Biography of Brecht Berthold. Bertolt Brecht: biography, personal life, family, creativity and best books Illness and death

Bertolt Brecht- German writer, playwright, prominent figure in the European theater, founder of a new direction called "political theater". Born in Augsburg on February 10, 1898; his father was the director of a paper mill. While studying at the city real gymnasium (1908-1917), he began to write poetry, stories, which were published in the Augsburg News newspaper (1914-1915). Already in his school essays there was a sharply negative attitude towards the war.

The young Brecht was attracted not only literary creativity but also theater. However, the family insisted that Berthold acquire the profession of a doctor. Therefore, after graduating from the gymnasium, in 1917 he became a student at the University of Munich, where, however, he had a chance to study for a short time, since he was drafted into the army. For health reasons, he served not at the front, but in the hospital, where he discovered real life, which was in conflict with propaganda speeches about great Germany.

Perhaps Brecht's biography could have been completely different if it were not for his acquaintance in 1919 with Feuchtwanger, a famous writer, who, seeing the talent of the young man, advised him to continue his studies in literature. In the same year, the first plays by the novice playwright appeared: Baal and Drumbeat in the Night, which were staged on the stage of the Kammerspiele Theater in 1922.

The world of theater becomes even closer to Brecht after graduating from the university in 1924 and moving to Berlin, where he made acquaintance with many artists, joined the Deutsches Theater. Together with the famous director Erwin Piscator, in 1925 he created the Proletarian Theater, for the productions of which it was decided to write plays on their own due to the lack of financial ability to order them from established playwrights. Brecht took well-known literary works and staged them. The first swallows were "Adventures good soldier Schweik" Hasek (1927) and "The Threepenny Opera" (1928), created on the basis of "The Beggar's Opera" by J. Gay. Gorky's "Mother" (1932) was also staged by him, since the ideas of socialism were close to Brecht.

Hitler's coming to power in 1933, the closure of all workers' theaters in Germany forced Brecht and his wife Helena Weigel to leave the country, move to Austria, and then, after its occupation, to Sweden and Finland. The Nazis officially stripped Bertolt Brecht of his citizenship in 1935. When Finland entered the war, the writer's family moved to the USA for 6 and a half years. It was in exile that he wrote his most famous plays - "Mother Courage and Her Children" (1938), "Fear and Despair in the Third Empire" (1939), Life of Galileo "(1943)," a kind person from Sesuan" (1943), "Caucasian Chalk Circle" (1944), in which the thought of the need for a human struggle with the outdated world order ran like a red thread.

After the end of the war, he had to leave the United States due to the threat of persecution. In 1947, Brecht went to live in Switzerland - the only country that issued him a visa. The western zone of his native country refused him permission to return, so a year later Brecht settled in East Berlin. Associated with this city final stage his biography. In the capital, he created a theater called the Berliner Ensemble, on the stage of which the playwright's best plays were performed. Brecht's brainchild went on tour in a large number of countries, including the Soviet Union.

In addition to plays, Brecht's creative heritage includes the novels The Threepenny Romance (1934), The Cases of Monsieur Julius Caesar (1949), a fairly large number of stories and poems. Brecht was not only a writer, but also an active public and political figure, he took part in the work of left-wing international congresses (1935, 1937, 1956). In 1950, he was appointed vice-president of the Academy of Arts of the GDR, in 1951 he was elected a member of the World Peace Council, in 1953 he headed the all-German PEN club, in 1954 he received the international Lenin Peace Prize. A heart attack ended the life of the playwright-turned-classic on August 14, 1956.

Biography from Wikipedia

The work of Brecht - a poet and playwright - has always been controversial, as well as his theory of "epic theater" and his political views. Nevertheless, already in the 1950s, Brecht's plays were firmly established in the European theatrical repertoire; his ideas were adopted in one form or another by many contemporary playwrights, including Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Arthur Adamov, Max Frisch, Heiner Müller.

The theory of "epic theater" post-war years put into practice by Brecht the director, opened up fundamentally new possibilities performing arts and had a significant impact on the development of the theater of the XX century.

Augsburg years

Eugen Berthold Brecht, who later changed his name to Bertolt, was born in Augsburg, Bavaria. Father, Berthold Friedrich Brecht (1869-1939), originally from Achern, moved to Augsburg in 1893 and, having entered as a sales agent at the Heindl paper factory, made a career: in 1901 he became a procurist (confidant), in 1917- m - commercial director of the company. In 1897 he married Sophie Bretzing (1871-1920), the daughter of a stationmaster in Bad Waldsee, and Eugen (as Brecht was called in the family) became their first child.

In 1904-1908, Brecht studied at the folk school of the Franciscan monastic order, then entered the Bavarian Royal Real Gymnasium, educational institution humanitarian profile. “During my nine-year stay ... in the Augsburg real gymnasium,” Brecht wrote in his short autobiography in 1922 - I did not succeed in any significant contribution to the mental development of my teachers. They tirelessly strengthened in me the will to freedom and independence. Brecht's relationship with a conservative family was no less difficult, from which he moved away shortly after graduating from high school.

Brecht House in Augsburg; currently a museum

In August 1914, when Germany entered the war, the chauvinist propaganda took hold of Brecht as well; he made his contribution to this propaganda - he published in the Augsburg Latest News "Notes on Our Time", in which he proved the inevitability of war. But the loss figures very soon sobered him up: at the end of that year, Brecht wrote the anti-war poem "Modern Legend" ( Moderne Legende) - about soldiers whose death is mourned only by mothers. In 1916, in an essay on a given topic: "It is sweet and honorable to die for the fatherland" (Horace's saying) - Brecht has already qualified this statement as a form of purposeful propaganda, easily given to the "empty-headed", confident that their last hour is still far away.

Brecht's first literary experiments date back to 1913; from the end of 1914, his poems, and then stories, essays and theater reviews, regularly appeared in the local press. The idol of his youth was Frank Wedekind, the forerunner of German expressionism: it was through Wedekind, according to E. Schumacher, that Brecht mastered the songs of street singers, farcical verses, chansons, and even traditional forms - a ballad and a folk song. However, even in his gymnasium years, Brecht, according to his own testimony, “by all sorts of sports excesses” brought himself to a heart spasm, which also influenced the initial choice of a profession: after graduating from a gymnasium in 1917, he entered the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, where he studied medicine and natural science. However, as Brecht himself wrote, at the university he "listened to lectures on medicine, and learned to play the guitar."

War and revolution

Brecht's studies did not last long: from January 1918 he was drafted into the army, his father sought deferrals, and in the end, in order not to be at the front, Brecht on October 1, as a nurse, entered the service in one of the Augsburg military hospitals. His impressions in the same year were embodied in the first "classic" poem - "The Legend of the Dead Soldier" ( Legende vom toten Soldaten), whose nameless hero, tired of fighting, died a hero’s death, but upset the Kaiser’s calculations with his death, was removed from the grave by a medical commission, recognized as fit for military service and returned to service. Brecht himself set his ballad to music - in the style of an organ-grinder's song - and performed publicly with a guitar; it was precisely this poem, which gained wide popularity and in the 1920s was often heard in literary cabarets performed by Ernst Busch, that the National Socialists pointed to as the reason for depriving the author of German citizenship in June 1935.

In November 1918, Brecht took part in the revolutionary events in Germany; from the infirmary in which he served, he was elected to the Augsburg Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, but very soon retired. At the same time, he participated in the funeral meeting in memory of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and in the funeral of Kurt Eisner; hid the persecuted Spartak player Georg Prem; he collaborated in the organ of the Independent Social Democratic Party (K. Kautsky and R. Hilferding) with the Volksville newspaper, even joined the USPD, but not for long: at that time, Brecht, by his own admission, "suffered from a lack of political convictions." The Volksville newspaper in December 1920 became the organ of the United Communist Party of Germany (section of the Third International), but for Brecht, who was far from the Communist Party at that time, this did not matter: he continued to publish his reviews until the newspaper itself was banned.

Demobilized, Brecht returned to the university, but his interests changed: in Munich, which at the turn of the century, during the time of the Prince Regent, turned into cultural capital Germany, he became interested in the theater - now, while studying at the Faculty of Philosophy, he attended classes at the theatrical seminar of Artur Kucher and became a frequenter of literary and artistic cafes. Brecht preferred the fairground booth to all theaters in Munich, with its touts, street singers, to the hurdy-gurdy, with the help of a pointer explaining a series of paintings (such a singer in the Threepenny Opera will talk about the adventures of Mackhit), panopticons and crooked mirrors - the city drama theater seemed to him mannered and sterile. During this period, Brecht himself performed on the stage of the small "Wilde bühne". Having completed two full courses at the university, in the summer semester of 1921 he did not make a mark at any of the faculties and in November he was excluded from the list of students.

