Episode Details

Bertolt Brecht wrote The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage while dodging Nazis, outwitting the House Un-American Activities Committee, and navigating life as a Marxist celebrity. His survival instincts were as theatrical as his plays.

This episode traces his journey from Weimar Berlin to Hollywood exile to East Berlin, examining how he used every political system he lived under as raw material for his art.

• How epic theater forced audiences to think instead of feel
• His testimony before HUAC and immediate flight from the United States
• The uneasy bargain he struck with the East German state
• Why his personal contradictions mirrored his dramatic theories