Bertold Brecht. Life and works of the German writer.
BERTOLD BRECHT: LIFE AND WORKS.
Bertold Brecht was one of the main authors of the twentieth century, especially in the field of theater. He conducted a critique of modern reality in its historical, social and economic aspects, using the tools of Marxist ideology. He was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, in 1898 to a bourgeois family. He moved to Munich and then to Berlin, where he became a theater critic, playwright and director. After 1928 he established relations with the Communist Party without ever joining. In 1933, when the Nazis interrupted one of his performances, he moved to Denmark, making trips to Paris, London and New York. When German troops invaded Denmark he took refuge in Finland and subsequently managed to escape to the United States, where he worked in Hollywood. In 1947, troubled by the Committee on Un-American Activities, he returned to Europe and settled in East Berlin, where in 1949 he founded the Berliner Ensemble. He died in 1956.
BERTOLD BRECHT: THE THEATRICAL WORKS. The first theatrical works (Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities) were born in the convulsive climate of the first post-war period and exalt forms of asociality and destructive energies, also addressing contemporary themes. With his adherence to communism Brecht begins to address social themes and the society divided into classes:
- Threepenny Opera, 1928: satire against the bourgeoisie through the life of criminals and outcasts as a mirror of the functioning of bourgeois society
- The Line of Conduct, 1930
- The Mother, 1930-32
- The Exception and the Rule, 1930
During the years of exile, his most mature works were born, in which we have a more complex problematic nature and the positive and negative are not rigidly divided:
- Mother Courage and Her Children, 1939: set during the Thirty Years’ War
- Life of Galileo, 1938-39: focused on the life of the scientist, initiator of modern science but also of the intellectual subservient to power
- The Good Soul of Szechwan, 1938-40: the protagonist splits into two opposing personalities, indicating that one cannot be good in such a bad world
- Mr Puntila and his servant Matti, 1940-41: a rich landowner and his servant are contrasted
- The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1944: Healthy Popular Energies Are Exalted
In these works Brecht’s epic theatre takes shape. It is a theatre that wants to oppose the bourgeois theatre. According to Brecht, the theatre that dominated at the time tended to detach the spectator from real problems and prevented him from thinking. Brecht instead wants the spectator to assume an active, alert and critical attitude, so as to become aware of the problems of reality. It is therefore necessary that total immersion in the scenic fiction is prevented by procedures that break the illusion of witnessing a real fact: projection of films, signs with scene titles or captions. The sets and the acting of the actors must contribute to the same purpose: they must not identify with the psychology of the characters but indicate them as if from the outside. This procedure is defined by Brecht as estrangement.
Brecht also wrote poetry, with the same political intent as his dramatic works and to stimulate the reader’s reflection.