In the early 1920s, in Munich pubs, Brecht watched Hitler's first steps in the political arena, but at that time the supporters of the obscure "Fuhrer" were nothing more than "a bunch of miserable bastards" for him. In 1923, during the "beer coup", his name was included in the "black list" of persons to be destroyed, although he himself had long since retired from politics and was completely immersed in his creative problems. Twenty years later, comparing himself to Erwin Piscator, the creator of political theater, Brecht wrote: “The turbulent events of 1918, in which both took part, disappointed the Author, Piscator was made a politician. Only much later, under the influence of his scientific studies, did the Author also come to politics.

Munich period. First plays

Brecht's literary affairs at that time did not develop in the best way: "I run like a stupefied dog," he wrote in his diary, "and I can't do anything." Back in 1919, he brought his first plays, Vaal and Drums in the Night, to the literary part of the Munich Kammerspiele, but they were not accepted for production. They did not find their director and five one-act plays, including "Petty Bourgeois Wedding". “What anguish,” Brecht wrote in 1920, “Germany brings me! The peasantry has become completely impoverished, but its rudeness gives rise not to fabulous monsters, but to dumb brutality, the bourgeoisie has become fat, and the intelligentsia is weak-willed! All that's left is America! But without a name, he had nothing to do in America either. In 1920 Brecht visited Berlin for the first time; his second visit to the capital lasted from November 1921 to April 1922, but he failed to conquer Berlin: “a young man of twenty-four years old, dry, skinny, with a pale, ironic face, prickly eyes, with short hair, sticking out in different directions dark hair", as Arnolt Bronnen described it, in the capital literary circles received a cool welcome.

With Bronnen, just as he came to conquer the capital, Brecht became friends back in 1920; Aspiring playwrights were brought together, according to Bronnen, by the "complete rejection" of everything that had hitherto been composed, written and printed by others. Unable to interest the Berlin theaters with his own compositions, Brecht tried to stage Bronnen's expressionist drama Parricide in Jung Byhne; however, he failed here too: at one of the rehearsals, he quarreled with the leading actor Heinrich George and was replaced by another director. Even Bronnen's feasible financial support could not save Brecht from physical exhaustion, with which he ended up in the Charité hospital in Berlin in the spring of 1922.

In the early 1920s, in Munich, Brecht also tried to master filmmaking, wrote several scripts, according to one of them, together with the young director Erich Engel and comedian Karl Valentin, he shot a short film in 1923 - “Mysteries of a Barbershop”; but even in this field he did not acquire laurels: the audience saw the film only a few decades later.

In 1954, in preparation for the publication of a collection of plays, Brecht himself did not appreciate his early experiments; however, success came in September 1922, when the Munich Kammerspiele staged Drums in the Night. The authoritative Berlin critic Herbert Iering spoke more than favorably about the performance, and he is credited with the “discovery” of Brecht the playwright. Thanks to Iering, "Drums in the Night" was awarded the Prize. G. Kleist, however, the play did not become a repertory play and did not bring wide fame to the author; in December 1922 it was staged at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and was severely criticized by another influential specialist, Alfred Kerr. But from that time on, Brecht's plays, including "Baal" (the third, most "smoothed" edition), and written in 1921 "In the Thicket of Cities", were staged in different cities of Germany; although performances were often accompanied by scandals and obstructions, even Nazi attacks and throwing rotten eggs. After the premiere of the play "In the thicket of cities" in the Munich Residenztheater in May 1923, the head of the literary department was simply fired.

Nevertheless, in the capital of Bavaria, unlike Berlin, Brecht managed to complete his directorial experiment: in March 1924, he staged The Life of Edward II of England, his own adaptation of K. Marlo's play Edward II, in the Kammerspiele. . This was the first experience of creating an "epic theater", but only Iering understood and appreciated it - having thus exhausted the possibilities of Munich, Brecht in the same year, following his friend Engel, finally moved to Berlin.

In Berlin. 1924-1933

Me-ti said: my deeds are bad. Rumors are spreading everywhere that I have said the most ridiculous things. The trouble is, absolutely between us, most of them I actually said.

B. Brecht

Berlin during these years turned into the theatrical capital of Europe, which only Moscow could compete with; here was his "Stanislavsky" - Max Reinhardt and his "Meyerhold" - Erwin Piscator, who taught the metropolitan audience not to be surprised at anything. In Berlin, Brecht already had a like-minded director - Erich Engel, who worked at the German Reinhardt Theater, another like-minded person followed him to the capital - his school friend Caspar Neher, at that time already a talented theater artist. Here, Brecht was provided in advance with the support of the authoritative critic Herbert Iering, and a sharp condemnation from his counterpart, the no less authoritative Alfred Kerr, an adherent of the Reinhardt theater. For the play "In the thicket of cities", staged by Engel in 1924 in Berlin, Kerr called Brecht "an epigon of epigones, exploiting on modern way trademark of Grabbe and Buchner”; its criticism became more severe as Brecht's position became stronger, and for "epic drama" Kerr did not find a better definition than "idiot's play". However, Brecht did not remain in debt: from the pages of the Berliner Börsen Courier, in which Iering was in charge of the feuilleton department, until 1933 he could preach his theatrical ideas and share thoughts about Kerr.

Brecht found work in the literary section of the Deutsches Theatre, where, however, he rarely appeared; at the University of Berlin he continued his study of philosophy; the poet Klabund introduced him to the metropolitan publishing circles - an agreement with one of the publishing houses for several years provided the subsistence level for the still unrecognized playwright. He was also accepted into the circle of writers, most of whom had only recently settled in Berlin and formed the "Group-1925"; among them were Kurt Tucholsky, Alfred Döblin, Egon Erwin Kisch, Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam. During those early years in Berlin, Brecht did not consider it shameful to write advertising texts for firms in the capital, and for the poem "Singing Machines of the Steyr Firm" he received a car as a gift.

In 1926, Brecht moved from the Reinhardt Theater to the Piskator Theatre, for which he edited plays and staged J. Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik. Piscator's experience opened up to him previously unknown possibilities of the theater; Subsequently, Brecht called the main merit of the director "the turn of the theater to politics", without which his "epic theater" could not have taken place. The innovative stage solutions of Piscator, who found his own means of epicization of the drama, made it possible, according to Brecht, "to cover new topics" that were inaccessible to the naturalistic theater. Here, in the process of turning the biography of the American entrepreneur Daniel Drew into a drama, Brecht discovered that his knowledge of economics was insufficient - he began to study stock speculation, and then K. Marx's Capital. Here he became close to the composers Edmund Meisel and Hans Eisler, and in the actor and singer Ernst Busche he found the ideal performer for his songs and poems in Berlin literary cabarets.

Brecht's plays attracted the attention of the director Alfred Braun, who, beginning in 1927, staged them with mixed success on the Berlin Radio. In the same year, 1927, a collection of poems "Home Sermons" was published; some called it the "new Revelation", others the "psalter of the devil" - one way or another, Brecht became famous. His fame extended beyond Germany when Erich Engel staged The Threepenny Opera with music by Kurt Weill at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in August 1928. It was the first unqualified success, about which the critic could write: "Brecht finally won."

By this time in in general terms formed his theatrical theory; it was obvious to Brecht that the new, "epic" drama needed new theater- a new theory of acting and directing art. The Theater am Schiffbauerdamm became a testing ground, where Engel, with the active participation of the author, staged Brecht's plays and where together, at first not very successfully, they tried to develop a new, "epic" style of performance - with young actors and amateurs from proletarian amateur troupes. In 1931, Brecht made his debut on the capital's stage as a director - he staged his play "Man is Man" at the State Theater, which Engel staged at the Volksbühne three years earlier. The playwright's directing experience was not highly appreciated by experts - Engel's performance turned out to be more successful, and the "epic" style of performance, tested in this production for the first time, was not understood by either critics or the public. Brecht's failure did not discourage him - back in 1927 he also swung at the reform of the musical theater, composing together with Weil a small zong opera "Mahogany", two years later reworked into a full-fledged opera - "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny"; in 1931 Brecht himself staged it at the Berlin Theater am Kurfürstendamm, and this time with great success.

On the left flank

From 1926 Brecht intensively studied the classics of Marxism; he later wrote that Marx would have been the best viewer for his plays: “…A man with such interests should have been interested in precisely these plays, not because of my mind, but because of his own; they were illustrative material for him." In the late 1920s, Brecht became close to the communists, to which he, like many in Germany, was prompted by the rise of the National Socialists. In the field of philosophy, one of the mentors was Karl Korsch, with his rather peculiar interpretation of Marxism, which was later reflected in Brecht's philosophical work “Me-ti. Book of Changes. Korsch himself was expelled from the KPD in 1926 as an “ultra-leftist”, where in the second half of the 1920s one purge followed another, and Brecht never joined the party; but during this period, together with Eisler, he wrote the "Song of Solidarity" and a number of other songs that Ernst Busch performed with success - in the early 30s they dispersed on gramophone records throughout Europe.

