Brecht — Brecht

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht, who lived from 1898 to 1956, is the most influential German playwright of the twentieth century. Die Dreigroschenoper, The Threepenny Opera, written with the composer Kurt Weill, premiered in Berlin in 1928 at the theater on the Schiffbauerdamm and became one of the great successes of the Weimar years. Its opening song, the Moritat von Mackie Messer, is known worldwide as Mack the Knife. Brecht developed what he called epic theater. Instead of drawing the audience into the illusion, he wanted to make the familiar look strange, the Verfremdungseffekt, so that spectators would think critically about society: actors address the audience, songs interrupt the action, and signs or projections comment on the scenes. Many of his lines have become fixed sayings in German, often quoted without their original bite. Brecht left Germany in 1933, lived in exile in Scandinavia and the United States, and returned in 1949 to East Berlin, where he founded the Berliner Ensemble with his wife, the actress Helene Weigel. The company still plays in the theater on the Schiffbauerdamm, and Brecht's plays remain a fixture of German school curricula and stages.