During his time as a young artist in Munich (1917–1924), Brecht’s burgeoning approach to drama and theater was considerably influenced by the playwright and cabaret performer Frank Wedekind and the Bavarian comedian Karl Valentin. This chapter outlines the nature of Brecht’s contact with these two artists and their performance work, and demonstrates how their aesthetic approaches had a significant impact on the development of his epic theater. In particular, it attends to how both artists provided compelling strategies for defamiliarizing material realities and societal oppression. While Wedekind offered enthrallingly deviant protagonists and repurposed popular art forms – cabaret, circus and the Moritat, Valentin’s clowning and fairground style inducted Brecht in the deployment of gestic performance and comic incongruity. What the chapter makes apparent is the extent to which these artists provided Brecht with key models for a subversive theater that recycled old and new, popular and highbrow forms in order to deliver a social commentary that was richly satirical and fun.

The years 1918–1933 were a time of such rapid and far-reaching change in Brecht’s life and artistic development that the period defies definition as a single “context.” His writings in these years were embedded in a multidimensional matrix of factors (social, intellectual, cultural, theatrical), at times complementary, at others pulling in contrary directions, some bearing the imprint of earlier experiences (particularly World War I), while others adumbrate developments that would unfold more fully in the following decades (the economic crisis of the late 1920s and the accompanying radicalization of German politics). The youthful “spirit of contradiction” that he hoped never to lose was fully in evidence in all Brecht’s efforts to master the multiple challenges facing him and his generation as it emerged from the war, with an intense hunger for life and eagerness to put its own stamp on an evolving and expanding world. In these efforts, which produced the first forms of epic theater and the Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht drew on an exceptionally diverse range of resources, including the Bible and Nietzsche, expressionism and new sobriety, Shakespeare and Shaw, Karl Valentin and Karl Marx, Georg Kaiser and Charlie Chaplin, film and circus, boxing matches and fairground entertainments.