Brecht, Bertolt (1898—1956) German Marxist playwright, novelist, poet and theorist. One of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and arguably the most important dramatist of his time. His writing displays what Wolfgang Haug usefully calls ‘unity-in-dispersal’, which is to say it ranges across an impressive variety of genres and styles, but at its core there is a consistent political conviction. Brecht was born in Augsburg in Southern Germany. His father was the managing director of a paper mill and solidly middle class. Brecht enrolled at Munich University in 1917 to study drama, but took on medical courses as well in the hope of avoiding being drafted into the army. He was partially successful in this gambit in that while he was eventually drafted, he was posted to a VD clinic in Augsburg as an orderly. After the war Brecht launched himself into his theatre career and was rewarded with early success. His first play, Baal (1918), won the prestigious Kleist Prize. In 1927 he joined the company of Erwin Piscator, widely regarded as the most important experimental theatre group in Germany. He borrowed a great deal from Piscator in his own later experiments in staging. Considerable wealth and genuine fame soon came his way with his adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Die Dreigroschenoper (1928), translated as The Threepenny Opera (1933), which he worked on with composer Kurt Weill. One of the most popular pieces of musical theatre of the twentieth century, it has been performed more than 10,000 times and many of its songs, such as ‘Mack the Knife’, have become jazz and cabaret standards sung by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone. Two years later Brecht and Weill collaborated on Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930), translated as Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a powerful critique of the rising tide of fascism in Germany. His anti-Nazi stance would necessitate him leaving Germany when they came to power in 1933. He fled first to Denmark, where he was joined by Benjamin, Walter, then to Sweden and thereafter, like so many of his compatriots, particularly the Frankfurt School, to the US. He ended up in Los Angeles, which he famously described as God’s way of economizing by having heaven and hell in the one place. He got work in Hollywood, despite not being able to speak English, and continued to write highly political plays, such as Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1939), translated as Mother Courage and her Children (1941), Leben des Galilei (1943), translated as Life of Galileo (1947), and Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943), translated as The Good Person of Szechuan (1948). Politics for Brecht---at least in his theatre---means two things: on the one hand, there is the pleasure (but also the pain) of the acquisition of knowledge, while on the other hand, there is the torment of the impossible situation in which no ‘right’ decision can be made. Brecht remained in the US until 1947, the year he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to account for his communist links. He was quickly blacklisted in Hollywood as a result, effectively making it impossible for him to continue working in the US. He returned to Europe, first to Switzerland, then to East Germany, where the Communist Government gave him his own theatre company, the soon-to-be world-renowned Berliner Ensemble, which continues to perform his works today, and his own theatre, The Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm, where The Threepenny Opera premiered. In his last years, Brecht wrote comparatively little, concentrating instead on directing his plays, which he toured to several European capitals, including Paris, where the young Barthes, Roland was captivated. Brecht is important to critical theory because he sought to make the theatre into a vehicle for political debate and in this regard he responded forcefully (perhaps more so than any other artist of the twentieth century) to the challenge of creating an aesthetics that is neither simply art for art’s sake nor pure agitprop. His name is synonymous with Epic Theatre, a method of staging he devised over a number of years with the goal of making performances more intellectual. He famously said that theatre ought to be viewed with the same detachment and disinterested judgement as that with which boxing enthusiasts view fights. To achieve this estrangement-effect, as he called it, Brecht staged things so as to thwart the feeling of empathy audiences ‘naturally’ feel for what they see on stage. Technically this was achieved in a number of ways: actors were instructed to break out of their roles and comment on their characters, or else intertitles might be dropped from the ceiling narrating the action ahead of time so as to diminish suspense. Further Reading: F. Jameson Brecht and Method (1998). P. Thompson and G. Sacks The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (2006). J. Willett Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches (1998).