Bertolt Brecht, a berliner?

Monday, August 7, 2017

Bertolt Brecht, one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century, was NOT born in Berlin, but in Bavaria. But, does the place of birth matter? Picasso was born in Malaga, but it is as a French artist that he is known for most people.

The same goes for Brecht. He arrived in Berlin in 1924, to join Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater, and it was in the cultural capital of Germany (of Europe some would say) that he wrote The Threepenny opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Saint Joan of the Stockyards.

The year 1933 marked a turning point for him, as for many other artists and writers. This is not an innocuous year, it is the year when the Nazis take power in Germany. Brecht was not Jewish, but he became a Communist, another favorite target for Nazi repression.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and his wife Helene Weigel (1900-1971) are buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in Berlin. The playwright wanted a grave "where all the dogs would want to piss".

In the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, a former theater of variety, Brecht made the first performance of the Opera de quat'sous in 1928 and his first triumph. With its overflowing of gilding, its cherubs, its caryatids with swollen breasts, the contrast couldn’t be more marked with the miserly staged by Brecht, with his clear and rigorous theater. The poet liked this distance between the stage and the audience. After the war, when he chose to settle in the communist half of Berlin, it was this theater that Brecht obtained to set up his troupe of the Berliner Ensemble.

Michael Bienert, a guide to literary walks, takes theater lovers to other parts of Berlin, exploring Brecht's relations with the Nazi regime and then with the GDR.

From the Berlin of the 1920s, which Brecht, the young provincial born in Bavaria in Augsburg, discovers with avidity, there is not much left. The cafes and cabarets that Brecht used to visit around the Kurfürstendamm are no more. But there remains a letter written to a friend in 1920: "Berlin is a wonderful place, can’t you steal 500 marks and come?"

Thank you for the informations borrowed from the site http://maisons-ecrivains.fr/