Stefan Brecht

Stefan Sebastian Brecht (November 3, 1924 – April 13, 2009) was a German-born American poet, critic, and scholar of theatre. Brecht was born in Berlin to playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and actress Helene Weigel. On September 26, 1944, he joined the United States Army. In 1947, when his family returned to Europe, Brecht chose to stay in the United States. He studied at UCLA (BS in chemistry) and Harvard on the G.I. Bill and received a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard. Brecht taught philosophy at the University of Miami. He pursued further study of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. He had a son, Michael Böhm, who was born in Germany in 1954. After moving to New York City in about 1966 with his wife, costume designer Mary McDonough Brecht (now deceased) and their two children, who were born in Paris in the early 1960s, Brecht became immersed in the radical theatre, which was just beginning at the time and started writing what he projected would be a series of seven books, The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the Mid-Sixties to the Mid-Seventies. Descriptions of performances by Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and others formed the core of Queer Theatre, which was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1978.