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German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer, one of the most prominent figures in the 20th-century theatre. In his works Brecht have been concerned with encouraging audiences to think rather than becoming too involved in the story and to identify with the characters. In this process he used alienation effects (A Effekts). Brecht developed a form of drama called epic theatre in which ideas or didactic lessons are important.

"In order to produce A Effects the actor has to discard whatever means he has learned of persuading the audience to identify itself with the characters which he plays. Aiming not to put his audience into a trance, he must not go into a trance himself. His muscles must remain loose, for a turn of the head, e.g., with tautened neck muscles, will "magically" lead the spectators' eyes and even their heads to turn with it, and this can only detract from any speculation or reaction which the gestures may bring about. His way of speaking has to be free from ecclesiastical singsong and from all those cadences which lull the spectator so that the sense gets lost." (from A Short Organum for the Theatre, 1948) Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg. His father, a Catholic, was a director of a paper company and his mother, a Protestant, was a daughter of a civil servant. Brecht began to write poetry as a boy, and had his first poems published in 1914. After finishing elementary school, he was sent to the Königliches Realgymnasium, where he gained fame as an enfant terrible.

In 1917 Brecht enrolled as a medical student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After military service as a medical orderly, he returned to his studies, but abandoned them in 1921. During the Bavarian revolutionary turmoil of 1918, Brech wrote his first play, BAAL, which was produced in 1923. The play celebrated life and sexuality and was a great success.

Brecht's association with Communism began in 1919, when he joined the Independent Social Democratic party. Friendship with the writer Lion Feuchtwanger was an important literary contact for the young writer. Feuchtwanger advised him on the discipline of playwriting. In 1920 Brecht was named chief adviser on play selection at the Munich Kammerspiele. As a result of a brief affair with a Fräulein Bie, Brecht's son Frank was born and in 1922 he married the actress Marianne Zoff. In 1924 Brecht was appointed a consultant at Max Reinhardt's Deutches Theater in Berlin. Brecht´s success started with TROMMELN IN DER NACHT (1922), and continued with DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER after John Gay´s The Beggar´s Opera, which he made with the composer Kurt Weil. Gay's play, revived by Sir Nigel Playfair at the Lyric Theatre in London, had been a great success from 1920. Brecht moved the action to Victorian times, and instead of mocking the pretentions of Italian grand opera, he attacked on bourgeois respectability. Although rehearsals were disastrous, the audience wanted to hear over and over again the duet between Macheath and the Police Chief, Tiger Brown.

"Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear - And he shows them pearly white - Just a jackknife has Macheath, dear - And he keeps it out of sight." (from The Threepenny Opera, 1928) Around 1927 Brecht started to study Karl Marx's Das Kapital and by 1929 he had become a Communist. At the Schiffbauerdam Theater he trained many actors who were to become famous on stage and screen, among them Oscar Homolka, Peter Lorre, and the singer Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weil's wife. With Hanns Eisler Brecht worked on a political film, Kuhle Wampe, the name referring to an area of Berlin where the unemployed lived in shacks. The film was released in 1932 and forbidden shortly afterward. Brecht's politcally committed play, DIE MASSNAHME (1930, The Measures Taken) reflected his antisentimentality and directness, which even the Communist Party found hard. In the play a young Communist is murdered by the Party - his sympathy for the poor and their suffering only postpones the day of the showdown. The lesson is that the freedom of the individual must be suppressed today so that in the future mankind will be able to achieve freedom.

In the 1930s Brecht´s books and plays were banned in Germany, performances were interrupted by the police or summarily forbidden. He went into exile, first to Denmark, where he lived mostly near Svendborg on the island of Fyn until 1939, and then to Finland, where he lived in Iitti in Villa Marlebäck as a guest of the Finnish author Hella Wuolijoki. The place is in the middle of the countryside, far from the cities, and perhaps boring for a person used to lively surroundings. There Brecht wrote with Wuolijoki the play HERR PUNTILA UND SEIN KNECHT MATTI (1940), and made his admiring "surrogate mother" jealous because rumors of affairs with other women. Brech, who disliked bathing, was also famous for his promiscuousness.

