THOSE who want to influence men’s minds have long recognized that the theatre is the most powerful medium through which to make the attempt. On 7 February 1601, the day before the Earl of Essex and his men staged their revolt in London, they paid the company to which Shakespeare belonged to put on a special, unexpurgated performance of his Richard II, then regarded as a play subversive to monarchy. The Jesuit-led Counter-Reformation placed dramatic presentations right at the centre of the propaganda fidei. The first secular intellectuals were no less aware of the importance of the stage. Both Voltaire and Rousseau wrote for it-and Rousseau warned of its dangerous capacity to corrupt public morals. Victor Hugo used it to destroy the last Bourbons. Byron devoted a high proportion of his energy to verse dramas; and even Marx worked on one. But it was Ibsen, as we have seen, who first deliberately and systematically, and with stunning success, used the stage to bring about a revolution in social attitudes. Bertolt Brecht, a totally different playwright in most ways, was his natural successor in this one. He created the modern, sophisticated propaganda play, exploiting brilliantly one of the twentieth century’s new cultural institutions, the large-scale state-subsidized theatre. In the two decades after his death, the 1960s and 1970s, he was probably the most influential writer in the world.
Yet Brecht was in his lifetime and remains to some extent even today a mysterious figure. This was the deliberate choice both of himself and of the Communist Party, the organization he served faithfully for the last thirty years of his existence. He, for many reasons, wanted to deflect all public attention from his life to his work. The communist establishment was equally unwilling to have his origins and background, or indeed his style of life, thoroughly explored.1 His biography thus contains many lacunae, though the main outlines are clear enough. He was born 10 February 1898 in the dull, respectable town of Augsburg, forty miles from Munich. Contrary to the repeated communist assertion, he was not of peasant stock. His forebears on both sides, going back to the sixteenth century, were solidly middle-class-gentlemen-farmers, doctors, schoolteachers, then stationmasters and businessmen.2 His mother was the daughter of a civil servant. His father was in the paper trade, as chief clerk then sales director of the papermill at Augsburg. His younger brother Walter later went into the business, becoming professor of paper-making at Darmstadt Technical University. Bertolt had a heart-condition and appeared delicate, becoming (like many other leading intellectuals) his mother’s favourite child. She said she found the sheer intensity of his wants impossible to refuse. As an adult, however, Brecht took no interest in his family. He scarcely ever mentioned his father. He did not reciprocate his mother’s affection. When his mother died in 1920 he insisted on inviting a group of noisy friends to the house the next day-‘the rest of us there were dumb with grief,’ his brother recalled-and ostentatiously left town the day before her funeral; though later, in one of his very rare moments of self-reproach, he criticized his behaviour towards his mother: ‘I should be stamped out.’3
The Brecht legend relates that at school he not only repudiated religion but publicly burned the Bible and the Catechism, and was nearly expelled for his pacifist views. In fact he seems to have written patriotic poetry and was in trouble not for pacifism but for cheating at exams. He was part of the pre-1914, guitar-playing German youth culture with its pro-nature, anti-city ideology. Most of his middle-class contemporaries were conscripted, went straight to the front and were killed there; or, if they survived, became Nazis. Brecht was not a conscientious objector but was excused army service because of his weak heart, and became a medical auxiliary (he had already studied medicine briefly at Munich University). He later painted a horrifying picture of the butchery he witnessed in military hospitals: ‘If the doctor ordered me “Amputate a leg, Brecht!” I would answer “Yes, Your Excellency,” and cut off the leg. If I was told “Make a trepanning!” I opened the man’s skull and tinkered with his brains. I saw how they patched them up to ship them back to the front as soon as possible.’4 But Brecht was not in fact called up until October 1918, by which time most of the fighting was over, and his work chiefly concerned venereal disease cases. He also lied when he later claimed (in his speech accepting the Stalin Peace Prize) that, in November 1918, he had ‘instantly’ rallied to the Bavarian Communist Republic and become a soldiers’ deputy. He gave various versions of what he did, but it was certainly not, then or at any other time, heroic.5
From 1919 onwards Brecht quickly established himself as a literary figure: first as a critic, feared for his rudeness, savagery and cruelty, then in the theatre itself, thanks to his guitar-playing, his skill at writing songs (from first to last, his poetic talent was his finest and purest) and his ability to sing them in a high-pitched, curiously mesmeric voice, not unlike Paul McCartney’s in the 1960s. The mood in the German theatre in the early 1920s was strongly leftist, and Brecht took his cue from it. His first success was Spartakus, renamed Drums in the Night (1922), which won the Kleist Prize for the best young dramatist. This made the right radical noises but Brecht was at this stage in no sense an ideologue, more an opportunist. He wanted to draw attention to himself and was astonishingly successful at it. His aim was épater la bourgeoisie. He denounced capitalism and all middle-class institutions. He attacked the army. He praised cowardice and practised it: Keuner, the autobiographical hero of his celebrated short story, ‘Measures Against Violence’, is an accomplished coward. His friend Walter Benjamin later noted that cowardice and sheer destructiveness were among his salient characteristics.6 He liked his work to provoke rows and scandals. Ideally he wanted a play of his to evoke boos and hissing from one half of the audience and aggressive applause from the other. A traditional theatre review, based on careful aesthetic analysis, did not interest him. Indeed he despised traditional intellectuals, especially those of the academic or romantic sort.
He invented, in fact, an intellectual of a new kind, rather as Rousseau or Byron had in their times. Brecht’s new-model egghead, for whom he himself was the prototype, was harsh, hard, heartless, cynical, part-gangster, part-sports-hearty. He wanted to bring to the theatre the raucous, sweaty, violent atmosphere of the sports arena. Like Byron, he enjoyed the company of professional boxers. Asked to judge a poetry competition in 1926, he ignored the four hundred entries from poets and gave the prize to a crude piece of verse he found in a bicycling magazine.7 He rejected the Austro-German musical tradition in favour of a metallic, repetitive sound, finding a kindred spirit in the Jewish composer Kurt Weill, with whom he collaborated. He wanted his stage sets to show, as it were, their bones, the machinery behind the illusion: this was his new kind of truth. Machinery fascinated him, as did the men who made and manipulated it, the engineers. He saw himself as a manipulator, a mental engineer. That, indeed, is how he is portrayed, as the engineer Kaspar Proechl in Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Erfolg, of whom another character says: ‘You lack the most important human organs: sense capable of pleasure and a loving heart.’
