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Drama Project

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Bertolt Brecht
Drama Project.

He was born on 10 February 1898 in Augsburg, Germany
His full birth name was Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht
He was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director
A prolific director he one of the most influential theatre practitioners of the 20th century
He died on 14 August 1956 in Mitte, East Berlin, German Democratic Republic

Brecht died on 14 August 1956 of a heart attack at the age of 58. He is buried in the Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery on Chausseestraße in the Mitte neighbourhood of Berlin, overlooked by the residence he shared with Helene Weigel.

Brecht left the Berliner Ensemble to his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, which she ran until her death in 1971. Perhaps the most famous German touring theatre of the postwar era, it was primarily devoted to performing Brecht's plays. His son, Stefan Brecht, became a poet and theatre critic interested in New York's avant-garde theatre. Brecht has been a controversial figure in Germany, and in his native city of Augsburg there were objections to creating a birthplace museum. By the 1970s, however, Brecht's plays had surpassed Shakespeare's in the number of annual performances in Germany.

Have a pleasant day.
Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, to a devout Protestant mother and a Catholic father. The modest house where he was born is today preserved as a Brecht Museum. His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914.Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would have a lifelong effect on his writing. From her, too, came the "dangerous image of the self-denying woman" that recurs in his drama. Brecht's home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied. At school in Augsburg he met Casper Neher, with whom he formed a lifelong creative partnership, Neher designing many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helping to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theater.

When he was 16, the First World War broke out. Initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates "swallowed by the army". On his father's recommendation, Brecht sought a loophole by registering for an additional medical course at Munich University, where he enrolled in 1917. There he studied drama with Arthur Ketscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret-star Frank Wedekind.

From July 1916, Brecht's newspaper articles began appearing under the new name "Bert Brecht" (his first theatre criticism for the Augsburger Volkswille appeared in October 1919). Brecht was drafted into military service in the autumn of 1918, only to be posted back to Augsburg as a medical orderly in a military VD Clinic; the war ended a month later.
In July 1919, Brecht and Paula Banholzer (who had begun a relationship in 1917) had a son, Frank. In 1920 Brecht's mother died.
Some time in either 1920 or 1921, Brecht took a small part in the political cabaret of the Munich Comedian Karl Valentin Brecht's diaries for the next few years record numerous visits to see Valentin perform.Brecht compared Valentin to Chaplin, for his "virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology". Writing in his messing Kauf years later, Brecht identified Valentin, along with Wedekind and Buchner as his "chief influences" at that time:
But the man he [Brecht writes of himself in the Third person learnt most from was the clown Valentin, who performed in a beer-hall. He did short sketches in which he played refractory employees, orchestral musicians or photographers, who hated their employers and made them look ridiculous. The employer was played by his partner, Liesl Karlstadt, a popular woman comedian who used to pad herself out and speak in a deep bass voice.Brecht's first full-length play, Baal (written 1918), arose in response to an argument in one of Kutscher's drama seminars, initiating a trend that persisted throughout his career of creative activity that was generated by a desire to counter another work (both others' and his own, as his many adaptations and re-writes attest). "Anyone can be creative," he quipped, "it's rewriting other people that's a challenge."
Brecht completed his second major play,Drums in the night, in February 1919.

Here are a list of his plays:

