Bertolt Brecht: biography, personal life, family, creativity and best books. Biography of Brecht Berthold The most famous plays

Every person who is at least a little interested in the theater, even if it is not yet a sophisticated theatergoer, is familiar with the name Bertolt Brecht. He occupies an honorable place among the outstanding theatrical figures, and his influence on the European theater can be compared with the influence of K. Stanislavsky And V. Nemirovich-Danchenko into Russian. Plays Bertolt Brecht are put everywhere, and Russia is no exception.

Bertolt Brecht. Source: http://www.lifo.gr/team/selides/55321

What is "epic theater"?

Bertolt Brecht- not just a playwright, writer, poet, but also the founder of theatrical theory - "epic theater". Myself Brecht opposed it to the system psychological» theater, the founder of which is K.Stanislavsky. Basic principle "epic theater" was a combination of drama and epic, which contradicted the generally accepted understanding of theatrical action, based, in the opinion of Brecht, only on the ideas of Aristotle. For Aristotle, these two concepts were incompatible on the same stage; the drama was supposed to completely immerse the viewer in the reality of the performance, evoke strong emotions and make them acutely experience events together with the actors, who were supposed to get used to the role and, in order to achieve psychological authenticity, isolate themselves on stage from the audience (in which, according to Stanislavsky, they were helped by the conditional "fourth wall" that separated the actors from auditorium). Finally, for the psychological theater, a complete, detailed restoration of the entourage was necessary.

Brecht on the contrary, he believed that such an approach shifts attention to a greater extent only to the action, distracting from the essence. Target " epic theater"- to force the viewer to abstract and begin to critically evaluate and analyze what is happening on the stage. Lion Feuchtwanger wrote:

“According to Brecht, the whole point is that the viewer no longer pays attention to the “what”, but only to the “how” ... According to Brecht, the whole point is that the person in the auditorium only contemplates the events on the stage, striving as much as possible learn and hear more. The spectator must observe the course of life, draw the appropriate conclusions from observation, reject them or agree - he must become interested, but, God forbid, just not get emotional. He must treat the mechanism of events in the same way as the mechanism of a motor vehicle.

Alienation effect

For "epic theater" was important" alienation effect". Myself Bertolt Brecht said it was necessary “simply to deprive an event or character of everything that goes without saying, is familiar, obviously, and arouses surprise and curiosity about this event”, which should form the viewer's ability to critically perceive the action.

actors

Brecht abandoned the principle that the actor should get used to the role as much as possible, moreover, the actor was required to express his own position in relation to his character. In his report (1939) Brecht argued this position as follows:

“If a contact was established between the stage and the audience on the basis of empathy, the viewer was able to see exactly as much as the hero in whom he was empathized saw. And in relation to certain situations on the stage, he could experience such feelings that the "mood" on the stage resolved.

Scene

Accordingly, the design of the scene had to work for the idea; Brecht refused to faithfully recreate the entourage, perceiving the stage as a tool. The artist was now required minimalist rationalism, the scenery had to be conditional and present the viewer with the depicted reality only in general terms. Screens were used to show titles and newsreels, which also prevented “immersion” into the play; sometimes the scenery was changed right in front of the audience, without lowering the curtain, deliberately destroying the stage illusion.

Music

To implement the "alienation effect" Brecht also used in his performances musical numbers- in the "epic theater" music complemented the acting and performed the same function - expression of critical attitude to what is happening on the stage. First of all, for this purpose, zongs. These musical inserts deliberately seemed to fall out of the action, were used out of place, but this technique emphasized the inconsistency only with the form, and not with the content.

Influence on Russian theater today

As already noted, plays Bertolt Brecht are still popular with directors of all stripes, and Moscow theaters today provide a large selection and allow you to watch the full spectrum of the playwright's talent.

So, in May 2016, the premiere of the play "Mother Courage" in the theatre Workshop of Peter Fomenko. The play is based on “Mother Courage and her children”, which Brecht began to write on the eve of the Second World War, conceived in this way as a warning. However, the playwright finished work in the fall of 1939, when the war had already begun. Later Brecht will write:

“Writers cannot write as quickly as governments unleash wars: after all, in order to compose, you have to think ... “Mother Courage and her children” - late”

When writing a play, sources of inspiration Brecht served two works - the story " A detailed and amazing biography of the notorious liar and vagabond Courage”, written in 1670 G. von Grimmelshausen, a participant in the Thirty Years' War, and " Tales of Ensign Stol» J. L. Runeberg. The heroine of the play, a canteen, uses the war as a way to get rich and does not have any feelings towards this event. Courage takes care of his children, who, on the contrary, represent the best human qualities that change in the conditions of war and doom all three to death. " Milf Courage” not only embodied the ideas of the “epic theater”, but also became the first production of the theater “ Berliner Ensemble» (1949), created Brecht.

Production of the play "Mother Courage" at the Fomenko Theater. Photo source: http://fomenko.theatre.ru/performance/courage/

IN theater them. Mayakovsky the premiere of the play took place in April 2016 "Caucasian chalk circle" By play of the same name Brecht. The play was written in America in 1945. Ernst Schumacher, biographer Bertolt Brecht, suggested that by choosing Georgia as the scene of action, the playwright, as it were, paid tribute to the role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War. There is a quote in the epigraph of the play:

"Bad times make humanity a danger to man"

The play is based on the biblical parable of the king Solomon and two mothers arguing over whose child (also, according to biographers, on Brecht influenced by the play chalk circle» Klabunda, which in turn was based on Chinese legend). The action takes place against the background of the Second World War. In this work Brecht raises the question, what is a good deed worth?

As the researchers note, this play is an example of the “correct” combination of epic and drama for the “epic theater”.

Production of the play "Caucasian Chalk Circle" at the Mayakovsky Theater. Photo source: http://www.wingwave.ru/theatre/theaterphoto.html

Perhaps the most famous in Russia production of "The Good Man of Sezuan"(« Good man from Sichuan"") - staging Yuri Lyubimov in 1964 in Theater on Taganka, with which the era of prosperity began for the theater. Today, the interest of directors and spectators in the play has not disappeared, the performance Lyubimova still on stage Pushkin Theater you can see the version Yuri Butusov. This play is considered one of the most striking examples of " epic theater". Like Georgia in Caucasian chalk circle”, China here is a kind of, very distant conditional fairy-tale country. And in this conditional world, the action unfolds - the gods descend from heaven in search of a good person. This is a play about kindness. Brecht believed that this is an innate quality and that it refers to a specific set of qualities that can only be expressed symbolically. This play is a parable, and the author poses questions to the viewer here, what is kindness in life, how is it embodied and can it be absolute, or is there a duality of human nature?

Production of Brecht's play "The Kind Man from Sichuan" in 1964 at the Taganka Theatre. Photo source: http://tagankateatr.ru/repertuar/sezuan64

One of the most famous plays Brecht, « Threepenny Opera", set in 2009 Kirill Serebrennikov at the Moscow Art Theater named after Chekhov. The director emphasized that he was staging a zong - an opera and had been preparing the performance for two years. This is a story about a bandit called Makki- a knife, the action takes place in Victorian England. Beggars, policemen, bandits, and prostitutes take part in the action. In the words of Brecht, in the play he portrayed bourgeois society. Based on the ballad opera Opera of the Beggars» John Gay. Brecht he said that the composer participated in the writing of his play Kurt Weill. Researcher W. Hecht Comparing these two works, he wrote:

“Gay directed disguised criticism at obvious outrages, Brecht subjected explicit criticism to disguised outrages. Gay explained ugliness with human vices, Brecht, on the contrary, vices with social conditions.

Peculiarity " The Threepenny Opera in her musicality. Zongs from the performance became incredibly popular, and in 1929 a collection was even released in Berlin, and later performed by many world stars of the music industry.

Staging of the play "Tekhgroshova Opera" in the Moscow Art Theater named after A.P. Chekhov. Photo source: https://m.lenta.ru/photo/2009/06/12/opera

Bertolt Brecht stood at the origins of a completely new theater, where the main goal of the author and actors is to influence not the emotions of the viewer, but his mind: to force the viewer to be not a participant, empathizing with what is happening, sincerely believing in the reality of the stage action, but a calm contemplator who clearly understands the difference between reality and the illusion of reality. The spectator of the drama theater cries with the one who weeps and laughs with the one who laughs, while the spectator of the epic theater Brecht

Brecht, Bertolt (Brecht), (1898-1956), one of the most popular German playwrights, poet, art theorist, director. Born February 10, 1898 in Augsburg in the family of a factory director. He studied at the medical faculty of the University of Munich. Even in his gymnasium years, he began to study the history of antiquity and literature. Author a large number plays that were successfully staged on the stage of many theaters in Germany and the world: "Baal", "Drumbeat in the Night" (1922), "What is this soldier, what is this" (1927), "The Threepenny Opera" (1928), "Talking "yes" and saying "no" (1930), "Horace and Curiatia" (1934) and many others. He developed the theory of "epic theater". In 1933, after Hitler came to power, Brecht emigrated; in 1933-47 he lived in Switzerland , Denmark, Sweden, Finland, USA In exile he created a cycle of realistic scenes "Fear and Despair in the Third Reich" (1938), the drama "The Rifles of Teresa Carrar (1937), the parable-drama" The Good Man from Cezuan "(1940)," The Career of Arturo Hui" (1941), "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" (1944), the historical dramas "Mother Courage and Her Children" (1939), "The Life of Galileo" (1939) and others. Returning to his homeland in 1948, he organized a theater in Berlin Berliner Ensemble. Brecht died in Berlin on August 14, 1956.

Brecht Bertolt (1898/1956) - German writer, director. Most of the plays created by Brecht are filled with a humanistic, anti-fascist spirit. Many of his works have entered the treasury of world culture: The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Life of Galileo, The Good Man from Cezuan, etc.

Guryeva T.N. New literary dictionary / T.N. Guriev. - Rostov n / a, Phoenix, 2009, p. 38.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was born in Augsburg, the son of a factory manager, studied at the gymnasium, practiced medicine in Munich and was drafted into the army as a nurse. The songs and poems of the young orderly attracted attention with the spirit of hatred for the war, for the Prussian military, for German imperialism. In the revolutionary days of November 1918, Brecht was elected a member of the Augsburg Soldiers' Council, which testified to the authority of a still young poet.

