taken from http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/german/brecht/index.htmlBertolt Brecht
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The Life of Bertolt Brecht Jennifer
taken from http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/german/brecht/index.html
Biographical information from http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~jamesf/goodwoman/brecht_bio.html
Brecht, Bertolt
original name EUGEN BERTHOLD FRIEDRICH BRECHT
(b. Feb. 10, 1898, Augsburg, Ger.--d. Aug. 14, 1956, East Berlin),
German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the
conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological
forum for leftist causes.
Until 1924 Brecht lived in Bavaria, where he was born, studied medicine (Munich, 1917-21), and served in an army hospital (1918). From this period date his first play, Baal (produced 1923); his first success, Trommeln in der Nacht (Kleist Preis, 1922; Drums in the Night); the poems and songs collected as Die Hauspostille (1927; A Manual of Piety, 1966), his first professional production (Edward II, 1924); and his admiration for Wedekind, Rimbaud, Villon, and Kipling.
During this period he also developed a violently antibourgeois attitude that reflected his generation's deep disappointment in the civilization that had come crashing down at the end of World War I. Among Brecht's friends were members of the Dadaist group, who aimed at destroying what they condemned as the false standards of bourgeois art through derision and iconoclastic satire. The man who taught him the elements of Marxism in the late 1920s was Karl Korsch, an eminent Marxist theoretician who had been a Communist member of the Reichstag but had been expelled from the German Communist Party in 1926.
In Berlin (1924-33) he worked briefly for the directors Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator, but mainly with his own group of associates. With the composer Kurt Weill (q.v.) he wrote the satirical, successful ballad opera Die Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny Opera) and the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930; Rise and Fall of the Town of Mahoganny). He also wrote what he called "Lehr-stucke" ("exemplary plays")--badly didactic works for performance outside the orthodox theatre--to music by Weill, Hindemith, and Hanns Eisler. In these years he developed his theory of "epic theatre" and an austere form of irregular verse. He also became a Marxist.
In 1933 he went into exile--in Scandinavia (1933-41), mainly in Denmark, and then in the United States (1941-47), where he did some film work in Hollywood. In Germany his books were burned and his citizenship was withdrawn. He was cut off from the German theatre; but between 1937 and 1941 he wrote most of his great plays, his major theoretical essays and dialogues, and many of the poems collected as Svendborger Gedichte (1939). The plays of these years became famous in the author's own and other productions: notable among them are Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941; Mother Courage and Her Children), a chronicle play of the Thirty Years' War; Leben des Galilei (1943; The Life of Galileo); Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan), a parable play set in prewar China; Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1957; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), a parable play of Hitler's rise to power set in prewar Chicago; Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1948; Herr Puntila and His Man Matti), a Volksstuck (popular play) about a Finnish farmer who oscillates between churlish sobriety and drunken good humour; and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (first produced in English, 1948; Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1949), the story of a struggle for possession of a child between its highborn mother, who deserts it, and the servant girl who looks after it.
Brecht left the United States in 1947 after having had to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He spent a year in Zurich, working mainly on Antigone-Modell 1948 (adapted from Hulderlin's translation of Sophocles; produced 1948) and on his most important theoretical work, the Kleines Organon fur das Theater (1949; "A Little Organum for the Theatre"). The essence of his theory of drama, as revealed in this work, is the idea that a truly Marxist drama must avoid the Aristotelian premise that the audience should be made to believe that what they are witnessing is happening here and now. For he saw that if the audience really felt that the emotions of heroes of the past--Oedipus, or Lear, or Hamlet--could equally have been their own reactions, then the Marxist idea that human nature is not constant but a result of changing historical conditions would automatically be invalidated. Brecht therefore argued that the theatre should not seek to make its audience believe in the presence of the characters on the stage--should not make it identify with them, but should rather follow the method of the epic poet's art, which is to make the audience realize that what it sees on the stage is merely an account of past events that it should watch with critical detachment. Hence, the "epic" (narrative, nondramatic) theatre is based on detachment, on the 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.
In 1949 Brecht went to Berlin to help stage Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (with his wife, Helene Weigel, in the title part) at Reinhardt's old Deutsches Theater in the Soviet sector. This led to formation of the Brechts' own company, the Berliner Ensemble, and to permanent return to Berlin. Henceforward the Ensemble and the staging of his own plays had first claim on Brecht's time. Often suspect in eastern Europe because of his unorthodox aesthetic theories and denigrated or boycotted in the West for his Communist opinions, he yet had a great triumph at the Paris Theatre des Nations in 1955, and in the same year in Moscow he received a Stalin Peace Prize. He died of a heart attack in East Berlin the following year.