In the same period, he staged, quite freely, the novel by A. M. Gorky "Mother", bringing events up to 1917 in his play, and although Russian names and city names were preserved in it, many problems were relevant specifically for Germany at that time. He wrote didactic plays in which he sought to teach the German proletarians the "right conduct" in the class struggle. The same theme was also devoted to the script written by Brecht in 1931 together with Ernst Otwalt for Zlatan Dudov's film Kule Vampe, or Who Owns the World?.

In the early 1930s, in the poem "When Fascism Gained Strength", Brecht called on the Social Democrats to create a "red united front" with the Communists, but the differences between the parties turned out to be stronger than his calls.

Emigration. 1933-1948

Wandering years

…Remember
talking about our weaknesses,
and those dark times
which you have avoided.
After all, we walked, changing countries
more than shoes...
and despair choked us,
when we only saw
injustice
and saw no outrage.
But at the same time, we knew:
hatred of meanness
also distorts features.

- B. Brecht, "To descendants"

Back in August 1932, the NSDAP organ "Völkischer Beobachter" published a book index in which Brecht found his last name among "Germans with a tarnished reputation", and on January 30, 1933, when Hindenburg appointed Hitler Reich Chancellor, and columns of supporters of the new head of government organized a triumphal procession through the Brandenburg Gate, Brecht realized it was time to leave the country. He left Germany on February 28, the day after the Reichstag fire, still fully convinced that it would not be for long.

With his wife, actress Helena Weigel, and children, Brecht arrived in Vienna, where Weigel's relatives lived and where the poet Karl Kraus greeted him with the phrase: "Rats run into a sinking ship." From Vienna, he very soon moved to Zurich, where a colony of German emigrants had already formed, but even there he felt uncomfortable; later, Brecht put the words into the mouth of one of the characters in Refugee Conversations: "Switzerland is a country famous for being free, but for this you have to be a tourist." In Germany, meanwhile, fascisization was carried out at an accelerated pace; On May 10, 1933, an "educational campaign of German students against the anti-German spirit" took place, culminating in the first public burning of books. Together with the works of K. Marx and K. Kautsky, G. Mann and E. M. Remarque, everything that Brecht managed to publish in his homeland flew into the fire.

Already in the summer of 1933, at the invitation of the writer Karin Makaelis, Brecht and his family moved to Denmark; a fishing hut in the village of Skovsbostrand, near Svendborg, became his new home, an abandoned barn next to it had to be converted into an office. In this barn, where Chinese theatrical masks hung on the walls, and Lenin’s words were inscribed on the ceiling: “Truth is concrete,” Brecht, in addition to many articles and open letters on current events in Germany, wrote The Threepenny Romance and a number of plays, one way or another responding to events in the world, including "Fear and Despair in the Third Empire" and "The Rifles of Teresa Carrar" - about civil war in Spain. Here "The Life of Galileo" was written and "Mother Courage" was begun; here, divorced from theatrical practice, Brecht seriously engaged in the development of the theory of the "epic theater", which in the second half of the 20s acquired the features of a political theater and now seemed to him more relevant than ever before.

In the mid-1930s, local National Socialists strengthened in Denmark, constant pressure was also exerted on the Danish embassy in Berlin, and if the staging of the play “Roundheads and Sharpheads” in Copenhagen, with a quite frank parody of Hitler, could not be banned, then the ballet “ The Seven Deadly Sins, written by Weil to Brecht's libretto, was withdrawn from the repertoire in 1936 after King Christian X expressed his indignation. The country became less and less hospitable, it became increasingly difficult to renew a residence permit, and in April left Denmark with his family.

Since the end of 1938, Brecht has been seeking an American visa and in anticipation of her settled in Stockholm, formally - at the invitation of the Swedish Association of Amateur Theaters. His social circle consisted mainly of German emigrants, including Willy Brandt, who represented the Socialist Workers' Party; in Sweden, as before in Denmark, Brecht witnessed the extradition of anti-fascists to the German authorities; he himself was under constant surveillance by the secret security service. The anti-war "Mother Courage", conceived back in Denmark as a warning, was completed in Stockholm only in the autumn of 1939, when the Second World War was already going on: “Writers,” Brecht said, “cannot write as quickly as governments unleash wars: after all, in order to compose, one must think.”

The German attack on Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940 and the refusal to renew the residence permit in Sweden forced Brecht to seek a new refuge, and already on April 17, without receiving an American visa, at the invitation of the famous Finnish writer Hella Vuolijoki, he left for Finland .

"Life of Galileo" and "Book of Changes"

In the second half of the 1930s Brecht was concerned not only with events in Germany. The Executive Committee of the Comintern, and after it the KKE, proclaimed the Soviet Union the decisive historical force in opposing fascism - in the spring of 1935, Brecht spent more than a month in the USSR and, although he did not find any use for himself or Helena Weigel and did not share the theses about "socialist realism" , adopted by the I Congress of Soviet Writers, in general, he was satisfied with what he was shown.

However, already in 1936, German emigrants whom Brecht knew well began to disappear in the USSR, including Bernhard Reich, the former chief director of the Munich Kammerspiele, the actress Carola Neher, who played Polly Pichem in The Threepenny Opera on stage and on screen, and Ernst Otwalt, with whom he wrote the script for "Kule Wampe"; Erwin Piscator, who lived in Moscow from 1931 and headed international association revolutionary theaters, even earlier considered it good to leave the Land of Soviets. The infamous Moscow open trials splintered the hard-won "united front": the Social Democrats called for the isolation of the communist parties.

The perpetrator keeps ready the evidence of his innocence.
The innocent often have no evidence.
But is it really best to remain silent in such a situation?
What if he's innocent?

B. Brecht

Brecht during these years strongly opposed the isolation of the communists: "... What is important," he wrote, "is only a tireless, weighty, carried out by all means and on the broadest basis struggle against fascism." He captured his doubts in the philosophical work “Me-ti. Book of Changes”, which he wrote both before and after the Second World War, but never finished. In this essay, written as if on behalf of the ancient Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu, Brecht shared his thoughts on Marxism and the theory of revolution and tried to understand what was happening in the USSR; in "Me-ti" with impartial assessments of Stalin's activity, arguments in his defense borrowed from the Soviet and other Comintern press coexisted.

In 1937, Sergei Tretyakov, a friend of Brecht and one of the first translators of his writings into Russian, was shot in Moscow. Brecht found out about this in 1938 - the fate of one well-known person made him think about many other people who were shot; he called a poem dedicated to the memory of Tretyakov “Is the people infallible?”: Knowing nothing about the “troikas” of the NKVD, Brecht believed that sentences in the USSR were passed by “courts of the people”. Each stanza of the poem ended with the question: "What if he is innocent?"

In this context, The Life of Galileo was born - one of Brecht's best plays. In a note accompanying the first German edition, in 1955, Brecht pointed out that the play was written at a time when newspapers "published a report on the fission of the uranium atom produced by German physicists" - thus, as Ilya Fradkin noted, hinting at the connection the idea of ​​the play with the problems of atomic physics. However, there is no evidence that Brecht foresaw the creation of an atomic bomb in the late 1930s; Having learned from Danish physicists about the splitting of the uranium atom carried out in Berlin, Brecht in the first (“Danish”) edition of the Life of Galileo gave this discovery a positive interpretation. The conflict of the play had nothing to do with the problem of the creators of the atomic bomb, but clearly echoed the Moscow open trials, about which Brecht wrote at that time in Meti: “... If they demand from me that I (without proof) believe into something provable, it is like asking me to believe in something that cannot be proven. I won’t do it… With an unsubstantiated process, he harmed the people.”

By the same time, Brecht’s theses “Prerequisites for the successful leadership of the movement for the social transformation of society” date back, the first paragraph of which called for “the abolition and overcoming of leaderism within the party”, and the sixth paragraph - for the “liquidation of all demagoguery, all scholasticism, all esotericism, intrigue, arrogance that does not correspond to the real state of things swagger”; it also contained a completely naive call to abandon the "requirement of blind" faith "in the name of convincing evidence." The theses were not in demand, but Brecht's own belief in the mission of the USSR forced him to justify Stalin's entire foreign policy in one way or another.

In the United States

Finland was not the safest place to be: Risto Ryti, the prime minister at the time, was in secret negotiations with Germany; and yet, at the request of Vuolijoki, he granted Brecht a residence permit - only because he had once enjoyed the Threepenny Opera. Here Brecht managed to write a play-pamphlet "The Career of Arturo Ui" - about the ascent of Hitler and his party to the heights of power. In May 1941, amid the overt deployment of German troops and clear preparations for war, he finally received an American visa; but it turned out to be impossible to sail to the USA from the northern port of Finland: the port was already controlled by the Germans. I had to go to the Far East - through Moscow, where Brecht, with the help of surviving German emigrants, unsuccessfully tried to find out the fate of his disappeared friends.

