Development of Brecht's Philosophy Through Artistic Influences
- Not wishing to be “swallowed by the army” during WWI, Brecht enrolled in an additional medical course at Munich University in 1917. There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired Brecht's admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret-star Frank Wedekind.
- In 1920/1921, Brecht took a small part in the political cabaret of the Munich comedian Karl Valentin, whose performances Brecht saw on numerous occasions. He compared Valentin to Charlie Chaplin, for his "virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology". Brecht identified Valentin, along with Wedekind and Büchner, as his "chief influences" at that time.
- A trend that persisted throughout his career was a desire to counter another work (both others' and his own, as his many adaptations and re-writes attest). "Anyone can be creative," he quipped, "it's rewriting other people that's a challenge."
- In 1922, Brecht came to the attention of an influential Berlin critic, Herbert Ihering: "At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany's literary complexion overnight", "[he] has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision. [...] It is a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column." Brecht was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize for unestablished writers, for his first three plays (Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle).
- The citation for the award insisted that: “[Brecht's] language is vivid without being deliberately poetic, symbolical without being over literary. Brecht is a dramatist because his language is felt physically and in the round.”
- Brecht's ‘In the Jungle’ opening night proved to be a "scandal"—a phenomenon that would characterize many of his later productions during the Weimar Republic—in which Nazis blew whistles and threw stink bombs at the actors on the stage.
- He was inspired by the harsh lighting, the boxing-ring stage and other anti-illusionistic devices of boxing fights, which he then used in the staging and production of his works.
Marxist and Socialist Interests
Brecht began studying Marxism and socialism in earnest
- "When I read Marx's Capital", a note by Brecht reveals, "I understood my plays." Marx was, it continues, "the only spectator for my plays I'd ever come across."
- Inspired by the developments in USSR Brecht wrote a number of agitprop plays, praising the bolshevik collectivism. As Herbert Lüthy commented on this period of Brecht's work: "Brecht was not attracted by the workers' movement—with which he was never acquainted—but by a profound need of total authority, of total submission to a total power, the immutable, hierarchical Church of the new Byzantine state, based on the infallibility of its chief"
- Brecht was struggling with the question of how to dramatize the complex economic relationships of modern capitalism in his unfinished project Joe P. Fleischhacker. It wasn't until his Saint Joan of the Stockyards (written between 1929–1931) that Brecht solved it.
- The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) was the biggest hit in Berlin of the 1920s and a renewing influence on the musical worldwide. One of its most famous lines underscored the hypocrisy of conventional morality imposed by the Church, working in conjunction with the established order, in the face of working-class hunger and deprivation: "Erst kommt das Fressen - First the grub (lit. "eating like animals, gorging")"; "Dann kommt die Moral. - Then the morality."
- He expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most famous plays: Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, and many others.
- Brecht also wrote the screenplay for the Fritz Lang-directed film Hangmen Also Die! (credited as Bert Brecht) which was loosely based on the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reich Protector of German-occupied Prague, number-two man in the SS, and a chief architect of the Holocaust, who was known as "The Hangman of Prague." Hanns Eisler was nominated for an Academy Award for his musical score. The collaboration of three prominent refugees from Nazi Germany – Lang, Brecht and Eisler – is an example of the influence this generation of German exiles had on American culture.
- Karl Korsch's version of the Marxist dialectic influenced Brecht greatly, both his aesthetic theory and theatrical practice. Brecht received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954.
- From his late twenties Brecht remained a lifelong committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his "epic theatre", synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism.
- In contrast to many other avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution; rather, he hoped to "re-function" the theatre to a new social use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era—particularly over the "high art/popular culture" dichotomy.
- Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger dubs him "the most important materialist writer of our time."
- Brecht believed, "Traditional Chinese acting also knows the alienation [sic] effect, and applies it most subtly.... The [Chinese] performer portrays incidents of utmost passion, but without his delivery becoming heated." Brecht attended a Chinese opera performance and was introduced to the famous Chinese opera performer Mei LanFang in 1935. However, Brecht was sure to distinguish between Epic and Chinese theatre. He recognized that the Chinese style was not a "transportable piece of technique," and that Epic theatre sought to historicize and address social and political issues.
- Marxist theories were about social justice, and were critical of Capitalism. About questioning economic and social classes, industrialisation and its effects, as well as the power structures of society.
- In theatre of Piscator and Brecht, epic devices are most notably used as a means of stressing theatre's role in the society and to foreground political goals of the performance.