Bertolt Brecht

German playwright and poet, one of the leaders of the "epic theatre movement." He wrote his first prize-winning play while at Munich University from 1917-1921, and directed his first play production on 18 March 1924. As a poet, he showed great mastery and forceful simplicity. Brecht's importance to 20th Century theater cannot be overstated. His operas and plays champion alienation the way that Kafka epitomizes anxiety. He combines text, balladry, stagecraft, imagery, movement and spoken word in a way now associated with performance art. His "Three-penny Opera" is familiar to every patron who has ever recognized theater as an art form.

A Marxist, a vegetarian, a genius and a contradictory figure, he was also considered an opportunist with an all-too-convenient ability to temporize. Despite his purposely shabby dress, unwashed stench, rotting teeth and icy persona, Brecht was some sort of modern Mesmer, able to hypnotize almost everyone he met into doing his bidding. He was considered a virtuoso in the bedroom, keeping regular revolving mistresses. When he fled Nazi Germany, he had not only his family but two other women, both of whom wrote large amounts of his work according to his specifications. Some of his major works may contain as little as 10% of his actual writing, but he served as a brilliant editor.

The saddest case - and most revealing of his character - is the story of Margaret Steffin, a young German writer from the provinces who had the misfortune to fall under Brecht's spell at an early age. She was almost single-handedly responsible for "Courage" and "Stezuan," as well as "Galileo" and at least four other major plays, a novel, and countless poems and stories, all published under Brecht's name. He was not able to read the source material in French for the works, and the manuscripts are all in Steffin's handwriting. Suffering from TB, Steffin died alone in a Moscow hospital ward after arranging for Brecht's safe passage to America.