In July, he arrived in Los Angeles and settled in Hollywood, where by that time, according to the actor Alexander Granach, "the whole of Berlin" had already ended up. But, unlike Thomas Mann, E. M. Remarque, E. Ludwig or B. Frank, Brecht was little known to the American public - his name was well known only to the FBI, which, as it turned out later, collected more than 1000 pages of “inquiry” about him ”, - and had to earn a living mainly by plot projects of screenplays. Feeling in Hollywood as if he had been “torn out of his age” or moved to Tahiti, Brecht could not write what was in demand on the American stage or in cinema, for a long time he could not work fully at all, and in 1942 he wrote his long-term to an employee: “What we need is a person who would lend me several thousand dollars for two years, with a return from my post-war fees ...” The plays “Dreams of Simone Machar” written in 1943 and “Schweik in World War II » could not be delivered to the USA; but an old friend Lion Feuchtwanger, attracted by Brecht to work on Simone Machard, wrote a novel based on the play and gave Brecht 20 thousand dollars from the fee received, which was enough for several years of comfortable existence.

Already after the end of World War II, Brecht created a new ("American") version of the "Life of Galileo"; staged in July 1947 in Los Angeles, at the small Coronet Theatre, with Charles Lawton in the title role, the play was very coolly received by the Los Angeles "film colony" - according to Charles Chaplin, with whom Brecht became close in Hollywood, the play , staged in the style of "epic theater", seemed too little theatrical.

Return to Germany

Even the flood
Didn't last forever.
once ran out
Black abysses.
But only a few
It's been lived through.

At the end of the war, Brecht, like many emigrants, was in no hurry to return to Germany. According to the memoirs of Schumacher, Ernst Busch, when asked where Brecht was, answered: “He must finally understand that his home is here!” - at the same time, Bush himself told his friends about how difficult it is for an anti-fascist to live among people for whom Hitler is only to blame for losing the war.

Brecht's return to Europe was accelerated in 1947 by the Un-American Activities Commission, which took an interest in him as a "communist". When an airplane delivered him to the capital of France in early November, many major cities were still in ruins, Paris appeared to him as a “shabby, impoverished, solid black market” - in Central Europe, Switzerland, where Brecht was heading, turned out to be the only country that the war did not devastated; son Stefan, who served in the American army in 1944-1945, chose to stay in the United States.

“A stateless person, always with only a temporary residence permit, always ready to move on, a wanderer of our time ... a poet who does not burn incense,” as Max Frisch described him, Brecht settled in Zurich, where, during the war years, German and Austrian emigrants staged his plays. With these like-minded people and with a long-time colleague Kaspar Neher, he created his own theater - first in the city's "Schaushpilhaus", where he failed with the processing of "Antigone" by Sophocles, and a few months later he knew the first success after returning to Europe with the production of "Mr. Puntila", performance, which has become a theatrical event with international resonance.

As early as the end of 1946, Herbert Jhering from Berlin urged Brecht to "use the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm for a certain cause." When Brecht and Weigel, with a group of émigré actors, arrived in the eastern sector of Berlin in October 1948, the theater, which had been inhabited back in the late 1920s, turned out to be busy - the Berliner Ensemble, which soon gained worldwide fame, had to be created on the small stage of the German theater. Brecht arrived in Berlin when F. Erpenbeck, editor-in-chief of the Theater der Zeit magazine, hailed the production of his play Fear and Despair in the Third Empire at the Deutsches Theater as a stage overcoming of the "false theory of the epic theatre". But the very first performance staged by the new team - "Mother Courage and Her Children", with Elena Vaigel in the title role - entered the "golden fund" of the world theatrical art. Although he caused a discussion in East Berlin: Erpenbeck even now predicted an unenviable fate for the "epic theater" - in the end it would get lost in "decadence alien to the people."

Later, in Tales of Herr Coyne, Brecht explained why he chose the eastern sector of the capital: “In city A ... they love me, but in city B they treated me friendly. City A is ready to help me, but city B needed me. In city A they invited me to the table, and in city B they invited me to the kitchen.”

There was no shortage of official honors: in 1950 Brecht became a full member, and in 1954 - vice-president of the Academy of Arts of the GDR, in 1951 he was awarded the National Prize of the first degree, since 1953 he headed the German PEN club "East and West ”, - meanwhile, relations with the leadership of the GDR were not easy.

Relations with the leadership of the GDR

After settling in East Germany, Brecht was in no hurry to join the SED; in 1950, the Stalinization of the GDR began, which complicated its relationship with the party leadership. At first, problems arose with his favorite actor Ernst Busch, who moved to East Berlin from the American sector in 1951: during the party purge of those who had been in Western emigration, some were expelled from the SED, including some of Brecht's friends, others were subjected to additional test - Bush, in not the most refined terms, refused to pass the test, considering it humiliating, and was also expelled. In the summer of the same year, Brecht, together with Paul Dessau, composed the cantata Hernburg Report, timed to coincide with the opening of III world festival youth and students; two weeks before the scheduled premiere, E. Honecker (who at that time was in charge of youth affairs at the Central Committee of the SED) urged Brecht by telegram to remove Bush's name from the song included in the cantata - "so as not to popularize it beyond measure." Brecht's argument surprised, but Honecker did not consider it necessary to explain to him the reasons for dissatisfaction with Bush; instead, an even stranger, from Brecht's point of view, argument was put forward: the youth have no idea about Bush. Brecht objected: if this is indeed the case, which he personally doubted, then Bush, by his entire biography, deserved to be known about him. Faced with the need to choose between loyalty to the leadership of the SED and elementary decency towards an old friend: in the current situation, deleting Bush's name could no longer cause moral damage to the actor - Brecht turned to another high-ranking functionary for help; and they helped him: without his knowledge, the song was removed entirely from the performance.

In the same year, a discussion about "formalism" unfolded in the GDR, which, along with the main composers of the Berliner Ensemble theater - Hans Eisler and Paul Dessau - touched Brecht himself. At the plenum of the Central Committee of the SED, which was specially dedicated to the fight against formalism, to the surprise of many, the production of Brecht's play "Mother" was presented as an example of this pernicious tendency; at the same time, they especially did not like its didactic nature - did the party leadership fear that East German dissidents would learn from the play, but many scenes of the play were declared "historically false and politically harmful."

In the future, Brecht was subjected to study for "pacifism", "national nihilism", "belittling the classical heritage" and for "humor alien to the people." The planting of the primitively interpreted, in the spirit of the then Moscow Art Theater, “system” of K. S. Stanislavsky, which began in the GDR in the spring of 1953, turned for Brecht into another accusation of “formalism”, and at the same time of “cosmopolitanism”. If the first performance of the Berliner Ensemble, Mother Courage and Her Children, was immediately awarded the National Prize of the GDR, then further performances increasingly aroused suspicion. Repertory problems also arose: the leadership of the SED believed that the Nazi past should be forgotten, attention was instructed to concentrate on the positive qualities of the German people, and primarily on the great German culture - therefore, not only anti-fascist plays turned out to be undesirable ("Arturo Ui's Career" appeared in the repertoire "Berliner Ensemble" only in 1959, after Brecht's student Peter Palich staged it in West Germany), but also "The Governor" by J. Lenz and G. Eisler's opera "Johann Faust", the text of which also seemed insufficiently patriotic. The references of Brecht's theater to the classics - "The Broken Jug" by G. Kleist and "Prafaust" by J. W. Goethe - were regarded as "denial of the national cultural heritage."

Tonight in a dream
I saw a strong storm.
She shook the buildings
Iron collapsed beams,
Removed the iron roof.
But everything that was made of wood
Bent and survived.

B. Brecht

As a member of the Academy of Arts, Brecht repeatedly had to defend artists, including Ernst Barlach, from the attacks of the newspaper Neues Deutschland (an organ of the Central Committee of the SED), which, in his words, "the few remaining artists were plunged into lethargy." In 1951, he wrote in his work journal that literature was once again forced to do "without a direct national response", since this response reaches writers "with disgusting extraneous noises." In the summer of 1953, Brecht urged Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl to dissolve the Commission for the Arts and thus put an end to "its dictatorship, poorly reasoned prescriptions, administrative measures alien to art, vulgar Marxist language that disgusts artists"; he developed this theme in a number of articles and satirical poems, but was heard only in West Germany and by the public, which, with their approval, could only do him a disservice.

At the same time, while reproducing the ideological campaigns carried out in the USSR at various times, the leadership of the SED refrained from Soviet "organizational conclusions"; swept through Eastern Europe a wave of political litigation- against R. Slansky in Czechoslovakia, against L. Reik in Hungary and other imitations of the Moscow trials of the 30s - bypassed the GDR, and it was obvious that East Germany did not get the worst leadership.

