Life & Background
Brecht was born in Augsburg in 1898, studied medicine briefly, and served as a medical orderly at the end of the First World War. In Weimar Berlin he became a Marxist and, with the composer Kurt Weill, produced The Threepenny Opera, the greatest theatrical success of the period. He fled Germany the day after the Reichstag fire in 1933 and spent fifteen years in exile — Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and finally California, where he wrote screenplays without much success and where his major plays were written. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, he gave evasive answers, denied Party membership, and left the United States the next day. He settled in East Berlin and founded the Berliner Ensemble with his wife Helene Weigel. He died in 1956.
Mother Courage and Her Children
Anna Fierling, called Mother Courage, follows the armies of the Thirty Years' War with a canteen wagon, trading with whichever side is nearby. She has three children by three fathers and intends to bring them all through the war on the profits of it. Each is destroyed by a virtue: her elder son Eilif by bravery, decorated for a raid in wartime and executed for the same act in a brief peace; her younger son Swiss Cheese by honesty, refusing to give up the regimental cashbox while she haggles too long over the bribe that would save him; her mute daughter Kattrin by kindness, drumming on a rooftop to wake the town of Halle and shot for it. At the end Mother Courage harnesses herself to the wagon alone and pulls it after the army.
Brecht wrote the play in exile in 1939 as a warning about war profiteering and was dismayed when Zurich audiences wept for its heroine — so he revised it to make her less sympathetic. That reaction is the problem his whole theory addresses. Epic theatre aims to prevent emotional identification through the Verfremdungseffekt, usually translated as alienation or estrangement effect: songs interrupting the action, placards announcing what will happen so suspense cannot operate, visible lighting rigs, actors demonstrating rather than becoming their characters. The purpose is political — a spectator who is moved is not thinking, and Brecht wanted an audience that judges. His Short Organum for the Theatre sets out the argument.
Why Brecht Matters
Brecht is the most influential theatre theorist of the twentieth century, and epic theatre stands as the great alternative to Stanislavskian naturalism — the two poles between which modern acting and staging are usually taught. His influence reaches Bond, Fugard, Dario Fo, and much political and street theatre worldwide, including in India, where Utpal Dutt and others adapted his methods. His HUAC testimony and his ambiguous position in East Germany also make him a standard case in questions about writers and state power.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Threepenny Opera1928
- The Life of Galileo1938
- Mother Courage and Her Children1939
- The Good Person of Szechwan1941
- The Caucasian Chalk Circle1944
- A Short Organum for the Theatre1948