Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was a German playwright, poet, and both a director and a theorist of theater. Among his best-known plays are Galileo, The Threepenny Opera, and Mother Courage and Her Children. As one of Germany’s foremost left-wing writers and public intellectuals of the Weimar era, Brecht fled shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933. His poem “An die Nachgeborenen”—written in the late 1930s while Brecht was living in Skovsbostrand outside Svendborg, Denmark, during his exile from Nazi Germany—was first published in Paris in the journal Die Neue Weltbühne in June 1939.