretical research Brecht is to make the theater an effective tool for changing a world that needs to change. Therefore, in the first years of his adoption of the Marxist doctrine, Brecht wrote instructive plays with an extreme pragmatism concern, and he saw the function of theater in these plays as posing a problem, a dilemma, and enabling the audience to find a solution to it.
The depression that the world fell into in the 1930s and early 1940s forced Brecht to put aside the theoretical finesse for a while and warn the world against Nazi barbarism with plays he wrote in a cruder way. The Horror and Misery of the Hitler Regime, Tak-Tik, Arturo Ui's Preventable Rise, and Carrar Ana's Weapons are thick-lined plays in which Brecht's political concerns predominate and he tries to gain immediate benefit. Mother Courage and Her Children, Galileo's Life, Sezuan's good man, and Caucasian Chalk Circle, written almost at the same time, are considered Brecht's masterpieces. In almost all of these plays, it is seen that Brecht's orientation to the past and to a different environment as time and place gives him creative freedom in every respect. This freedom freed him from the concern of limiting solutions to urgent problems and enabled him to deal with human problems in their universal dimensions with a rational approach.
Some critics have argued that the "alienation factor", which is used in Brecht's theater to prevent the audience from identifying with the characters of the play, cannot prevent a certain degree of identity and emotion, especially in these mature plays, where concrete experience manifests itself with great richness and its application with Brecht's theory. regarded as an inconsistency between them. Indeed, the images of love encountered in these games are images of a happy world that can be created in the future with a common consciousness and under the guidance of the mind, despite the hindrance of the terrible reality in which people live. Brecht's great achievement is that he sees the tension and relationship between lived time, future time, facts and expectations, reality and dream, which lies at the core of his worldview, and uses this dialectical movement as the driving force of his plays. For this reason, he states that it would be correct to call the form of theater he believed in and performed Dialectical theater instead of Epic theater. According to Brecht, “the theater of the age of science will make the dialectic palatable”, because “all arts serve the supreme art, the art of living.”
Bertolt Brecht Works
The game:
Baal, 1918;
Trommeln in der Nacht, 1918-1920, (“Snakes in the Night”);
Im Dickicbt der Stdate, 1921-1924, (“In the Heather of Cities”);
Leben Eduards des Ztveiten von England, 1924, (“Edward II”);
Mann ist Mann, 1924-1926, (“Man is Man”);
Das Elefantenkalb, 1924-1925, (“The Elephant Baby”);
Mahagonny, 1927;
Die Dreigroschenoper, 1928, (The Threepenny Opera);
Aufstieg und Fail der Stadt Mahagonny, 1928-1929 (“The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”);
Der Ozeanflug, 1928-1929, (“Ocean Flight”)
Badener Lehrstück vom Einverstandnis, 1929, (“Baden Teaching Game on Understanding and Acceptance”);
Die Fieilige Johanna der Schlacbtböfe, 1929-1931, (“The Saint Johanna of the Slaughterhouses”)
Der Jasager/Der Neinsager, 1929-1930, (“Say Yes/Say No”);
Die Massnabme, 1930, (“Precaution”);
Die Ausnahme und die Regel, 1930, (“The Rule and the Illegal”);
Die Mutter, 1930-1931, (Main);
Die Horatier und die Kuriatier, 1933-1934, (“Horatians and Kuriatvans”);
Die Rundköpfe and die Spitzköpfe, 1931-1934, (Tack-Tick);
Die Sieben Todsinden, 1933, (The Seven Major Sins of Anna);
Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches, 1935-1938, (The Fear and Misery of the Hitler Regime);
Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar, 1937, (The Weapons of Mother Carrar);
Leben des Galilei, 1937-1938, (The Life of Galileo);
Mutter Courage und needle Kinder, 1938-1939, (Mother Courage and Her Children);
Das Verhör des Lukullus, 1938-1939, (“The Trial of Lukullus”);
Der Gute Mensek von Sezuan, 1938-1941, (Sezuan's Good Man);
Herr Puntill und sein Knecht Matti, 1940, (Mr. Puntila and his valet Matti);
Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui, 1941, (The Preventable Rise of Arturo Ui);
Schmeik im Zvieiten Weltkrieg, 1942-1943, (Svaik vs Hitler);
Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1943-1945, (Caucasian Chalk Circle);
Die Antigone des Sophocles, 1947, (“Antigone”);
Die Tage der Commune, 1948-1949, (Days of the Commune);
Der Hofmeister, 1950, (“Private Teacher”);
Herrnburger Bericht, 1951, (“News from Herrnburg”);
Turandot oder der Kongress der Wfisswascher, 1953-1954, (Turandot or the Whitewashers' Congress).