B.B.

THE TUMULTUOUS THRONG that poured westward through the rents in the Berlin Wall last November emptied the supermarkets and the video shops. Within hours, there was neither fast food nor deodorant left. West Berlin emporiums were stripped of their ample supplies of soft- and sometimes hard-core porno video-cassettes. T-shirts and jeans, a currency across the Wall in the days of the two Germanys, flew off the shelves. Wide-eyed and knowing, moving to the beat of heavy metal and rock, which, clandestine or overt, had been the odes to freedom throughout Eastern Europe, the young and not so young enacted the first TV revolution. Once “Dallas” had come their way (it could be picked up several hundred kilometres east of Checkpoint Charlie), once tapes of Western soap operas and rock jamborees could be multiplied and sold beyond the “Dallas line,” the cataclysm and saturnalia were inevitable. Television sparked the great, wild surge toward a consumer economy, and television packaged (brilliantly) the actual rush. Why live by bread alone when there is peanut butter? Why endure as a Soviet satellite when the word “satellite” means cable television?

The gains have been tremendous. Regimes of hideous stupidity, of corrupt despotism, of inefficiency beyond credence have been broken. Slowly, human beings east of Berlin and the Oder-Neisse are regaining their self-respect, their liberty of motion, their sense of a possible future. More slowly, but tangibly nonetheless, the hidden dimensions of the iceberg of past massacres, lies, sadistic charades are surfacing. The corpses cry out, the shades of the tortured and the obliterated take on uncanny substance. History is beginning to reënter the uncertain light of truth. Not since 1789 has Europe felt so alive, so inebriate with possibility. Both the Soviet Union and the United States are receding into colossal, lamed—if occasionally belligerent—provinciality. The ancient bells of Prague and Kraków can be heard across sombre but living ground. Leningrad and Odessa are again opening their windows on the Western light (the talismanic image of Russian nineteenth-century liberals). The violence and the cant in Romania are fearsome, but even there it is difficult to envisage a recession to the lunatic past. Only an irresponsible mandarin would fail to exult in this season of hope.

But there are losses. Marxism, being itself the product of an intelligentsia, notably in East Germany, felt committed to certain archaic, paternalistic ideals of high literacy, of literary-academic culture. Classical theatre and music, the publication of the classics flourished. Because it carried within its raucous facility and mass seductiveness the germ of anarchic protest, much of what is shoddiest in modernity, in the media, in down-market entertainment was kept (partly) at bay. Now the conductors and the performers are leaving the more than seventy symphony orchestras financed by the East German government. The professors are draining away. The poets, the thinkers wonder whether they can compete on the futures market of commercial choices. Oppression happens to be the mother of metaphor. In the supermarket, Goethe is a lossmaker. These losses, however, are, at an immediate level, luxury losses, and are perhaps recoverable. The minus signs on the balance sheet cut deeper but are much more difficult to define.

After the Mosaic-prophetic summons to justice, after early Christianity, Marxism constituted the third of the major blueprints of hope. When Marx, in the famous 1844 manuscripts, imagined a society in which love and solidarity, rather than money and competitive hatreds, would be exchanged among human beings, he was simply rephrasing the summons to transcendence of Jeremiah, of Amos, and of the Gospels. When he urged a kingdom of social justice, of classless fraternity on earth, he was translating into secular terms the sunburst of the messianic. We know—I suppose we always knew—that such summonings were utopian: that human beings are more or less gifted carnivores; and that man is wolf to man. What is even grimmer, we know now—and should have known since the Utopian fantasies of Plato—that ideals of equality, of communal rationality, of self-sacrificial austerity can be enforced only at totally unacceptable costs. Human egotism, the competitive pulse, the lust for waste and display can be suffocated only by tyrannical violence. And, in turn, those who practice such violence themselves wither into corruption. Ineluctably, collectivist-socialist ideals seem to lead to one or another form of the Gulag.

