Bertold Brecht
From Philosopedia
Brecht, Bertold (10 Feb 1898 - 14 Aug 1956)
Brecht, the German dramatist and poet, wrote Man is Man (1926), an expressionist work, and he developed his revolutionary “epic theater,” designed to create—using bright lights, films, and mottos displayed on cards—a politically conscious distance between the spectator and the stage.
His Threepenny Opera (1928), with music by Kurt Weill, reflected Brecht’s social views.
During the Nazi period, Brecht went into exile in Denmark, then settled in the United States, moving in 1948 to East Berlin. There, he directed the state-supported Berliner Ensemble.
He married Marianne Zoff (1922-1926) and Helene Weigel (1930 - 1956). He had four children: Frank Banholzer (1919-1943, killed in northwest Russia in an cinema that was off-duty to German troops but was bombed by Russian artillery), Hanne Hiob (1923 - 2009, his actress daughter born of Marianne Zoff), and Stefan (1924 - 2009) and Barbara Brecht (28 October 1930 - ).
Brecht’s attempt to codify his aesthetics, according to Michael Feingold, translator of six of his plays, began well before his conversion to Communism. Like his politics, his view of aesthetics was always under construction, changed with time, situation, atmosphere, and even impulse. His theory was only a theory, for he was not basically an intellectual and, as Feingold has written, “a theory to any artist is just a provisional guideline for finding a path through the work.”
Brecht’s diaries document his heterosexual exploits, but also he was interested in Arthur Rimbaud’s and Paul Verlaine’s relationship and wrote realistically about homosexuals. His conduct toward women was one long parade of offenses, yet many befriended and helped him. His secretaries may or may not have had their work plagiarized and their emotions abused, but if in truth he used any of their work he also transformed his borrowings from Kipling, Goethe, folk songs, even Salvation Army hymns.
In a television exchange in the early 1960, Kenneth Tynan asked actor Richard Burton “What do you think of Brecht?” Burton replied, “Awful, pretentious, dull, pedestrian.” Retorted Tynan, “To that I say illuminating, passionate, poetic, humanist.”
- Graves of Brecht and Helene Weigel
Brecht was openly atheistic. He died of a heart attack when 58 and is buried in Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof on Chausseestraße in the Mitte neighborhood of Berlin, overlooked by the residence he shared with Helene Weigel.
Stefan and Barbara Brecht
Brecht's son Stefan Sebastian Brecht (3 November 1924 - 13 April 2009) died of a heart attack in Manhattan. He had a form of Parkinson's disease - Lewy body dementia - that had left him unable to speak and write since 2001.
The Brechts fled the Nazis, going to Scandinavia, the Soviet Union, and eventually in 1941 to Santa Monica, California.
Stefan, after graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, served in the Army, then earned a Ph. D. in philosophy from Harvard. He taught at the University of Miami, researched Marx and Hegel in Paris, and settled in Manhattan in the 1960s.
His first wife, theatrical costume designer Mary McDonough, died in 1998 after their many years of being separated. He then married clothing designer Rena Gill in 2004.
Brecht wrote The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (1972); Stefan Brecht: Poems (1978); Queer Theatre (1982); Bread and Puppet Theatre (1987); and 8th Avenue, a 1985 work containing photographs taken while he (alked from his West Village home to his writing studio in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City's Greenwich Village. In the 1960s he performed with Robert Wilson and Charles Ludlam - his account of Richard Foreman's Ontological Hysteric Theatre is scheduled to be published in 2010.
Barbara, an actress, has played herself in several movies.
{CE; The Economist, 17 October 1998; Michael Feingold, The Village Voice, 8 September 1998; GL; TRI; TYD}
