1. Bertolt Brecht ( )
Biography

2. Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht
He was born on 10th Feb 1898 in Augsburg, Germany
Brecht was a sickly child, with a congenital heart condition and a facial tic, He suffered a heart attack at the age of twelve, but soon recovered and continued his education
While in school, he began writing and ended up co-founding and co-editing a school magazine called ‘The Harvest’ and wrote hid first play ‘The bible’
Studied medicine in Munich ( ) and served in a army hospital in 1918 during World War I
After the war, he moved to Berlin where he was attracted to modern theater
Appointed as a consultant in 1924 in Deutches Theater in Berlin

3. In 1922, his play ‘Drums in the night’ opened and received the prestigious Kleist prize for young dramatist as a result
In 1923 his two plays ‘Jungle of Cities’ and ‘Baal’ were performed
First professional production – ‘Edward II’ in 1924

4. Violent antibourgeois attitude
Among his friends were members of the Dadaist group
Thought Marxism in the late 1920s with Karl Korsch, an eminent Marxist theoretician
He developed his theory of ‘epic theater’ and an austere form of irregular verse and became also a Marxist

5. The threepenny opera, 1928 Rise and fall of the
city of Mahagonny, 1930

6. In 1933 to 1941 he went on exile in Scandinavia (mainly in Denmark)
Until 1947 he lived in the USA where he did some film work Hollywood
In this period, his books were burned and his citizenship was withdrawn
He was cut off German theater
In this period away from Germany, Brecht wrote most of his greatest plays, major theoretical essays and dialogues

7. Mother Courage and her Children
The life of Galileo, 1943

8. The good woman of Setzuan, written in 1943
Herr Puntila and his man Matti, written in 1948
Causation Chalk Circle, first produced in English – 1948, then in German 1949

9. Adaptation of Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’, directed together with Caspar Neher at the Chur Theater in 1948
A little Organum for the Theater – his most important theoretical work

10. Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect)
Achieved through a number of devices that remind the spectator that he is being presented with a demonstration of human behaviour in scientific spirit rather than with an illusion of reality, in short, that the theatre is only a theatre and not the world itself.

11. Techniques *a lot of Brechts’ techniques derived from earlier works
Three-dimensional set pieces
Usage of machineries
Insistence on the actors demonstrating through physical disposition of the body their Gestus (attitude)
Predisposing the audience so that it concentrates on how and what will happen in advance

12. Differentiation from epic theater
The set and props were on stage only if the were necessary for telling the story
The lights were to be in full view of the audience, as were their operators
Music was meant to comment on or conflict with the action on stage
Structure of music halls so that each element of the play should operate on its own

13. Brecht wrote very few plays in his last years in Berlin, none of them as famous as his previous works. Some of his most famous poems, however, including the "Buckower Elegies", were from this time. Brecht died in 1956 of a heart attack at the age of 58.

14. References