Brecht, Bertolt
Brecht, Bertolt ( 1898 – 1956 ),German dramatist and poet. After emigrating (to the United States, where he collaborated on translations and productions of his plays with Eric Bentley and Charles Laughton ), he settled in 1949 in East Berlin, where he founded and directed the Berliner Ensemble. After his death his widow, the actress Helene Weigel , directed the company until she died in 1971 . Brecht's early plays, e.g. Baal ( 1922 ) and Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night, 1922 ), show kinship with Expressionism . Mann ist Mann (Man is Man, 1927 ) anticipates Brecht's later systematic development of his famous ‘ alienation effect’, and Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928 ), his version of The Beggar's Opera , was one of the theatrical successes of Weimar Germany, not least in the bourgeois circles which were satirized in the work....
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