June events of 1953

On June 16, 1953, strikes began at individual enterprises in Berlin, directly related to the increase in production rates and the rise in prices for consumer goods; During spontaneous demonstrations in different parts of Berlin, political demands were put forward, including the resignation of the government, the dissolution of the People's Police and the reunification of Germany. By the morning of June 17, the strike turned into a citywide strike, thousands of excited columns of demonstrators rushed to the government quarter - in this situation, the non-party Brecht considered it his duty to support the leadership of the SED. He wrote letters to Walter Ulbricht and Otto Grotewohl, which, however, in addition to expressing solidarity, also contained an appeal to enter into a dialogue with the strikers - to respond properly to the legitimate discontent of the workers. But his assistant Manfred Wekwert could not break into the building of the Central Committee of the SED, already besieged by the demonstrators. Outraged that the radio broadcasts operetta melodies, Brecht sent his assistants to the radio committee with a request to provide air to the staff of his theater, but was refused. Without waiting for anything from the leadership of the SED, he himself went out to the demonstrators, but from conversations with them he got the impression that the discontent of the workers was trying to take advantage of the forces that he described as “fascist”, attacking the SED “not because of its mistakes, but because of its merits,” Brecht spoke about this on June 17 and 24 at a general meeting of the Berliner Ensemble collective. He understood that in the radical mood of the demonstrators, the lack of freedom of speech avenges itself, but he also spoke of the fact that lessons were not learned from the history of Germany in the 20th century, since this topic itself was banned.

The letter written by Brecht to Ulbricht on June 17 reached the addressee and was even partially published a few days later - only the part in which support was expressed, despite the fact that after the suppression of the uprising, the support itself acquired a different meaning. In West Germany, and especially in Austria, it aroused indignation; an address published on June 23, in which Brecht wrote: “... I hope that ... the workers who have demonstrated their legitimate discontent will not be put on the same level as provocateurs, because from the very beginning this would prevent a much-needed broad exchange of views on mutually committed mistakes," - nothing could change; the theaters that had previously staged his plays announced a boycott of Brecht, and if in West Germany it did not last long (calls for a boycott resumed in 1961, after the construction of the Berlin Wall), then the “Viennese boycott” lasted for 10 years, and in the Burgtheater ended only in 1966.

Last year

Under the conditions of the Cold War, the struggle for the preservation of peace became an important part of not only Brecht's public, but also creative activity, and Picasso's dove of peace adorned the curtain of the theater he created. In December 1954, he was awarded the International Stalin Prize "For Strengthening Peace Among Nations" (two years later renamed the Lenin Prize), on this occasion, in May 1955, Brecht arrived in Moscow. He was taken to theaters, but in those days the Russian theater was just beginning to revive after twenty years of stagnation, and, according to Lev Kopelev, of all that was shown to him, Brecht liked only V. Mayakovsky's Bathhouse in the Theater of Satire. He recalled how in the early 1930s, when he first went to Moscow, his Berlin friends said: “You are going to the theatrical Mecca,” the past twenty years had thrown the Soviet theater back half a century. He was in a hurry to please: in Moscow, after a 20-year break, a one-volume collection of his selected plays is being prepared for publication - Brecht, who wrote back in 1936 that "epic theater", in addition to a certain technical level, implies "an interest in a free discussion of vital questions”, noted not without sarcasm that his plays for the Soviet theater were outdated, such “radical hobbies” in the USSR were ill in the 20s.

When delusions are exhausted,
Emptiness looks into our eyes -
Our last interlocutor.

B. Brecht

In Moscow, Brecht met with Bernhard Reich, who had survived the Stalinist camps, and again unsuccessfully tried to find out the fate of the rest of his friends. Back in 1951, he reworked Shakespeare's Coriolanus for staging in his theater, in which he significantly shifted the emphasis: “The tragedy of an individual,” wrote Brecht, “interests us, of course, to a much lesser extent than the tragedy of society caused by an individual” . If Shakespeare's Coriolanus is driven by wounded pride, Brecht added to it the hero's belief in his own indispensability; in Coriolanus he looked for specific means of counteracting "leadership" and found them in the "self-defense of society": while in Shakespeare the people are changeable, the aristocracy is cowardly and even the tribunes of the people do not shine with courage, in Brecht the people rushing from one extreme to another , in the end, under the leadership of the tribunes, creates something reminiscent of the "popular front" of the 30s, on the basis of which a kind of people's power is formed.

However, in the same year, work on Coriolanus was interrupted: the “cult of personality” borrowed from the experience of the USSR flourished in the early 50s in many countries of Eastern Europe, and what gave the play relevance, at the same time made it impossible to stage it. In 1955, it seemed as if the time had come for Coriolanus, and Brecht returned to this work; but in February 1956, the 20th Congress of the CPSU was held - the resolution of the Central Committee "On overcoming the cult of personality and its consequences" published in June dispelled his last illusions; Coriolanus was staged only eight years after his death.

From the beginning of 1955, Brecht worked with an old colleague, Erich Engel, on a production of The Life of Galileo at the Berliner Ensemble and wrote a play that, unlike The Life of Galileo, was really dedicated to the creators of the atomic bomb and was called The Life of Einstein. “Two powers are fighting…” Brecht wrote about the central conflict of the play. - X gives one of these powers a great formula, so that with its help he himself can be protected. He does not notice that the facial features of both powers are similar. A power favorable to him defeats and overthrows the other, and a terrible thing happens: she herself turns into another ... ”The illness hampered his work both in the theater and at the desk: Brecht returned from Moscow completely exhausted and could only start rehearsals at the end of December, and in April he was forced to interrupt them due to illness - Engel had to finish the performance alone. The Life of Einstein remained in outline; written in 1954 "Turandot" turned out to be last play Brecht.

Illness and death

A general decline in strength was evident already in the spring of 1955: Brecht aged dramatically, at 57 he walked with a cane; in May, going to Moscow, he made a will, in which he asked that the coffin with his body should not be publicly exhibited anywhere and that farewell words should not be said over the grave.

In the spring of 1956, while working on a production of The Life of Galileo at his theater, Brecht suffered a myocardial infarction; since the heart attack was painless, Brecht did not notice it and continued to work. He attributed his growing weakness to fatigue, and at the end of April he went on vacation to Buccow. However, the state of health did not improve. On August 10, Brecht arrived in Berlin for the rehearsals of the play "Caucasian Chalk Circle" for the upcoming tour in London; from the evening of the 13th, his condition began to deteriorate.

The next day, a doctor invited by relatives diagnosed a massive heart attack, but the ambulance from the government clinic arrived too late. On August 14, 1956, five minutes before midnight, Bertolt Brecht died at the age of 59.

Early in the morning of August 17, Brecht was buried, according to his will, in the small Dorotheenstadt cemetery not far from the house where he lived. In addition to family members, only the closest friends and the staff of the Berliner Ensemble Theater participated in the funeral ceremony. As the playwright wanted, no speeches were made over his grave. Only a few hours later the official wreath-laying ceremony took place.

The next day, August 18, a funeral meeting was organized in the building of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, where the Berliner Ensemble had been located since 1954; Ulbricht read out the official statement of the President of the GDR, W. Pieck, in connection with the death of Brecht, adding on his own behalf that the leadership of the GDR provided Brecht with the leadership of the theater "for the implementation of all his creative plans", he received in East Germany "every opportunity to speak with the working people." Literary scholar Hans Mayer, who knew the value of his words well, noted only three sincere moments at this “absurd celebration”: “when Ernst Busch sang their common songs to a dead friend,” and Hans Eisler, hidden backstage, accompanied him on the piano.

Personal life

In 1922, Brecht married actress and singer Marianne Zoff, in this marriage in 1923 he had a daughter, Hannah, who became an actress (known as Hannah Hiob) and played many of his heroines on stage; passed away June 24, 2009. Zoff was five years older than Brecht, kind-hearted and caring, and to a certain extent, Schumacher writes, replaced his mother. Nevertheless, this marriage turned out to be fragile: in 1923, Brecht met the young actress Helena Weigel in Berlin, who gave birth to his son Stefan (1924-2009). In 1927, Brecht divorced Zoff and in April 1929 formalized his relationship with Weigel; in 1930 they had a daughter, Barbara, who also became an actress (known as Barbara Brecht-Schall).

In addition to legitimate children, Brecht had an illegitimate son from his youthful love - Paula Bahnholzer; born in 1919 and named after Wedekind by Frank, Brecht's eldest son stayed with his mother in Germany and died in 1943 on the Eastern Front.

Creation

Brecht the poet

According to Brecht himself, he began "traditionally": with ballads, psalms, sonnets, epigrams and songs with a guitar, the texts of which were born simultaneously with the music. “In German poetry,” Ilya Fradkin wrote, “he entered as a modern vagant, composing songs and ballads somewhere at a street intersection ...” Like vagants, Brecht often resorted to parody techniques, choosing the same objects for parody - psalms and chorales (collection "Home Sermons", 1926), textbook poems, but also petty-bourgeois romances from the repertoire of organ grinders and street singers. Later, when all Brecht's talents were focused on the theater, the zongs in his plays were born in the same way along with music, only in 1927, when staging the play "Man is Man" in the Berlin "Volksbühne", he entrusted his texts to a professional composer for the first time - Edmund Meisel, who was collaborating with Piscator at the time. In The Threepenny Opera, zongs were born along with the music of Kurt Weill (and this prompted Brecht to indicate when publishing the play that it was written “in collaboration” with Weill), and many of them could not exist outside this music.