Already in Brecht's earliest poems, we see a combination of catchy slogans designed for instant memorization and complex imagery that evokes associations with classical German literature. These associations are not imitations, but an unexpected rethinking of old situations and techniques. Brecht seems to move them into modern life, makes you look at them in a new way, "alienated". Thus, already in the earliest lyrics, Brecht gropes for his famous dramatic device of "alienation". In the poem "The Legend of the Dead Soldier", satirical techniques resemble the techniques of romanticism: a soldier going into battle against the enemy has long been only a ghost, the people who see him off are philistines whom German literature has long been drawing in the form of animals. And at the same time, Brecht's poem is topical - it contains intonations, pictures, and hatred of the times of the First World War. Brecht stigmatizes German militarism and war in the 1924 poem "The Ballad of a Mother and a Soldier"; the poet understands that the Weimar Republic is far from eradicating militant Pan-Germanism.

During the years of the Weimar Republic poetic world Brecht expands. Reality appears in the sharpest class upheavals. But Brecht is not content with merely recreating pictures of oppression. His poems are always a revolutionary appeal: such are "The Song of the United Front", "The Faded Glory of New York, the Giant City", "The Song of the Class Enemy". These poems clearly show how, at the end of the 1920s, Brecht comes to a communist worldview, how his spontaneous youthful rebellion grows into proletarian revolutionism.

Brecht's lyrics are very wide in their range, the poet can capture the real picture of German life in all its historical and psychological concreteness, but he can also create a meditation poem, where the poetic effect is achieved not by description, but by the accuracy and depth of philosophical thought, combined with exquisite, by no means a far-fetched allegory. For Brecht, poetry is above all the accuracy of philosophical and civic thought. Brecht considered even philosophical treatises or paragraphs of proletarian newspapers full of civil pathos to be poetry (for example, the style of the poem “Message to Comrade Dimitrov, who fought the fascist tribunal in Leipzig” is an attempt to bring the language of poetry and newspapers together). But these experiments eventually convinced Brecht that art should speak about everyday life in a language far from everyday. In this sense, Brecht the lyricist helped Brecht the playwright.

In the 1920s, Brecht turned to the theater. In Munich, he becomes a director, and then a playwright in the city theater. In 1924 Brecht moved to Berlin, where he worked in the theater. He acts simultaneously as a playwright and as a theorist - a theater reformer. Already during these years, Brecht's aesthetics, his innovative view of the tasks of dramaturgy and theater, took shape in their decisive features. Brecht expressed his theoretical views on art in the 1920s in separate articles and speeches, later combined into the collection Against the Theatrical Routine and On the Way to the Modern Theatre. Later, in the 1930s, Brecht systematized his theatrical theory, refining and developing it, in the treatises On the Non-Aristotelian Drama, New Principles of Acting, The Small Organon for the Theatre, The Purchase of Copper, and some others.

Brecht calls his aesthetics and dramaturgy "epic", "non-Aristotelian" theater; by this naming, he emphasizes his disagreement with the most important, according to Aristotle, principle of ancient tragedy, which was later adopted to a greater or lesser extent by the entire world theatrical tradition. The playwright opposes the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis. Catharsis is an extraordinary, supreme emotional tension. This side of the catharsis Brecht recognized and retained for his theatre; emotional strength, pathos, open manifestation of passions we see in his plays. But the purification of feelings in catharsis, according to Brecht, led to reconciliation with tragedy, life's horror became theatrical and therefore attractive, the viewer would not even mind experiencing something like that. Brecht constantly tried to dispel the legends about the beauty of suffering and patience. In the Life of Galileo, he writes that the hungry have no right to endure hunger, that “starving” is simply not eating, and not showing patience, pleasing to heaven. Brecht wanted tragedy to stimulate reflection on ways to prevent tragedy. Therefore, he considered Shakespeare's shortcoming that in the performances of his tragedies it is unthinkable, for example, "a discussion about the behavior of King Lear" and it seems that Lear's grief is inevitable: "it has always been like that, it is natural."

The idea of ​​catharsis, generated by the ancient drama, was closely connected with the concept of the fatal predestination of human destiny. Playwrights, by the power of their talent, revealed all the motivations of human behavior, in moments of catharsis, like lightning, they illuminated all the reasons for human actions, and the power of these reasons turned out to be absolute. That is why Brecht called the Aristotelian theater fatalistic.

Brecht saw a contradiction between the principle of reincarnation in the theatre, the principle of the dissolution of the author in the characters, and the need for direct, agitational and visual identification of the philosophical and political position writer. Even in the most successful and tendentious best sense words in traditional dramas, the position of the author, according to Brecht, was associated with the figures of reasoners. This was also the case in the dramas of Schiller, whom Brecht highly valued for his citizenship and ethical pathos. The playwright rightly believed that the characters of the characters should not be “mouthpieces of ideas”, that this reduces the artistic effectiveness of the play: “... on the stage of a realistic theater there is only place for living people, people in flesh and blood, with all their contradictions, passions and deeds. The stage is not a herbarium or a museum where stuffed effigies are exhibited ... "

Brecht finds his own solution to this controversial issue: the theatrical performance, stage action does not coincide with the plot of the play. The plot, the story of the characters is interrupted by direct author's comments, lyrical digressions, and sometimes even a demonstration of physical experiments, reading newspapers and a peculiar, always topical entertainer. Brecht breaks the illusion of a continuous development of events in the theater, destroys the magic of scrupulous reproduction of reality. The theater is genuine creativity, far surpassing mere plausibility. Creativity for Brecht and the play of actors, for whom only "natural behavior in the circumstances offered" is completely insufficient. Developing his aesthetics, Brecht uses traditions forgotten in the everyday, psychological theater of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he introduces choirs and zongs of contemporary political cabarets, lyrical digressions characteristic of poems, and philosophical treatises. Brecht allows a change in the commentary beginning when resuming his plays: he sometimes has two versions of zongs and choirs for the same plot (for example, the zongs in the productions of The Threepenny Opera in 1928 and 1946 are different).

Brecht considered the art of disguise to be indispensable, but completely insufficient for an actor. Much more important, he believed the ability to show, demonstrate his personality on stage - both civilly and creatively. In the game, the reincarnation must necessarily alternate, be combined with the demonstration of artistic data (recitations, plastics, singing), which are interesting precisely for their originality, and, most importantly, with the demonstration of the actor's personal citizenship, his human credo.

Brecht believed that a person retains the ability of free choice and responsible decision in the most difficult circumstances. This conviction of the playwright manifested faith in man, a deep conviction that bourgeois society, with all the power of its corrupting influence, cannot reshape humanity in the spirit of its principles. Brecht writes that the task of "epic theater" is to force the audience "to give up ... the illusion that everyone in the place of the portrayed hero would act in the same way." The playwright deeply comprehends the dialectics of the development of society and therefore crushingly smashes the vulgar sociology associated with positivism. Brecht always chooses complex, "non-ideal" ways to expose capitalist society. "Political primitive", according to the playwright, is unacceptable on stage. Brecht wanted the life and actions of the characters in the plays from the life of a property society to always give the impression of unnaturalness. He poses a very difficult task for the theatrical performance: he compares the viewer with a hydraulic builder, who “is able to see the river at the same time both in its actual course and in the imaginary one along which it could flow if the slope of the plateau and the water level were different” .

Brecht believed that a true depiction of reality is not limited only to the reproduction of the social circumstances of life, that there are universal categories that social determinism cannot fully explain (the love of the heroine of the "Caucasian Chalk Circle" Grusha for a defenseless abandoned child, Shen De's irresistible impulse for good) . Their depiction is possible in the form of a myth, a symbol, in the genre of parable plays or parabolic plays. But in terms of socio-psychological realism, Brecht's dramaturgy can be put on a par with the greatest achievements of the world theater. The playwright carefully observed the basic law of realism of the 19th century. - historical concreteness of social and psychological motivations. Comprehension of the qualitative diversity of the world has always been a paramount task for him. Summing up his path as a playwright, Brecht wrote: "We must strive for an ever more accurate description of reality, and this, from an aesthetic point of view, is an ever finer and more effective understanding of description."

Brecht's innovation was also manifested in the fact that he managed to fuse into an indissoluble harmonic whole traditional, mediated methods of revealing aesthetic content (characters, conflicts, plot) with an abstract reflective beginning. What gives amazing artistic integrity to the seemingly contradictory combination of plot and commentary? The famous Brechtian principle of "alienation" - it permeates not only the commentary itself, but the entire plot. Brecht's "alienation" is both an instrument of logic and poetry itself, full of surprises and brilliance.

Brecht makes "alienation" the most important principle of philosophical knowledge of the world, the most important condition for realistic creativity. Brecht believed that determinism is not sufficient for the truth of art, that the historical concreteness and socio-psychological completeness of the environment - the "Falstaffian background" - are not enough for the "epic theater". Brecht connects the solution to the problem of realism with the concept of fetishism in Marx's Capital. Following Marx, he believes that in bourgeois society the picture of the world often appears in a "bewitched", "hidden" form, that for each historical stage there is its own objective "visibility of things" forced on people. This "objective appearance" hides the truth, as a rule, more impenetrably than demagogy, lies or ignorance. The highest goal and the highest success of the artist, according to Brecht, is "alienation", i.e. not only exposing the vices and subjective delusions of individual people, but also a breakthrough beyond objective visibility to genuine, only emerging, only guessed in today's laws.

“Objective appearance,” as Brecht understood it, is capable of turning into a force that “subdues the entire structure of everyday language and consciousness.” In this Brecht seems to coincide with the existentialists. Heidegger and Jaspers, for example, considered the entire everyday life of bourgeois values, including everyday language, "rumour", "gossip". But Brecht, realizing, like the existentialists, that positivism and pantheism are just “rumor”, “objective appearance”, exposes existentialism as a new “rumour”, as a new “objective appearance”. Getting used to the role, to the circumstances does not break through the "objective appearance" and therefore serves realism less than "alienation". Brecht did not agree that getting used to and reincarnated is the way to the truth. K.S. Stanislavsky, who asserted this, was, in his opinion, "impatient." For living does not distinguish between truth and "objective appearance."

Brecht's plays of the initial period of creativity - experiments, searches and first artistic victories. Already "Baal" - Brecht's first play - strikes with a bold and unusual production of human and artistic problems. in poetics and stylistic features"Baal" is close to expressionism. Brecht considers the dramaturgy of G. Kaiser "decisive", "changed the situation in European theater". But Brecht immediately alienates the expressionistic understanding of the poet and poetry as an ecstatic medium. Without rejecting the expressionist poetics of the fundamental principles, he rejects the pessimistic interpretation of these fundamental principles. In the play, he reveals the absurdity of reducing poetry to ecstasy, to catharsis, shows the perversion of a person on the path of ecstatic, disinhibited emotions.

