The Mother is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. It is based on Maxim Gorky's 1906 novel of the same name.
Helene Weigel was a German actress and artistic director. She was the second wife of Bertolt Brecht and was married to him from 1930 until his death in 1956. Together they had two children.
Ekkehard Schall was a German stage and screen actor/director.
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.
Katharina Thalbach is a German actress and stage director. She played theatre at the Berliner Ensemble and at the Volksbühne Berlin, and was actress in the film The Tin Drum. She worked as a theatre and opera director.
The Theater am Schiffbauerdamm is a theatre building at the Schiffbauerdamm riverside in the Mitte district of Berlin, Germany, opened on 19 November 1892. Since 1954, it has been home to the Berliner Ensemble theatre company, founded in 1949 by Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht.
The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen, 1431 is an adaptation by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht of a radio play by Anna Seghers. It was written in collaboration with Benno Besson and premiered at the Berliner Ensemble in November 1952, in a production directed by Besson, with Käthe Reichel as Joan.
Therese Giehse, born Therese Gift, was a German actress. Born in Munich to German-Jewish parents, she first appeared on the stage in 1920. She became a major star on stage, in films, and in political cabaret. In the late 1920s through 1933, she was a leading actress at the Munich Kammerspiele.
Ruth Berlau was a Danish actress, director, photographer and writer, known for her collaboration with Bertolt Brecht and for founding the Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv in Berlin.
Erich Gustav Otto Engel was a German film and theatre director.
Burghart Klaußner is a German film actor. He received acting training at the Max-Reinhardt-Schule für Schauspiel in Berlin.
The Farewell is a 2000 German drama film directed by Jan Schütte. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known professionally as Bertolt 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 Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt.
Hans-Joachim Bunge was a German Dramaturg, Director and Author. Bunge became famous through his conversations with Hanns Eisler about Brecht.
Heinrich Breloer is a German author and film director. He has mainly worked on docudramas related to modern German history and has received many awards. Breloer's 2005 docudrama Speer und Er was described as a milestone in the understanding of Nazi Germany by the German people.
Barbara Brecht-Schall was a German actress.
Peter Palitzsch was a German theatre director. He worked with Bertolt Brecht in his Berliner Ensemble from the beginning in 1949, and was in demand internationally as a representative of Brecht's ideas. He was a theatre manager at the Staatstheater Stuttgart and the Schauspiel Frankfurt. Many of his productions were invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen festival. He worked internationally from 1980.
Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder is a DEFA film which documents the staging of Bertold Brecht's play of the same name from 1959 to 1961, which Manfred Wekwerth and Peter Palitzsch directed with the Berliner Ensemble, modelled after the original production by Bertolt Brecht and Erich Engel from 1949, with Helene Weigel in the title role. The film, made in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), received a prize at the Locarno Film Festival.
Paula Banholzer was an educator and first love of Bertolt Brecht.
As part of an anti-communist campaign in Austria against the author Bertolt Brecht, his work was boycotted for ten years. Between 1953 and 1963, no established Viennese theater performed his works. The initiators were the publicists Hans Weigel and Friedrich Torberg as well as the Burgtheater director Ernst Haeussermann.
