Brecht, Realism and the Media

Abstract

Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898 in Augsburg, southern Germany. He died of a heart attack in East Berlin, in the German Democratic Republic, in 1956. The 1928 musical The Threepenny Opera, based on John Gay’s eighteenth-century parody of high opera in the style of Handel, was a collaboration between Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann and composer Kurt Weill that became the most successful stage performance of the Weimar Republic, translated into numerous languages and produced all over the world. With the Nazi accession to power in March 1933, Brecht went into exile, his books were burned in Germany and his German citizenship was revoked.