The fundamental principle, the substance of life is happiness. She, according to Brecht, is in the snake rings of a powerful, but not fatal, evil that is essentially alien to her, in the power of coercion. Brecht's world - and the theater must recreate this - seems to constantly balance on a razor's edge. He is either in the power of “objective visibility”, it feeds his grief, creates a language of despair, “gossip”, then finds support in the comprehension of evolution. In Brecht's theater, emotions are mobile, ambivalent, tears are resolved by laughter, and hidden, indestructible sadness is interspersed in the brightest pictures.

The playwright makes his Baal the focal point, the focus of the philosophical and psychological tendencies of the time. After all, the expressionistic perception of the world as horror and the existentialist concept of human existence as absolute loneliness appeared almost simultaneously, almost simultaneously the plays of the expressionists Hasenclever, Kaiser, Werfel and the first philosophical works of the existentialists Heidegger and Jaspers were created. At the same time, Brecht shows that the song of Baal is a dope that envelops the head of the listeners, the spiritual horizon of Europe. Brecht depicts the life of Baal in such a way that it becomes clear to the audience that the delusional phantasmagoria of his existence cannot be called life.

“What is that soldier, what is this one” is a vivid example of an innovative play in all its artistic components. In it, Brecht does not use the techniques consecrated by tradition. He creates a parable; the central scene of the play is a zong that refutes the aphorism “What is this soldier, what is this”, Brecht “alienates” the rumor about the “interchangeability of people”, speaks of the uniqueness of each person and the relativity of environmental pressure on him. This is a deep foreboding of the historical guilt of the German layman, who is inclined to interpret his support for fascism as inevitable, as a natural reaction to the failure of the Weimar Republic. Brecht finds new energy for the movement of drama in place of the illusion of developing characters and naturally flowing life. The playwright and the actors seem to be experimenting with the characters, the plot here is a chain of experiments, the lines are not so much the communication of the characters as a demonstration of their probable behavior, and then the "alienation" of this behavior.

Brecht's further searches were marked by the creation of the plays The Threepenny Opera (1928), Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses (1932) and Mother, based on Gorky's novel (1932).

Brecht took comedy as the basis for the plot of his "opera". English playwright 18th century Gaia's Opera of the Beggars. But the world of adventurers, bandits, prostitutes and beggars, depicted by Brecht, has not only English specifics. The structure of the play is multifaceted, the sharpness of plot conflicts is reminiscent of the crisis atmosphere in Germany during the Weimar Republic. This play is sustained by Brecht in the compositional techniques of the "epic theater". Directly aesthetic content, contained in the characters and the plot, is combined in it with zongs that carry a theoretical commentary and encourage the viewer to hard work of thought. In 1933, Brecht emigrated from fascist Germany, lived in Austria, then in Switzerland, France, Denmark, Finland, and since 1941 - in the USA. After World War II, he was prosecuted in the United States by the Un-American Activities Commission.

The poems of the early 1930s were intended to dispel Hitlerite demagogy; the poet found and flaunted contradictions in fascist promises that were sometimes imperceptible to the layman. And here Brecht was greatly helped by his principle of "alienation".] Common in the Hitlerite state, habitual, pleasing to the ear of a German - under Brecht's pen began to look dubious, absurd, and then monstrous. In 1933-1934. the poet creates "Hitler's chants". The high form of the ode, the musical intonation of the work only enhance the satirical effect contained in the aphorisms of the chorales. In many poems, Brecht emphasizes that the consistent struggle against fascism is not only the destruction of the Nazi state, but also the revolution of the proletariat (poems "All or Nobody", "Song against the War", "Resolution of the Communards", "Great October").

In 1934, Brecht published his most significant prose work, The Threepenny Romance. At first glance, it may seem that the writer created only a prose version of The Threepenny Opera. However, The Threepenny Romance is a completely independent work. Brecht specifies the time of action here much more precisely. All events in the novel are connected with the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. The characters familiar from the play - the bandit Makhit, the head of the "beggar's empire" Peacham, the policeman Brown, Polly, Peacham's daughter, and others - are transformed. We see them as businessmen of imperialist acumen and cynicism. Brecht appears in this novel as a genuine "doctor of social sciences". It shows the mechanism behind the backstage connections of financial adventurers (like Cox) and the government. The writer depicts the external, open side of events - the dispatch of ships with recruits to South Africa, patriotic demonstrations, a respectable court and the vigilant police of England. He then draws the true and decisive course of events in the country. Merchants for profit send soldiers in "floating coffins" that go to the bottom; patriotism is inflated by hired beggars; in court, the bandit Makhit-knife calmly plays the offended "honest merchant"; the robber and the chief of police are connected by a touching friendship and provide each other with a lot of services at the expense of society.

Brecht's novel presents the class stratification of society, class antagonism and the dynamics of struggle. The fascist crimes of the 1930s, according to Brecht, are not new; the English bourgeoisie of the beginning of the century in many respects anticipated the demagogic methods of the Nazis. And when a petty merchant who sells stolen goods, just like a fascist, accuses the communists, who oppose the enslavement of the Boers, of treason, of lack of patriotism, then this is not an anachronism in Brecht, not anti-historicism. On the contrary, it is a deep insight into certain recurring patterns. But at the same time, for Brecht, the exact reproduction of historical life and atmosphere is not the main thing. For him, the meaning of the historical episode is more important. The Anglo-Boer War and fascism for the artist is the raging element of property. Many episodes of The Threepenny Romance are reminiscent of a Dickensian world. Brecht subtly captures the national flavor of English life and the specific intonations of English literature: a complex kaleidoscope of images, tense dynamics, a detective tone in the depiction of conflicts and struggles, and the English nature of social tragedies.

In exile, in the struggle against fascism, Brecht's dramatic work blossomed. It was exceptionally rich in content and varied in form. Among the most famous plays of emigration - "Mother Courage and her children" (1939). The sharper and more tragic the conflict, the more critical, according to Brecht, a person's thought should be. In the conditions of the 30s, Mother Courage sounded, of course, as a protest against the demagogic propaganda of the war by the Nazis and was addressed to that part of the German population that succumbed to this demagogy. War is depicted in the play as an element that is organically hostile to human existence.

The essence of the "epic theater" becomes especially clear in connection with "Mother Courage". Theoretical commentary is combined in the play with a realistic manner, merciless in its consistency. Brecht believes that it is realism that is the most reliable way of influence. That is why in "Mother Courage" the "genuine" face of life is so consistent and sustained even in small details. But one should keep in mind the duality of this play - the aesthetic content of the characters, i.e. a reproduction of life, where good and evil are mixed regardless of our desires, and the voice of Brecht himself, not satisfied with such a picture, trying to affirm good. Brecht's position is directly evident in the Zongs. In addition, as follows from Brecht's directorial instructions to the play, the playwright provides theaters with ample opportunities to demonstrate the author's thought with the help of various "alienations" (photographs, film projections, direct appeal of actors to the audience).

The characters of the characters in "Mother Courage" are depicted in all their complex inconsistency. The most interesting is the image of Anna Firling, nicknamed Mother Courage. The versatility of this character causes a variety of feelings of the audience. The heroine attracts with a sober understanding of life. But she is a product of the mercantile, cruel and cynical spirit of the Thirty Years' War. Courage is indifferent to the causes of this war. Depending on the vicissitudes of fate, she hoists either a Lutheran or a Catholic banner over her van. Courage goes to war in the hope of big profits.

The conflict between practical wisdom and ethical impulses that excites Brecht infects the whole play with the passion of the dispute and the energy of the sermon. In the image of Catherine, the playwright drew the antipode of Mother Courage. Neither threats, nor promises, nor death forced Katrin to abandon the decision dictated by her desire to at least somehow help people. The talkative Courage is opposed by the mute Katrin, the girl's silent feat, as it were, crosses out all the lengthy arguments of her mother.

Brecht's realism is manifested in the play not only in the depiction of the main characters and in the historicism of the conflict, but also in the life authenticity of episodic persons, in Shakespeare's multicolor, reminiscent of the "Falstaff background". Each character, drawn into the dramatic conflict of the play, lives his own life, we guess about his fate, about the past and future life and as if we hear every voice in the discordant choir of war.

In addition to revealing the conflict through a clash of characters, Brecht complements the picture of life in the play with zongs, which give a direct understanding of the conflict. The most significant zong is the Song of Great Humility. This is a complex kind of “alienation”, when the author acts as if on behalf of his heroine, sharpens her erroneous positions and thereby argues with her, inspiring the reader to doubt the wisdom of “great humility”. To the cynical irony of Mother Courage, Brecht responds with his own irony. And Brecht's irony leads the viewer, who has already succumbed to the philosophy of accepting life as it is, to a completely different view of the world, to an understanding of the vulnerability and fatality of compromises. The song about humility is a kind of foreign counteragent that allows us to understand the true wisdom of Brecht, which is opposite to it. The entire play, critical of the heroine's practical, compromising "wisdom," is an ongoing argument with the "Song of Great Humility." Mother Courage does not see clearly in the play, having survived the shock, she learns "about its nature no more than a guinea pig about the law of biology." The tragic (personal and historical) experience, while enriching the viewer, taught Mother Courage nothing and did not enrich her in the least. The catharsis she experienced turned out to be completely fruitless. So Brecht argues that the perception of the tragedy of reality only at the level of emotional reactions is not in itself knowledge of the world, it is not much different from complete ignorance.

The play "The Life of Galileo" has two editions: the first - 1938-1939, the final - 1945-1946. The "epic beginning" constitutes the inner hidden basis of the "Life of Galileo". The realism of the play is deeper than traditional. The whole drama is permeated by Brecht's insistence on theoretically comprehending every phenomenon of life and accepting nothing, relying on faith and generally accepted norms. The desire to present every thing requiring an explanation, the desire to get rid of familiar opinions is very clearly manifested in the play.

