Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht

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 3,923,240 page views. His biography is available in 101 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 100 in 2019). Bertolt Brecht is the 57th most popular writer (down from 55th in 2019), the 48th most popular biography from Germany (down from 35th in 2019) and the 5th 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.