Bertolt Brecht

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht 10 February 1898 14 August 1956 known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht was a German theatre practitioner playwright and poet Coming of age during the Weimar Republic he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924 where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill and began a lifelong collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler Immersed in Marxist thought during this period Brecht wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre which he later preferred to call dialectical theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 Brecht fled his home country initially to Scandinavia During World War II he moved to Southern California where he established himself as a screenwriter while being surveilled by the FBI In 1947 he was part of the first group of Hollywood film artists to be subpoenaed by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee for alleged Communist Party affiliations The day after testifying he returned to Europe eventually settling in East Berlin where he cofounded the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and longtime collaborator actress Helene Weigel Description above from the Wikipedia article Bertolt Brecht licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia