Berliner Ensemble

21 March 2026 | Author/Destination: | Category: General, Berlin, Opera Houses, Theaters, Libraries Reading Time:  9 minutes

© Jörg Zägel/cc-by-sa-3.0

© Jörg Zägel/cc-by-sa-3.0

The Berliner Ensemble is a German theatre company established by actress Helene Weigel and her husband, playwright Bertolt Brecht, in January 1949 in East Berlin. In the time after Brecht’s exile, the company first worked at Wolfgang Langhoff‘s Deutsches Theater and in 1954 moved to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, built in 1892, that was open for the 1928 premiere of The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper).   read more…

Portrait: Bertolt Brecht, a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet

19 February 2025 | Author/Destination: | Category: Portrait Reading Time:  9 minutes

© Bundesarchiv - Bild 183-W0619-307/cc-by-sa-3.0-de

© Bundesarchiv – Bild 183-W0619-307/cc-by-sa-3.0-de

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, Brecht wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call “dialectical theatre”) and the Verfremdungseffekt.   read more…

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