Bertolt Brecht

Family Life Of Bertolt Brecht

• Paula Baholzer gave birth to brecht illegitimate son in 1919.
• He married an opera singer Marianne Zoff at the age of 20 in 1922 and had a daughter called hanne the following year.
• He divorced Marianne in 1929 then married Helene Weigel who gave birth to stefan just before and then gave birth to barbara their second child together in 1930.
• Whilst he was still married to Helene Ruth Berlau gave birth to brecht 3rd illegitimate child in 1944.

The Education

Of Bertolt Brecht

Birth & Childhood Of Bertolt Brecht

• when he was 6 he attended a Protestant elementary school (Volksschule) and when he was 10 a private school, The Royal Bavarian Realgymnasium here he studied Latin and the humanities.
• In 1917 he resumed his education, this time attending Ludwig Maximilian Universitaet in Munich

• Born In Ausberg, Germany
• Born 19th Febuary 1898
• Baptized as Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht
• Mother: Wilhelmine Friederike Sophie Brezing
• Father: Bertolt Friedrich Brecht
• He had one brother, Walter, who was born in 1900
• He Had a congenital heart condition and a facial tic as a child.
• He suffered a heart attack at the age of twelve but soon recovered and continued his education

"People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart."

Bertolt Brecht

"It's all right to hesitate if you then go ahead"

Bertolt Brecht

Plays By Bertolt Brecht

Baal:

This play of Brechts was about life's sexuality and how at that time there were no homosexual people and if there were they didn't tell anyone as it was considering discusting.

Bertolt Brecht

Fear and misery of the theird reich:

(Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches)

When he fled to Denmark after the uprise of hitler and his men, he set out to create a work that portrayed the fear, repression, and violence of life in Nazi Germany.

This play is about the lives off everyone living in Germany when Hitlers seizes power, it shows the lengths familys go through to protect there family's and loved ones. It shows the true extent of the hollolcasts and the lengths Hitler would go to.

Poems By Bertolt Brecht

An Extract From 'A German War Primer'

O Germany, O Pale Mother:

Not What Was Meant:

When the Academy of Arts demanded freedom

Of artistic expression from narrow-minded bureaucrats

There was a howl and a clamour in its immediate vicinity

But roaring above everything

Came a deafening thunder of applause

From beyond the Sector boundary.

Freedom! it roared. Freedom for the artists!

Freedom all round! Freedom for all!

Freedom for the exploiters! Freedom for the warmongers!

Freedom for the Ruhr cartels! Freedom for Hitler's generals!

Softly, my dear fellows...

The Judas kiss for the artists follows

Hard on the Judas kiss for the workers.

The arsonist with his bottle of petrol

Sneaks up grinning to

The Academy of Arts.

But it was not to embrace him, just

To knock the bottle out of his dirty hand that

We asked for elbow room.

Even the narrowest minds

In which peace is harboured

Are more welcome to the arts than the art lover

Who is also a lover of the art of war.

IT IS NIGHT

The married couples

Lie in their beds. The young women

Will bear orphans.

GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE

It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.

But it has one defect:

It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.

It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.

But it has one defect:

It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.

He can fly and he can kill.

But he has one defect:

He can think.

Let others speak of her shame,

I speak of my own.

O Germany, pale mother!

How soiled you are

As you sit among the peoples.

You flaunt yourself

Among the besmirched.

The poorest of your sons

Lies struck down.

When his hunger was great.

Your other sons

Raised their hands against him.

This is notorious.

With their hands thus raised,

Raised against their brother,

They march insolently around you

And laugh in your face.

This is well known.

In your house

Lies are roared aloud.

But the truth

Must be silent.

Is it so?

Why do the oppressors praise you everywhere,

The oppressed accuse you?

The plundered

Point to you with their fingers, but

The plunderer praises the system

That was invented in your house!

Whereupon everyone sees you

Hiding the hem of your mantle which is bloody

With the blood

Of your best sons.

Hearing the harangues which echo from your house,

men laugh.

But whoever sees you reaches for a knife

As at the approach of a robber.

O Germany, pale mother!

How have your sons arrayed you

That you sit among the peoples

A thing of scorn and fear!

This is my favourite poem and favourite extract from it, as i believe that everyone deserves their own rights, to think, to read, to write etc, and this "man has one defect, he can think" really reminds me of there rights. Brecht is saying that Hitler is killing all his men, and by being at war his soliders are getting killed and in the end he won't have anyone to fly his planes, fix his plans and drive his tanks. he's saying that this war is useless and that they were losing men for unessecary reasons.

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.

Bertolt Brecht

"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the same"

Bertolt Brecht

Brechtian Theatre

A Effects:

(Also Know as Alienattion effects, distant effect.)

This was a technique created by Brecht and it aloud the audience to see everything from scene changes, to stunts. The scene changes weren't blacked out, the lights and ropes weren't hidden, actors would come out of character to illustrate and caption the events happening on stage at that time. Brecht wanted o distance the audience from emotion, he didn't want them to get emotional involved. He didn't want them to feel about it, he wanted them to think about it without biased emotions from the play. He didn't want special effects to create moods, he could have had it, only if there was a way to attract full attention to it, he wanted everything being used in the play to be seen and heard.

Life & Death Of Bertolt Brecht

He Called his characters my their job role not their names E.g. Policemen not Mr Plod. This represents society and he didn't want the audience to get attached to the characters, and because Hitler took away everybodys Identity.

“The Brechtian style of acting is acting in quatation marks"

He and Stanislavsky agreed that if an actor believes he is clear the audience would believe that actor, Brecht didn't want that.

Brecht wanted everybody to understand his theatre even the blind, he used movement & sounds to show them his theatre.

Life

In 1954 he won the international Lenin Peace Prize.

Brecht received the National Prize, first class, in 1951

He'd subsitute props for objects, for example if he was to have a baby on stage he'd use a melon or a different piece of fruit, if he was to need an umbrella he might use a pineapple or bananna, etc.

- He had 5 children, with 4 different women.

- He Lived in Sweden, Norway, Poland, United States

Death

Brecht Died of a heartattack in 1956

He provided instructions that a stiletto be placed in his heart and that he be buried in a steel coffin so that his corpse would not be riddled with worms.

Brecht is buried in the Dorotheenfriedhof in Berlin

Brecht was a medic in the first world war in 1914.

He was in university when the war began but he put his dream of become a doctor behind him and went into war.

Bertolt Brecht had written a book in which he tells all about the war, he wrote poems, cut our magazine photos

(Kriegsfibel was published in Germany in 1955. It was published in English as War Primer in 1998.

The day after his HUAC testimony, Brecht left the U.S. for Switzerland. In 1949, after fifteen years of exile, he finally returned to East Berlin.

During Adolf Hitler's control over Germany nobody was aloud to write, read, have their own minds. Bertolt Brecht still wrote but in secret, his writing meant alot to him.

EVERYTHING CHANGES

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

But what has happened has happened. And the water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again.

What has happened has happened. The water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again, but

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

You, in your tanks and bombers, mighty warriors,

You that in Algiers sweat, in Lapland freeze

In scores of battles you have been victorious

See whom you’ve conquered. Hail your victories!

Those you see lying here, buried in mud

As if they lay already in their grave–

They’re merely sleeping, are not really dead

Yet, not asleep, would still not be awake.

Mother Courage and her children:

• Was classed as one of the finest anti-war plays.

• A mother of 3, loses all her children to the war. Brecht wanted his audience to assess the effects of war for themselves.

Drums In The Night:

This play was about a returning solider who couldn't get back to a normal life before the war.

He Wrote plays about these oppresive times and how people were not aloud to have a mind, and think, read, write. They were not aloud any of their rights.

- It portrays what happened in the lives of severely war-stressed middle-class civilians at the end of World War I

Brecht moved around alot during the war as he was writing about the secrets of Germany, and he was being hunted.