Bertolt Brecht was a prominent figure in the German theatre scene during the Weimar Republic. He came of age in this period and had his first successes as a playwright in Munich before moving to Berlin in 1924. In Berlin, he wrote the acclaimed The Threepenny Opera with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill, and began a long-lasting collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Brecht was immersed in Marxist thought during this time and wrote didactic Lehrstücke, plays intended to educate the audience. He became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt, a technique to distance the audience from the action on stage in order to encourage critical thinking.