In the "Life of Galileo" - Brecht's extraordinary sensitivity to the painful antagonisms of the 20th century, when the human mind reached unprecedented heights in theoretical thinking, but could not prevent the use of scientific discoveries for evil. The idea of ​​the play goes back to the days when the first reports about the experiments of German scientists in the field of nuclear physics appeared in the press. But it is no coincidence that Brecht turned not to modernity, but to a turning point in the history of mankind, when the foundations of the old worldview were collapsing. In those days - at the turn of the XVI-XVII centuries. - scientific discoveries for the first time became, as Brecht says, the property of streets, squares and bazaars. But after the abdication of Galileo, science, according to Brecht's deep conviction, became the property of only one scientists. Physics and astronomy could free humanity from the burden of old dogmas that fetter thought and initiative. But Galileo himself deprived his discovery of philosophical argumentation and thereby, according to Brecht, deprived mankind not only of the scientific astronomical system, but also of the far-reaching theoretical conclusions from this system, affecting the fundamental questions of ideology.

Brecht, contrary to tradition, sharply condemns Galileo, because it was this scientist, unlike Copernicus and Bruno, who, having in his hands irrefutable and obvious for every person proof of the correctness of the heliocentric system, was afraid of torture and refused the only correct teaching. Bruno died for a hypothesis, and Galileo renounced the truth.

Brecht "alienates" the idea of ​​capitalism as an epoch of unprecedented development of science. He believes that scientific progress has rushed along only one channel, and all other branches have dried up. About the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Brecht wrote in his remarks to the drama: "... it was a victory, but it was also a shame - a forbidden trick." When creating Galileo, Brecht dreamed of the harmony of science and progress. This subtext is behind all the grandiose dissonances of the play; Behind the seemingly disintegrated personality of Galileo is Brecht's dream of an ideal personality "constructed" in the process of scientific thinking. Brecht shows that the development of science in the bourgeois world is a process of accumulation of knowledge alienated from man. The play also shows that another process - "the accumulation of a culture of research action in individuals themselves" - was interrupted, that at the end of the Renaissance, the masses of the people were excluded from this most important "process of accumulation of research culture" by the forces of reaction: "Science left the squares for the silence of offices" .

The figure of Galileo in the play is a turning point in the history of science. In his person, the pressure of totalitarian and bourgeois-utilitarian tendencies destroys both a real scientist and a living process of perfection of all mankind.

Brecht's remarkable skill is manifested not only in the innovative and complex understanding of the problem of science, not only in the brilliant reproduction of the intellectual life of the characters, but also in the creation of powerful and multifaceted characters, in the disclosure of their emotional life. The monologues of the characters in The Life of Galileo are reminiscent of the "poetic verbiage" of Shakespeare's characters. All the heroes of the drama carry something renaissance in themselves.

The play-parable "The Good Man from Sezuan" (1941) is dedicated to the affirmation of the eternal and innate quality of a person - kindness. The main character of the play, Shen De, seems to radiate goodness, and this radiance is not caused by any external impulses, it is immanent. Brecht the playwright inherits in this the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment. We see Brecht's connection with fairy tale tradition and folk legends. Shen De resembles Cinderella, and the gods rewarding the girl for her kindness are a beggar fairy from the same fairy tale. But Brecht interprets traditional material in an innovative way.

Brecht believes that kindness is not always rewarded with a fabulous triumph. The playwright introduces social circumstances into the fairy tale and parable. China, depicted in the parable, is devoid of authenticity at first glance, it is simply "a certain kingdom, a certain state." But this state is capitalist. And the circumstances of Shen De's life are the circumstances of life at the bottom of a bourgeois city. Brecht shows that on this day, the fairy laws that rewarded Cinderella cease to operate. The bourgeois climate is ruinous for the best human qualities that arose long before capitalism; Brecht sees bourgeois ethics as a profound regression. Equally disastrous for Shen De is love.

Shen De embodies the ideal norm of behavior in the play. Shoi Yes, on the contrary, is guided only by soberly understood own interests. Shen De agrees with many of Shoi Da's thoughts and actions, she saw that only in the form of Shoi Da could she really exist. The need to protect her son in a world of hardened and vile people, indifferent to each other, proves to her that Shoi Da is right. Seeing how the boy is looking for food in the garbage can, she vows that she will ensure the future of her son, even in the most brutal struggle.

The two appearances of the main character are a bright stage “alienation”, a clear demonstration of the dualism of the human soul. But this is also a condemnation of dualism, for the struggle between good and evil in man is, according to Brecht, only a product of "bad times." The playwright clearly proves that evil in principle is a foreign body in a person, that the evil Shoi Da is just a protective mask, and not the true face of the heroine. Shen De never becomes really evil, cannot corrode his spiritual purity and gentleness.

The content of the parable leads the reader not only to the idea of ​​the pernicious atmosphere of the bourgeois world. This idea, according to Brecht, is no longer sufficient for the new theatre. The playwright makes you think about ways to overcome evil. The gods and Shen De tend to compromise in the play, as if they cannot overcome the inertia of the thinking of their environment. It is curious that the gods, in essence, recommend Shen De the same recipe that Makhit acted in The Threepenny Romance, robbing warehouses and selling goods at a cheap price to poor shop owners, thereby saving them from starvation. But the plot ending of the parable does not coincide with the playwright's commentary. The epilogue in a new way deepens and illuminates the problems of the play, proves the profound effectiveness of the "epic theater". The reader and the viewer turn out to be much more vigilant than the gods and Shen De, who did not understand why great kindness interferes with her. The playwright seems to suggest a decision in the finale: to live selflessly is good, but not enough; The main thing for people is to live intelligently. And that means building a reasonable world, a world without exploitation, a world of socialism.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945) is also one of Brecht's most famous parable plays. Both plays have in common the pathos of ethical searches, the desire to find a person in whom spiritual greatness and kindness would be most fully revealed. If in The Good Man from Sezuan Brecht tragically portrayed the impossibility of embodying the ethical ideal in the everyday atmosphere of a possessive world, then in The Caucasian Chalk Circle he revealed a heroic situation that requires people to uncompromisingly follow moral duty.

It would seem that everything in the play is classically traditional: the plot is not new (Brecht himself had already used it in the short story The Augsburg Chalk Circle). Grushe Vakhnadze, both in its essence and even in its appearance, evokes intentional associations with both the Sistine Madonna and the heroines of fairy tales and songs. But this play is innovative, and its originality is closely connected with the main principle of Brecht's realism - "alienation". Anger, envy, self-interest, conformism make up the immovable living environment, her flesh. But for Brecht, this is only an appearance. The monolith of evil is extremely fragile in the play. All life seems to be permeated with streams of human light. The element of light in the very fact of existence human mind and ethical principles.

In the lyrics of the Circle, rich in philosophical and emotional intonations, in the alternation of lively, plastic dialogue and song intermezzos, in the softness and inner light of the paintings, we clearly feel Goethe's traditions. Grushe, like Gretchen, carries the charm of eternal femininity. Wonderful person and the beauty of the world seem to gravitate towards each other. The richer and more comprehensive the giftedness of a person, the more beautiful the world for him, the more significant, ardent, immeasurably valuable is invested in other people's appeal to him. Many external obstacles stand in the way of the feelings of Grusha and Simon, but they are insignificant in comparison with the force that rewards a person for his human talent.

Only upon his return from exile in 1948 was Brecht able to regain his homeland and practically realize his dream of an innovative drama theater. He is actively involved in the revival of democratic German culture. The literature of the GDR immediately received a great writer in the person of Brecht. His work was not without difficulties. His struggle with the "Aristotelian" theater, his concept of realism as "alienation" met with misunderstanding both from the public and from dogmatic criticism. But Brecht wrote during these years that he considered the literary struggle "a good sign, a sign of movement and development."

In the controversy, a play appears that completes the path of the playwright - "Days of the Commune" (1949). The Berliner Ensemble theater team, directed by Brecht, decided to dedicate one of their first performances to the Paris Commune. However, the available plays did not meet, according to Brecht, the requirements of the "epic theater". Brecht himself creates a play for his theater. In The Days of the Commune, the writer uses the traditions of classical historical drama in its best examples (free alternation and saturation of contrasting episodes, bright everyday painting, encyclopedic "Falstaff's background"). "Days of the Commune" is a drama of open political passions, it is dominated by an atmosphere of debate, a popular assembly, its heroes are speakers and tribunes, its action breaks the narrow confines of a theatrical performance. Brecht in this regard relied on the experience of Romain Rolland, his "theater of the revolution", especially Robespierre. And at the same time, "Days of the Commune" is a unique, "epic", Brechtian work. The play organically combines the historical background, the psychological authenticity of the characters, the social dynamics and the "epic" story, a deep "lecture" about the days of the heroic Paris Commune; it is both a vivid reproduction of history and its scientific analysis.

Brecht's text is, first of all, a live performance; it needs theatrical blood, stage flesh. He needs not only acting actors, but personalities with a spark of the Maid of Orleans, Grusha Vakhnadze or Azdak. It can be objected that any classical playwright needs personalities. But in Brecht's performances such personalities are at home; it turns out that the world was created for them, created by them. It is the theater that should and can create the reality of this world. Reality! The solution to it - that's what primarily occupied Brecht. Reality, not realism. The artist-philosopher professed a simple, but far from obvious thought. Talk about realism is impossible without preliminary talk about reality. Brecht, like all theater figures, knew that the stage does not tolerate lies, mercilessly illuminates it like a searchlight. It does not allow coldness to disguise itself as burning, emptiness as content, insignificance as significance. Brecht continued this thought a little, he wanted the theater, the stage, not to let conventional ideas about realism disguise themselves as reality. So that realism in understanding limitations of any kind is not perceived as a reality by everyone.

Notes

Brecht's early plays: Baal (1918), Drums in the Night (1922), The Life of Edward II of England (1924), In the Jungle of Cities (1924), This Soldier and That Soldier (1927) .

So are the plays: “Roundheads and Sharpheads” (1936), “The Career of Arthur Wie” (1941), etc.

Foreign literature XX century. Edited by L.G. Andreev. Textbook for universities

Reprinted from http://infolio.asf.ru/Philol/Andreev/10.html

Read further:

Historical Persons of Germany (biographical guide).

World War II 1939-1945 . (chronological table).

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was born in the family of a manufacturer on February 10, 1898 in Augsburg. He graduated from a public school and a real gymnasium in his native city, and was listed among the most successful, but unreliable students. In 1914, Brecht published his first poem in a local newspaper, which did not delight his father at all. But the younger brother Walter always admired Berthold and imitated him in many ways.

In 1917 Brecht became a medical student at the University of Munich. However, he was much more interested in theater than medicine. He was especially delighted with the plays of the nineteenth German playwright Georg Buchner and the contemporary playwright Wedekind.

