Bertolt Brecht Journals, 1934-55 eBook

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Playwright, poet, novelist and essayist, he was born in Augsburg, Germany, on February 10, 1898.
In 1917 he began studying medicine in Munich, but was soon drafted into the army, working as a nurse in a military hospital. The man who would become one of the most important figures in 20th-century theatre soon began writing his first poems and rebelled against the "false standards" of art and bourgeois life, corroded by the First World War. This attitude is reflected in his first play, the expressionist drama "Baal" (1918). He collaborated with directors Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator. In 1928, he made "The Threepenny Opera" with Kurt Weill. With the rise of Hitler, he left the country in 1933 and went into exile in countries such as Denmark and the United States, where he survived by working for Hollywood. He made criticism of Nazism and war the theme of works such as "Mother Courage and Her Children" (1939). Leaving the United States, a victim of McCarthyism, he went to Switzerland in 1947 where he wrote the "Little Organon," a summary of his theatrical theory. He returned to Germany in 1948, where the following year he founded the Berliner Ensemble company in East Berlin.
Bertolt Brecht also excelled in poetry, which had a strong social message.
He died in Berlin on August 14, 1956.