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himself Bertolt) grew up in his Bavarian birthplace, Augsburg, and he enrolled Munich University as a medical student in 1917. He served briefly as a hospital orderly in his hometown. Having experienced first-hand the barbarism of war, he turned to Marxism and became an ardent critic of institutional religion He wrote his first anti-war play, Baal, in 1918, and during the revolutionary upheavals at the end of World War I he served on a soldiers’ and workers’ council. Brecht became a dramaturge (theatrical literary adviser) in Munich for two years following the success of his second anti-militaristic work Drums in the Night (1918-1920). Then he moved to Max Reinhardt’s (1873-1943) Berlin theatre in 1924. Unsuccessful at first at the box office and unwanted as a director, he left after a year to work freelance. In 1927, at the height of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) he began his association with Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), a leading exponent of epic theatre. In that year he met composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950), with whom he wrote what is without doubt his most successful work, The Threepenny Opera (first production, 1928; first film, 1931), freely adapted from John Gay’s (1685-1732) ballad-play, The Beggar's Opera (1728). This was the first major collaborative venture by an author whose strength lay in the notion of shared authorship. A full-scale opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, followed in 1930. By then, however, Brecht had become interested in Lehrstuecke (teaching plays), and after Weill scored two of these, their collaboration ceased. The music for the militantly Communist The Measures Taken (1930) and The Mother (1932) was composed by Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), a committed communist with whom Brecht wrote all his best-known political songs.
When the Nazis took over in 1933, Brecht and his wife, the actor Helene Weigel (1900-1971), left Germany to live in Denmark until the German invasion forced them once again to move to Finland. During the period of Scandinavian exile, however, Brecht returned to large-scale playwriting with Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), Life of Galileo (1939), The Good Person of Setzuan (1940), and the Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui (1941).
In 1941, travelling by way of Helsinki, Moscow, and Vladivostok, the couple settled for six years in California, where Brecht tried vainly to find work in films. In California he wrote The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945), as well as some of his finest songs with Eisler. He worked with Charles Laughton (1899-1962) on the adaptation and theatrical production of Galileo(1947).
In 1947, Brecht was interrogated by the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities. He denied that he had ever been a fully paid up member of any communist party. But still he was hounded. Within days, he had returned to Europe. In Zurich he wrote his principal theoretical work, the Short Organum for the Theater (1947-48). After settling in East Berlin in 1949, he devoted his last seven years to directing and training his own company, the Berlin Ensemble.

Appraisal of Play

In West Germany and West Berlin the performance of Brecht’s work was hindered even after his death by his identification with the East German regime, which he had publicly - but not uncritically - supported during the uprising of June 1953. With the publication of his remaining plays and poems, however, the way