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Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht
(February 10, 1898 - August 14, 1956) Germany

Bertolt Brecht

Poet, playwright, and theatre director

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Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria (about fifty miles North-west of Munich) to a conventionally-devout Protestant mother and a Catholic father (who had been persuaded to a Protestant wedding). His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914. Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew his Bible, a familiarity that would impact on his writing throughout his life. 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.

From 1904-1908, Brecht attended Volksschule for elementary school and from 1908-1917, Königlich-Bayerisches Realgymnasium. At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a life-long creative partnership, Neher designing many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helping to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre. At sixteen, 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 Artur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret-star Wedekind. In July 1919, Brecht and Paula Banholzer (who had begun a relationship in 1917) had a son, Frank. In 1920 Brecht's mother died.

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 [the work of] other people that's a challenge."

Brecht completed his second major play, Spartakus -later to be renamed, published and produced as Drums in the Night - in February 1919. In 1922 he married the Viennese opera-singer Marianne Zoff. Their daughter - Hanne Hiob (born in 1923) - is a successful German actress.

In 1924 Brecht's marriage to Zoff began to break down (though they did not divorce until 1926). Brecht had become involved with both Elisabeth Hauptmann and Helene Weigel. Brecht and Weigel's son, Stefan, was born in October of 1924.

In 1925 in Mannheim the artistic exhibition Neue Sachlichkeit ('new sobriety' or 'new objectivity') had given its name to the new post-Expressionist movement in the German arts. With little to do at the Deutsches Theater, Brecht began to develop his Man Equals Man project, which was to become the first product of "the 'Brecht collective' - that shifting group of friends and collaborators on whom he henceforward depended."

In 1930 Brecht married Weigel; their daughter Barbara Brecht was born soon after the wedding. She also became an actress and currently holds the copyrights to all of Brecht's work.

Fearing persecution, Brecht left Germany in February 1933, when Hitler took power. He went to Denmark, but when war seemed imminent in 1939, he moved to Stockholm, Sweden. He stayed there for one year. Then Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark, and Brecht felt the need to leave Sweden for Finland where he waited for his visa for the United States until May 3, 1941.

In the years of the Cold War and "red scare", the House Un-American Activities Committee called Brecht to account for his communist allegiances, and he was soon blacklisted by movie studio bosses. Brecht, along with about 41 other Hollywood writers, directors, actors and producers, was subpoenaed to appear before the HUAC in September 1947.

While Brecht's communist sympathies were a bane in the United States, East German officials sought to make him their hero. Though he had not been a member of the Communist Party, he had been deeply schooled in Marxism by the dissident communist Karl Korsch, and his communist allegiances were sincere. He claimed communism appeared to be the only reliable antidote to militarist fascism and spoke out against the remilitarization of the West and the division of Germany. Brecht used Korsch's version of the Marxist dialectic in both his aesthetic theory and practice in a central way when presenting his plays.

Brecht had previously supported the measures taken by the East German government to crush the uprising, including the use of Soviet military force; he even wrote a letter on the day of the uprising (17 June) to SED First Secretary Walter Ulbricht stating that, "History will pay its respects to the revolutionary impatience of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The great discussion [exchange] with the masses about the speed of socialist construction will lead to a viewing and safeguarding of the socialist achievements. At this moment I must assure you of my allegiance to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany".[59]

Brecht died on of a heart attack at the age of 58. He is buried in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof on Chausseestraße in the Mitte neighbourhood of Berlin.

His depictions of homosexual desire are found only in a few of his earliest writings. In these works, homosexuality is often cloaked in ambiguity and almost always is tied to issues of power struggle, manipulation, and sadomasochism.

These early writings have led to questions about Brecht's own sexual orientation. Although his heterosexual exploits are well documented by biographers, memoirists, and by Brecht himself in his diaries, the playwright's possible gayness remains speculative. Brechtian scholar Erika Munk has asserted that Brecht "preferred male company" during his late teens and early twenties and has suggested that Brecht's "bisexuality is not reasonably in doubt."

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