Baal 1918/1923
Drums in the Night (Trommeln in der Nacht) 1918–20/1922
The Beggar (Der Bettler oder Der tote Hund) 1919/?
A Respectable Wedding (Die Kleinbürgerhochzeit) 1919/1926
Driving Out a Devil (Er treibt einen Teufel aus) 1919/?
The Catch (Der Fischzug) 1919?/?
Lux in Tenebris 1919/?
Mysteries of a Barbershop (Mysterien eines Friseursalons) (screenplay) 1923
In the Jungle of Cities (Im Dickicht der Städte) 1921–24/1923
The Life of Edward II of England (Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England) 1924/1924
Downfall of the Egotist Johann Fatzer (Der Untergang des Egoisten Johnann Fatzer) (fragments) 1926–30/1974
Man Equals Man (Mann ist Mann) 1924–26/1926
The Elephant Calf (Das Elefantenkalb) 1924–26/1926
Little Mahagonny (Mahagonny-Songspiel) 1927/1927
The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) 1928/1928
The Flight across the Ocean (Der Ozeanflug); originally Lindbergh's Flight (Lindberghflug) 1928–29/1929
The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent (Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis) 1929/1929
Happy End (Happy End) 1929/1929
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny) 1927–29/1930
He Said Yes / He Said No (Der Jasager; Der Neinsager) 1929–30/1930–?
The Decision/The Measures Taken (Die Maßnahme) 1930/1930
Saint Joan of the Stockyards (Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe) 1929–31/1959
The Exception and the Rule (Die Ausnahme und die Regel) 1930/1938
The Mother (Die Mutter) 1930–31/1932
Kuhle Wampe (screenplay, with Ernst Ottwalt) 1931/1932
The Seven Deadly Sins (Die sieben Todsünden der Kleinbürger) 1933/1933
Round Heads and Pointed Heads (Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe) 1931–34/1936
The Horatians and the Curiatians (Die Horatier und die Kuriatier) 1933–34/1958
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches) 1935–38/1938
Señora Carrar's Rifles (Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar) 1937/1937
Life of Galileo (Leben des Galilei) 1937–39/1943
How Much Is Your Iron? (Was kostet das Eisen?) 1939/1939
Dansen (Dansen) 1939/?
Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) 1938–39/1941
The Trial of Lucullus (Das Verhör des Lukullus) 1938–39/1940
The Judith of Shimoda (Die Judith von Shimoda) 1940
Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti) 1940/1948
The Good Person of Szechwan (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan) 1939–42/1943
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui) 1941/1958
Hangmen Also Die! (screenplay) 1942/1943
The Visions of Simone Machard (Die Gesichte der Simone Machard ) 1942–43/1957
The Duchess of Malfi 1943/1943
Schweik in the Second World War (Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg) 1941–43/1957
The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Der kaukasische Kreidekreis) 1943–45/1948
Antigone (Die Antigone des Sophokles) 1947/1948
The Days of the Commune (Die Tage der Commune) 1948–49/1956
The Tutor (Der Hofmeister) 1950/1950
The Condemnation of Lucullus (Die Verurteilung des Lukullus) 1938–39/1951
Report from Herrnburg (Herrnburger Bericht) 1951/1951
Coriolanus (Coriolan) 1951–53/1962
The Trial of Joan of Arc of Proven, 1431 (Der Prozess der Jeanne D'Arc zu Rouen, 1431) 1952/1952
Turandot (Turandot oder Der Kongreß der Weißwäscher) 1953–54/1969
Don Juan (Don Juan) 1952/1954

In February 1933, Bertolt Brecht's career was suddenly and violently interrupted as the Nazis came to power in Germany. The night after the Reichstag (German parliament building) was burned down, Brecht wisely fled with his family to Prague. His books and plays were soon banned in Germany and those who dared stage his plays found their productions unpleasantly interrupted by the police.
The exiled dramatist bounced around from Prague to Vienna to Zurich to the island of Fyn to Finland, where he lived for a while in Villa Marlebäck as a guest of the Finnish author Hella Wuolijoki. There Brecht and Wuolijoki wrote the play Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (1940). During this period of exile, while Brecht awaited a pending visa to the United States, he also completed the plays Mother Courage and her Children (1939), The Good Person of Szechwan (1941), and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Uri (1941).
In May of 1941, Brecht finally received his U.S. visa and relocated to Santa Monica, California, where he attempted to become a Hollywood screenwriter, but his unusual concepts were mostly dismissed by Hollywood producers who couldn't seem to comprehend his artistic visions (or, as a result, take him seriously). His only comparitively successful Hollywood film was Hangmen Also Die (1943), an apocryphal version of the assassination of Nazi leader and "Hangman" Reinhard Heydrich, who died from the bullets of unidentified resistance fighters. The money Brecht received from this film allowed him to write The Visions of Simone Marchand, Schwyk in the Second World War and his adaptation of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.
Unfortunately, Brecht's stay in America would not be as successful or as lengthy as he might have hoped. In 1947, during the years of the "red scare," the House Un-American Activities Committee called the playwright to account for his communist activities. Originally, Brecht was one of several witnesses who had refused to testify about their political affiliations. But on October 30, 1947, he appeared before the committee, wearing overalls, smoking a cigar, cracking jokes, and making constant references to the translators who transformed his German statements into English ones he could not comprehend. Although he outwitted his investigators with half-truths and skilful innuendo, Brecht feared the irrational political climate, and shortly after his testimony took a plane to Switzerland, not even waiting to see the opening of his play Galileo in New York.
On October 22, 1948, after 15 years of exile, Bertolt Brecht returned to Germany, settling in East Berlin where he was welcomed by the Communist cultural establishment and immediately given facilities to direct Mother Courage at the Deutsches Theater. The following year he founded his own company, the Berliner Ensemble, and in 1954 he was rewarded with his own theatre--the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Brecht quickly discovered, however, that the German Democratic Republic was not quite his ideal brand of Communism, and he was often at odds with his East German hosts. He did not care to keep up appearances, and because of his scruffy, unshaven appearance, East German security guards once excluded him from a Berlin reception being held in his own honor.

For once you must try not to shrink the facts: Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.
(Bertolt Brecht)

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