In 1918, Brecht was called up for military service, but was not sent to the front because of kidney problems, but was left to work as an orderly in Augsburg. He lived out of wedlock with his girlfriend Bea, who bore him a son, Frank. At this time, Berthold wrote his first play "Baal", and after it the second - "Drums in the Night". In parallel, he worked as a theater reviewer.

Brother Walter introduced him to the head of the Wild Theater, Truda Gerstenberg. "Wild Theater" was a variety show in which most of the actors were young, who loved to shock the audience on stage and in life. Brecht sang his songs with a guitar in a harsh, harsh, creaky voice, clearly pronouncing every word - in essence, it was a melodic declamation. The plots of Brecht's songs shocked listeners much more than the behavior of his colleagues in the "Cruel Theater" - these were stories about child murderers, children killing their parents, about moral decay and death. Brecht did not castigate vices, he simply stated the facts, described the everyday life of contemporary German society.

Brecht went to theaters, to the circus, to the cinema, listened to pop concerts. I met with actors, directors, playwrights, listened attentively to their stories and disputes. Having met the old clown Valentine, Brecht wrote short farces for him and even performed on the stage with him.

“Many are leaving us, and we do not keep them,
We told them everything, and there was nothing left between them and us, and our faces were hard at the moment of parting.
But we have not said the most important, we have missed the necessary.
Oh, why don't we say the most important thing, because it would be so easy, because if we don't speak, we condemn ourselves to a curse!
These words were so light, they were hiding there, close behind the teeth, they fell from laughter, and therefore we are choking with our throats closed.
Yesterday my mother died, on the evening of the First of May!
Now you can’t scrape it off with your nails ... "

Father was more and more annoyed by Berthold's work, but he tried to restrain himself and not sort things out. His only demand was to print "Baal" under a pseudonym, so that the name Brecht would not be sullied. Berthold's connection with his next passion Marianna Tsof did not cause delight of the father - young people lived without getting married.

Feuchtwanger, with whom Brecht had friendly relations, characterized him as "a somewhat gloomy, casually dressed person with pronounced inclinations towards politics and art, a man of indomitable will, a fanatic." Brecht became the prototype of the communist engineer Kaspar Pröckl in Feuchtwanger's Success.

In January 1921, the Augsburg newspaper published the last review of Brecht, who soon moved permanently to Munich and regularly visited Berlin, trying to print the Baal and the Drumbeat. It was at this time, on the advice of his friend Bronnen, that Berthold changed the last letter of his name, after which his name sounded like Bertolt.

On September 29, 1922, the premiere of Drums took place at the Chamber Theater in Munich. Posters were hung in the hall: “Everyone is the best for himself”, “Your own skin is the most expensive”, “There is nothing to stare at so romantically!” The moon, hanging over the stage, turned purple every time before the appearance of the protagonist. In general, the performance was successful, reviews were also positive.

In November 1922, Brecht and Marianne got married. In March 1923, Brecht's daughter Hannah was born.

Premieres followed one after another. In December, "Drums" showed the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Newspaper reviews were mixed, but the young playwright was awarded the Kleist Prize.

Brecht's new play In the Thicket was staged at the Residenz Theater in Munich by the young director Erich Engel, and the scene was designed by Caspar Neher. Bertolt worked with both of them more than once.

The Munich Chamber Theater invited Brecht to direct for the 1923/24 season. At first he was going to put modern version Macbeth, but then settled on Marlowe's historical drama The Life of Edward II, King of England. Together with Feuchtwanger they revised the text. It was at this time that the Brechtian style of work in the theater took shape. He is almost despotic, but at the same time he requires independence from each performer, listens attentively to the sharpest objections and remarks, if only they are sensible. In Leipzig, meanwhile, the Baal was staged.

The famous director Max Reinhardt invited Brecht to the post of full-time playwright, and in 1924 he finally moved to Berlin. He has a new girlfriend - a young actress Reinhardt Lena Weigel. In 1925, she gave birth to Brecht's son Stefan.

Kipenheuer's publishing house entered into an agreement with him for a collection of ballads and songs "Pocket Collection", which was published in 1926 with a circulation of 25 copies.

Developing a military theme, Brecht created the comedy "What is that soldier, what is that." Its main character, loader Galey Gay, left the house for ten minutes to buy fish for dinner, but got into the company of soldiers and in a day he became a different person, a super-soldier - an insatiable glutton and a stupidly fearless warrior. The theater of emotions was not close to Brecht, and he continued his line: he needed a clear, reasonable view of the world, and, as a result, a theater of ideas, a rational theater.

Brecht was very fascinated by Segre Eisenstein's principles of montage. Several times he watched "The Battleship Potemkin", comprehending the features of its composition.

The prologue to the Vienna production of Baal was written by the living classic Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Brecht, meanwhile, became interested in America and conceived a series of plays "Humanity Enters the Big Cities", which was supposed to show the rise of capitalism. It was at this time that he formulated the basic principles of the "epic theater".

Brecht was the first among all his friends to buy a car. At this time, he helped another famous director - Piskator - to stage Hasek's novel "The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik", one of his favorite works.

Brecht still wrote songs, often composing the melodies himself. He had peculiar tastes, for example, he did not like Beethoven's violins and symphonies. The composer Kurt Weill, nicknamed "Verdi for the Poor", became interested in Brecht's Zongs. Together they composed "Songspiel Mahagonny". In the summer of 1927 the opera was presented at the festival in Baden-Baden directed by Brecht. The success of the opera was largely facilitated by the brilliant performance of the role by Weill's wife, Lotta Leni, after which she was considered an exemplary performer of Weill-Brecht's works. "Mahogany" in the same year was transferred to the radio stations of Stuttgart and Frankfurt am Main.

In 1928, "What is that soldier, what is this" was published. Brecht divorced and married again - to Lena Weigel. Brecht believed that Weigel was the ideal actress of the theater he created - critical, mobile, hard-working, although she herself liked to say about herself that she was a simple woman, an uneducated comedian from the outskirts of Vienna.

In 1922, Bracht was admitted to the Charite hospital in Berlin with a diagnosis of "extreme malnutrition", where he was treated and fed free of charge. Having recovered a little, the young playwright tried to stage Bronnen's play "Paricide" at the "Young Theater" by Moritz Seeler. Already on the first day, he presented to the actors not only the general plan, but also the most detailed development of each role. First of all, he demanded from them meaningfulness. But Brecht was too harsh and uncompromising in his work. As a result, the already announced performance was cancelled.

Early in 1928 London celebrated the bicentennial of John Gay's Beggar's Opera, a hilarious and wicked parody play loved by the great satirist Swift. Based on it, Brecht created The Threepenny Opera (the title was suggested by Feuchtwanger), and Kurt Weill wrote the music. The dress rehearsal lasted until five in the morning, everyone was nervous, almost no one believed in the success of the event, overlays followed overlays, but the premiere was brilliant, and a week later, all of Berlin sang Mackey's couplets, Brecht and Weill became celebrities. In Berlin, the Threepenny Cafe was opened - only melodies from the opera were constantly heard there.

The history of the production of The Threepenny Opera in Russia is curious. famous director Alexander Tairov, while in Berlin, saw The Threepenny Opera and agreed with Brecht on a Russian production. However, it turned out that the Moscow Theater of Satire would also like to stage it. Litigation began. As a result, Tairov won and staged a performance in 1930 called "The Beggar's Opera". Criticism crushed the performance, Lunacharsky was also dissatisfied with it.

Brecht was convinced that hungry, impoverished geniuses were as much a myth as noble bandits. He worked hard and wanted to earn a lot, but he refused to sacrifice principles. When the Nero film company signed an agreement with Brecht and Weil to film the opera, Brecht presented a script in which socio-political motives were strengthened and the ending was changed: Mackey became the director of the bank, and his entire gang became members of the board. The firm terminated the contract and shot the film according to a script close to the text of the opera. Brecht sued, refused a lucrative peace deal, lost a ruinous lawsuit, and The Threepenny Opera was released against his will.

In 1929, at the festival in Baden-Baden, Brecht and Weill's "educational radio play" Lindbergh's Flight was performed. After that, it was broadcast several more times on the radio, and the leading German conductor Otto Klemperer performed it in concerts. At the same festival, Brecht's dramatic oratorio - Hindemith's "Baden Educational Play on Consent" was performed. Four pilots crashed, they are threatened
deadly danger. Do they need help? The pilots and the choir thought aloud about this in recitatives and zongs.

Brecht did not believe in creativity and inspiration. He was convinced that art is reasonable perseverance, work, will, knowledge, skill and experience.

On March 9, 1930, Brecht's opera to Weill's music, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, premiered at the Leipzig Opera. At the performances, admiring and indignant cries were heard, sometimes the audience grappled hand to hand. The Nazis in Oldenburg, where they were going to put "Mahogany", officially demanded a ban on "the base immoral spectacle." However, the German communists also believed that Brecht's plays were too grotesque.

Brecht read the books of Marx and Lenin, attended classes at MARCH, a Marxist working school. However, when asked by Die Dame magazine which book made the strongest and most lasting impression on him, Brecht wrote briefly: "You will laugh - the bible."

In 1931, the 500th anniversary of Joan of Arc was celebrated in France. Brecht writes the answer - "Saint John of the slaughterhouse." Joanna Dark in Brecht's drama is a lieutenant of the Salvation Army in Chicago, an honest, kind girl, reasonable, but ingenuous, dies, realizing the futility of peaceful protest and calling on the masses to revolt. Again, Brecht was criticized by both left and right, accusing him of outright propaganda.

Brecht prepared a staging of Gorky's "Mother" for the Comedy Theater. He significantly revised the content of the play, bringing it closer to the current situation. Vlasova was played by Elena Weigel, Brecht's wife.
The downtrodden Russian woman appeared businesslike, witty, insightful and boldly courageous. The police banned the performance at a large club in the working-class Moabit district, citing the "poor condition of the stage," but the actors won permission to simply read the play without costumes. The reading was interrupted several times by the police, and the play was never finished.

In the summer of 1932, at the invitation of the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, Brecht arrived in Moscow, where he was taken to factories, theaters, and meetings. It was supervised by playwright Sergei Tretyakov, a member of the literary community "Left Front". A little later, Brecht received a return visit: Lunacharsky and his wife visited him in Berlin.

On February 28, 1933, Brecht and his wife and son left light, so as not to arouse suspicion, to Prague, their two-year-old daughter Barbara was sent to her grandfather in Augsburg. Lilya Brik and her husband, the Soviet diplomatic worker Primakov, settled in Brecht's apartment. From Prague, the Brechts crossed over to Switzerland to Lake Lugano, where they secretly managed to transport Barbara.

