Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht was a German Marxist poet, playwright, and theatre director. Brecht died on 14 August 1956 of a heart attack at the age of 58. 

His Notable works are The Threepenny Opera, Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. 

From his late twenties Brecht remained a lifelong committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his "epic theatre", synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. 

Brecht has been a controversial figure in Germany, and in his native city of Augsburg there were objections to creating a birthplace museum. By the 1970s, however, Brecht's plays had surpassed Shakespeare's in the number of annual performances in Germany.

During the war years, Brecht became a prominent writer of the Exilliteratur. He expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most famous plays: Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and many others.