Brecht - His Background

Bertolt Brecht (image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bertolt-Brecht.jpg)

Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898 and died in 1956. He was a German political theatre writer and practitioner. He was brought up in a middle class household by a protestant mother and catholic father. He was 16 when World War 1 started. He found a way out of joining the army by taking an additional medical course at Munich University where he began his studies in 1917.

Brecht left Germany in 1933 when Hitler took power in fear of persecution.  He was a committed Marxist for his whole life something of course the Nazi regime was totally against. I have visited the Bavarian region and Munich city many times. It is important to remember that this is a separate state to the rest of Germany and has a very different set of rules, even today. Looking back to Brecht’s era it was in Munich, the capital of Bavaria where the Nazi party was born. This is also where most of the people who actually supported to regime lived and not just because they were under the duress of the Nazi party but because they truly believed in the facist ideology.  For the people living there with socialist left wing and anti-Nazi beliefs life would have been very difficult.  It is important to think about these things when thinking about Brecht as a political writer and why he developed the far left opinions he did. Growing up in Bavaria would have been and still is very right wing.

Brecht developed a style of theatre called ‘epic’ theatre. This is what we are exploring in our workshops. He used theatre and the poetry he wrote as a platform to express his political opinions and ideologies.  He wanted his audience to ask questions about what they were seeing. This is a concept we will be developing more through our work in class.