On May 10, Brecht's books, along with those of other "underminers of the German spirit" - Marx, Kautsky, Heinrich Mann, Kestner, Freud, Remarque - were publicly set on fire.

Living in Switzerland was too expensive, and Brecht had no steady source of income. The Danish writer Karin Michaelis, a friend of Brecht and Weigel, invited them to her place. At this time in Paris, Kurt Weill met choreographer Georges Balanchine, and he suggested creating a ballet based on Brecht's songs "The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petty Bourgeois". Brecht traveled to Paris, attended rehearsals, but the production and the London tour went without much success.

Brecht returned to his favorite subject and wrote The Threepenny Novel. The image of the bandit Mackey in the novel was solved much more harshly than in the play, where he is not without a peculiar charm. Brecht wrote poetry and prose for émigré and underground publications.

In the spring of 1935, Brecht again came to Moscow. At the evening, arranged in his honor, the hall was packed. Brecht read poetry. His friends sang zongs from the Threepenny Opera, showed scenes from plays. In Moscow, the playwright saw the Chinese theater of Mei Lan-fang, which made a strong impression on him.

In June, Brecht was charged with anti-state activities and stripped of his citizenship.

The Civic Repertory Theater in New York staged Mother. Brecht made a special trip to New York: this is the first professional production in three years. Alas, the director rejected Brecht's "new theater" and staged a traditional realistic performance.

Brecht wrote the keynote "The Alienation Effect in Chinese performing arts". He was looking for the foundations of a new epic, "non-Aristotelian" theater, relying on the experience of the ancient art of the Chinese and his personal observations of everyday life and fairground clowns. Then, inspired by the war in Spain, the playwright composed a short play, The Rifles of Teresa Carrar. Its content was simple and relevant: the widow of an Andalusian fisherman does not want her two sons to participate in the civil war, but when the eldest son, who was peacefully fishing in the bay, is shot by machine gunners from a fascist ship, she goes into battle with her brother and younger son. The play was staged in Paris by émigré actors, and in Copenhagen by an amateur working troupe. In both productions, Teresa Carrar was played by Elena Weigel.

Since July 1936, the monthly German magazine Das Worth has been published in Moscow. The editors included Bredel, Brecht and Feuchtwanger. Brecht published poems, articles, excerpts from plays in this journal. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, Brecht's play Roundheads and Sharpheads was staged in Danish and the ballet The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petty Bourgeois. The king himself was at the premiere of the ballet, but after the very first scenes he left, loudly indignant. The Threepenny Opera was staged in Prague, in New York, in Paris.

Fascinated by China, Brecht wrote the novel TUI, a book of short stories and essays The Book of Changes, poems about Lao Tzu, and the first version of the play The Good Man from Sezuan. After the German invasion of Czechoslovakia and the signing of a peace treaty with Denmark, the prudent Brecht moved to Sweden. There he is forced to write under the pseudonym John Kent short plays for working theaters in Sweden and Denmark.

In the autumn of 1939, Brecht swiftly, in a few weeks, created the famous "Mother Courage" for the Stockholm Theater and its prima Naima Vifstrand. Brecht made the main character's daughter mute so that Weigel, who did not speak Swedish, could play her. But the staging never took place.

Brecht's wanderings in Europe continued. In April 1940, when Sweden became unsafe, he and his family moved to Finland. There he compiled the "Anthology of War": he selected photographs from newspapers and magazines and wrote a poetic commentary for each.

Together with his old friend Hella Vuolioki, Bertolt created the comedy "Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti" for the Finnish play competition. Main character- a landowner who becomes kind and conscientious only when he gets drunk. Brecht's friends were delighted, but the jury ignored the play. Then Brecht reworked "Mother Courage" for the Swedish theater in Helsinki and wrote "The Career of Arturo Ui" - he was waiting for an American visa and did not want to go to the States empty-handed. The play metaphorically reproduced the events that took place in Germany, and its characters spoke in verse that parodied Schiller's Robbers, Goethe's Faust, Richard III, Julius Caesar and Shakespeare's Macbeth. As usual, in parallel, he created comments on the play.

In May, Brecht received a visa, but refused to go. The Americans did not issue a visa to his employee, Margaret Steffin, on the grounds that she was ill. Brecht's friends were in a panic. Finally, Steffin managed to get a visitor visa, and she, along with the Brecht family, left for the United States through the Soviet Union.

The news of the beginning of the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union caught Brecht on the road, in the ocean. He arrived in California and settled closer to Hollywood, in the resort village of Santa Monica, communicated with Feuchtwanger and Heinrich Mann, followed the course of hostilities. Brecht did not like America, he felt like a stranger, no one was in a hurry to stage his plays. Together with the French writer Vladimir Pozner and his friend, Brecht wrote a script about the French Resistance, Silent Witness, then another script, And the Executioners Die, about how Czech anti-fascists destroyed the Nazi governor in the Czech Republic, the Gestapo member Heydrich. The first scenario was rejected, the second was substantially remade. Only student theaters agreed to play Brecht's plays.

In 1942, in one of the large concert halls in New York, friends arranged a Brecht evening. While preparing for this evening, Brecht met the composer Paul Dessau. Dessau later wrote the music for "Mother Courage" and several songs. He and Brecht conceived the operas The Wanderings of the God of Fortune and The Interrogation of Lucullus.

Brecht simultaneously worked on two plays: the comedy "Schweik in the Second World War" and the drama "Dreams of Simone Machar", written together with Feuchtwanger. In the autumn of 1943, he began negotiations with Broadway theaters about the play The Chalk Circle. It was based on a biblical parable about how King Solomon sorted out the lawsuit of two women, each of whom assured that she was the mother of the child standing in front of him. Brecht wrote the play (“Caucasian Chalk Circle”), but the theaters did not like it.

The theater producer Lozi suggested that Brecht direct Galileo with the famous actor Charles Loughton. From December 1944 until the end of 1945, Brecht and Loughton worked on the play. After the explosion of the atomic bomb, it became especially relevant, because it dealt with the responsibility of a scientist. The performance took place in a small theater in Beaverly Hills on July 31, 1947, but it was not a success.

McCarthyism flourished in America. In September 1947, Brecht received a summons for questioning before the Congressional Un-American Activities Committee. Brecht microfilmed his manuscripts and left his son Stefan as archivist. Stefan by that time was an American citizen, served in the American army and was demobilized. But, fearing prosecution, Brecht nevertheless appeared for interrogation, behaved emphatically politely and seriously, brought the commission to white heat with his tediousness, and was recognized as an eccentric. A few days later, Brecht flew to Paris with his wife and daughter.

From Paris, he went to Switzerland, to the town of Herrliberg. The city theater in Chur offered Brecht to stage his adaptation of Antigone, and Elena Weigel was invited to play the main role. As always, life in the Brechts' house was in full swing: friends and acquaintances gathered, the latest cultural events were discussed. A frequent guest was the greatest Swiss playwright Max Frisch, who ironically called Brecht a Marxist pastor. The Zurich Theater staged "Puntila and Matti", Brecht was one of the directors.

Brecht dreamed of returning to Germany, but it was not so easy to do this: the country, like Berlin, was divided into zones and no one really wanted to see him there. Brecht and Weigel (born in Vienna) filed a formal application for Austrian citizenship. The petition was granted only after a year and a half, but they quickly issued a pass to travel to Germany through Austrian territory: the Soviet administration invited Brecht to stage "Mother Courage" in Berlin.

A few days after his arrival, Brecht was solemnly honored in the Kulturbund club. At the banquet table, he sat between the President of the Republic, Wilhelm Pick, and the representative of the Soviet command, Colonel Tyulpanov. Brecht commented as follows:

“I didn’t think I would have to listen to obituaries for myself and speeches over my coffin.

On January 11, 1949, Mother Courage premiered at the State Theater. And already on November 12, 1949, the Berliner Ensemble - Brecht Theater opened with a production of "Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti". Actors from both the eastern and western parts of Berlin worked in it. In the summer of 1950, the Berliner Ensemble was already on tour in the west: in Braunschweig, Dortmund, Düsseldorf. Brecht released several performances in a row: The Home Teacher by Jakob Lenz, The Mother based on his play, The Beaver Fur Coat by Gerhart Hauptmann. Gradually the Berliner Ensemble became the leading German-speaking theatre. Brecht was invited to Munich to stage Mother Courage.

Brecht and Dessau worked on the opera The Interrogation of Lucullus, which was scheduled to premiere in April 1951. At one of the last rehearsals, employees of the Commission for the Arts and the Ministry of Education came and gave Brecht a dressing down. There were accusations of pacifism, decadence, formalism, and disrespect for the national classical heritage. Brecht was forced to change the title of the play - not "Interrogation", but "The Condemnation of Lucullus", change the genre to "musical drama", introduce new characters and partially change the text.

On October 7, 1951, the biennium of the GDR was marked by the award of National state awards honored workers of science and culture. Among the recipients was Bertolt Brecht. His books began to be published again, and books about his work appeared. Brecht's plays are staged in Berlin, in Leipzig, in Rostock, in Dresden, his songs were sung everywhere.

Life and work in the GDR did not prevent Brecht from having a Swiss bank account and a long-term contract with a publishing house in Frankfurt am Main.

In 1952, the Berliner Ensemble released The Trial of Joan of Arc in Rouen in 1431 by Anna Zegers, Goethe's Prafaust, Kleist's Broken Jug and Pogodin's Kremlin Chimes. They were staged by young directors, Brecht supervised their work. In May 1953, Brecht was elected chairman of the united PEN Club, a joint organization of writers from the GDR and the FRG, and was already perceived by many as a major writer.

In March 1954, the Berliner Ensemble moved to a new building, Moliere's Don Giovanni came out, Brecht enlarged the troupe, invited a number of actors from other theaters and cities. In July, the theater went on its first foreign tour. In Paris, at the International Theater Festival, he showed "Mother Courage" and received the First Prize.

"Mother Courage" was staged in France, Italy, England and the USA; "The Threepenny Opera" - in France and Italy; Teresa Carrar Rifles in Poland and Czechoslovakia; "The Life of Galileo" - in Canada, USA, Italy; "Interrogation of Lucullus" - in Italy; "Good Man" - in Austria, France, Poland, Sweden, England; "Puntila" - in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland. Brecht became a world famous playwright.