Brecht was, first, a superior poet, with a command of many styles and moods. As a playwright he was an intensive worker, a restless piecer-together of ideas not always his own (The Threepenny Opera is based on John Gay's Beggar's Opera, and Edward II on Marlowe), a sardonic humorist, and a man of rare musical and visual awareness; but he was often bad at creating living characters or at giving his plays tension and shape. As a producer he liked lightness, clarity, and firmly knotted narrative sequence; a perfectionist, he forced the German theatre, against its nature, to underplay. As a theoretician he made principles out of his preferences--and even out of his faults.
18.5 Brecht Bio Kevin
Brecht, Bertolt 
original name EUGEN BERTHOLD FRIEDRICH BRECHT
(b. Feb. 10, 1898, Augsburg, Ger.--d. Aug. 14, 1956, East Berlin),
German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the
conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological
forum for leftist causes.
Until 1924 Brecht lived in Bavaria, where he was born, studied medicine (Munich, 1917-21), and served in an army hospital (1918). From this period date his first play, Baal (produced 1923); his first success, Trommeln in der Nacht (Kleist Preis, 1922; Drums in the Night); the poems and songs collected as Die Hauspostille (1927; A Manual of Piety, 1966), his first professional production (Edward II, 1924); and his admiration for Wedekind, Rimbaud, Villon, and Kipling.
During this period he also developed a violently antibourgeois attitude that reflected his generation's deep disappointment in the civilization that had come crashing down at the end of World War I. Among Brecht's friends were members of the Dadaist group, who aimed at destroying what they condemned as the false standards of bourgeois art through derision and iconoclastic satire. The man who taught him the elements of Marxism in the late 1920s was Karl Korsch, an eminent Marxist theoretician who had been a Communist member of the Reichstag but had been expelled from the German Communist Party in 1926.
In Berlin (1924-33) he worked briefly for the directors Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator, but mainly with his own group of associates. With the composer Kurt Weill (q.v.) he wrote the satirical, successful ballad opera Die Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny Opera) and the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930; Rise and Fall of the Town of Mahoganny). He also wrote what he called "Lehr-stucke" ("exemplary plays")--badly didactic works for performance outside the orthodox theatre--to music by Weill, Hindemith, and Hanns Eisler. In these years he developed his theory of "epic theatre" and an austere form of irregular verse. He also became a Marxist.
In 1933 he went into exile--in Scandinavia (1933-41), mainly in Denmark, and then in the United States (1941-47), where he did some film work in Hollywood. In Germany his books were burned and his citizenship was withdrawn. He was cut off from the German theatre; but between 1937 and 1941 he wrote most of his great plays, his major theoretical essays and dialogues, and many of the poems collected as Svendborger Gedichte (1939). The plays of these years became famous in the author's own and other productions: notable among them are Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941; Mother Courage and Her Children), a chronicle play of the Thirty Years' War; Leben des Galilei (1943; The Life of Galileo); Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan), a parable play set in prewar China; Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1957; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), a parable play of Hitler's rise to power set in prewar Chicago; Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1948; Herr Puntila and His Man Matti), a Volksstuck (popular play) about a Finnish farmer who oscillates between churlish sobriety and drunken good humour; and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (first produced in English, 1948; Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1949), the story of a struggle for possession of a child between its highborn mother, who deserts it, and the servant girl who looks after it.
Brecht left the United States in 1947 after having had to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He spent a year in Zurich, working mainly on Antigone-Modell 1948 (adapted from Hulderlin's translation of Sophocles; produced 1948) and on his most important theoretical work, the Kleines Organon fur das Theater (1949; "A Little Organum for the Theatre"). The essence of his theory of drama, as revealed in this work, is the idea that a truly Marxist drama must avoid the Aristotelian premise that the audience should be made to believe that what they are witnessing is happening here and now. For he saw that if the audience really felt that the emotions of heroes of the past--Oedipus, or Lear, or Hamlet--could equally have been their own reactions, then the Marxist idea that human nature is not constant but a result of changing historical conditions would automatically be invalidated. Brecht therefore argued that the theatre should not seek to make its audience believe in the presence of the characters on the stage--should not make it identify with them, but should rather follow the method of the epic poet's art, which is to make the audience realize that what it sees on the stage is merely an account of past events that it should watch with critical detachment. Hence, the "epic" (narrative, nondramatic) theatre is based on detachment, on the 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.
In 1949 Brecht went to Berlin to help stage Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (with his wife, Helene Weigel, in the title part) at Reinhardt's old Deutsches Theater in the Soviet sector. This led to formation of the Brechts' own company, the Berliner Ensemble, and to permanent return to Berlin. Henceforward the Ensemble and the staging of his own plays had first claim on Brecht's time. Often suspect in eastern Europe because of his unorthodox aesthetic theories and denigrated or boycotted in the West for his Communist opinions, he yet had a great triumph at the Paris Theatre des Nations in 1955, and in the same year in Moscow he received a Stalin Peace Prize. He died of a heart attack in East Berlin the following year.
