Bertolt Brecht was a playwright and poet from Augsburg, Bavaria. His work was greatly influenced and directly affected by the two world wars. He studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and served during World War I before pursuing writing and the theater. His plays include Mother Courage and her Children (1941) and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1958).
Brecht was exiled from Germany in 1933 and spent some time in California before moving to Switzerland for a short while. In 1949, he returned to East Berlin. Brecht’s works and direction techniques encouraged the “alienation effect” in acting and theater.
Information from the Poetry Foundation.