Such knowledge lessens us. It makes louder the yawp of money in the marketplaces of the West and, even more stridently, on the black markets around the Brandenburg Gate and on the once comely squares of Prague. Moribund Utopias leave venom behind. The drug pusher, the salesman of kitsch, the hoodlum have moved into the East European and Russian vacuum. The Marxist dream turned to unpardonable nightmare, but the new daydreams are rabid; tribalism, regional chauvinism, nationalist loathings are blazing from Soviet Asia to Transylvania, from the skinheads of East Berlin to the muggers of Croatia and Kosovo. With them comes inevitably the hatred of Jews—the intuition that the Marxist program of internationalism, of the abolition of frontiers, was radically tainted by Judaic universalism. Trotsky was, after all, a Jew. So once again the old crazy drums of irredentist territorial claims and ethnic autonomy are pounding in the jungle of the cities.

*      *      *

There is, of course, scarcely a sentence I have written up to this point which does not incorporate, more or less directly, a phrase, an idea, an ambiguity out of Bertolt Brecht. I just adapted the titles of two early masterpieces: “Drums in the Night” and “In the Jungle of Cities.” No lyric poet, no dramatist, no pamphleteer has given sharper voice to the hymns of money, has rendered more palpable the stench of greed. Few minds have seen more unsparingly into the cant and into the fluent self-deceptions that oil the wheels of profit and make outwardly hygienic the power relations in mercantilism and mass-consumption capitalism. At the same time, and often inside the same Aesopian, oblique texts, Brecht bore witness to the cynicism, to the ruses (he was the most cunning of survivors, catlike in his sinuous maneuvers and landings) needed if one was to endure in the homicidal labyrinth of Leninism and Stalinism. In Brecht’s greatest poems (some are among the finest in our century), in his best plays, in the innumerable songs of rebellion and scarred hope which he inspired and sang, the ultimate key is minor, the beat, though sometimes imperceptibly, downward. “Man Is Man” (another famous title)—man’s avarice, his cowardice, his frenetic selfishness will most likely prevail. Mother Courage, her children slain, the land made waste, harnesses herself to her fatal cart: armaments for sale. The stage turns and turns. History is a self-inflicted treadmill. The visions of justice turn to red apocalypse. What will remain of our cities is, as a great early lyric proclaims, the black winds that have swept through them. Yet the absurd, murdering dreams were worth dreaming. Knowingness is not knowledge, however accurate it turns out to have been. Those who were wrong, hideously wrong, like the Bolsheviks, the Communards in France in 1871, the International brigades in the Spanish Civil War, the millions who died proclaiming their fidelity to Stalin, were, in a paradoxical, profoundly tragic way, less wrong than the clairvoyant, than the ironists and the yuppies, than the Madison Avenue hype peddlers and the jobbers “bellowing” on the floor of the bourse. (The image is from W. H. Auden, whom Brecht knew, for a time, as Comrade Auden.) It is better to have been hallucinated by justice than to have been awakened to junk food. The cruiser whose blank shot initiated the Petrograd uprising was named Aurora, or Dawn. So felt Brecht, “who came out of the Black Forest.”

And seems to have come almost fully formed, like some incubus ready to wreak mischief. The Brecht intonations, the cunning gait, the corner-of-the-mouth wit, the carapace of the tightrope walker tensed for survival are there in the earliest of the “Letters, 1913–1956,” selected, edited, and annotated by John Willett and translated into straight, faithful English by Ralph Manheim (Routledge; $39.95). Bertolt Brecht is only fifteen when we pick up the trail. But the credo has been arrived at: “To combine fidelity to nature with idealism—that is art.” And so is the fierce insight. Brecht has a poem in mind: “In the afternoon the enemy is defeated.” (We are in November, 1914.) Joy on one side, rage and despair on the other: “This is a night when mothers weep.” Nothing revelatory in that, but then the Brecht stroke: “On both sides.” Those impotent tears were to fill his works. Mothers—militant, blind, cynical, idealistic—recur over and over. Later, Brecht would turn Gorky’s “The Mother” into a play very much his own. But B.B. himself did not weep. April, 1918, a month before his call-up: “These are heavenly days. . . . At night we sing songs by Goethe, Wedekind and Brecht. Everybody loves us. . . . And I love everybody. . . . I’d sooner have victors than victory. . . . You will conquer the world and listen to my teaching, and you will die old and surfeited with life like Job who was admired by 100 camels. And then, together, we shall reform hell and make something of it.” This to Caspar Neher, Brecht’s lifelong colleague, collaborator, designer. The entire program is set: to reform, to make something of hell, be hell the defeated Germany after 1918, the crazed hive of refugees when Hitler came to power, the tin pots of Californian exile, or the gray gangsterism of the East German regime.

