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.
Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, home of the Berliner Ensemble
Manfred Wekwerth and Gisela May during rehearsals of Mother Courage and Her Children (1978)
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 Elisabeth Hauptmann & 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.
Brecht in 1954
Brecht's house in Santa Monica, 1063 26th Street (2014)
Brecht and Weigel on the roof of the Berliner Ensemble during the International Workers' Day demonstrations in 1954
Graves of Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery