Biography
Elisabeth Hauptmann was born in 1897 in Peckelsheim, Westphalia, worked first as a teacher, and moved to Berlin in 1922, where she met Bertolt Brecht in 1924. Working as an editor at the Kiepenheuer publishing house and afterwards as his closest literary collaborator, she supplied translations, research material and draft texts for his plays, including The Threepenny Opera (1928), based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. In 1929 she wrote the book for Happy End under the pseudonym Dorothy Lane, and her translation of Japanese Noh plays contributed to the creation of the teaching play Der Jasager (He Said Yes). After being arrested by the Gestapo, she fled via Paris to the United States, where she lived from 1934 to 1948, working among other things as a teacher in St. Louis, before returning to Berlin. There she worked as a dramaturg at DEFA and, from 1954, at the Berliner Ensemble; after Brecht's death in 1956 she edited his works for Suhrkamp Verlag and received the East German Lessing Prize in 1961. She died in East Berlin in 1973.
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