Many of Brecht’s attitudes and activities in the 1920s reflected his genius for self-publicity. He shared this gift with Hemingway, almost his exact contemporary (as of course with many other intellectuals), and like Hemingway he developed, as part of it, his own distinctive sartorial style. Hemingway’s, however, was all-American and predominantly sporting. Brecht clearly, if secretly, admired Hemingway and became very upset if anyone suggested he stole ideas from ‘Papa’. In the 1920s he was open about his admiration for the United States-it was the last epoch at which Europe’s intelligentsia felt it acceptable to be pro-American-especially its gangsters and sports heroes: he wrote a poem about the Dempsey-Tunney fight in 1926. So some of his dress ideas derived from across the Atlantic. But others were distinctively European. The belted leather jerkin and cap had been favoured by the violent young men of the Cheka which Lenin created early in 1918. To this Brecht added his own invention, a leather tie and waistcoats with cloth sleeves. He wanted to look half student, half workman and wholly smart. His new rig evoked varied comments. His enemies claimed he wore silk shirts under the proletarian leather gear. Carl Zuckmayer called him ‘a cross between a truck-driver and a Jesuit seminarist’8 He completed his personal style by devising a special way of combing his hair straight down over his forehead and by maintaining a perpetual three-day beard, never more, never less. These touches were to be widely imitated by young intellectuals thirty, forty, even fifty years later. They also copied his habit of wearing steel-rimmed ‘austerity’ spectacles. In Brecht’s case they were grey, his favourite colour. He wrote on a kind of grey tissue-paper and, as he became well-known, began to publish ‘Work in Progress’, called Versuche (drafts), texts of his plays in grey, deliberately sombre paperbacks like school textbooks, a highly effective form of self-promotion also much imitated later. His car, an open Steyre tourer, was also grey; he got it free by writing advertising jingles for its makers. In short, Brecht had a remarkable talent for visual presentation, a field in which, during the 1920s, the Germans led the world: at almost exactly the same time, Hitler was designing the brilliant sumptuary apparatus of the Nazi Party and SS and inventing the night-display technique later known as son et lumière.
The rise of Hitler was one factor which pushed Brecht into a more political posture. In 1926 he read Capital, or parts of it, and thereafter was associated with the Communist Party, although on the evidence of Ruth Fischer, a German CP leader and sister of his composer-friend Hanns Eisler, he did not actually join it until 1930.9 The year 1926 was also notable for the beginning of his collaboration with Weill. In 1928 they produced The Threepenny Opera, which had its first night on 31 August and was an immediate smash hit, first in Germany, then all over the world. In many ways it was a characteristic example of the way Brecht operated. The main idea was taken from Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and entire passages of the writing were simply stolen from K.L. Ammers’ translation of François Villon (after protests, Ammers was given a share of the royalties). The work’s success was in large part due to Weill’s catchy and highly original music. But somehow Brecht managed to acquire most of the credit for its lasting success, and when he finally quarrelled with Weill, he announced contemptuously: ‘I’ll kick that fake Richard Strauss downstairs.’10
One reason Brecht captured the credit was his great skill in public relations and showbiz politics. In 1930 G.W. Pabst, who had got the film rights of Threepenny Opera, objected to the shooting script Brecht had written, which changed the plot, moving it sharply in a more communist direction. Brecht refused to change it back and the issue came to court in October. He performed some carefully staged tantrums for the cameras and although the case was bound to go against him-Pabst had bought the original play, not a new Marxist version of it-Brecht extracted a massive financial settlement in return for abandoning the suit and was able, moreover, to pose as a martyr to his artistic integrity at the hands of a brutal capitalist system. He published his own script with an introductory essay pointing up the strictly Marxist moral-‘justice, freedom and character have all become conditional upon the process of production’.11 He had a brilliant knack of advancing his personal interests while proclaiming his devotion to the public’s.
A second reason for Brecht’s growing celebrity was that, by 1930, he was accepted by the CP as their own star and had all the advantages of its powerful institutional backing. Brecht never cut much ice in Moscow in Stalin’s day, and even the German CP, far more flexible in artistic matters, thought some of his work lightweight and heterodox-for instance The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), which provoked rows, fights and Nazi-organized demonstrations. But Brecht showed himself amenable to Party discipline, attended lectures on Marxism-Leninism at the Workers’ College in Berlin and indeed, being at heart a Hegelian who loved the mental fantasy-world of the dialectic method-his mind was very German, like Marx’s own-found the system intellectually attractive. His first proper Marxist work, Die Massnahme, dates from the summer of 1930 and his adaptation of Gorky’s The Mother was performed all over Germany in CP-controlled halls. He wrote agitprop film scripts. He developed, again with Weill (who was never, however, a keen Marxist), the new political art form of the Schulopern (school-opera or didactic drama). Its object was not so much (as it claimed) to educate the audience politically as to turn it into a well-drilled chorus, not unlike the crowds at Nuremberg. The actors became mere political instruments, men-machines rather than artists, and the characters in the plays were not individuals but types, performing highly formalized actions. Such artistic merit as this art form possessed lay in the brilliance of the staging, at which of course Brecht excelled, but its political uses were obvious and it lived on for decades, reaching its nadir with the grim opera-dramas staged by Madame Mao during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Brecht also invented the use of the set-piece trial (of witches, Socrates, Galileo, Marx’s suppressed newspaper, etc.) for agitprop purposes, and it passed into the left-wing repertoire, surfacing from time to time as in the Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal. Indeed many of Brecht’s stage inventions-use of white make-up, skeletons, coffins, floats of giant weapons-are still regularly employed in progressive street theatre, processions and demonstrations.
Brecht had other devices for keeping his name before the public. He had himself photographed writing poetry in the midst of a crowd of workers, to emphasize that the days of romantic political individualism were dead and that poetry was now a collective proletarian activity. He embraced publicly the principles of Marxist self-criticism. He took his school opera Der Jasager (The Yes-Man) to the Communist-controlled Karl Marx Schule, invited comments from the students and re-wrote it in the light of them (later, having got the publicity, he quietly changed it back again).12 He repeatedly stressed the element of collaboration in his work, though if a play failed he quickly made it clear his own share in it was modest.
Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 brought this successful career to an abrupt end, and Brecht left Germany the morning after the Reichstag fire. The 1930s were a difficult time for him. He had no wish to be a martyr. He tried Vienna, did not like the growing mood of pan-German politics, and left for Denmark. He flatly refused to fight in Spain. He went several times to Moscow, and indeed was co-editor of Das Wort (with Feuchtwanger and Willi Bredel), published in Russia, which brought him his only regular income. But he rightly judged that Russia was a dangerous place for such as he and never spent more than a few days at a time there. His writing was mainly political hack-work in the years 1933-38. Then, towards the end of the decade, he suddenly began to produce, in quick succession, work of much higher quality-The Life of Galileo (1937), The Trial of Lucullus (1938), The Good Woman of Setzuan (1938-40) and Mother Courage (1939). He decided to tackle the American market, writing The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, with Hitler presented as a Chicago gangster. The coming of war in 1939 persuaded him Denmark was too risky; he moved to Sweden, then Finland, then-having got a US visa-across Russia and the Pacific to California and Hollywood (1941).
