WRITER

Bertolt Brecht

1898 - 1956

Photo of Bertolt Brecht

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Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt 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 Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the Verfremdungseffekt. During the Nazi Germany period, Brecht fled his home country, first to Scandinavia, and during World War II to the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Bertolt Brecht has received more than 4,519,265 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

  • 4.5M

    Page Views (PV)

  • 78.94

    Historical Popularity Index (HPI)

  • 104

    Languages Editions (L)

  • 11.77

    Effective Languages (L*)

  • 3.92

    Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

Der kaukasische Kreidekreis
German drama, Translations into Welsh, Translations into English
1954
Gesammelte Werke
1967
Die Dreigroschenoper
Berliner Ensemble
1955
Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder
Amateur theater, Criticism and interpretation, Drama
Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder wurde in Skandinavien vor dem Ausbruch des Zweiten Weltkrieges geschrieben (1938/39) und am 19. April 1941 am Schauspielhaus Zuerich uraufgefuehrt. "Was eine Affuehrung von Mutter Courage", schrieb Brecht einmal, "hauptsaechlich zeigen soll: Dass die grossen Geschaefte in den Kriegen nicht von den kleinen Leuten gemacht werden. Dass der Krieg, der eine Fortfuehrung der Geschaefte mit anderen Mitteln ist, die menschlichen Tugenden toedlich macht, auch fuer ihre Besitzer. Dass er darum bekaempft werden muss." "Mutter Courage ist Brechts Meisterwerk. Es ist wirklich das politische Drama, in einem absoluten Sinn verstanden, wie Schillers oder Grillparzers Drama: es ist im Grunde schon heute ein klassiches Drama. - Willy Haas - Flyleaf.
1949
Stücke
German drama, Translations into English, Translations into Russian
1953
Poems
Translations into Polish, Translations into Irish, Translations into English
1947

Page views of Bertolt Brechts by language

Over the past year Bertolt Brecht has had the most page views in the with 487,447 views, followed by German (413,756), and Spanish (134,205). In terms of yearly growth of page views the top 3 wikpedia editions are Indonesian (126.42%), Manx (82.95%), and Uzbek (77.54%)

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.

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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, Frederick Soddy, Robert Walser, Emil Nolde, and Lucien Febvre.

Others Born in 1898

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Others Deceased in 1956

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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

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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

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