Bertolt Brecht- Notable Biographies

(10/02/1898 - 1956/08/14)

Bertolt Brecht
German dramatist and poet

He was born the on February 10, 1898 in Augsburg (Bavaria) in a prosperous family.
His father was the owner of a paper mill. Grows in his hometown and from adolescence reveals his vocation of writer.
It is registered with the School of medicine at the University of Ludwig-Maximilian in Munich. At the same time attending seminars on Theatre with Artur Kutscher. He studied at the universities of Munich and Berlin.
From age 15 he began a relationship with Paula Banholzer. His first son, Frank, was born in 1919 and the author participates with hyphens in the political cabaret Karl Valentin of Baal.
In 1924, it appears as playwright at the Deutsches Theater Berlín, under the direction of Max Reinhardt. The influence of Expressionismcan be seen in his early works. In 1928, he wrote a musical drama, the opera's two cents, with the German composer Kurt Weill. It premiered in Berlin in 1928. In 1924 he met Elisabeth Hauptmann, a writer and translator one year older than he, and lovers and literary contributors were almost immediately. In that same year, he began to study Marxism, and from 1928 until the arrival of Hitler to power, wrote and premiered several didactic music dramas.
The opera rise and fall of the city of Mahagonny (1927-1929), again with music by Weill, was a critique of capitalism. During this period he directed actors and began developing the epic theatre. He opted for a free-form narrative in which mechanisms of alienation such as the asides and masks appeared to avoid the spectator to be identified with the characters in the scene. This feature appears in the taking of measures, the exception and the rule, which says Yes and he says no...
His opposition to Hitler's Government, forced into exile to Germany in 1933, living first in Scandinavia , and finally settling in California in 1941. In these years he wrote some of his best works, such as the life of Galileo Galilei (1938-1939), mother courage and her children (1941), which consolidated its reputation as important playwright, and the Caucasian chalk circle (1944-1945).
In 1948 he returned to Germany, he settled in East Berlin, where he founded his own theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble. He also wrote several collections of poems.
Bertolt Brecht died on August 14, 1956 in Berlin of a heart attack.