German literary critics

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the Verfremdungseffekt.
During the Nazi Germany period, Brecht fled his home country, first to Scandinavia, and during World War II to the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI. After the war he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator, actress Helene Weigel.

Walter Arthur Berendsohn (10 September 1884, in Hamburg – 30 January 1984, in Stockholm) was a German literary scholar. He was an active member of the Deutsche Liga fur Menschenrechte (League for Men's Rights), a spinoff of the pacifist Bund Neues Vaterland, until 1933 when he fled for Sweden when the group was dissolved by Nazis.

Erich Auerbach (November 9, 1892 – October 13, 1957) was a German philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. His best-known work is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a history of representation in Western literature from ancient to modern times frequently cited as a classic in the study of realism in literature. Along with Leo Spitzer, Auerbach is widely recognized as one of the foundational figures of comparative literature.

Hans Sahl (born Hans Salomon, 20 May 1902 in Dresden – 27 April 1993 in Tübingen) was a poet, critic, and novelist who began during the Weimar Republic. He came from an affluent Jewish background, but like many such German Jews he fled Germany due to the Nazis. First to Czechoslovakia in 1933, then to Switzerland, and then France. In France he was interned along with Walter Benjamin. He would later flee Marseille and work with Varian Fry to help other artists or intellectuals fleeing Nazism. From 1941, he lived in New York. In 1952, Sahl became an American citizen. He became known as one of the anti-fascist exiles and in the US translated Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, and Tennessee Williams into German. In 1989, he returned to Germany.

Luise Rinser (30 April 1911 – 17 March 2002) was a German writer, best known for her novels and short stories.