In Our Time: Bertolt Brecht

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Bertolt Brecht, one of the greatest European playwrights of the 20th century. His aim was to make the familiar 'strange', with plays such as Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, wanting his audience not to sit back but to engage, observe and discover the contradictions in life, and act on what they learnt. He developed this approach in turbulent times, from Weimar Germany to the rise of the Nazis, to exile in Scandinavia and America and then post-war life in East Berlin, and he has since inspired dramatists around the world