Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht, born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet who came of age during the Weimar Republic and had his first successes as a playwright in Munich before moving to Berlin in 1924. There he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill and began a lifelong collaboration with composer Hanns Eisler, becoming a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt. When the Nazis took power in 1933 he fled Germany, eventually settling in Southern California, where he worked as a screenwriter while under FBI surveillance and was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. He returned to Europe the day after testifying, eventually settling in East Berlin, where he co-founded the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife, actress Helene Weigel.