Life of Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was born on February 10, 1898 in the medieval city of Augsburg, part of the Bavarian section of the German Empire. His father (Bertolt Friedrich Brecht) was a Catholic and his mother (Wilhelmine Friederike Sophie Brezing) a Protestant. He was baptised as Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht and he was there first child. ... His mother was ill with breast cancer most of Bertolt’s young life. Throughout his life Brecht had a troubled relationship with his father. Brecht disagreed with the bourgeois lifetstyle and only one correspondance between he and his father survives; a letter where Brecht begs his father to raise his illegitimate children. Brecht was a Marxist (part of political movement founded by the German Karl Marx), and this greatly influenced his theatrical content. Karl Korsch, who had been a Communist member of the Reichstag but had been expelled from the German Communist Party in 1926, taught Brecht’s the theories of Marxism.