He had been to America before but had made no impact outside left-wing circles. His young man’s idealized, comic-strip vision of America quickly faded and he never got to like the reality; hated it, indeed. He could not work the Hollywood studio system, and grew bitterly jealous of other émigrés who succeeded there (Peter Lorre was an exception).13 His screenplays were not liked. Some of his projects foundered completely. In 1944-45 W.H. Auden worked with him on an English version of The Caucasian Chalk Circle and they collaborated on an adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi; but at the last minute their version was dropped in favour of the original text, which had had an unexpected hit in London, so Brecht took his name off it. A production of Galileo, starring the great Charles Laughton, flopped. Neither in Hollywood nor on Broadway did he understand the market or steel himself to adapt to it. He could not abide theatrical masters or even co-equals; he had to be in absolute charge to be effective.
Realizing that his theatre could not succeed except under ideal conditions which he personally dominated, Brecht prepared himself for a Faustian bargain. It was precipitated by an appearance before the Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee, on 30 October 1947. The Committee was then investigating communist subversion in Hollywood and Brecht, along with nineteen others, was subpoenaed to appear as a potential ‘hostile witness’. The others had collectively agreed to refuse to answer questions about their CP membership, and so were cited for contempt of Congress; ten of them got one-year prison sentences.14But Brecht had no intention of serving time in a US jail. When asked about membership he flatly denied it: ‘No, no, no, no, no, never.’ The interrogation had elements of farce, for his interpreter, David Baumgardt of the Library of Congress, had an even thicker accent than Brecht’s own, and the furious Chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, shouted: ‘I cannot understand the interpreter any more than I can the witness.’ However, the Committee had not done its homework and Brecht, realizing this, lied smoothly and earnestly. ‘Haven’t many of your writings been based on the philosophy of Lenin and Marx?’ ‘No. I don’t think that is quite correct. But of course I studied. I had to study as a playwright who wrote historical plays.’ When asked about songs he had contributed to the Communist Party Song Book, he said they were mistranslations. He planned, indeed, to make a submissive statement, asserting, ‘My activities…have always been purely literary activities of a strictly independent nature,’ but was given no chance to read it. But he lied with such conviction, was so punctilious in correcting any factual mistakes, appeared so sincere and anxious to help the Committee in any way he could, that he was publicly thanked as an exceptionally cooperative witness.15 The other subpoenaed writers were so delighted by the cunning way in which he had hoodwinked the Committee that they ignored the fact that he had betrayed them by agreeing to answer questions at all. So he remained a hero of the left. Safely back in Europe, he struck a defiant posture for the press: ‘When they accused me of wanting to steal the Empire State Building, I felt it was time for me to leave.’16
Basing himself in Switzerland, Brecht now began a careful survey of the European scene before deciding how to plan his future career. He devised a new uniform for himself, a well-cut, grey ‘worker’s suit’, with a grey cloth cap. He had many well-informed contacts through his CP connections. He quickly discovered a fact of critical importance to himself. The emergent Soviet puppet regime in East Germany, struggling for political recognition and, still more, for cultural self-respect, would go a long way to accommodate a major literary figure who helped to give it legitimacy. Brecht had exactly the right literary and ideological credentials for East Germany’s purposes. In October 1948 Brecht carried out a reconnaissance in East Berlin, attending a reception in his honour given by the CP Kulturbund. Wilhelm Pieck, later to be President of East Germany, sat on one side of him, Colonel Tupanov, the Soviet Political Commissar, on the other. Called on to reply to the speeches, Brecht used a characteristic gimmick, which both retained all his options and struck a theatrical note of modesty. He simply shook hands with the men on either side of him, and sat down. Three months later, a lavish, heavily subsidized production of Mother Courage opened in East Berlin; it was a huge success, with critics coming from all over Western Europe to see it. This finally persuaded Brecht to make East Germany the base for his theatrical operations.
However, his master plan was more complicated. He discovered that Austria, too, was in quest of post-war legitimacy. Austrians had been among Hitler’s most enthusiastic supporters and had run many of his concentration camps (including four out of the six big death camps). For strategic reasons the Allies had found it convenient to treat Austria as an ‘occupied country’, technically a ‘victim of Nazi aggression’ rather than an enemy, so after 1945 Austrians had neutral status. An Austrian passport was therefore very convenient to hold. At the same time the Austrian authorities were as anxious as the East Germans to win their way back into civilized hearts by stressing their cultural contribution. They too saw Brecht as a useful recruit. So a deal was struck. Brecht certified that he wanted ‘to do intellectual work in a country that offered the appropriate atmosphere for it’. He added: ‘Let me emphasize that I consider myself only a poet and do not wish to serve any definite political ideology. I repudiate the idea of repatriating myself in Germany.’ He insisted that his links with East Berlin were superficial: ‘I have no kind of official function or engagement in Berlin and receive no salary at all…it is my intention to regard Salzburg as my permanent place of residence.’17 Most of these statements were lies, and Brecht had no intention of living in Salzburg. But he got his Austrian passport, and this not only enabled him to travel wherever he wanted but gave him a considerable degree of independence vis-à-vis the East German government.
There was yet a third element to Brecht’s carefully designed strategy. His arrangement with the East Germans was that they would provide him with a company and theatre of his own, backed by considerable resources, in return for his artistic identification with the regime. He calculated, rightly as it turned out, that such an investment would give his plays exactly the right push they needed to penetrate the world repertoire. His copyrights would thus become extremely valuable and he had no intention of allowing the East Germans to benefit from them, nor to subject himself to the control of their publishing houses. In the decade 1922-33 he had always refused to have anything to do with the German CP’s publishing cooperatives, preferring sound capitalist firms which paid proper royalties. Now too he put his copyrights into the hands of a West German publisher, Peter Suhrkamp, and forced the East Germans to carry, even in their own editions of his works, the line ‘By permission of Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt-on-Main.’ All his publishing profits, worldwide, and royalties on international productions, were thus paid in hard West German currency, and in due course transferred to the bank account he had opened in Switzerland.
By the summer of 1949, thanks to a good deal of double-dealing and outright lying, Brecht had exactly what he wanted: an Austrian passport, East German government backing, a West German publisher and a Swiss bank account. He took up residence as ‘artistic adviser’ to what was in effect his own company, the Berliner Ensemble, with his wife Helene Weigel as director. The first big production, Mr Puntila, opened on 12 November 1949. In due course, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm was made over to him as the permanent home of the company, launched with a poster by Picasso. No artist since Wagner had been given a set-up on this scale for the ideal performance of his works. He had sixty actors, plus costume and set designers and musicians, and dozens of production assistants, a total of 250 employees. All the conceivable luxuries which a playwright had ever dreamed of were his. He could rehearse for up to five months. Indeed he could, and did, cancel an evening performance of a play already in the repertoire in order to continue rehearsing a new one-patrons were simply handed their money back when they arrived. There were no worries about the numbers of actors or production costs. He could rewrite and transform his plays several times over in the light of full rehearsals and thus achieve a degree of polish no other playwright in the world could attain. There was a large travelling budget which enabled him to take the company’s production of Mother Courage to Paris in 1954, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle the following year.
