SUMMARY
Leading German dramatist Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), the son of a Protestant mother and Catholic father, was born into a middle-class Bavarian family. Brecht's first success came with the 1922 production of Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night) in Munich. He moved to Berlin in 1924 in order to pursue his career in earnest. Brecht was appointed consultant for Max Reinhardt's German Theater. In Berlin he collaborated with composer Kurt Weill, most famously on Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928).
Although Brecht never joined the Communist party, he began to study the works of Karl Marx in the late 1920s and sympathized with the Communist cause. He became more critical of the Weimar Republic and wrote political films and plays which were banned by the government. His plays attacked German middle-class society, drew on Marxist principles, and criticized Nazism. Brecht fled Nazi Germany in February 1933, and his works were consigned to the flames shortly thereafter during the book burnings of 1933.