At the same time, Brecht remained a poet until his last years - not only the author of lyrics and zongs; but over the years he increasingly preferred free forms: the “torn” rhythm, as he himself explained, was “a protest against the smoothness and harmony of ordinary verse” - that harmony that he did not find either in the world around him or in his own soul. In the plays, since some of them were written mainly in verse, this "torn" rhythm was also dictated by the desire to more accurately convey the relationship between people - "as contradictory relationships, full of struggle." In the poems of the young Brecht, in addition to Frank Wedekind, the influence of Francois Villon, Arthur Rimbaud and Rudyard Kipling is noticeable; later he became interested in Chinese philosophy, and many of his poems, especially in recent years, and above all "Bukovsky Elegies", in form - in terms of conciseness and capacity, partly contemplative - resemble the classics of ancient Chinese poetry: Li Bo, Du Fu and Bo Juyi, which he translated.

From the late 1920s, Brecht wrote songs designed to raise the fight, like "Song of the United Front" and "All or Nobody", or satirical, like a parody of the Nazi "Horst Wessel", in Russian translation - "Sheep March". At the same time, writes I. Fradkin, he remained original even in such topics that seemed to have long turned into a cemetery of truisms. As one of the critics noted, Brecht was already such a playwright in these years that many of his poems, written in the first person, are more like statements of stage characters.

In post-war Germany, Brecht put all his work, including poetry, at the service of the construction of the "new world", believing, unlike the leadership of the SED, that this construction can be served not only with approval, but also with criticism. He returned to the lyrics in 1953, in his last closed cycle of poems - "Bukovsky Elegies": Brecht's country house was located in Bukovo on Schermützelsee. Allegory, which Brecht often resorted to in his mature dramaturgy, was increasingly encountered in his later lyrics; Written on the model of Virgil's "Bukolik", "Bukovsky Elegies" reflected, as E. Schumacher writes, the feelings of a person "standing on the verge of old age and fully aware that there is very little time left for him on earth." With bright memories of youth, here are not just elegiac, but stunningly gloomy, according to the critic, poems - to the extent that their poetic meaning is deeper and richer than the literal meaning.

Brecht the playwright

House of Brecht and Weigel in Bukovo, now - Bertolt-Brecht-Straße, 29/30

Brecht's early plays were born out of protest; "Baal" in the original edition, 1918, was a protest against everything that is dear to the respectable bourgeois: the asocial hero of the play (according to Brecht - asocial in an "asocial society"), the poet Vaal, was a declaration of love for Francois Villon, "a murderer, a robber from the main road, the writer of ballads, ”and, moreover, obscene ballads - everything here was designed to shock. Later, "Baal" was transformed into an anti-expressionist play, a "counter-play", polemically directed, in particular, against the idealized portrait of the playwright Christian Grabbe in G. Jost's "Lonesome". The play Drums in the Night was also polemical in relation to the well-known thesis of the expressionists “the man is good”, which developed the same theme already in the “concrete historical situation” of the November Revolution.

In his next plays, Brecht also argued with the naturalistic repertoire German theaters. By the mid-20s, he formulated the theory of "epic" ("non-Aristotelian") drama. “Naturalism,” wrote Brecht, “gave the theater the opportunity to create exceptionally subtle portraits, scrupulously, in every detail to depict social “corners” and individual small events. When it became clear that naturalists overestimated the influence of the immediate, material environment on a person's social behavior ... - then interest in the "interior" disappeared. A broader background took on significance, and it was necessary to be able to show its variability and the contradictory effects of its radiation. At the same time, Brecht called Baal his first epic drama, but the principles of the “epic theater” were developed gradually, its purpose was refined over the years, and the nature of its plays changed accordingly.

Back in 1938, analyzing the reasons for the special popularity of the detective genre, Brecht noted that a person of the 20th century acquires his life experience mainly in the conditions of catastrophes, while he himself is forced to find out the causes of crises, depressions, wars and revolutions: “Already when reading newspapers ( but also bills, notices of dismissal, mobilization summonses, and so on), we feel that someone has done something ... What and who did? Behind the events we are told about, we assume other events that we are not told about. They are the real events." Developing this idea in the mid-1950s, Friedrich Dürrenmatt came to the conclusion that the theater was no longer able to reflect the modern world: the state is anonymous, bureaucratic, sensually incomprehensible; under these conditions, only victims are accessible to art, it can no longer comprehend those in power; "The modern world is easier to recreate through a small speculator, clerk or policeman than through the Bundesrat or through the Bundeschancellor."

Brecht was looking for ways to present "genuine events" on the stage, although he did not claim to have found them; he saw, in any case, only one opportunity to help modern man: show what the world we change, and to the best of our ability to study its laws. From the mid-1930s, beginning with Roundheads and Sharpheads, he increasingly turned to the genre of parabola, and in recent years, working on the play Turandot, or the Congress of Whitewashers, he said that the allegorical form is still the most suitable for "alienation" of social problems. I. Fradkin also explained Brecht's tendency to transfer the action of his plays to India, China, medieval Georgia, etc. by the fact that exotic costume plots more easily enter the form of a parabola. “In this exotic setting,” the critic wrote, “ philosophical idea a play, freed from the shackles of a familiar and familiar life, more easily achieves universal significance. Brecht himself saw the advantage of the parabola, with its well-known limitations, also in the fact that it is “much more ingenious than all other forms”: the parabola is concrete in abstraction, making the essence visual, and, like no other form, “it can elegantly present the truth”

Brecht - theorist and director

It was difficult to judge from the outside what Brecht was like as a director, since the outstanding performances of the Berliner Ensemble were always the fruit of a collective labor: in addition to the fact that Brecht often worked in tandem with the much more experienced Engel, he also had thinking actors, often with directorial inclinations, which he himself knew how to awaken and encourage; His talented students Benno Besson, Peter Palich and Manfred Wekwert contributed to the creation of performances as assistants - such collective work on the performance was one of the fundamental principles of his theater.

At the same time, according to Wekwert, it was not easy to work with Brecht - because of his constant doubts: “On the one hand, we had to accurately record everything that was said and developed (...), but the next day we had to hear:“ I never didn't say, you spelled it wrong." The source of these doubts, according to Wewkvert, in addition to Brecht's spontaneous dislike for all kinds of "final decisions", was the contradiction inherent in his theory: Brecht professed an "honest" theater that did not create the illusion of authenticity, did not try to influence the subconscious of the viewer bypassing it. reason, deliberately revealing its techniques and avoiding the identification of the actor with the character; meanwhile, theater by its very nature is nothing but the "art of deception", the art of depicting what is not really there. “The magic of the theatre,” writes M. Wekwert, lies in the fact that people, having come to the theater, are ready in advance to indulge in illusions and take at face value everything they are shown. Brecht, both in theory and in practice, tried by all means to counteract this; often he chose performers depending on their human inclinations and biographies, as if he did not believe that his actors, experienced masters or bright young talents, could portray on stage what was not characteristic of them in life. He did not want his actors to play the act - "the art of deception", including acting acting, in Brecht's mind was associated with those performances into which the National Socialists turned their political actions.

But the "magic of the theater", which he drove through the door, kept bursting in through the window: even the exemplary Brechtian actor Ernst Busch, after the hundredth performance of "The Life of Galileo", according to Wekwert, "already felt not only a great actor, but also a great physicist ". The director tells how once employees of the Institute for Nuclear Research came to the "Life of Galileo" and after the performance expressed a desire to talk with the leading actor. They wanted to know how an actor works, but Bush preferred to talk to them about physics; he spoke with all passion and persuasiveness for about half an hour - the scientists listened as if spellbound and at the end of the speech burst into applause. The next day, Wekvert received a phone call from the director of the institute: “Something incomprehensible has happened. … I just realized this morning that it was sheer nonsense.”

Did Bush, despite all Brecht's insistence, identify himself with the character, or was he simply explaining to physicists what the art of the actor was, but, as Wekwert testifies, Brecht was well aware of the indestructibility of the "magic of the theater" and in his directing practice tried to make it serve their goals - to turn into a "cunning of the mind" ( List der Vernunft).

The "cunning of the mind" for Brecht was "naivety", borrowed from folk, including Asian, art. It was the readiness of the spectator in the theater to indulge in illusions - to accept the proposed rules of the game - that allowed Brecht to strive for maximum simplicity both in the design of the performance and in acting: to designate the scene, the era, the character of the character with sparing but expressive details, to achieve "reincarnation" sometimes with the help of ordinary masks - cutting off everything that can divert attention from the main thing. Thus, in Brecht's production of The Life of Galileo, Pavel Markov noted: “Director knows unmistakably at what point in the action the viewer's special attention should be directed. She does not allow a single extra accessory on stage. Precise and very simple decoration<…>only a few spare details of the situation convey the atmosphere of the era. The mise-en-scenes are constructed in the same expedient, sparingly, but faithfully way” – this “naive” laconicism ultimately helped Brecht to focus the audience’s attention not on the development of the plot, but, above all, on the development of the author’s thought.