These visits were the true beginning of Brecht’s international fame and influence. But he had been preparing for this day for many years, using all his wonderful skills of self-promotion. He polished his proletarian image as well as his plays. Extreme care was taken in tailoring his worker’s suits. Interviewers were encouraged but scrupulously vetted. Photographs were allowed but only on condition Brecht could select those for publication. Brecht had always been anxious to give his work a ‘serious’, even solid, dimension and attract the attention of academics, whom he shrewdly saw were excellent long-term promoters of a writer’s reputation. That was why he had begun his ‘Work in Progress’ series, and this was now resumed but on a much larger scale. In the United States he had kept a ‘working journal’, not so much a diary as a running account of his work and the functioning of his artistic mind, dressed up with what he liked to call ‘documentation’, newspaper clippings and the like. In 1945 he began to call these and other working papers an ‘archive’. He had them all photographed by the then-equivalent of microfilm and persuaded the New York Public Library to take a complete set. The object was to encourage students to write Ph.D. theses on Brecht’s work by making it easy for them. Another set went to a Harvard graduate, Gerhard Nellhaus, who was already at work on such a thesis and in due course became an enthusiastic and effective promoter of Brecht’s image in the US. Brecht had already acquired an American academic evangelist in the shape of Eric Bentley, an UCLA English professor, who had been working on Stefan Georg. In 1943 Brecht encouraged him to drop Georg and concentrate on himself. Thereafter Bentley not only translated (with Maja Bentley) The Caucasian Chalk Circle and arranged its first US production in 1948, but became Brecht’s leading drum-beater across the Atlantic. Brecht was cold towards such disciples and forced them to concentrate relentlessly on his work. Bentley testified: ‘he did not try to find out much about me. He did not invite me to find out much about him.’18 Brecht grasped that raising difficulties, even being curmudgeonly, far from discouraging academic sleuths and would-be acolytes, actually whetted their appetites to do him service. He became systematically awkward and exigent, all in the name of artistic integrity. Rousseau had made exactly the same discovery and exploited it, but in Brecht’s case the technique was applied with Germanic efficiency and thoroughness.
By the 1950s these efforts were paying increasing dividends in America. Brecht was also assiduously promoting his reputation in Europe and encouraging others to do the same. In East Berlin his vast power of theatrical patronage attracted a circle of young would-be directors and designers. He ordered them around like a Prussian sergeant-major-indeed he ran the whole company with a fierce and arbitrary authority-and they dutifully revered him. His rehearsals themselves became theatrical occasions and were tape-recorded by his disciples, the results being added to the ‘archive’ as well as circulated in London, Paris and elsewhere. These young men were one means whereby the Brechtian gospel was spread throughout the world of show-business.19 But he was also promoted by key intellectuals outside his circle. In France the drum was beaten by Roland Barthes in the magazine Théâtre populaire. As one of the founders of the new and fashionable science of semiology-study of the modes of human communication-Barthes was in an ideal position to place Brecht on a pedestal for intellectual admiration. In Britain there was a still more influential fugelman in the shape of Kenneth Tynan, who had been converted to Brecht by Eric Bentley in 1950 and who from 1954 was theatre critic of the Observer.
This assiduous promotion of Brecht and his work might have been less effective had it not coincided with a fundamental change in the economics of the Western theatre. In the quarter-century 1950-75, for the first time, virtually every country in Europe accepted the principle of state-subsidized theatre. These new institutions were conceived on a large scale and endowed with ample resources, often partly funded from the private sector. Unlike the state theatres of the ancien régime, of which the Comédie Française was the archetype, the new companies were usually placed by their constitution outside government control and indeed prided themselves on their independence. Superficially they resembled the generously financed theatres of Eastern Europe, Brecht’s in particular; indeed, they tended to take Eastern Europe as their model, concentrating on lavish, meticulously rehearsed productions. Where they differed, however, was in performing not only the classics but ‘significant’ new plays from an international repertoire. Brecht’s oeuvre was a natural choice for this category. Indeed in London, where the change was most revolutionary-the subsidized theatres quickly displacing the commercial ones as providers of ‘quality’ plays-the National Theatre itself appointed Kenneth Tynan its first literary manager. Hence, throughout Europe and then all over the world, audiences saw Brecht plays performed under heavily subsidized and so ideal conditions, often directly copied from the standards he had laid down in his own theatre. Not even Wagner had enjoyed this degree of good fortune.
Thus Brecht’s Faustian bargain paid off, and even in his own lifetime he was rapidly becoming the most influential figure in world theatre. He had always been prepared to deliver his share, or as much of it as he could not withhold by his cunning. From a very early age Brecht had not merely practised but made a cult of self-interested servility. His philosophy was Schweikian. One of the earliest sayings attributed to him is: ‘You mustn’t forget that art’s a swindle. Life’s a swindle.’ To survive you have to engage in swindles yourself, cautiously, successfully. His works abound in advice to this effect. In Drums in the Night, the cowardly soldier Kragler boasts: ‘I am a swine-and the swine goes home [from the war].’ His hero Galileo, bowing before the Medici, says: ‘You think my letter too subservient?…A man like me can get into a moderately dignified position only by crawling on his belly. And you know I despise people whose brains are unable to fill their stomachs.’ Brecht reiterated this doctrine off stage too. He told his fifteen-year-old son Stefan that poverty must be avoided at all costs, because poverty precluded generosity. To survive, he said, you had to be egotistic. The most important commandment was ‘Be good to yourself.’20
Behind this philosophy was the adamantine selfishness which seems to be such a common characteristic of leading intellectuals. But Brecht pursued his egotistical objectives with a systematic and cold-blooded ruthlessness which is very rare, even by their standards. He accepted the grim logic of servility: that is, if he bowed to the strong, he tyrannized over the weak. His attitude to women throughout his life had an awesome consistency: he made all of them serve his purpose. They were hens in a farmyard of which he was cock. He even devised a sartorial style for his women, complementary to his own: long dresses, dark colours, a hint of puritanism.21 He appears to have had his first success when seventeen, seducing a girl two years younger. As a young man he concentrated on working-class girls: peasants, farmers’ daughters, hairdressers, shopgirls; later it was actresses, by the score. No impresario ever used the casting couch more unscrupulously, and Brecht took particular pleasure in corrupting strictly brought-up Catholic girls. It is not clear why women found him so attractive. One actress girlfriend, Marianne Zoff, said he was always dirty: she had to wash his neck and ears herself. Elsa Lanchester, wife of Charles Laughton, said his teeth were ‘little tombstones sticking out of a black mouth’. But his voice, thin, reedy, high-pitched, clearly appealed to some; when he sang, said Zoff, his ‘grating metallic voice’ sent shivers down her spine; she also liked his ‘spider thinness’ and ‘the dark button eyes’ which ‘could sting’. Brecht was attentive (in the early stages), a great hand-kisser, persistent, above all demanding; it was not only his mother who found the sheer intensity of his requests hard to resist.
