Bertolt Brecht

This is my research on theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht. I learnt that Brecht was born in 1898 and died in 1956 and that he was a play write, politician and theatre director. Brecht was a trouble maker at school and he was expelled for writing an anti war poem. When he was 16, the first world war broke out. Brecht was not very keen on taking part in the war and was ready to see his fellow classmates been killed. Bertolt Brecht had soon found a way of getting himself to not take part in the war, by registering himself to study a medical course and the Munich university he did not have to go to war.

Fearing persecution, Brecht left Germany in February 1933, when Hitler took power. After brief spells in Prague, Zurich and Paris he and Weigel accepted an invitation from journalist and author Karin Michealis to move to Denmark , where they settled in a house in Svendborg on the island of Funen. 


This became the residence of the Brecht family for the next six years, where they often received guests including Walter Benjamin, Hanns Eisler and Ruth Berlau. During this period Brecht also travelled frequently to Copenhagen, Paris, Moscow, New York and London for various projects and collaborations.Brecht was also a Marxist. Brecht relationship to Marxism is extremely important and highly complex. From the 1920's until his death in 1956' Brecht identified himself as a Marxist. When he returned to Germany after World War II , he chose the German Democratic Republic, where his actress wife people Helen Weigel and he formed their own theatre troupe, the fame Berliner ensemble, and were eventually given a state theatre to run. 

Yet Brecht's relationship to orthodox Marxist officials and doctrine was often conflictual, and his own work and life were highly idiosyncratic. Of a strongly anti-bourgeois disposition from his youth, the young Brecht was also initially repelled by Bolshevism. He was also interested in social justice. 
Brecht created epic theatre in the 1920s. the main reason was because he wanted the audience to stop and think about what they were watching.In those times the different types of drama that there were are : mellow drama, realism and naturalism.