In 1917 Brecht enrolled as a medical student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After military service as a medical orderly, he returned to his studies, but abandoned them in 1921. During the Bavarian revolutionary turmoil of 1918, Brecht wrote his first play, BAAL, which was produced in 1923. The play celebrated life and sexuality and was a great success.

Around 1927 Brecht started to study Karl Marx’s DAS KAPITAL and by 1929 he had become a Communist. At the Schiffbauerdam Theatre he trained many actors who were to become famous on stage and screen, among them Oscar Homolka, Peter Lorre and the singer Lotte Lenya.

Brecht’s politically committed play, DIE MASSNAHME (1930, The Measures Taken) reflects his anti-sentimentality and directness, in such a way that even the Communist Party was quite disturbed. In the play a young Communist is murdered by the Party – his sympathy for the poor and their suffering only postpones the day of the showdown. T

In Brecht’s essay titled “On Experimental Theatre” (Brecht, pp 130 – 135), Brecht traces through the modern theatre the two lines running from naturalism and Expressionism. Naturalism he sees as the “assimilation of art to science” which gave the Naturalistic theatre great social influence, but at the expense of artistic elements:

Brecht’s “epic” (narrative and non-dramatic) theatre is based on detachment, on the Verfremdung or translated, the alienation effect, to “disrupt the viewer’s normal or run of the mill perception by introducing elements that will suddenly cause the viewer to see familiar objects in a strange way and to see strange objects in a familiar way” (Fuegi, p.83). This was achieved through techniques that reminded the audience that they were being shown a demonstration of human behaviour in scientific spirit rather than an illusion of reality. The audience must be reminded that it is watching a play, and that the theatre is only a theatre and not the world itself. The clearest of his alienation devices was the projections of captions proceeding the scene so that the audience knew in advance what would happen and could therefore concentrate on how it happens.

On the other hand, he writes – Expressionism “vastly enriched the theatre’s means of expressions and brought aesthetic gains that still remain to be exploited” (Brecht, 132). But this theory proved incapable of shedding any light on the world as an object of human activity, and the theatre’s educational value collapsed. Brecht recognized the great achievements of Piscator’s work where he states that “they were striving towards an entirely new social function of the theatre,” (Brecht p, 131) but he proposed a further advance in the development of epic theatre.

In 1947 while living in America, Brecht was accused of un-American activities, bu

Some topics in this essay:
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