Bertolt Brecht
The Threepenny Opera, a play Brecht wrote in German, stands as the work most durably associated with his name. It belongs to a body of theatrical writing produced across decades and across shifting political borders, by a man who worked simultaneously as a playwright, poet, theatre director, and writer.
Brecht was born on 10 February 1898 in Augsburg and went on to study at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. His life unfolded under successive political orders: he held citizenship in the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Austria, and eventually the German Democratic Republic. To these years belong plays including Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui — works that extended his output well beyond the sharp social register of The Threepenny Opera.
In recognition of his writing, Brecht received both the National Prize of East Germany and the International Stalin Prize for Peace. He died on 14 August 1956 in East Berlin, a city that had become his home during the final years of his life as a citizen of the German Democratic Republic.
Quotes by Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht's insights on:
On my wall hangs a Japanese carving, / The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer. / Sympathetically I observe / The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating / What a strain it is to be evil.
What kind of a crime is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank?
Near my bed, to my pain / The last thing at night, the first thing in the morning, / Of their victories and of my cares, /Promise me not to go silent all of a sudden.
You little box, held to me escaping / So that your valves should not break / Carried from house to house to ship from sail to train, / So that my enemies might go on talking to me.
There must always be some who are brighter and some who are stupider. The latter make up for it by being better workers.
I don't think the traditional form of theatre means anything any longer. Its significance is purely historic.