Moreover Brecht, though heartless, clearly saw women as more important to him than men; he gave them responsibilities, even if only on a servile basis. He liked to provide each with a special name, which only he used: ‘Bi’, ‘Mar’, ‘Muck’ and so on. He did not mind jealousy, spitting, scratching, rows; liked them in fact. His aim, like Shelley’s, was to run small sexual collectives, with himself as master. Where Shelley failed, he usually succeeded. At all times he ran women in tandem, double-and triple-banking them. In July 1919 he had a son by a young woman called Paula Banholzer (‘Bi’), before whom he dangled vague promises of marriage. In February 1921 he took up with Zoff (‘Mar’), who also became pregnant. She wanted to keep the baby but he refused: ‘A child would destroy all my peace of mind.’ The two women found out about each other and ran Brecht to earth in a Munich café. They made him sit down between them and choose: which? He replied; ‘Both.’ Then he proposed to Bi that he marry Mar, make her baby legitimate, then divorce her and marry Bi, making her son legitimate too. Mar read him an angry lecture and swept out of the café in disgust. Bi, rather more timid, would have liked to do the same. Instead she just left. Brecht followed her, got into her train compartment, proposed marriage and was accepted. A few weeks later he did indeed marry-not Bi but Mar. She lost her first child but produced a daughter, Hanne, in March 1923. Within months Brecht was having an affair with another actress, Helene Weigel. He moved into her flat in September 1924 and their son, Stefan, was born two months later. Gradually other members of the sexual collective were acquired, including his devoted secretary, Elizabeth Hauptmann, and yet another actress, Carola Neher, who played Polly in the Threepenny Opera. Brecht and Mar were divorced in 1927, thus making him available for matrimony again. Which would he choose this time? He hesitated two years, finally picking Weigel as the most consistently useful. He presented Neher with a compensatory bunch of flowers, saying: ‘It can’t be helped but it doesn’t mean anything.’ She bashed him on the head with the bouquet. Hauptmann tried to commit suicide. These messy and for the women harrowing arrangements left Brecht serene. Not once did he give any indication he was perturbed by the sufferings he inflicted on women. They were to be used and discarded, as and when they served his purpose.
There was the tragic case of Margarete Steffin (‘Muck’), an amateur actress to whom he had given a part, then seduced during rehearsals. She followed him into exile and became an unpaid secretary. She was a gifted linguist and dealt with all his foreign correspondence (Brecht found it difficult to cope with any language except his own). She suffered from tuberculosis and her condition slowly worsened during the exile years of the 1930s. When her doctor and friend Dr Robert Lund urged her to go into hospital, Brecht objected: ‘That won’t do any good, she can’t stay in hospital now because I need her.’ So she forwent the treatment and continued to work for him, being abandoned in Moscow in 1941 when he left for California; she died there suddenly a few weeks later, a telegram from Brecht in her hand. She was thirty-three.
Another case was Ruth Berlau, with whom he began an affair in 1933, a clever Dane aged twenty-seven, whom he stole from her distinguished doctor husband. As with his other mistresses, he gave her a good deal of secretarial and literary work to do. Indeed, he took a lot of notice of what she said about his plays. This infuriated Weigel, who hated Berlau more than any other of Brecht’s girls. Berlau was with him in America, where she complained bitterly: ‘I am Brecht’s backstreet wife’ and ‘I am the whore of a classical writer.’ She became deranged and had to be treated in New York’s Bellevue Hospital. Brecht’s comment: ‘Nobody is as crazy as a crazy communist.’ Discharged from hospital, she began to drink heavily. She followed him to East Berlin, sometimes submissive, sometimes creating scenes, until he finally had her shipped back to Denmark, where she collapsed into alcoholism. Berlau was warmhearted and gifted, and her sufferings over the years do not bear thinking about.
Weigel was the toughest of Brecht’s women, but also the most servile. In effect she replaced his mother. Brecht, like Marx, had a perpetual need to exploit people, and in Weigel he achieved his masterpiece of exploitation, Marx’s Jenny and Lenchen rolled into one. In many ways Weigel was a strong-minded woman, with powers of leadership and immense organizing capacity. At a superficial level they seemed equals: he called her ‘Weigel’, she called him ‘Brecht’. But she lacked confidence in herself as a woman, especially in her sex appeal, and he seized on this weakness and made use of it. She served him equally in the home and the theatre. At home she washed and scrubbed with passionate energy, scoured the antique shops for fine things, cooked furiously, sometimes brilliantly, and gave endless parties for his colleagues, friends and girls. She promoted his professional interests with every fibre in her being. When he acquired his own theatre in 1949 she ran it for him: box office, bills, builders, cleaners, staff and catering, all the administrative side. But he made it abundantly, even cruelly, clear she was in charge of the building only and had nothing to do with the creative activities, from which she was pointedly excluded. She often had to write to him for an appointment on theatre business.
Indeed at home they each had distinct apartments with their own doorbells. This was to spare her from the full extent of Brecht’s philanderings, which continued relentlessly, almost impersonally, during his Berlin years, when his power and position gave him physical access to scores of young actresses. From time to time Weigel, driven beyond endurance, would leave home. But usually she was grimly, resignedly tolerant. Sometimes she gave the young mistresses good advice: Brecht was a very jealous man; promiscuous himself, he expected his women to be faithful or at least to remain firmly under his direction. He demanded control, and that meant good information. He was quite capable of making several telephone calls to check on the activities of a mistress who was not spending the evening with him. Towards the end he sometimes resembled an old stag, working hard to keep his hinds together.
Brecht’s intensive, lifelong womanizing left him no time for his children. He had at least two illegitimate ones. Ruth Berlau bore him a son, born in 1944, who died young. His earlier son by Paula, Frank Banholzer, grew to manhood and was killed on the Russian front in 1943. Brecht did not exactly refuse to acknowledge him, as Marx disowned his Freddy. But he took no interest either, scarcely ever saw him, and never mentions him in his journals. But then his legitimate children did not figure much in his life either. He grudged any time he had to spend on or with them. It was the usual tale of intellectual idealism. Ideas came before people, Mankind with a capital ‘M’ before men and women, wives, sons or daughters. Oscar Homolka’s wife Florence, who knew Brecht well in America, summed it up tactfully: ‘in his human relationships he was a fighter for people’s rights without being overly concerned with the happiness of persons close to him.’22 Brecht himself argued, quoting Lenin, that one had to be ruthless with individuals to serve the collective.