Brecht was, first, a superior poet, with a command of many styles and moods. As a playwright he was an intensive worker, a restless piecer-together of ideas not always his own (The Threepenny Opera is based on John Gay's Beggar's Opera, and Edward II on Marlowe), a sardonic humorist, and a man of rare musical and visual awareness; but he was often bad at creating living characters or at giving his plays tension and shape. As a producer he liked lightness, clarity, and firmly knotted narrative sequence; a perfectionist, he forced the German theatre, against its nature, to underplay. As a theoretician he made principles out of his preferences--and even out of his faults.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
A complete bibliography of Brecht's writings published up to the time of his death by Walter Nubel may be found in the Second Special Brecht Number of the East German periodicial Sinn und Form (1957); a concise summary of Brecht literature is contained in Bertolt-Brecht-Bibliographie by Klaus-Dietrich Petersen (1968). Collected works in the original German are available in an edition in 8 thin-paper or 20 paperback volumes; Gesammelte Werke (1967). This edition, however, is far from complete and the principles according to which it was edited are open to doubt. A major collected edition of Brecht's work in English, under the joint editorship of John Willett and Ralph Manheim started publication with the first volume of Collected Plays (1970). Eric Bentley has edited Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht (1961), a series of paperback volumes of Brecht's plays, and has translated the poetry collection, Hauspostille (1927; Manual of Piety, 1966). A good selection of Brecht's theoretical writings is Brecht on Theatre, trans. by John Willett (1964).
Critical and biographical works available in English include: John Willett, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (1959); Martin Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils (1959; revised edition under the title, Brecht: The Man and His Work, 1971); and Frederic Ewen, Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art and His Times (1967, 1970). Max Spalter, Brecht's Tradition (1967), analyzes the chief influences on Brecht in German literature.
Copyright (c) 1995 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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Brecht // Visually intriguing Jennifer
In Bertolt Brecht’s poem "War has been given a bad name", the long dramatic spaces in the lines are eye catching. What is their purpose?
In my opinion, the spaces are included in the conversation of the poem, to emphasize and imitate human speech.
For example:
… … … … The Ruhr Industrialists
Are said to regret the bloody manhunts
Which filled their mines and factories with slave workers. (Brecht, 99 Poems in Translation, p. 24)
The gap in the second line allows for the sharp intake of breath of the speaker. The speaker, in her or his ironic tone is conceding something with the pause that the space implies. One could read this with a shrug and make it sound like, "I had a really good day today (pause), but I did hit that girl on the playground." Brecht uses this method again later in the poem for a slightly different purpose as follows:
A lamentably bad turn, and that war
While in itself natural and necessary, has, thanks to the
Unduly uninhibited and positively inhuman
Way in which it was conducted on this occasion, been
Discredited for some time to come. (Brecht, 99 Poems in Translation, p. 24)
The gap in the first line again allows for a pause of speech, but this time it is for emphasis of a specific point. The pause is left for a definition by the speaker to a disbelieving listener. In a conversation, this would be like saying, "My best friend Bob (pause), you know Bob the tailer." The second portion of the sentence is used to define who Bob is after a pause for an "everyone knows this" affect.
There is another kind of pause in the poem. This one is for extra sarcastic emphasis on two words… "intellectual" in line 8 and "feeling" in line 12. The speaker is implying with his HUGE gaps before each word that she or he does not believe what is being said at all. If the line were merely straight, the sarcasm would be lost.
There is also another visual aspect to this poem in that there is a building (growth of line length) to the center of the poem and then there is a receding (shortening of line length) as the poem continues to its end. I’m not sure what is intended with the overall appearance of the poem, but it is definitely noticeable. - jen
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Brecht // Dripping sarcasm... Kevin
Brecht's poem, War Has Been Given a Bad Name, is so sarcastic i missed it the first time through. My first reaction was that this guy is really disillusioned, but upon second reading i am convinced he is quite the opposite, and is in fact belittling those who are.
I am told that the best people have begun saying// How, from a moral point of view, the Second World War// Fell below the standard of the First.
The best people, not the normal folk, the elite. The creme de le creme. These are the people that opposed the nazis till they gained power, and then supported them wholeheartedly, but jumped ship as soon as it began to falter. They are the rats. The rich rats. The ones who sit around all day and talk and complain, but never actually do any work themselves. The talk and use big words. Of course the second world war is bad in moral standards! Why have they begun saying this? Cause the Nazis have lost and now its vogue to denounce them! Brecht is calling the upper class spineless worms basically.