Director's work

• 1924 - "The Life of Edward II of England" by B. Brecht and L. Feuchtwanger (arrangement of the play by K. Marlo "Edward II"). Artist Kaspar Neher - Kammerspiele, Munich; premiered March 18
• 1931 - "Man is a man" B. Brecht. Artist Caspar Neher; composer Kurt Weill State Theater, Berlin
• 1931 - "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny", an opera by K. Weil to a libretto by B. Becht. Artist Kaspar Neher - Theater am Kurfürstendamm, Berlin
• 1937 - “The Rifles of Teresa Carrar” by B. Brecht (co-director Zlatan Dudov) - Salle Adyar, Paris
• 1938 - "99%" (selected scenes from the play "Fear and Despair in the Third Empire" by B. Brecht). Artist Heinz Lomar; composer Paul Dessau (co-producer Z. Dudov) - Sall d'Yena, Paris
• 1947 - "The Life of Galileo" by B. Brecht ("American" edition). Illustrator Robert Davison (co-director Joseph Losey) - Coronet Theatre, Los Angeles
• 1948 - "Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti" by B. Brecht. Theo Otto (co-director Kurt Hirschfeld) - Schauspielhaus, Zurich
• 1950 - "Mother Courage and her children" by B. Brecht. Artist Theo Otto - "Kammerspiele", Munich

"Berliner Ensemble"

• 1949 - "Mother Courage and her children" by B. Brecht. Artists Theo Otto and Caspar Neher, composer Paul Dessau (co-directed by Erich Engel)
• 1949 - "Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti" by B. Brecht. Artist Caspar Neher; composer Paul Dessau (co-producer Erich Engel)
• 1950 - "Governor" by J. Lenz, processed by B. Brecht. Artists Kaspar Neher and Heiner Hill (co-directed by E. Monk, K. Neher and B. Besson)
• 1951 - "Mother" B. Brecht. Artist Caspar Neher; composer Hans Eisler
• 1952 - "Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti" by B. Brecht. Composer Paul Dessau (co-directed by Egon Monck)
• 1953 - "Katzgraben" by E. Strittmatter. Artist Carl von Appen
• 1954 - "Caucasian chalk circle" B. Brecht. Artist Carl von Appen; composer Paul Dessau; director M. Wekvert
• 1955 - "Winter Battle" by J. R. Becher. Artist Carl von Appen; composer Hans Eisler (co-producer M. Wekvert)
• 1956 - "The Life of Galileo" by B. Brecht ("Berlin" edition). Artist Kaspar Neher, composer Hans Eisler (co-director Erich Engel).

Heritage

Brecht is best known for his plays. In the early 60s, the West German literary critic Marianne Kesting, in her book Panorama of the Modern Theatre, presenting 50 playwrights of the 20th century, noted that the majority of those living today are “sick with Brecht” (“brechtkrank”), finding a simple explanation for this: his “completed in the very itself ”a concept that united philosophy, drama and acting technique, drama theory and theater theory, no one could oppose another concept,“ just as significant and internally integral ”. Researchers find Brecht's influence in the works of artists as diverse as Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Arthur Adamov, Max Frisch and Heiner Müller.

Brecht wrote his plays "on the topic of the day" and dreamed of the time when the world around him would change so much that everything he wrote would be irrelevant. The world was changing, but not so much - interest in Brecht's work either weakened, as it was in the 80s and 90s, then revived again. It was also revived in Russia: Brecht's dreams of a "new world" lost their relevance - his view of the "old world" turned out to be unexpectedly relevant.

The name of B. Brecht is the Political Theater (Cuba).

Compositions

Most famous plays

• 1918 - "Baal" (German: Baal)
• 1920 - "Drums in the Night" (German Trommeln in der Nacht)
• 1926 - "A man is a man" (German: Mann ist Mann)
• 1928 - The Threepenny Opera (German: Die Dreigroschenoper)
• 1931 - "Saint Joan of the slaughterhouse" (German: Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe)
• 1931 - "Mother" (German Die Mutter); based on the novel of the same name by A. M. Gorky
• 1938 - "Fear and Despair in the Third Empire" (German: Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches)
• 1939 - “Mother Courage and her children” (German Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder; final edition - 1941)
• 1939 - "The Life of Galileo" (German: Leben des Galilei, second edition - 1945)
• 1940 - "Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti" (German: Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti)
• 1941 - "Arturo Ui's career, which might not have been" (German: Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui)
• 1941 - "The Good Man from Sichuan" (German: Der gute Mensch von Sezuan)
• 1943 - "Schweik in the Second World War" (German: Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg)
• 1945 - "Caucasian chalk circle" (German: Der kaukasische Kreidekreis)
• 1954 - "Turandot, or the Whitewash Congress" (German: Turandot oder Der Kongreß der Weißwäscher)

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) is one of the largest German theatrical figures, the most talented playwrights of his time, but his plays are still popular and staged in many world theaters. and poet, as well as the creator of the theater "Berliner Ensemble". The work of Bertolt Brecht led him to create a new direction of "political theater". He was from the German city of Augsburg. From his youth he was fond of the theater, but his family insisted that he become a doctor, after the gymnasium he entered the University. Ludwig Maximilian in Munich.

Bertolt Brecht: biography and creativity

However, serious changes occurred after a meeting with the famous German writer Leon Feichwanger. He immediately noticed a remarkable talent in the young man and recommended that he take up close literature. By this time, Brecht had finished his play "Drums of the Night", which was staged by one of the Munich theaters.

By 1924, after graduating from the university, the young Bertolt Brecht went to conquer Berlin. His biography indicates that another amazing meeting awaited him here with the famous director Erwin Piscator. A year later, this tandem creates the Proletarian Theater.

A brief biography of Bertolt Brecht indicates that the playwright himself was not rich, and his own money would never have been enough to order and buy plays from famous playwrights. That is why Brecht decides to write on his own.

But he started with a remake famous plays, and then came the staging of popular literary works for non-professional artists.

Theatrical work

The creative path of Bertolt Brecht began with the play The Threepenny Opera by John Gay, based on his book The Beggar's Opera, which became one of the first such debut experiments staged in 1928.

The plot tells the story of the life of several impoverished vagrants who do not disdain anything and by any means seek their livelihood. The performance almost immediately became popular, since beggars-tramps had not yet been the main characters on the stage.

Then Brecht, together with his partner Piscator, he puts at the Volksbünne Theater the second joint play based on the novel “Mother” by M. Gorky.

Spirit of revolution

In Germany at that time, the Germans were looking for new ways of developing and arranging the state, and therefore there was some kind of fermentation in the minds. And this revolutionary pathos of Berthold very strongly corresponded to the spirit of that mood in society.

This was followed by a new play by Brecht based on the novel by J. Hasek, which tells about the adventures of the good soldier Schweik. She attracted the attention of the audience by the fact that she was literally crammed with humorous everyday situations, and most importantly - with a bright anti-war theme.

The biography indicates that at that time he was married to the famous actress Elena Weigel, and now he moves to Finland with her.

Work in Finland

There he begins to work on the play "Mother Courage and her children." He spied the plot in a German folk book, which described the adventures of a merchant during the period

He could not leave the state of fascist Germany alone, so he gave it a political coloring in the play "Fear and Despair in the Third Empire" and showed in it the true reasons for Hitler's fascist party to power.

War

During World War II, Finland became an ally of Germany, and therefore Brecht again had to emigrate, but this time to America. He puts on his new plays there: "The Life of Galileo" (1941), "The Good Man from Cezuan", "Mr Puntilla and his servant Matti".

Folklore stories and satire were taken as a basis. Everything seems to be simple and clear, but Brecht, having processed them with philosophical generalizations, turned them into parables. So the playwright was looking for new expressive means of his thoughts, ideas and beliefs.

Theater on Taganka

His theatrical performances were in close contact with the audience. Songs were performed, sometimes the audience was invited to the stage and made them direct participants in the play. Such things affected people in an amazing way. And Bertolt Brecht knew this very well. His biography contains another very interesting detail: it turns out that the Moscow Taganka Theater also began with Brecht's play. Director Y. Lyubimov made the play "The Good Man from Sezuan" the hallmark of his theatre, though with several other performances.

When the war ended, Bertolt Brecht immediately returned to Europe. The biography has information that he settled in Austria. Benefit performances and standing ovations were at all of his plays, which he wrote back in America: "Caucasian Chalk Circle", "Arturo Ui's Career". In the first play, he showed his attitude to Ch. Chaplin's film "The Great Dictator" and tried to prove what Chaplin did not finish.

