Brecht

Bertolt Brecht was born in February 1898 in Augsburg, Bavaria (about 80 km or 50 mi north-west of Munich), to a devout Protestant mother and a Catholic father (who had been persuaded to have a Protestant wedding). The modest house where he was born is today preserved as a Brecht Museum. His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914. Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would have a lifelong effect on his writing. From her, too, came the "dangerous image of the self-denying woman" that recurs in his drama. Brecht's home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied. At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a lifelong creative partnership, Neher designed many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helped to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre.