Kleist Prize winners

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.

Agnes Miegel (9 March 1879 – 26 October 1964) was a German author, journalist and poet. She is best known for her poems and short stories about East Prussia, but also for the support she gave to the Nazi Party.

Reinhard Johannes Sorge (29 January 1892 – 20 July 1916) was a German dramatist and poet. He is best known for writing the Expressionist play The Beggar (Der Bettler), which won the Kleist Prize in 1912 and almost singlehandedly created surrealist theatre and modern theatrical stagecraft. After being subsequently received into the Roman Catholic Church, Sorge began an effort to bring the Catholic literary revival into the literature of the Germanosphere. Instead, Sorge was conscripted into the Imperial German Army in World War I in 1915. He was killed in action during the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916. Sorge's Der Bettler, however, received a posthumous premiere in a groundbreaking production by legendary Austrian Jewish stage director Max Reinhardt in 1917.

Walter Georg Alfred Hasenclever (8 July 1890 – 22 June 1940) was a German Jewish Expressionist poet and playwright. His works were banned when the Nazis came to power and he went into exile in France. There he was imprisoned as a "foreign enemy". He died in Les Milles (Camp des Milles) near Aix-en-Provence.