Bertolt Brecht. 1898-1956. Art is Not a Mirror Held Up To Reality, But a Hammer With Which to Shape It. Postcard on Recycled Paper. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) Was a German playwright & poet. His most famous play was The Threepenny Opera (1928). As a Marxist he faced Nazi persecution, fleeing Germany in 1933. In 1947 he fled communist persecution in the US., living his final years in East Berlin.
The following information is NOT printed on this postcard: Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century. From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. There are few areas of modern theatrical culture that have not felt the impact or influence of Brecht's ideas and practices.