Eugen Berthold Brecht—he later dropped the first name and changed the spelling of the middle namewas born in Augsburg into a fairly well-to-do bourgeois family on 10 February 1898. His father, Friedrich Berthold Brecht, an employee of a paper factory, advanced to the position of business director; Brecht's mother was Sofie Brezing Brecht. Brecht attended elementary and high school in Augsburg. Having failed to educate his teachers (as he put it), he began to write occasional poems. In 1914 he had a short play, Die Bibel (The Bible), published in the school journal. This first drama, a kind of Judith story set in the religious wars of the seventeenth century, reflects not only the beginning of a lifelong critical involvement in the conflicting teachings of the Bible (influenced, perhaps, by a Protestant father and a Catholic mother) but also the victimization of a girl by a warring world—a motif Brecht was to take up again in later plays. Although he wrote a few patriotic poems at the outbreak of World War I, Brecht's antiwar sentiments developed early. His criticism of Horace's dictum "Dulce est et decorum pro patria mori" (It is sweet and honorable to die for the fatherland) almost led to his expulsion from school.
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