This article provides an introduction to the volume, briefly relating the primary aspects of Bertolt Brecht’s life and writing and exploring particularly his importance as a writer for the German language.Brecht was the most influential playwright of the twentieth-century worldwide, and modern theater would be unthinkable without his plays and theoretical concepts such as estrangement/distanciation.Brecht was also one of Germany’s greatest poets and a distinguished writer of prose. As a prime example of Brecht’s cultural influence, the article explores the impact that Brecht and his use of language had on Bob Dylan, the Nobel Prize-winning singer-songwriter from the US, who testifies eloquently in his memoirs to the extraordinary effect that Brecht had on him as a young man. The introduction also examines some of the key controversies involving Brecht, including above all controversies about his revolutionary politics and his approach to collaboration and sexual morality. Brecht was not a hero but a flawed human being, and he himself was well aware of his own imperfections. He wanted to use his art and his work in order to create a world in which flawed human beings, in spite of their imperfections, could still lead decent lives of dignity and humanity.

During his time as a young artist in Munich (1917–1924), Brecht’s burgeoning approach to drama and theater was considerably influenced by the playwright and cabaret performer Frank Wedekind and the Bavarian comedian Karl Valentin. This chapter outlines the nature of Brecht’s contact with these two artists and their performance work, and demonstrates how their aesthetic approaches had a significant impact on the development of his epic theater. In particular, it attends to how both artists provided compelling strategies for defamiliarizing material realities and societal oppression. While Wedekind offered enthrallingly deviant protagonists and repurposed popular art forms – cabaret, circus and the Moritat, Valentin’s clowning and fairground style inducted Brecht in the deployment of gestic performance and comic incongruity. What the chapter makes apparent is the extent to which these artists provided Brecht with key models for a subversive theater that recycled old and new, popular and highbrow forms in order to deliver a social commentary that was richly satirical and fun.

The years 1918–1933 were a time of such rapid and far-reaching change in Brecht’s life and artistic development that the period defies definition as a single “context.” His writings in these years were embedded in a multidimensional matrix of factors (social, intellectual, cultural, theatrical), at times complementary, at others pulling in contrary directions, some bearing the imprint of earlier experiences (particularly World War I), while others adumbrate developments that would unfold more fully in the following decades (the economic crisis of the late 1920s and the accompanying radicalization of German politics). The youthful “spirit of contradiction” that he hoped never to lose was fully in evidence in all Brecht’s efforts to master the multiple challenges facing him and his generation as it emerged from the war, with an intense hunger for life and eagerness to put its own stamp on an evolving and expanding world. In these efforts, which produced the first forms of epic theater and the Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht drew on an exceptionally diverse range of resources, including the Bible and Nietzsche, expressionism and new sobriety, Shakespeare and Shaw, Karl Valentin and Karl Marx, Georg Kaiser and Charlie Chaplin, film and circus, boxing matches and fairground entertainments.

This essay introduces Brecht’s oft-neglected interviews. First, it reviews efforts to incorporate these interviews in (or exclude them from) his body of work, before outlining Brecht’s own interest in the form as a both a source of material and a platform for his views. At the center of the article is an examination of Brecht’s interview with Die literarische Welt in 1926. Archival material is used to illuminate the process of construction behind the conversation, which contains Brecht’s first discussion of epic theater. Finally, the article sketches two key influences on the development of his interviews: his embrace of radio as a new medium and his commitment to Marxist media tactics.

This chapter examines the Berliner Ensemble, the theater company Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel founded in East Berlin in 1949. It considers Brecht’s desire to create an ensemble to help realize the theoretical positions he had drafted while in exile and the difficulties the Berliner Ensemble faced in its infancy. These included a lack of theater space for a new company in the wake of the devastation of World War II and intense ideological hostility from the ruling party. At times, the problems encountered posed a direct threat to the BE’s very existence, yet it was the quality of its work that ultimately saved it and allowed it to thrive on the international stage.

This article examines Bertolt Brecht’s impact on contemporary transcultural theater worldwide.Globalization and migration have increased the importance and impact of transcultural theater in recent decades, leading to new forms of theatrical creation and experience. In the context of aggressive anti-globalization reactions characterized by xenophobia and racism, transcultural theater, as influenced and initiated by Brecht, celebrates hybridity and the fragment, focusing above all on processes of estrangement (Verfremdung) that reject the fantasy of a complete, self-identical, separate cultural sphere.Transcultural theater embraces multiperspectivalism and views the supposedly well-known and obvious self as strange and foreign, while at the same time it invites the self into a process of dialog with other cultures and identities that are equally strange and foreign. It rejects the notion of holistic identities and instead embraces the fragmentary, basing itself on repetition, historicization, and the citability of gestures. Transcultural theater seeks to create theatrical experiences that are adequate to, and also respond in a meaningful way to, the complex and changing world of migration and mobility in which both theater practitioners and theater audiences actually live.

Given the controversies surrounding Brecht's life and politics it is no surprise that he turns up in various degrees of fictionalization in works of his fellow writers. It is also little surprise that the fictionalized “Brecht” rarely transcends caricature. Some of the authors simply don't seem to know much about him and have little grasp of his work. However, comparing the historical Brecht to his fictional revenants is not the focus of this paper. After a survey of the various works in which "Brecht" appears, the paper discusses the more ambitious transformations, in the works of Lion Feuchtwanger (Success), Günter Grass (The Plebeians), and Peter Weiss (The Aesthetics of Resistance), evaluating them on their own merits.

This chapter explores Brecht’s understanding of political theater and sets it in the context of other contemporary approaches, including the work of director Erwin Piscator. It explains why Brecht did not view naturalism or expressionism as acceptable aesthetic models, and it demonstrates how he rooted his theater in a material approach to reality, showing the social and economic influences on, and implications of, characters’ decisions and actions. Epic theater creates the scope for the agency that Brecht found lacking in naturalist drama: it shows that characters have choices, enabling audiences to imagine how different decisions or circumstances might yield different results.