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Other authors named Bertolt:
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Author's popularity: 3
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Popularity: 2
Vote: | A man who sees another man on the street corner with only a stump for an arm will be so shocked the first time he'll give him sixpence. But the second time it'll only be a three penny bit. And if he sees him a third time, he'll have him cold-bloodedly handed over to the police. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. |
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Vote: | Boy meets Girl, So What? |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Don't tell me peace has broken out. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Everyone needs help from everyone. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | From the cradle to the coffin underwear comes first. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Grub first, then ethics. |
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Vote: | He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | It is easier to rob by setting up a bank than by holding up a bank clerk. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand. |
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Vote: | No one will improve your lot if you do not yourself. |
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Vote: | One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life. |
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Vote: | People are too durable, that's their main trouble. They can do too much to themselves, they last too long. |
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Vote: | People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart. |
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Vote: | Right is its own defense. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Science knows only one commandment - contribute to science. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Sometimes it's more important to be human, than to have good taste. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn when teachers themselves are taught to learn. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | War is like love; it always finds a way. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | What a miserable thing life is: you're living in clover, only the clover isn't good enough. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone? |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Why be a man when you can be a success? |
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Biography
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Bertolt Brecht (February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956) was an influential German dramatist, stage director, and poet of the 20th century.
His life and career
Born in Augsburg, Bavaria, Brecht studied medicine and worked briefly as an orderly in a hospital in Munich during World War I. After the war he moved to Berlin where an influential critic, Herbert Ihering, brought him to the attention of a public longing for modern theater. Already in Munich his first two plays, Baal and Drums in the Night, had had performances, and he got to know Erich Engel, a director who worked with him off and on for the rest of his life. In Berlin, In the Jungle of the Cities, starring Fritz Kortner and directed by Engel, became his first success.
During the postwar socialist governments and then the Weimar Republic, Brecht met and began to work with Hanns Eisler — the composer with whom he shared the closest friendship throughout his life. He also met Helene Weigel, who would become his second wife and accompany him through exile and for the rest of his life. His first book of poems, Hauspostille, won a literary prize.
Brecht formed a writing collective which became prolific and very influential. Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri, Ruth Berlau and others worked with Brecht and produced the multiple Lehrstücke (teaching plays), which attempted a new dramaturgy for participants rather than passive audiences. These addressed themselves to the massive worker arts organisation that existed in Germany and Austria in the 1920s. So did his first great play, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, which attempted to portray the drama in financial transactions. He also worked in the theaters of Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator.
This collective also created the story for, and Brecht wrote songs and engaged Kurt Weill to compose, The Threepenny Opera — the largest hit in Berlin of the 1920s and a renewing influence on the musical worldwide. This was followed by Mahagonny, less of a success and eclipsed by the dawn of fascist rule in Germany. After Adolf Hitler won the elections, Brecht was in great danger and left for a long exile — in Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, then England, and finally in the United States.
In exile and in active resistance of the Fascist movement, Brecht wrote his most famous plays: Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, Puntila and Matti, his Hired Man, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Good Person of Sezuan, among many other works. He also wrote many poems which have continued to attract notice to this day. He participated some in screenplays for Hollywood, for instance Hangmen also Die, but had no real success or pleasure in this.
After World War II the HUAC (House Unamerican Activities Committee) hounded Brecht. As a result, he was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses and he left the United States. He came to Switzerland where he adapted Antigone and then was invited to Berlin by East Germany. Horrified at the reinstatement of Nazis into the government of the western portion of Germany, Brecht made his home in the east. He had not been a member of the communist party, but had been deeply schooled in Marxism by the dissident communist Karl Korsch. He saw the goal of communism as the only reliable antidote to militarist fascism and spoke out against the remilitarisation of the west and the division of Germany.
He was almost as uncomfortable for his East German hosts as for the West Germans across the iron curtain. Brecht was a scruffily dressed person and he invented designer stubble — he always looked as though he had shaved three days earlier. As a result, security guards once excluded him from a reception being given in Berlin in his own honour.
Brecht also found the experience of living in a Stalinist state far different from what he imagined in exile, when he composed works such as Die Massnahme (The Measure), which glorified the self-denying infallible vanguard party, or, more concretely, in Die Massnahmen, which justified the political decisions made by the Comintern that resulted in the spectacular failure of the revolution attempted in Shanghai in 1927. Brecht showed his more sober appreciation of the impossibility of socialism without democracy in a piece he wrote while living in Berlin in the 1950s, after the state suppressed a workers' revolt in 1953:
"Die Lösung"
:Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands:Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk:Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit:Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung:Wählte ein anderes?
"The Solution"
:The Secretary of the Writers Union:That the People had frivolously:And that they could only regain it:Simpler if the Government:And elected another?
Although he lived in the DDR, a copyright on his writings was held by a Swiss company and he received valuable hard currency remittances. He used to drive around East Berlin in a prewar DKW car — a rare luxury in the austere divided capital.
The Berliner Ensemble, that world famous theater which toured and was the most influential theater of the postwar decades, was given to his wife: the actress Helene Weigel. She ran it as a theater devoted primarily to the plays and praxes developed by Brecht until her death in 1971. Brecht wrote few plays in his last years in Berlin, none of them as famous. Some of his most famous poems though, including the "Buckower Elegies", were from this time.
Brecht died an early death at the age of 58 in 1956 (of a heart attack), leaving a legacy which has been taken up by nearly every country in the world, particularly those where political activity is occurring. In one of his last poems he ironically suggested that inscribing "He made suggestions; we took them on" on his gravestone would be "a way to honour everyone". In fact, on his grave at the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder Cemetery in Berlin there is only a boulder with his name.
Had he wanted to use it, one of his late poems could have served as a fitting epitaph:
:Müssen genügen. Wenn ich sage, was ist:Daß du untergehst, wenn du dich nicht wehrst.:Must be enough. That when I say how things are:That you'll go down if you don't stand up.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bertolt Brecht".
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