The same principle applied to work. Brecht had a highly original and creative presentational style but his matter, as often as not, was taken from other writers. He was a gifted adapter, parodist, refurbisher and updater of other men’s plots and ideas. Indeed it is probably true that no other writer ever attained such eminence by contributing so little that was truly his own. And why not, he would ask cynically? What did it matter so long as the proletariat was served? Detected in stealing Ammers’ Villon, he conceded what he termed his ‘basic laxity in matters of literary property’-an odd admission from a man later so tenacious in guarding his own. His St Joan of the Stockyards (1932) is a kind of parody of Schiller’s Maid of Orleans and Shaw’s St Joan. He based Señora Carrar’s Rifles on J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea. His Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti involved stealing the work of the folklorist Hella Wuolojoki, who had been Brecht’s hostess in Finland, a characteristic piece of ingratitude. His Freiheit und Demokratie (1947) owed a good deal to Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy. He stole from Kipling. He stole from Hemingway. When Ernest Bornemann drew Brecht’s attention to a curious resemblance between one of his plays and a Hemingway short story-thus touching on a tender spot-he provoked an explosion. Brecht shouted: ‘Get out-get out-get out!’ Helene Weigel, who was in the kitchen cooking and had not heard the beginning of the row-had no idea what it was about-loyally joined in and rushed into the room screaming ‘Yes, go, go, go!’ and ‘swinging her frying pan like a sword’.23
Brecht’s ‘basic laxity’ was one reason why, apart from his satellites and those tied to him by party bonds, he was generally unpopular with other writers. He was much despised by the academic writers of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Horkheimer, etc.) as a ‘vulgar Marxist’. Adorno said that Brecht spent hours every day putting dirt under his fingernails so he looked like a worker. In America he made enemies of both Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden. Isherwood resented the efforts of both Brecht and Weigel to destroy his newly acquired Buddhist faith. He found Brecht ‘ruthless’, a bully, and the pair of them rather like a Salvation Army couple.24 Auden, Brecht’s former collaborator, praised his poetry but dismissed him as a serious political figure (‘He couldn’t think’) and found his moral character deplorable: ‘a most unpleasant man’, ‘an odious person’, one of the few who actually deserved the death sentence-‘In fact I can imagine doing it to him myself.’25 Thomas Mann, too, disliked Brecht: he was ‘a party-liner’, ‘very gifted-unfortunately’, ‘a Monster’. Brecht lashed back: Mann was ‘that short-story writer’, a ‘clerico-fascist’, ‘half-wit’, ‘reptile’.26
One of the reasons why Adorno and his friends disliked Brecht so much was that they resented his identification with ‘the workers’, which they rightly saw as humbug. Of course their own claim to understand what ‘the workers’ really wanted, felt and believed was equally without foundation; they led entirely middle-class lives too and, like Marx himself, never met the sons of toil. But at least they did not dress up as proles, in clothes carefully designed by expensive tailors. There was a degree of lying, of systematic deception about Brecht which turned even their stomachs. For instance, there was a tale he spread about himself arriving at the door of an expensive hotel for an appointment (the Savoy in London, the Ritz in Paris, the Plaza in New York-the venue changed), dressed of course in his ‘worker’s suit’, and being refused admission by the uniformed doorman. As Brecht was naturally autocratic and quite capable of behaving like an incensed Junker if anyone tried to prevent him from getting what he really wanted, it is most improbable that such an event ever occurred. But Brecht used it as an emblem of his relations with the capitalist system. In one of his versions, the story goes that he was stopped at the entrance to a lavish Western reception to which he had been invited, and asked to fill out a form. When he had done so, the doorman asked: ‘Bertolt Brecht? Are you a relative of Bertolt Brecht?’ Brecht replied: ‘Yes, I am his own son,’ then exited, murmuring: ‘In every hole, you still find a Kaiser Wilhelm II.’27
Some of his publicity tricks Brecht picked up from Charlie Chaplin, whom he admired and once rated a better director even than himself. Thus, when he arrived in his car at an official party and the commissionaire opened its door, Brecht would pointedly get out at the other side, leaving the commissionaire looking foolish and getting a laugh from the gaping crowd. The car, as it happened, was still the old Steyre. Brecht had noisily declined the privilege of an official East German limousine. But keeping and running the Steyre (including fuel, spare parts, repairs, etc.) was just as much a privilege in practice-it was impossible for anyone not connected with the regime to run a private car-and the Steyre had the added advantage to Brecht of serving as a personal publicity symbol.
Again, there was something intrinsically deceptive about the way Brecht lived. In addition to his fine flat overlooking the cemetery where his beloved Hegel was buried (Weigel’s flat was on the floor below), Brecht purchased a superb country property at Buckow on Lake Scharmutzel. It had been confiscated by the government from a ‘capitalist’ and Brecht used it for summer entertaining under its massive old trees. It was in fact two houses, one smaller than the other, and Brecht let it be known that he lived in what he called ‘the gardener’s cottage’. In his city flat he kept, for display to visiting officials of the regime, portraits of Marx and Engels; but they were arranged in a slightly ‘satirical’ manner-undetectable, it was supposed, to the official eye-to evoke a titter from friends.
Brecht’s anxiety to preserve his image and present at any rate the appearance of independence arose from the undoubted fact that he had made a Faustian exchange. But there was nothing really new in his identification of his professional interests with the survival and spread of communist power. It was implicit and sometimes explicit in his life since 1930. Brecht was a Stalinist throughout the 1930s, sometimes a fanatical one. The American philosopher Sidney Hook records a chilling conversation in 1935 when Brecht called at his apartment on Barrow Street, Manhattan. The great purges were just beginning and Hook, raising the cases of Zinoviev and Kamenev, asked Brecht how he could bear to work with the American communists, who were trumpeting their guilt. Brecht said that the US communists were no good-nor were the Germans either-and that the only body which mattered was the Soviet Party. Hook pointed out that they were all part of the same movement, responsible for the arrests and imprisonment of innocent former comrades. Brecht: ‘As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.’ Hook: ‘What are you saying?’ Brecht: ‘The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.’ (The conversation was in German, which Hook gives in his account.) Hook: ‘Why? Why?’ He repeated the question but Brecht did not answer. Hook got up, went into the next room and brought Brecht’s hat and coat. ‘When I returned he was still sitting in his chair, holding a drink in his hand. When he saw me with his hat and coat, he looked surprised. He put his glass down, rose and with a sickly smile took his hat and coat and left.’28 When Hook first published this account, it was disputed by Eric Bentley. But according to Hook, when he originally related the incident to Bentley (at the 1960 Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom), Bentley had said: ‘That was just like Brecht’-uncannily recalling Byron’s initial reaction to the story of Shelley and his illegitimate child by Claire Clair-mont. Moreover, confirmation came from Professor Henry Pachter of City University who testified that Brecht had made ‘statements to the same effect in my presence’, and adding the still more devastating justification which Brecht had produced at the time: ‘Fifty years hence the communists will have forgotten Stalin but I want to be sure that they will still read Brecht. Therefore I cannot separate myself from the Party.’29
