This article explores Brecht’s origins and life in Augsburg from the time he was born in 1898 until he left Augsburg for Berlin in 1924. Brecht came from a well-educated and prosperous middle-class family, and he was raised as a Lutheran by his mother, although he soon rejected any form of Christian religious belief. From an early age he demonstrated great promise and ambition as a writer and soaked up influences from all around him, including the fairs that occurred in Augsburg on a regular basis. He read widely and was influenced by what he read. Among his most important influences were Frank Wedekind, Georg Büchner, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine.In his adolescence Brecht became the center of a group of friends in Augsburg devoted to literature, music, and a nonconformist approach to life. In Augsburg Brecht experienced the Bavarian Revolution after the end of World War I.Brecht’s first plays Baal and Drums in the Night reflect some of his experiences and thoughts while living in Augsburg, and his revolutionary first book of poetry, Domestic Breviary, also emerged above all out of his life in Augsburg.

The years 1918–1933 were a time of such rapid and far-reaching change in Brecht’s life and artistic development that the period defies definition as a single “context.” His writings in these years were embedded in a multidimensional matrix of factors (social, intellectual, cultural, theatrical), at times complementary, at others pulling in contrary directions, some bearing the imprint of earlier experiences (particularly World War I), while others adumbrate developments that would unfold more fully in the following decades (the economic crisis of the late 1920s and the accompanying radicalization of German politics). The youthful “spirit of contradiction” that he hoped never to lose was fully in evidence in all Brecht’s efforts to master the multiple challenges facing him and his generation as it emerged from the war, with an intense hunger for life and eagerness to put its own stamp on an evolving and expanding world. In these efforts, which produced the first forms of epic theater and the Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht drew on an exceptionally diverse range of resources, including the Bible and Nietzsche, expressionism and new sobriety, Shakespeare and Shaw, Karl Valentin and Karl Marx, Georg Kaiser and Charlie Chaplin, film and circus, boxing matches and fairground entertainments.

This chapter explores Brecht’s understanding of political theater and sets it in the context of other contemporary approaches, including the work of director Erwin Piscator. It explains why Brecht did not view naturalism or expressionism as acceptable aesthetic models, and it demonstrates how he rooted his theater in a material approach to reality, showing the social and economic influences on, and implications of, characters’ decisions and actions. Epic theater creates the scope for the agency that Brecht found lacking in naturalist drama: it shows that characters have choices, enabling audiences to imagine how different decisions or circumstances might yield different results.