German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Bertolt Brecht

(1898 - 1956)

Bertolt Brecht served in an army hospital in 1918, had his first theatrical success with Drums in the Night in 1922, and became interested in Marxism in 1926: “I am eight feet deep in Das Kapital,” he wrote a friend. “I’ve got to know it all now.” Having completed The Threepenny Opera in 1928, he fled Germany in 1933, living first in Scandinavia and then the United States. Brecht returned to Berlin in 1949, staging Mother Courage and Her Children and creating the Berliner Ensemble.

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From the cradle to the coffin, underwear comes first.

—Bertolt Brecht, 1928

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