But Brecht himself felt worse and worse, he was admitted to the hospital with acute angina pectoris, serious heart problems were discovered. The condition was difficult. Brecht wrote a will, marked the place of burial, refused a magnificent ceremony and determined the heirs - his children. The eldest daughter Hanna lived in West Berlin, the youngest played in the Berliner Ensemble, the son Stefan remained in America, studied philosophy. The eldest son died during the war.

In May 1955, Brecht flew to Moscow, where he was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize in the Kremlin. He watched several performances in Moscow theaters, learned that a collection of his poems and prose had been put into print at the Publishing House of Foreign Literature, and a one-volume collection of selected dramas was being prepared in Art.

At the end of 1955, Brecht turned again to Galileo. He rehearsed ardently, in less than three months he held fifty-nine rehearsals. But the flu, which developed into pneumonia, interrupted the work. Doctors did not allow him to go on tour to London.

I don't need a tombstone, but
If you need it for me
I want it to say:
“He made suggestions. We
They accepted them."
And would honor such an inscription
All of us.

About Bertolt Brecht was filmed TV Broadcast from the Geniuses and Villains series.

Your browser does not support the video/audio tag.

The text was prepared by Inna Rozova

German playwright, theater director, poet, one of the brightest theatrical figures of the 20th century.

Eugen Bertolt Frederick Brecht/ Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was born February 10, 1898 in the Bavarian city of Augsburg in the family of a paper mill employee. His father was a Catholic, his mother a Protestant.

At school, Bertolt met by Caspar Neher/ Caspar Neher, with whom he was friends and worked together all his life.

In 1916 Bertolt Brecht started writing articles for newspapers. In 1917 he enrolled in a medical course at the University of Munich, but he was more interested in studying drama. In the autumn of 1918 he was drafted into the army and a month before the end of the war he was sent as an orderly to a clinic in his native city.

In 1918 Brecht wrote his first play Baal”, in 1919 the second was ready -“ Drums in the night". It was placed in Munich in 1922.

With the support of renowned critic Herbert Ihering, the Bavarian public discovered the work of the young playwright who won the prestigious Kleist literary prize.

In 1923 Bertolt Brecht tried his hand at cinematography, writing the script for the short film " Secrets of the barbershop". The experimental tape did not find an audience and gained cult status much later. In the same year, Brecht's third play was staged in Munich - " In more cities».

In 1924 Brecht worked with Lion Feuchtwanger/ Lion Feuchtwanger over adaptation " Edward II» Christopher Marlow/ Christopher Marlowe. The play formed the basis of the first experience of the "epic theater" - the debut directorial production of Brecht.

In the same year Bertolt Brecht moved to Berlin, where he received a position as an assistant playwright at the Deutsches Theater, and where he staged a new version of his third play without much success.

In the mid 20s Brecht published a collection of short stories and became interested in Marxism. In 1926, the play " Man is man". In 1927 he joined the theater company Erwin Piscator/ Erwin Piscator. Then he staged a performance based on his play "" with the participation of the composer Kurt Weill/ Kurt Weill and Caspar Neher responsible for the visual part. The same team worked on Brecht's first big hit, the musical play " Threepenny Opera”, which has firmly entered the repertoire of world theaters.

In 1931 Brecht wrote the play Saint Joan of the slaughterhouse”, which was never staged during the life of the author. But this year, The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny was a success in Berlin.

In 1932, with the rise of the Nazis Brecht left Germany, going first to Vienna, then to Switzerland, then to Denmark. There he spent 6 years, wrote " Threepenny Romance», « Fear and Despair in the Third Empire», « Life of Galileo», « Mother Courage and her children».

With the outbreak of World War II Bertolt Brecht, whose name was blacklisted by the Nazis, without obtaining a residence permit in Sweden, he first moved to Finland, and from there to the USA. In Hollywood, he wrote the script for the anti-war film " Executioners also die!", which was put by his compatriot Fritz Lang/ Fritz Lang. At the same time, the play " Dreams of Simone Machar».

In 1947 Brecht, whom the American authorities suspected of having links with the communists, returned to Europe - to Zurich. In 1948, Brecht was offered to open his own theater in East Berlin - this is how the " Berliner Ensemble". The very first performance, Mother Courage and her children”, brought success to the theater - Brecht constantly invited to tour throughout Europe.

Personal life of Bertolt Brecht / Berthold Brecht

In 1917 Brecht began dating Paula Bahnholser/ Paula Banholzer, in 1919 their son Frank was born. He died in Germany in 1943.

In 1922 Bertolt Brecht married a Viennese opera singer Marianne Zoff/ Marianne Zoff. In 1923, their daughter Hannah was born, she became famous as an actress under the name Hannah Hiob/ Hanne Hiob.

In 1927, the couple divorced due to Bertolt's connections with his assistant. Elizabeth Hauptmann/ Elisabeth Hauptmann and actress Helena Weigel/ Helene Weigel, who in 1924 gave birth to his son Stefan.

In 1930, Brecht and Weigel got married, in the same year their daughter Barbara was born, who also became an actress.

Key plays by Bertolt Brecht / Berthold Brecht

• Turandot, or the Whitewash Congress / Turandot oder Kongreß der Weißwäscher (1954)
• Arturo Ui's career that might not have been / Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1941)
• Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti / Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1940)
• Life of Galileo / Leben des Galilei (1939)
• Mother Courage and her children / Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1939)
• Fear and Despair in the Third Empire / Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (1938)
• St. Joan of the Abattoirs / Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (1931)
• The Threepenny Opera / Die Dreigroschenoper (1928)
• Man is Man / Mann ist Mann (1926)
• Drums in the Night / Trommeln in der Nacht (1920)
• Baal / Baal (1918)

Brecht Bertolt

Full name Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (b. 1908 - d. 1956)

Outstanding German playwright, writer, director, theater figure, critic. Educated on his behalf theatrical term"Brechtian" means - rational, brilliantly caustic in its analysis of human relations. According to researchers, he owes much of his dramatic success to the talent and dedication of the women who loved him.

Brecht's genius undoubtedly belongs not only to his native Germany, whose spiritual situation of the late twenties he expressed in his merciless plays. It belongs to the whole of the 20th century, because Brecht, perhaps like no other artist, was able with boundless frankness to throw off all the illusions that are seductive and saving for humanity and show the mechanics of social relations in all their undisguised nakedness, cynicism and frankness, which knows no shame. If before the XX century. Humanity followed the Prince of Elsinore in deciding the question: "To be or not to be?" - then Brecht, with all his frankness, asked another question in his famous plays: "How to survive in the struggle of life?"

The outstanding theatrical reformer created the system of "epic theater" with its "alienation", ironic pathos, mocking and aggressive ballads, in which the fading melody of the human soul and sobs invisible to the world are hidden. When in the late 1950s Brecht brought his "Berliner Ensemble" on tour to Moscow, it was a powerful aesthetic shock. Helena Weigel - mother Courage, who in a shameless hoarse voice continued to bargain for pennies after all her children were taken away by the war - the audience remembered for a long time.

And yet, Brecht became one of the most important figures who determined the spiritual atmosphere of his age, not because he discovered a new theatrical system. And because he decided with defiant straightforwardness to deprive a person of the saving veil of traditional psychology, morality, psychological conflicts, he mercilessly tore all this “humanistic” lace and, like a surgeon, opened in a person and human relationships, even lyrical, intimate, their “popular mechanics."

Brecht boldly stripped humanity of all illusions about itself. When high truths fell in price, he sharply reduced in price and high genres: wrote "threepenny" operas, operas of beggars. His philosophy of the world and man, as well as theatrical aesthetics, were blatantly poor. Brecht was not afraid to show a person his portrait without mysticism, psychology and spiritual habitual warmth; as if on purpose, drowned out in himself and in his viewers spiritual sadness and heartache. With detached, almost heartless coldness, he demonstrated in his plays a kind of world lumpenism. Therefore, quite rightly, he was crowned with the title of "damned poet."

Bertolt Brecht was born on February 10, 1898 in Augsburg into the family of a paper mill owner. After graduating from a real school, he studied philosophy and medicine at the University of Munich, took part in the First World War. In his student years he wrote the plays Baal and Drums in the Night.

Wieland Herzfelde, founder of the famous Malik publishing house, once remarked: “Berthold Brecht was a kind of forerunner of the sexual revolution. And even, as can be seen now, one of its prophets. This seeker of truth preferred two lusts to all the pleasures of life - the voluptuousness of a new thought and the voluptuousness of love ... "

Among the hobbies of Brecht's youth, we should first of all mention the daughter of the Augsburg doctor Paula Binholz, who

1919 gave birth to his son Frank. A little later, a dark-skinned medical student in Augsburg, Heddy Kuhn, conquered his heart. In 1920, Brecht's mistress Dora Mannheim introduced him to her friend Elisabeth Hauptmann, half English, half German, who later became his mistress. At that time, Brecht looked like a young wolf, thin and witty, shaved bald and posing for photographers in a leather coat. In his teeth is the unchanging cigar of the winner, around him is a retinue of admirers. He was friends with filmmakers, choreographers, musicians.

In January 1922, Brecht entered the real theater for the first time, not as a spectator, but as a director. He starts, but does not finish work on the play of his friend A. Bronnen "Paricide". But he does not give up this idea, he decides to stage the expressionist play in his own way, suppresses pathos and declaration, demands a clear meaning in the pronunciation of each word, each remark.

At the end of September, the first performance of Brecht as a director took place, followed by the first drama by Brecht as a playwright. In Munich, at the Chamber Theater, director Falkenberg staged "Drums". Success and recognition, to which the young writer went so hard, come in all their glory. The drama "Drums in the Night" won the Kleist Prize, and its author became a playwright of the Chamber Theater and ended up in the house of famous writer Lion Feuchtwanger. Here Brecht conquered the Bavarian writer Marie-Louise Fleisser, who later became his friend and reliable collaborator.

In November of the same year, Berthold was forced to marry the Munich opera singer Marianne Zoff, after she became pregnant twice by him. True, the marriage was short-lived. Their daughter Hanne Hiob later became a performer of roles in her father's plays. During this period, the aspiring playwright met the actress Carola Neher, who after a while became his mistress.

In the autumn of 1924, Berthold moved to Berlin, having received a place as a playwright at the German Theater from M. Reinhardt. Here he met Helena Weigel, his future wife, who bore him a son, Stefan. Around 1926, Brecht became a freelance artist, read Marx and Lenin, finally convinced that the main goal and meaning of his work should be the struggle for the socialist revolution. The experience of the First World War made the writer an opponent of wars and became one of the reasons for his conversion to Marxism.

