Stefan Brecht

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Stefan Brecht (b. 1924) is a poet, critic and scholar of theater.

The son of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, Stefan Brecht was born in Berlin. He chose to stay in the USA when his family, who had arrived in Santa Monica in 1941, returned to Europe. He went to UCLA and Harvard on the GI bill, and after receiving a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard did further work at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. A son was born in Germany in 1954.

He taught philosophy at the University of Miami. After moving to New York City in the 1960s, with his wife, costume designer Mary McDonough Brecht(now deceased) and their two children, he began writing what he projected as 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, among others, formed the core of Queer Theatre (Suhrkamp, 1978). He performed with Ludlam and also with Robert Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s; The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson was published in 1978 (Suhrkamp) and is being translated into German in abridged version for publication in 2006.^{[citation needed]} Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre (Methuen, 1988) includes the early history of that theatre and describes in detail many performances and street parades of the 1960s and '70s, with comments on Schumann's masks. A fourth book in this series, on the origins and early work of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, is being prepared for publication in 2007.^{[citation needed]}

A collection of poems he self-published in 1976 was picked up by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights and appeared in their City Lights Pocket Poets Series in 1977 as Stefan Brecht: Poems. A small collection of poems in the German language, Gedichte, was published by Aufbau-Verlag in 1984.

8th Avenue Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006) is a collection of poems written as he walked to and from the Chelsea Hotel, where he wrote, from the mid-1970s to 2001; his photographs of 8th Avenue pavements, taken to accompany the poems, appear as 8th Avenue, an artist's book from onestar press, Paris (2006).^{[citation needed]}

Now married to Rena Gill, a longtime friend whose Victoria Falls clothing store was a '70s Soho landmark, he continues to reside in downtown New York City.