Berliner Ensemble Theater

In 1949, Berthold was invited to work in the GDR at the Berliner Ensemble Theater, where he became artistic director and director. He writes dramatizations based on the largest works of world literature: "Vassa Zheleznova" and "Mother" by Gorky, "The Beaver Fur Coat" and "The Red Rooster" by G. Hauptmann.

With his performances, he traveled half the world and, of course, visited the USSR, where in 1954 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.

Bertolt Brecht: biography, list of books

In mid-1955, Brecht, at the age of 57, began to feel very ill, he was very old, he walked with a cane. He made a will, in which he indicated that the coffin with his body was not put on public display and no farewell speeches were made.

Exactly a year later, in the spring, while working in the theater on the production of "The Life of Gadiley", Brekh suffers a microinfarction on his feet, then, by the end of the summer, his health worsens, and he himself dies of a massive heart attack on August 10, 1956.

This is where you can finish the topic "Brecht Bertolt: a biography of a life story." It only remains to add that throughout his life this amazing person wrote many literary works. His most famous plays, in addition to those listed above, are Baal (1918), Man is Man (1920), Galileo's Life (1939), Caucasian Cretaceous and many, many others.

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 devices reminiscent of 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 painted in the guise 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, Brecht's poetic world expanded. 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 modern theater". 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 of the writer. Even in the most successful and tendentious traditional dramas in the best sense of the word, 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. plot, history actors interrupted by direct author's comments, lyrical digressions, and sometimes even a demonstration of physical experiments, reading newspapers and a peculiar, always relevant 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 outlined, only guessed in today 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 initial period creativity - experiments, searches and the first artistic victories. Already "Baal" - Brecht's first play - strikes with its bold and unusual presentation of human and artistic problems. In terms of poetics and stylistic features, "Baal" is close to expressionism. Brecht considers the dramaturgy of G. Kaiser "decisive", "changing the situation in the 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 meaning is more important historical episode. 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, 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 the 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.

Two skins main character- this is a bright stage "alienation", this is 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". Malice, envy, greed, conformity constitute the motionless environment of life, its 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 is in the very fact of the existence of the human mind and the ethical principle.

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 dramatic 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 of the twentieth 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).

- (Brecht) (1898 1956), German writer, director. In 1933 47 in exile. In 1949 he founded the Berliner Ensemble Theatre. In philosophical satirical plays on modern, historical and mythological subjects: "The Threepenny Opera" (post. 1928, music ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

Brecht (Brecht) Bertolt (February 10, 1898, Augsburg, August 14, 1956, Berlin), German writer, art theorist, theater and public figure. Factory manager's son. He studied at the medical faculty of the University of Munich. In November 1918 was ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Brecht, Bertolt- (Brecht, Bertolt) (full name Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, 02/10/1898, Augsburg 08/14/1956, Berlin, GDR) German playwright, poet, prose writer, director, theorist of theatrical art. Parents come from Swabian peasants, father from 1914 ... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary of Expressionism

Brecht, Bertolt Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht 1948 photograph from the German Federal Archives ... Wikipedia

Brecht is a surname. Famous speakers: Brecht, Bertolt Brecht, George ... Wikipedia

Bertolt Brecht Birth name: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht Date of birth: February 10, 1898 Place of birth: Augsburg, Germany Date of death: 14 ... Wikipedia

Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht Birth name: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht Date of birth: February 10, 1898 Place of birth: Augsburg, Germany Date of death: 14 ... Wikipedia

Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht Birth name: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht Date of birth: February 10, 1898 Place of birth: Augsburg, Germany Date of death: 14 ... Wikipedia

Books

• Bertolt Brecht. Theater. In 5 volumes (set of 6 books), Bertolt Brecht. One of the most significant and striking phenomena German literature XX century - the work of Brecht. This is determined not only by the amazing universality of his talent (he was a playwright, ...
• Bertolt Brecht. Favorites, Bertolt Brecht. The collection of the outstanding German revolutionary poet, playwright and prose writer, laureate of the international Lenin Prize Bertolt Brecht (1898 - 1956) includes the dramas The Threepenny Opera, Life ...

(1898-1956) German playwright and poet

Bertolt Brecht is rightfully considered one of the greatest figures in the European theater of the second half of the 20th century. He was not only a talented playwright, whose plays are still being performed on the stage of many theaters around the world, but also the creator of a new direction, called "political theater".

Brecht was born in the German city of Augsburg. Even in his gymnasium years, he became interested in theater, but at the insistence of his family he decided to devote himself to medicine and after graduating from the gymnasium he entered the University of Munich. The turning point in the fate of the future playwright was the meeting with the famous German writer Lion Feuchtwanger. He noticed the talent of the young man and advised him to take up literature.

Just at this time, Bertolt Brecht finished his first play - "Drums in the Night", which was staged in one of the Munich theaters.

In 1924 he graduated from the university and moved to Berlin. Here he met with the famous German director Erwin Piskator, and in 1925 together they created the Proletarian Theater. They had no money to order plays from famous playwrights, and Brecht I decided to write myself. He began by reworking plays or writing re-enactments of well-known literary works for non-professional actors.

The first such experience was his Threepenny Opera (1928) based on the book English writer John Gay's Beggar's Opera. Its plot is based on the story of several vagabonds who are forced to look for a means of subsistence. The play immediately became a success, since beggars had never been the heroes of theatrical productions.

Later, together with Piscator, Brecht came to the Volksbünne Theater in Berlin, where his second play, Mother, based on the novel by M. Gorky, was staged. The revolutionary pathos of Bertolt Brecht corresponded to the spirit of the time. Then in Germany there was a fermentation of different ideas, the Germans were looking for ways of the future state structure of the country.

The next play - "The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik" (dramatization of the novel by J. Hasek) - attracted the attention of the audience with folk humor, comical everyday situations, and a bright anti-war orientation. However, she also brought on the author the discontent of the Nazis, who by that time had come to power.

In 1933, all workers' theaters in Germany were closed, and Bertolt Brecht had to leave the country. Together with his wife, the famous actress Elena Weigel, he moved to Finland, where he wrote the play "Mother Courage and Her Children".

The plot was borrowed from a German folk book, which told about the adventures of a merchant during the Thirty Years' War. Brecht moved the action to Germany during the First World War, and the play sounded like a warning against a new war.

The play Fear and Despair in the Third Empire, in which the playwright revealed the reasons for the Nazis' coming to power, received an even more distinct political coloring.

With the outbreak of World War II, Bertolt Brecht had to leave Finland, which had become an ally of Germany, and move to the United States. There he brings several new plays - "The Life of Galileo" (the premiere took place in 1941), "Mr. Puntilla and his servant Matti" and "The Good Man from Cezuan." They are based on folklore stories. different peoples. But Brecht managed to give them the power of philosophical generalization, and his plays from folk satire became parables.

Trying to convey his thoughts, ideas, beliefs to the viewer as best as possible, the playwright is looking for new expressive means. The theatrical action in his plays unfolds in direct contact with the audience. The actors enter the hall, making the audience feel like they are direct participants in the theatrical action. Zongs are actively used - songs performed by professional singers on stage or in the hall and included in the outline of the performance.

These discoveries shocked the audience. It is no coincidence that Bertolt Brecht was one of the first authors who started the Moscow Taganka Theater. Director Yuri Lyubimov staged one of his plays - "The Good Man from Sezuan", which, along with some other performances, became the hallmark of the theater.

After the end of World War II, Bertolt Brecht returned to Europe and settled in Austria. There, with great success, plays written by him in America - "The Career of Arturo Ui" and "Caucasian Chalk Circle" - are performed. The first of them was a kind of theatrical response to Chaplin's sensational film The Great Dictator. As Brecht himself noted, in this play he wanted to finish what Chaplin himself did not say.

In 1949, Brecht was invited to the GDR, and he became the head and chief director of the Berliner Ensemble Theater. A group of actors unites around him: Erich Endel, Ernst Busch, Helena Weigel. Only now Bertolt Brecht got unlimited opportunities for theatrical creativity and experimentation. Not only all of his plays were premiered on this stage, but also the stage adaptations of the largest works of world literature written by him - a dilogy from Gorky's play "Vassa Zheleznova" and the novel "Mother", G. Hauptmann's plays "The Beaver Fur Coat" and "The Red Rooster". In these productions, Brecht acted not only as the author of dramatizations, but also as a director.

The peculiarities of his dramaturgy required an unconventional organization of theatrical action. The playwright did not strive for the maximum recreation of reality on stage. Therefore, Berthold abandoned the scenery, replacing them with a white backdrop, against which there were only a few expressive details indicating the scene, such as Mother Courage's van. The light was bright, but devoid of any effects whatsoever.

The actors played slowly, often improvised, so that the viewer became an accomplice in the action and actively empathized with the heroes of the performances.

Together with his theater, Bertolt Brecht traveled to many countries, including the USSR. In 1954 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.