ABSTRACT
Brecht was sixteen years old and living in his parents’ home in Augsburg when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in remote Sarajevo. He was twenty when the war that was the consequence of that untidy assassination ended. The blustering, posturing adolescent of 1914 was, by 1918, an angry young man. Anger is something that must always come into the reckoning when Brecht’s theatrical career is under scrutiny. Anger at the way things are provides the impetus for political or social campaigning, and Brecht’s approach to acting cannot properly be divorced from his campaign to change the world. That campaign found its eventual rationale in Marxism, but it began with the impulse to contradict. Given the conventional Christian upbringing of a bourgeois provincial in traditionally Protestant Augsburg, Brecht responded with confrontational pragmatism:
What business have they got putting that stuff about Truth in the catechism
If one’s not allowed to say what is? (Brecht 1976b: 16)
These are the concluding lines of a poem written shortly after his twentieth birthday and obliquely addressed to his mother – worried about his dirty linen and dirtier language. It was time for Brecht to get away from Augsburg into the headier atmosphere of Bavaria’s cultural capital, Munich. In the months following the signing of the Armistice on 11 November 1918, he travelled regularly between Augsburg and Munich, where he was trying to establish a literary foothold. It was a period of extraordinary political turmoil in Bavaria, and Brecht was caught up in it.
