Wekwerth, Manfred

(1929- )

   Director, intendant. Wekwerth completed doctoral studies in 1951 and began working with Bertolt Brecht the same year at the Berliner Ensemble. His directing debut with the company came two years later with Brecht's The Mother, starring Helene Weigel. Other important Brecht productions he directed that remained in the company's repertoire through the 1960s included Die Tage derKommune (Days of the Commune), Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle), and Coriolanus; John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World and Johannes R. Becher's Winterschlacht (Winter Battle) were also part of his oeuvre. Wekwerth left the Berliner Ensemble in 1969 for work in London, Zurich, the Burgtheater in Vienna, and the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. He founded the directing program at the Ernst Busch School in Berlin, and in 1977 returned to the Berliner Ensemble as its intendant, remaining in that position until the collapse of the German Democratic Republic.