The following year saw the release of Brecht's first book of poetry, as well as a short version of the play Mahagonny Songspiel, his first work in collaboration with the talented composer Kurt Weill. Their next, most significant work - The Threepenny Opera (a free adaptation of the play by the English playwright John Gay "The Beggar's Opera") - was shown with great success on August 31, 1928 in Berlin, and then throughout Germany. From that moment until the Nazis came to power, Brecht wrote five musicals, known as "study plays", to the music of K. Weill, P. Hindemith and X. Eisler.

In 1930, he created a new opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, where he developed the motifs of previous plays. There, even more frankly than in The Threepenny Opera, bourgeois morality is ridiculed in a straightforward, even simplistic way, and along with the romantic idealization of America. The music was written by Brecht's longtime associate Kurt Weill. At the very first production at the Leipzig Opera, which took place on March 9, a scandal erupted. Some of the audience whistled, hissed, stamped their feet, but the majority applauded. Fights broke out in several places, and the whistlers were led out of the hall. Scandals were repeated at every performance in Leipzig, and later in other cities. And already in January 1933, bloody skirmishes began to occur daily on the streets of German cities. Stormtroopers, often with the direct support of the police, attacked workers' demonstrations and strike pickets. And this was no longer connected with Brecht's theater, rather, it was the reaction of the "spectator" to the actions of the political theater.

At this time, Brecht was discharged from the hospital, where he was kept for a long time by a severe flu with complications. In an atmosphere of general chaos, the playwright could not feel safe. Helena Weigel, who by that time had become Brecht's second wife and the leading actress of Brecht's performances, quickly packed up, and on February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, they left for Prague with their son. The recently born daughter was sent to Augsburg for the time being.

Brecht and his family settled in Denmark and already in 1935 was deprived of German citizenship. Away from his homeland, the playwright wrote poetry and sketches for anti-Nazi movements, and in 1938-1941. created four of his largest plays - "The Life of Galileo", "Mother Courage and Her Children", "The Good Man from Cezuan" and "Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti".

In 1939, the Second World War. A wave of indignation and unwillingness to obey the German dictator swept through Europe. Anti-fascist congresses in Spain and in Paris condemned the war, trying to warn the crowd enraged by the nationalist call. The rich craved the benefits of the war, they were ready to obey a fanatical army that would bring them real money, the poor went into battle with only one goal - to steal wealth for themselves in other countries, they became the kings of life, the whole world obeyed them. To be at the forefront of such a movement, tearing the throat, trying to prove something to the stupid crowd - this path was not for the philosopher Brecht.

Once aloof from the noise of public life, Brecht began to work on the formulation of the foundations of the "epic theater". Speaking against external drama, the need to sympathize with his characters, identifying "bad" and "good" in their personal characteristics, Brecht also opposed other traditional features of drama and theater. He was against "getting used to" the actor in the image, in which he identifies himself with the character; against the viewer's selfless faith in the veracity of what is happening on the stage; against the "fourth wall", when the actors act as if there is no auditorium; against tears of tenderness, delight, sympathy. In this way, Brecht's system was the opposite of Stanislavsky's. The most important word here was the word "meaning". The viewer should think about what is depicted, try to comprehend it, draw conclusions for themselves, for society. In this, with the help of appropriate “methods of alienation”, the theater should help him. A feature of Brecht's aesthetics was that his performances required the public to master "the art of being a spectator." Since in the productions of his theater the main attention was paid to the relations of the characters, the audience was aimed not at the denouement of the performance, but at the whole course of action.

In 1940, the Nazis invaded Denmark, and the anti-fascist writer was forced to leave for Sweden and then to Finland. And the following year, Brecht, passing through the USSR, found himself in California. Despite his persistent reputation as a "rabid Marxist", he managed to stage several of his plays in the United States and even worked for Hollywood. Here he wrote The Caucasian Chalk Circle and two more plays, and also worked on the English version of Galileo.

In 1947, the playwright had to respond to the charges brought against him by the Commission of Inquiry into Un-American Activities, and then completely leave America. At the end of the year, he ended up in Zurich, where he created his main theoretical work The Short Theatrical Organon, whose title echoed the title of Francis Bacon's famous treatise, The New Organon. In this work, Brecht outlined his views on art in general and on the theater as a genre of art in particular. In addition, he wrote the last completed play, Days of the Commune.

In October 1948, the playwright moved to the Soviet sector of Berlin, and already in January of the following year, there was the premiere of "Mother Courage" in his production, with his wife Helena Weigel in the title role. Then the two of them founded their own troupe "Berliner Ensemble", which this creator of the "epic theater" and the great lyricist led until his death. Brecht adapted or staged about twelve plays for his theatre. In March 1954, the group received the status of a state theater.

Recently, publications have begun to appear more and more often, from which it follows that the great German playwright wrote almost nothing himself, but used the talents of his secretaries, who were also his mistresses. This conclusion was reached, among other things, by the most serious researcher of the work and biography of Bertolt Brecht, American professor John Fuegi. He devoted more than thirty years to the cause of his life, as a result of which he published a book on Brecht, published in Paris and numbering 848 pages.

While working on his book, he interviewed hundreds of people in the GDR and the Soviet Union who knew Brecht intimately. He talked with the playwright's widow and his assistants, studied thousands of documents, including archives in Berlin, which had been under lock and key for a long time. In addition, Fuegi gained access to Brecht's manuscripts and previously unknown materials stored in Harvard University. The handwritten versions of most of the works of the great German writer and playwright were not written by his hand.

It turned out that Berthold dictated them to his mistresses. All of them prepared food for him, washed and ironed things and ... wrote plays for him, not to mention the fact that Brecht used his passions as personal secretaries. For all this, the playwright paid them off with sex. His motto was: "A little sex for a good text." In addition, it became known that in the 1930s. the future fiery anti-fascist and faithful Leninist not only did not condemn the Nazis, but also advised his brother to join the National Socialist Party.

Years of research allowed the American professor to conclude that the author of The Song of Alabama is one of Brecht's literary secretaries - the daughter of a Westphalian doctor, student Elizabeth Hauptmann. She had a brilliant knowledge of English literature, and Brecht often used her as a goldmine to choose the theme of his works. It was Elizabeth who was the author of the first drafts of The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The playwright had only to edit what she had written. According to Elisabeth Hauptmann, it was she who introduced Brecht to Japanese and Chinese classical works, which the playwright later used in his writings.

Actress Helena Weigel was first a mistress, and then the wife of Brecht. Resigned to her husband's endless love affairs, Helena bought a typewriter and typed his works herself, editing the texts along the way.

Berthold met the writer and actress Ruth Berlau in 1933 in Denmark. Because of him, the "rising star" of the Royal Theater divorced her husband and went into exile with the anti-fascist writer in America. Brecht's biographers believe that Ruth wrote the play The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Simone Machar's Dreams. In any case, he himself testified to a literary collaboration with a beautiful Scandinavian. In one of his letters to Berlau there are these words: "We are two playwrights writing works in joint creative work."

And finally, another love of Berthold is the daughter of a bricklayer from the Berlin outskirts, Margaret Steffin. There are speculations that she wrote the plays The Good Man of Sezuan and The Roundheads and the Sharpheads. On the back title pages six Brecht plays: "The Life of Galileo", "The Career of Arturo Ui", "Fear and Despair", "Horaces and Curatii", "The Rifles of Teresa Carrar" and "The Interrogation of Lucullus" typed in small print: "In collaboration with M. Steffin." In addition, according to the German literary scholar Hans Bunte, what Margaret contributed to The Threepenny Romance and The Cases of Julius Caesar cannot be separated from what Brecht wrote.

Margarethe Steffin met on the path of a novice playwright in 1930. The daughter of a Berlin proletarian knew six foreign languages, had innate musicality, undoubted artistic and literary abilities - in other words, she was quite capable of translating her talent into a significant work of art that would have been destined to live. longer than its creator.

However, your life and creative way Steffin chose herself, she chose quite consciously, voluntarily renouncing the share of the creator and choosing for herself the fate of Brecht's co-author. She was a stenographer, clerk, referent... Only two people from his entourage Berthold called his teachers: Feuchtwanger and Steffin. This fragile, blond, modest woman first participated in the leftist youth movement, then joined the German Communist Party. Her collaboration with Bertolt Brecht lasted almost ten years.

Mystery and a starting point The relationship between the nameless co-authors and the outstanding German playwright is contained in the word "love". The same Steffin loved Brecht, and her faithful, literally to the grave, literary service to him was, presumably, in many respects only a means of expressing her love. She wrote: “I loved love. But love is not like, “Will we make a boy soon?” Thinking about it, I hated such a mess. When love doesn't bring joy. In four years, I have only once felt a similar passionate delight, a similar pleasure. But what it was, I didn't know. After all, it flashed in a dream and, therefore, never happened to me. And now we're here. Do I love you, I don't know myself. However, I wish to stay with you every night. As soon as you touch me, I already want to lie down. Neither shame nor looking back resists this. Everything obscures the other…”

Were Brecht's women his victims? A colleague of the playwright, writer Leon Feuchtwanger characterized him as follows: "Berthold gave his talent disinterestedly and generously - more than he demanded." The creator of the "epic theater" demanded complete dedication. What about women? Women really liked to give themselves to him.

Brecht has always been a controversial figure, especially in a divided Germany recent years his life. In June 1953, after the riots in East Berlin, he was accused of loyalty to the regime, and many West German theaters boycotted his plays. In 1954, the world-famous playwright, who never became a communist, received the international Lenin Prize "For the strengthening of peace among peoples."

Bertolt Brecht died in East Berlin on August 14, 1956. He was buried next to the grave of Hegel.

In our theaters, Brecht rarely plays today. It has no fashion. In fact, the principles theater system, his "epic theater" in its purest form never took root on our theatrical soil and could not. In Lyubimov's famous "The Good Man from Sezuan", from which the legendary Taganka began in 1963, according to the critics of those years, "a drop of Russian, Tsvetaev's blood was mixed with Brecht's didactics and merciless formulas." The Taganka actors there inimitably cordially sang Marina Tsvetaeva's poems to the guitar, violating the purity of the system...

Be that as it may, but by his centenary Brecht again rises in price. The lost generation, with all the great depressions that the 20th century did not skimp on, no less than faith in goodness and miracles, needs Brecht's sobriety of thought, unbiased by any, even the most beautiful and humanistic ideas and slogans.