Brecht, Bertolt

German poet, playwright and essayist born in Augsburg where his father was the managing director of a paper mill. Brecht went to school in his hometown. He was drafted as a medical orderly at the end of the First World War; his experiences turned him into a life-long pacifist and social critic. The poem "Legende vom toten Soldaten", written in 1918, is a bitter satire on the subject of militarism and jingoism, for which he was punished when the Nazis retracted his German passport in 1935.