The truth is, Brecht never protested against the purges even when they struck down his own friends. When his former mistress, Carola Neher, was arrested in Moscow, he commented: ‘If she has been condemned, there must have been substantial evidence against her’; the furthest he would go was to add that, in this case, ‘one does not have the feeling that one pound of crime has been met with one pound of punishment.’30 Carola vanished-almost certainly murdered by Stalin. When another friend, Tretiakov, was shot by Stalin, Brecht wrote an elegiac poem; but he would not publish it until many years later. At the time his public comment was: ‘With total clarity the trials have proved the existence of active conspiracies against the regime…All the scum at home and abroad, all the parasites, professional criminals, informers joined them. All this rabble had the same objectives as [the conspirators]. I am convinced this is the truth.’31
At the time, indeed, Brecht always, and often publicly, supported all Stalin’s policies, including his artistic ones. In 1938-39, for instance, he supported the attack on ‘formalism’-that is, in effect, any kind of artistic experiment or innovation. ‘The very salutary campaign against formalism,’ he wrote, ‘has helped the productive development of artistic forms, by proving that social content is an absolutely decisive condition for such development. Any formal innovation which does not serve and derive its justification from its social content will remain utterly frivolous.’32 When Stalin finally died, Brecht’s comment was: ‘The oppressed of all five continents…must have felt their heartbeats stop when they heard that Stalin was dead. He was the embodiment of their hopes.’33 He was delighted in 1955 to be awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. Most of the 160,000 roubles went straight into his Swiss account. But he went to Moscow to receive it and asked Boris Pasternak, apparently unaware of his vulnerable position, to translate his acceptance speech. Pasternak was happy to do this, but later-the prize having been renamed in the meantime-ignored Brecht’s request that he translate a bunch of his poems in praise of Lenin. Brecht was dismayed by the circulation of Khrushchev’s Secret Session Speech on Stalin’s crimes and strongly opposed to its publication. He gave his reasons to one of his disciples: ‘I have a horse. He is lame, mangy and he squints. Someone comes along and says: but the horse squints, he is lame and, look here, he is mangy. He is right, but what use is that to me? I have no other horse. There is no other. The best thing, I think, is to think about his faults as little as possible.’34
Not thinking was a policy Brecht had perforce adopted himself, since from 1949 he had in effect been a theatrical functionary of the ultra-Stalinist East German regime. He began as he meant to continue, writing a court poem, ‘To My Compatriots’, to mark the ‘election’ of Wilhelm Pieck as President of the new German Democratic Republic, 2 November 1949. He enclosed it in a letter to Pieck expressing his ‘delight’ at the event. On the whole Brecht was the most consistently loyal of all the writers owned by the Communist Party, if we exclude the absolute hacks. He lent his name to whatever international policy the regime was currently promoting. He protested strongly to the West German intelligentsia for conniving at the rearmament by the Federal Republic, while remaining silent about similar arming by the GDR. It was a habit of his to denounce others for his own sins: a repeated theme in these years was the wickedness of Western intellectuals who ‘serve’ capitalism for money and privileges. He was at work on a play dealing with this subject when he died. He supplied masses of anti-Adenauer material including a preposterous cantata Herrnburger Bericht, with such ditties as
Adenauer, Adenauer, show us your hand
For thirty pieces of silver you sell our land, etc.
This won him the GDR’s National Prize for Literature (First Class). He made himself available to be shown to visiting dignitaries and gave them a set speech denouncing West German rearmament. He signed protest telegrams. He wrote marching songs and other poems for the regime.
There were occasional rows, usually over money-for instance with the East German state film company over Mother Courage. The regime rejected Kriegsfibel at first as ‘pacifist’, but gave way when he threatened to bring the issue before the Communist-controlled World Peace Council. But as a rule it was Brecht who yielded. His 1939 play The Trial of Lucullus, originally written for radio as an anti-war diatribe, was set to music by Paul Dessau and a production planned to open on 17 March 1951 at the East Berlin State Opera. The regime became alarmed by the advance publicity. They decided it, too, was pacifist, and while it was too late to stop the production they reduced it to three performances and issued all the tickets to Party workers. But some were sold on the black market to West Berliners, who came and applauded wildly. The two remaining performances were cancelled. A week later the official Party paper, Neues Deutschland, published an attack under the heading: ‘The Trial of Lucullus: the Failure of an Experiment at the German State Opera’. The fire concentrated on the music of Dessau, described as a follower of Stravinsky, ‘a fanatical destroyer of the European musical tradition’, but the text was also criticized for ‘failing to correspond to reality’. Brecht as well as Dessau was summoned to a party meeting which lasted eight hours. At the end of it Brecht dutifully spoke up: ‘Where else in the world can you find a government which shows such interest in artists and pays such attention to what they say?’, and he made the alterations the party requested, changing the title to The Condemnation of Lucullus, while Dessau rewrote the music. But the new production on 12 October still did not satisfy. It was, said Neues Deutschland, ‘a distinct improvement’ but still lacked popular appeal and was ‘dangerously close to symbolism’. Thus condemned, it disappeared from the East German stage, though Brecht got it put on in the West.35
The real test of Brecht’s Faustian bargain came in June 1953, when the East German workers staged an uprising and Soviet tanks were brought in to suppress it. Brecht remained loyal, but at a price; indeed he cunningly used the tragedy to strengthen his own position and improve the terms of the bargain he had struck. When Stalin died in March 1953 Brecht was under growing pressure from the East German authorities to conform to Soviet arts policy, at that time boosting Stanislavsky’s methods, which Brecht hated. Neues Deutschland which reflected the views of the State Commission for the Fine Arts-where Brecht had enemies and which was running a campaign against his Ensemble-warned that Brecht’s company was ‘undeniably in opposition to everything Stanislavsky’s name stood for’. Moreover, at this time the Ensemble was still sharing a theatre, and the Commission was blocking Brecht’s attempts to take over the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Brecht’s aim was to destroy the Commission and grab the theatre.
The rising seems to have come as a complete surprise to him, thus revealing how completely out of touch he was with the lives of ordinary people. He had ample foreign currency and constantly travelled abroad, he and his wife doing most of their shopping there; in East Germany itself he had access to the special shops open only to senior party officials and other privileged elites. But the masses, many of whom were close to starving, were completely at the mercy of arbitrary switches in government rationing policy, and nearly 60,000 had taken refuge in West Berlin alone. In April, prices were abruptly raised and ration cards withdrawn from whole categories of people-the self-employed and house owners, for instance (Brecht, who was both, was exempted by his privileged status and his Austrian citizenship). On 11 June the policy was abruptly reversed, when ration cards were restored, and the prices and wages policy moved decisively against the factory workers. On 12 June the construction workers, finding their wages cut in half, demanded a mass meeting. The protests began in earnest on 15 June and continued with increasing fury until the Soviet tanks moved in.
