Bertolt Brecht Bibliography

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Bertolt Brecht was born on February 10, 1898 in the medieval city of Augsburg, part of the Bavarian section of the German Empire. He married in 1897, his father was a Catholic and his mother a Protestant. Brecht was their first child. His father worked as Chief Clerk in a paper factory, clearly fitting the definition of "bourgeois." His mother was ill with breast cancer most of his young life. Throughout his life Brecht was supported by his family, especially his father with whom he disagreed strongly concerning the bourgeois lifestyle. His father continued to provide financial support and a home for much of his life. Only one piece of correspondence between them survives: a letter where Brecht begs his father to raise his illegitimate children.
Brecht was a sickly child, with a congenital heart condition and a facial tic. As a result he was sent to a sanatorium to relax. At age six he attended a Protestant elementary school and at age ten a private school. Like most students, he was educated in Latin and the humanities, and later exposed to thinkers such as Nietzsche. He suffered a heart attack at the age of twelve, but soon recovered and continued his education.
While in school he began writing, and ended up co-founding and co-editing a school magazine called "The Harvest". By age sixteen he was writing for a local newspaper and had written his first play, The Bible, about a girl who must choose whether between living or dying and saving many others. He was later almost expelled at age eighteen for disagreeing on whether it was necessary to defend his country in time of war. By nineteen he had left school and started doing clerical work for the war, prevented from active duty due to health problems.
In 1917 he resumed his education, this time attending Ludwig Maximilian Universitaet in Munich where he matriculated as a medical student. While there he attended Artur Kutscher's seminars on the theatre. He despised many of his fell...