366 | Bertolt Brecht

Today is the birthday of Bertolt Brecht, playwright, poet, director, thinker, and political contrarian. The adaptation above and the birthday calendar with 366 legendary people were made by me, Frieke.

Bertolt Brecht was born on 10 February 1898 in Augsburg, into a relatively well-to-do middle-class family. From an early age he began writing poems, songs, and short plays in which he set himself against bourgeois morality and authority. While studying medicine in Munich, he became increasingly involved in the theatre. The First World War, during which he worked as a hospital orderly, left a lasting impression on him and strengthened his antimilitarist stance.

After the war, Brecht broke through with early plays such as Baal and Drums in the Night. These works were raw, provocative, and clearly influenced by Expressionism. They brought him recognition, but also a reputation as a troublemaker. In the mid-1920s Brecht moved to Berlin, then the cultural centre of the Weimar Republic. There he further developed as a writer and theatre-maker and began to formulate his ideas about what would later become epic theatre. During this period he worked closely with the composer Kurt Weill. Their joint productions combined music, satire, and sharp social critique. The greatest success of this time was The Threepenny Opera (1928), in which songs such as “Mack the Knife” and “Alabama Song” play a central role.

After 1930 Brecht’s work became increasingly explicit in its politics. His Marxist convictions came more clearly to the fore as the political situation in Germany rapidly deteriorated. After Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, Brecht was forced to leave Germany. In the years that followed he lived in exile in various European countries. This period was artistically highly productive. He wrote some of his most important plays, including Mother Courage and Her Children, Life of Galileo, The Good Person of Szechwan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Much of his poetry also dates from these years, collected in volumes such as Svendborg Poems, in which exile, moral doubt, and political threat are central themes.

In 1941 Brecht fled to the United States. In California he tried to find work in the film industry, but his critical attitude and political reputation made this difficult. Although he continued to write, he felt increasingly out of place. In 1947 he was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committeebecause of alleged communist sympathies. Shortly after this interrogation, he left the US.

After the war, Brecht settled in East Berlin, in the young GDR. In 1949 he founded the Berliner Ensemble together with Helene Weigel. There he was able to put his ideas about epic theatre into practice. His company achieved international fame for its sober, analytical, and deliberately distanced stagings. Although Brecht was supported by the state, his relationship with the authorities remained tense; he also continued to view the socialist system critically.

After Brecht’s death in 1956, his influence was not confined to the theatre. On the contrary, his song lyrics and ideas found a new life in music, often detached from their original context. In cabaret and musical theatre, singers such as Lotte Lenya, Gisela May, and later Ute Lemper kept his work alive. In the jazz world, “Mack the Knife” in particular was interpreted by artists such as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. In these versions, the emphasis often shifted from social critique to musical refinement and charm—an evolution that, ironically, perfectly illustrates how criticism can be absorbed by entertainment.

At the same time, artists in rock and pop music used Brecht’s work precisely to heighten alienation and discomfort. The Doors gave “Alabama Song” a disruptive, almost hallucinatory charge, while David Bowie explicitly embraced Brecht, both by singing his texts and by adopting his idea of identity as role-playing and art as construction. In a more indirect way, Brecht’s influence can also be heard in artists such as Tom Waits and Nick Cave, whose ballads about outsiders, crime, and morality are clearly related to Brecht’s song tradition. In this way, Brecht continued to live on in diverse musical forms: sometimes sharp and unsettling, sometimes smoothed over and seductive, but always recognisable in the tension between beauty and critique.