Life of Brecht

Abstract

Eugen Berthold Brecht was born in Augsburg on 10 February 1898, of middle-class background. His father, a Catholic, rose during the first twenty years of this century from a subordinate secretarial position to the directorship of a paper-mill, and appears — though tolerant of his son’s work — to have been a typical ambitious, nationalistic bourgeois of the time. Brecht’s mother, a Protestant, who died in 1920 after long suffering from cancer, lived in his memory rather as the passive, tolerant, rural element. She was the bookish one of his parents, the odd one out of the family. He seems to have been an arrogant child (though not an only child), joined in games only when he could be the leader, and was excused exercise at the grammar-school he attended because of a weak heart. He had a good grounding in literature and in (Protestant) religious knowledge. With a group of classmates he spent much time mounting productions in a puppet theatre. In 1914 he published in the schoolboys’ journal Die Ernte his first drama Die Bibel (‘The Bible’), already noteworthy for its unimpressed attitude to heroism and to the putting of beliefs above people. In 1914 — unsurprisingly, in view of the atmosphere in Germany at the time — he was affected by patriotic frenzy, but his general attitude was rebellious, as seen in a speech on German Dynasties which gained him the lowest possible mark, and an essay of 1916 with a pacifist theme.