WRITER

Bertolt Brecht

1898 - 1956

Photo of Bertolt Brecht

Icon of person Bertolt Brecht

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Bertolt Brecht has received more than 4,915,907 page views. His biography is available in 104 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 101 in 2019). Bertolt Brecht is the 68th most popular writer (down from 57th in 2019), the 51st most popular biography from Germany (down from 48th in 2019) and the 7th most popular German Writer.

Bertolt Brecht is most famous for his theories of theater and the alienation effect. Brecht believed that theater should be a tool for social change and not just entertainment. He coined the term "alienation effect" to describe the process of making the audience aware of the artificiality of the play.

Memorability Metrics

  • 4.9M

    Page Views (PV)

  • 82.25

    Historical Popularity Index (HPI)

  • 104

    Languages Editions (L)

  • 11.77

    Effective Languages (L*)

  • 3.92

    Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Among WRITERS

Among writers, Bertolt Brecht ranks 68 out of 7,302. Before him are Ayn Rand, Rabindranath Tagore, Arthur Conan Doyle, Umberto Eco, Heinrich Heine, and Romain Rolland. After him are Nikolai Gogol, Li Bai, Charles Perrault, Milan Kundera, Robert Frost, and Theodor Herzl.

Most Popular Writers in Wikipedia

Go to all Rankings
Load previousLoad previous

Contemporaries

Among people born in 1898, Bertolt Brecht ranks 2. Before him is Golda Meir. After him are René Magritte, Alvar Aalto, Erich Maria Remarque, Federico García Lorca, Enzo Ferrari, Sergei Eisenstein, Umm Kulthum, M. C. Escher, Zhou Enlai, and William James Sidis. Among people deceased in 1956, Bertolt Brecht ranks 1. After him are Irène Joliot-Curie, B. R. Ambedkar, Jackson Pollock, Konstantin von Neurath, Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, Pietro Badoglio, Jules Rimet, Emil Nolde, Frederick Soddy, Juho Kusti Paasikivi, and Lucien Febvre.

Others Born in 1898

Go to all Rankings
Load previousLoad previous

Others Deceased in 1956

Go to all Rankings
Load previousLoad previous

In Germany

Among people born in Germany, Bertolt Brecht ranks 51 out of 7,253. Before him are Pope Benedict XVI (1927), Karl Benz (1844), Marlene Dietrich (1901), Adolf Eichmann (1906), Felix Mendelssohn (1809), and Heinrich Heine (1797). After him are Hannah Arendt (1906), Josef Mengele (1911), Hildegard of Bingen (1098), Georg Ohm (1789), William I, German Emperor (1797), and Klemens von Metternich (1773).

Others born in Germany

Go to all Rankings
Load previousLoad previous

Among WRITERS In Germany

Among writers born in Germany, Bertolt Brecht ranks 7. Before him are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749), Anne Frank (1929), Friedrich Schiller (1759), Hermann Hesse (1877), Thomas Mann (1875), and Heinrich Heine (1797). After him are Erich Maria Remarque (1898), Charles Bukowski (1920), Novalis (1772), Heinrich Böll (1917), Eckhart Tolle (1948), and Friedrich Hölderlin (1770).

German born Writers

Go to all Rankings
Load previousLoad previous