The Wermarcht// Allegedly deplores the methods by which the SS effected// The extermination of certain peoples.
The army thinks that what the SS did is bad. But only allegeldy. They cant say that for sure because their hands are just as bloody.
The Ruhr industrialists// Are said to regret the bloody manhunts// Which filled their mines and factories with slave workers.
They are said to regret bloody manhunts. Again, Brecht is calling all of the German aristocrats jelly fish.
The intellectuals// so i heard, condemn industry's demand for slave workers// Likewise their unfair treatment.
So the intellectuals are now condemning industry too. And for unfair treatment. Why arent they condemning the fact that millions of jews were killed?
Even the bishops// dissociate themselves from this way of waging war; in short the feeling// prevails in every corner that the nazis did the fatherland a lamentably bad turn,
The bishops dont want to be involved with mass genocide? Since when? Brecht once again is shedding light on the fact that all these seemingly sane people became involved with the nazi war movement.
and that war// While in itself natural necessary, has, thanks to the// Unduly uninhibited and positively inhuman// Way in which it was conducted on this occasion, been// discredited for some time to come.
So war got a bad name from the nazis, huh. Now this poem has caused me to be sarcastic! War is a bloody and vile thing that ought to be condemned in all forms. Brecht is condemning everyone in Germany that sat idly by and let themselves be swallowed in Nazi propaganda.
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Brecht // who do these people think they are? Kate
I am told that the best people have begun saying
All around, this poem seems very tongue-in-cheek to me, very sarcastic in tone. It has a real, consistent voice throughout, a conversational tone. The way it beings with "I am told" begins this tone right away (both the sarcastic and the conversational). "I am told" also seems to qualify what the speaker is about to say; this isn't something the he himself believes. There are many words throughout the poem that point toward a sarcastic rather than genuine, face-value tone. "The best people" in this line is the first such phrase. It is such a bold, generalized statement. Why are they the "best?" What gives them the authority to speak on this issue? Why are they better than anyone else?
How, from a moral point of view, the Second World War
The poem's style as a whole with its qualifiers, parenthetical-like statements sandwiched between commas, adds to the ironicy in the speaker's voice. For example, in the next line, the parenthetical "from a moral point of view," so matter-of-fact, only brings more questions. Who's morals? How did these morals all of a sudden appear, as the line above says the "best people" have just started to say these things? Aren't morals believe to be a solid, stable thing? Where was this "moral point of view" during the war?
Fell below the standard of the First. The Wehrmacht
Another question. What standard? By what scale did WWI differ so greatly to make it acceptable but put WWII over the brink? The poem leaves these answers out and stays purposely vague, i think. Standard of war? I don't think the speaker really thinks there is one. This is made all the more ironic by the self-assured tone in which these people talk (whom he, the narrator, is quoting).
Allegedly deplores the methods by which the SS effected
Allegedly is an important word in this line; it takes away more of the credibility of the "best people." It seems to become more clear here that the speaker doesn't trust or believe them. "Deplores" is also an important word. It is a strong, emphatic emotion, again a self-assured, confident tone. It brings up another question. How can they be so sure all of a sudden? Finally, the word "effected" is interesting. It seems to imply that the SS weren't as actively involved in the deaths. It's not a very action verb. They were a source of the deaths but they didn't actual do the killing? It sounds like a euphemism on the "best people's" part to me.
The extermination of certain peoples. The Ruhr industrialists
Extermination is a pretty strong word, however, and therefore doesn't quite fit if i'm saying this part is downplaying the deaths. But the phrase "certain peoples" seems a downplay again to me. Can't they say who was actually killed? Is it hush-hush all of a sudden? They murdered (not "effected the extermination") Jews, gypsies, homosexuals---real people (not "certain individuals"). Why don't they say it like it really is, this part makes me want to ask.
Are said to regret the bloody manhunts
"Are said" is another qualifier, another detachment of the speaker from the "best people." The word "regret" sticks out. Before were overstatements, a seeming exaggeration with "deplores," now a seeming understatement, which sounds fake. "Regret" bloody manhunts? What kind of weak, passive word is this for such a vulgar way of describing murder?
i'm going to jump to this line and then stop---there's so much here it's hard for me to be concise . . .
Dissociate themselves from this way of waging war; in short the feeling
"This way" seems to be used ironically here. . . again, why is "this way," this war, so different from all others? "Dissociate" is also a strong word. We all seem to want to shy away from blame, not claim a part in it. But we, someone, had to stop it. Does anyone really deserve the right to dissociate themselves from the situation? I think complacency is synonymous with consent in these circumstances. And are these circumstances really that unusual, that different, from situations today? Say, Burma? Afghanistan?
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