Brecht fled Nazis in 1933 and rewrote political theatre
Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), born Eugen in Augsburg, became Weimar Germany’s defining playwright-poet before Nazi rule forced him into Scandinavian then Southern California exile as a watched screenwriter. Bible-soaked maternal influence and clown Karl Valentin shaped his stage craft as much as Marx.
Nearly expelled in 1915 for an anti-war school essay, he dodged early conscription via medical study, published as Bert Brecht from 1916, and was drafted late into a military hospital. Son Frank, born 1919 with Paula Banholzer, died as a Wehrmacht conscript in 1943; Brecht’s mother died in 1920. Munich cabaret nights with Valentin taught him refractory comic employees who sabotage bosses—a template for epic theatre’s estrangement.
Home life in Augsburg was comfortably middle class, whatever peasant roots he sometimes claimed, and his mother and grandmother gave him a thorough knowledge of the Bible that marked his writing for life. At school he met Caspar Neher, who became a lifelong creative partner. Enrolled at Munich's university in 1917, he studied drama under Arthur Kutscher and came to admire the cabaret star Frank Wedekind. His first full-length play, Baal, written in 1918, grew out of an argument in Kutscher's seminar, starting a lifelong habit of writing against other works; rewriting other people, he joked, was the real challenge.
Success came fast. In 1922 the Berlin critic Herbert Ihering declared, after Drums in the Night, that the 24-year-old had transformed German letters overnight. Brecht respelled his first name Bertolt to rhyme with that of Arnolt Bronnen, his partner in a joint company, wrote the scenario for the slapstick film Mysteries of a Barbershop starring Karl Valentin in 1923, and in 1924 adapted Marlowe's Edward II with Lion Feuchtwanger, his first collaborative text and his solo directing debut.
From 1925 he leaned on a shifting circle of collaborators, the Brecht collective, beginning with Man Equals Man; Elisabeth Hauptmann, first hired to help finish his poems, stayed on. Chaplin's The Gold Rush and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin struck him that year, and after 1926 he studied Marxism seriously under Hauptmann's guidance, later noting that reading Capital made him understand his own plays.
Source: Bertolt Brecht