Though surprised by the rising, Brecht, who was at his country house, was swift to take advantage of it. He realized how important his support would be to the regime at this juncture. On 15 June he wrote to the party boss, Otto Grotewohl, insisting that the takeover of the theatre by the Ensemble be decided and publicized. The understanding was that in return he would back the party line, whatever it might be. There was some difficulty in deciding the line until two days later, when an unemployed West Berliner called Willi Gottling, who had taken a short cut through the Eastern sector to collect his dole money, was arrested, secretly tried, convicted of being a ‘Western agitator’, and shot. ‘Fascist agitation’ thus became the explanation for the riots, and so the party line, which Brecht promptly adopted. By the end of the same day he had dictated letters to the party leaders Ulbricht and Grotewohl and to the Soviet political adviser, Vladimir Semionov, who was in effect the Russian Governor-General. On 21 June Neues Deutschland announced: ‘National Prize Laureate Bertolt Brecht has sent the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party, Walter Ulbricht, a letter in which he declared: “I feel the need to express to you at this moment my attachment to the Socialist Unity Party, Yours, Bertolt Brecht”.’ Brecht claimed later that his letter in fact contained a good deal of criticism of the government, and that the sentence quoted was preceded by two others: ‘History will pay its respects to the revolutionary impatience of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The great discussion with the masses about the tempo of socialist construction will cause the Socialist achievements to be sifted and secured.’ Gody Suter, a Swiss correspondent, wrote: ‘It was the only time that I saw him helpless, almost small: when he pulled out eagerly the tattered original of that letter from his pocket. He had obviously shown it to many people.’36 However, Brecht made no effort to publish the full text of his letter, then or later; and he would have possessed the carbon, not the top copy. If he had published it, the regime might have produced the original. Brecht was quite capable of sending one letter, then complaining privately he had sent a quite different one. Even if his version were true, his complaints about Ulbricht’s behaviour have not much substance. The bosses of the GDR had more important things to think about than the subtleties of Brecht’s support-how to save their necks, for example. In any case, was not Brecht bought and paid for already? Why should they hesitate to cut his little thank-you note?
Neues Deutschland published a long letter from him two days later which made his position brutally clear. It did indeed refer to ‘the dissatisfaction of an appreciable section of Berlin’s workers with a series of economic measures that had miscarried’. But it went on: ‘Organized fascist elements tried to abuse this dissatisfaction for their bloody purpose. For several hours Berlin was standing on the verge of a Third World War. It was only thanks to the swift and accurate intervention of Soviet troops that these attempts were frustrated. It was obvious that the intervention of the Soviet troops was in no way directed against the workers’ demonstrations. It was perfectly evident that it was directed exclusively against the attempt to start a new holocaust.’37 In a letter to his West German publisher he repeated this version: ‘a fascistic and war-mongering rabble’, composed of ‘all kinds of déclassé young people’ had poured into East Berlin and only the Soviet Army had prevented world war. That was the party line down to the last ‘t’. But there was never the slightest evidence of ‘fascist agitators’. Nor did Brecht himself believe in them. His private diary shows that he knew the truth. But of course it was not published until long after his death.38 Moreover, Brecht found the truth-that ordinary German workers rejected the regime-hateful. Like most members of a ruling class he did not meet workers except as servants or occasionally as artisans making repairs in his house. He recorded a conversation with a plumber doing a job at his country place. The plumber complained that an apprentice he sacked for stealing was now in the People’s Police, which was full of ex-Nazis. The plumber wanted free elections. Brecht replied: ‘In that case the Nazis will be elected.’ That was not at all the logic of the plumber’s argument but it represented the bent of Brecht’s mind. He did not trust the German people and he preferred Soviet colonial rule to democracy.39
Brecht got his quid pro quo for supporting the regime, though Ulbricht took the best part of a year to deliver. In his efforts to smash the Fine Arts Commission Brecht found he needed the help of Wolfgang Harich, the young and brilliant Professor of Marxist Philosophy at Humboldt University, who provided him with the doctrinal arguments, couched in the right jargon, which he could not himself produce. Early in 1954 the Commission was finally dissolved, being replaced by a new Ministry of Culture, with Brecht’s crony Johannes Becher in charge. In March the final payment in the bargain was made when Brecht was given formal possession of the theatre he coveted. He celebrated his victory by pinching Harich’s pretty wife, Isot Kilian, whom he made his principal mistress, pro tern, and promoted her from bit-player to assistant at his new headquarters. To the shattered Harich he gave the cynical advice: ‘Divorce her now. You can marry her again in two years’ time’-by then, he implied, he would have finished with her.
By that time, as it happened, he was virtually finished himself. He became ill towards the end of 1954. It was some time before heart trouble was diagnosed-odd in view of his medical history. He did not trust Communist medicine but used a clinic in West Berlin. He arranged to go into another clinic in Munich in 1956, but never got there: a massive coronary thrombosis carried him off on 14 August. He had played one last trick on the long-suffering Weigel. He devised a will leaving some of his literary copyrights to four women: his old secretary-mistress Elizabeth Hauptmann, who got The Threepenny Opera the most valuable of all, poor Ruth Berlau, Isot Kilian, and Käthe Rulicke, whom he had seduced at the end of 1954 and double-banked with Kilian. However, Kilian, who was deputed by Brecht to get the will properly certified, was too impatient to wait in the lawyer’s office while it was witnessed. So it turned out to be invalid. Weigel, as the sole legal wife, got the lot, and allocated the other women their share according to her good pleasure. But other desires of Brecht were carried out. He expressed the wish to be buried in a grey steel coffin, to keep out worms, and to have a steel stiletto put through his heart as soon as he was dead. This was done and published: the news being the first indication to many who knew him that he had a heart at all.
I have striven, in this account, to find something to be said in Brecht’s favour. But apart from the fact that he always worked very hard-and sent food parcels to people in Europe during and just after the war (but this may have been Weigel’s doing)-there is nothing to be said for him. He is the only intellectual among those I have studied who appears to be without a sole redeeming feature.
Like most intellectuals he preferred ideas to people. There was no warmth in any of his relationships. He had no friends in the usual sense of the word. He enjoyed working with people, provided he was in charge. But, as Eric Bentley noted, working with him was a series of committee or board meetings. He was not, Bentley said, interested in people as individuals. This was probably why he could not create characters, only types. He used them as agents for his purposes. This applied equally to his women, whom he saw not so much as individuals but as bedmates, secretaries, cooks. But what, in the end, were his purposes? It is not at all clear whether Brecht had any real, settled beliefs. His French translator, Pierre Abraham, said that Brecht told him, shortly before his death, that he intended to republish his didactic plays with a new preface, saying they were not meant to be taken seriously but as ‘limbering-up exercises for those athletes of the spirit that all good dialecticians must be’.40 These works were certainly presented seriously at the time, and if they were mere ‘exercises’, which of Brecht’s works was not? In the winter of 1922-23, Arnolt Bronnen had a conversation with Brecht about the needs of the people. Bronnen was a major influence on Brecht. He had ‘hardened’ or ‘lefted’ his name by changing it from Arnold to Arnolt, and Brecht copied him. Not only did he drop his other two Christian names, Eugen and Friedrich, as ‘too royalist’, he also hardened Bertold into Bertolt. But when, on this occasion, Bronnen urged the need to change the world so that no one should ever go hungry, Brecht became angry. According to Bronnen, he said: ‘What business is it of yours if people are starving? One must get on, make a name for oneself, get a theatre to put on one’s own plays!’ Bronnen added: ‘He was not interested in anything else.’41 Brecht loved to be ambivalent, ambiguous, mysterious. He veiled his mind cunningly, just as he clothed his body in worker’s suits. But it may be that on this occasion, just for once, he said what he really thought.