Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht was a German playwright and poet who invented epic theatre, in which the audience is kept from losing itself in the story so that it will think about the world that produced it. The Threepenny Opera, with Kurt Weill, made him famous in 1928; he fled Hitler in 1933 and wrote Mother Courage and Her Children in Scandinavian exile in 1939, a chronicle of a canteen woman who loses her three children to the Thirty Years’ War and learns nothing. He was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee, left for East Berlin, and founded the Berliner Ensemble there.