Berthold alias Bert Brecht,

was a pretty important 20th century playwright,
very political. He wrote great songs, fine poems and
(my favourite) The Threepenny Novel.

He is still pretty important, since his 
Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941)
is pretty relevant just now. And has been
much performed in recent years.

The play is about a Chicago mobster
who gets control of the city’s wholesale
vegetable trade through corruption,
intimidation and violence and murder:
a clear allegory of how a certain nondescript Austrian
had climbed to power during the 1920s and 1930s,
and founded a Thousand-Year Empire
on sand and hate and submission.

It was not staged until 1958, after Brecht's death.
But Mother Courage and Her Children, about
an enterprising, child-collecting refugee/
asylum-seeker during the Thirty Years' War.
was frequently performed during his lifetime and since.

For me, however, Brecht is like Shakespeare:

better on the page than on the stage.
Unlike Ibsen.

Here is his poem on Hell (from a page of my translations)

Considering Hell,
my brother Shelley thought
it must be much like London.
Since I live in Los Angeles and not London
I think Hell is more like
Los Angeles.

In Hell, too, there must be luxuriant gardens
with flowers big as trees
which of course wither at once
if not fed
with rich people's water.

And fruit-markets where great piles of fruit*
have no smell, have no taste.
And endless convoys of cars
as light as their shadows, faster than impulses -
gleaming conveyances in which well-fed people
go nowhere from nowhere.

And houses
built for the happy, thus standing empty
even when lived in.

The houses in Hell, too, aren't
all of them ugly,
but the fear of being dumped on the street
oppresses the suburbanites
no less than the shanty-town squatters.

*Cultivated by semi-slaves in Guatemala and Honduras.

Which reminds me of this poem by MTC Cronin
about Hitler in Hell:

In hell, Hitler is forced
to protect his anonymity.

He paints walls and cadavers
and sniffs fumes of the dead;

he eats the ashes of children
and drinks blood from a funnel;

hammered into his mouth
are many pulled gold teeth; but mostly
he sits forgotten on the chair
just inside hell's door.

*

An illustrated note on Hell.

Thus end today's commonplaces.