From Finland Brecht continued with his family through Russia to the United States, settling in Santa Monica. Brecht's travelling companion to America was Ruth Berlau, a Danish actress. Margarete Steffin, a German proletarian writer and another follower, had died in Moscow. In the new country Brecht tried to write for Hollywood, but the only script that found partial acceptance was Hangmen Also Die (1942). "The intellectual isolation here is enormous," Brecht compained. "Compared to Hollywood, Svendborg was a world center." His ideas, such as "the production, distribution and enjoyment of bread," were not taken seriously by movie moguls. In 1947 Brecht was accused of un-American activities, but managed to confuse with half-truths J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, who praised Brecht for being an exemplary witness. However, he flew to Switzerland, without waiting for the opening of his play Galileo in New York.

Between the years 1938 and 1945 Brecht wrote his four great plays. LEBEN DES GALILEI (1938-39, The Life og Galileo), which did follow too slavishly the actual historical person, dealt with the hero's self-condemnation for giving up his heliocentric theory in front of the Inquisition. MUTTER COURAGE UND IHRE KINDER (1939) was an attempt to demonstrate that greedy small entrepreneurs make devastating wars possible. "What they could do with round here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization." DER GUTE MENSCH VON SEZUAN (1938-40) examined the dilemma of how to be virtuous and at the same time survive in a capitalist world, and DER KAUKASICHE KREIDEKREIS (1944-45), demonstrating that ownership belongs best to those who can make humane use of it.

After 15 years of exile Brecht returned to Germany in 1948 and spend a year in Zürich working on Sophocles Antigone (trans. by Friedrich Hölderin) and on his major theoretical work A Little Organum for the Theatre. After Zürich Brech moved in 1949 to Berlin where he founded his own Marxist theater Berliner Ensemble. His second wife, Helene Weigel, whom he had married in 1928, was his chief actress and carried on as a director. Brecht had with the new authorities of DDR his problems, although he wrote prose that pleased the censors. In his verse Brecht cryptically expressed his suspicion about the regime. "What times are these, when / to speak of trees is almost a crime / because it passes in silence over such infamy!," he wrote. To assure for himself freedom of travel, Brecht took in 1950 Austrian passport.

In West as well as in East Germany Brecht became the most popular contemporary poet, outdistanced only by such classics as Shakespeare, Schiller, and Goethe. Jean Vilar's production of Mutter Courage in 1951 secured him a following in France, and the Berliner Ensemble's participation in the Paris International Theatre Festival (1954) further spread his reputation. In 1955 Brecht received the Stalin Peace Prize. Next year he contracted a lung inflammation and died of a coronary thrombosis on August 14, 1956, in East Berlin.

Brecht's works have been translated into 42 languages and sold over 70 volumes. He wanted his theater to represent a forum for debate hall rather than a place of illusions. From the Russian and Chinese theaters Brecht derived some of his basic concepts of staging and theatrical stylization. His concept of the Verfremdungseffekt, or V-Effekt (sometimes translated as 'alienation effect') centered on the idea of 'making strange' and thereby making poetic. He aimed to take emotion out of the production, persuade the audience to distance from the make believe characters and make the actors to dissociate from their roles. Then the political truth would be more easy to comprehend. Once he said: "Nothing is more important than learning to think crudely. Crude thinking is the thinking of great men."

"His theater of alienation intended to motivate the viewer to think. Brecht's postulate of a thinking comportment converges, strangely enough, with the objective discernment that autonomous artworks presupposes in the viewer, listener, or reader as being adequate to them. His didactic style, however, is intolerant of the ambiguity in which thought originates: It is authoritarian. This may have been Brecht's response to the ineffectuality of his didactic plays: As a virtuoso of manipulative technique, he wanted to coerce the desired effect just as he once planned to organize his rise to fame." ( Theodor Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, 1997) Brecht formutated his literary theories much in reaction to Georg Lukács (1885-1971), a Hungarian philosopher and Marxist literary theoretician. He disapproved Lukács attempt to distinguish between good realism and bad naturalism. Brecht considered the narrative form of Balzac and Tolstoy limited. He rejected Aristotele's concept of catharsis and plot as a simple story with a beginning and end. From Marx he took the idea of superstructure to which art belongs, but avoided too simple explanations of ideological world view - exemplified in the character of the Good Woman of Setzuan.


mohammed ibrahim

1st year puc
christ pu college 
   bangalore