The “everybody” Brecht loves comprises a bevy of Rosies, Helenes, Ruths. Bullheaded, ungainly, prone to bohemian vulgarities, systematically promiscuous, B.B. fascinated women. He used them and used them up, as Baal does in the early autobiographical play. For Brecht, a ménage à trois meant meagre fare. At times, his caravan (those hundred worshipful camels) included at least two accredited mistresses and their brood. Helene Weigel (the association dates from 1923) was to reign supreme—officially, at least. Brecht came to find indispensable her genius as an actress and her rigor as a Communist. But other involvements proliferated. With Carola Neher, with Ruth Berlau—at a terrible cost to the women involved. When Carola Neher was sucked into the Stalinist death machine, Brecht gauged, with almost inhuman caution and dispassion, the limits to which he might go in (vain) attempts to save her. Ruth Berlau collapsed into near-madness. In Mack the Knife, there is more than a touch of Brecht’s cavalier sexuality and, one suspects, contempt for the subservience of women to male appetites. “The shark has teeth”: creative genius has needs and licenses.

“The Threepenny Opera” is by no means Brecht’s best work. It is unimaginable without the brazen bark and lilt of Kurt Weill’s music. But it caught and stylized precisely a certain sour-sweet eleventh hour in Western history. Like no other work, it conveys the macabre vitality, the self-lacerating grin of the Weimar twilight. “The theatre is dead,” Brecht trumpets throughout 1926 and 1927, but the cadaver can be jolted into feverish life. And in terms of celebrity and earning power those three pennies made Brecht indestructible from 1928 on.

Which was more than fortunate. Hitler makes a very early appearance in the letters, “shitting on Moses Iglstein” in a Munich park in March, 1923. Brecht kept a wary eye on his fellow word-spinner. But his attitudes toward Nazism are complicated, and laced with dialectical-materialist theory. National Socialism represents for Brecht and his K.P.D. comrades the logical, perfectly predictable terminal phase of capitalism. Its organized violence and bureaucratic efficacy both fulfill and travesty the industrial-assembly-line processes and the bookkeeping conventions of Western free-market institutions. Hitler’s triumph—this was the appalling, suicidal error of the German Communists—would be brief. It would unleash the authentic proletarian revolution and bring with it the final collapse of the Wall Street empire. To prevent that triumph might well be to falsify the laws of history.

The carnival of street battles, monetary collapse, and erotic emancipation suited Brecht’s observant, analytic sensibility. The period from 1927 to Hitler’s takeover in 1933 is one of the most fertile in his career. His several strengths came together. We follow in these letters the hammering out of Brecht’s didacticism, his Aristotelian-Marxist conviction that the theatre represents a matchless teaching instrument—that a play is always also a potential manual for human sociopolitical perceptions and conduct. Very much in the manner of such German predecessors as Lessing and Schiller, Brecht sets out to be a teacher, a moral preceptor. His plays are Lehrstücke, or “teaching pieces.” At the same time, the formal experimenter comes into his own. Even today, a “song play” such as “Mahagonny” remains radically innovative. Brecht breaks with realism and the lyric, Expressionist eloquence of his first dramas. The cabaret, the boxing ring, the cinema enter into his technical and perceptual means. Brecht is among the very earliest masters of radio drama. (See “Lindbergh’s Flight.”) He experiments with choral techniques and masks. Adopting the modes of collage and montage as these were being exploited by contemporary painters and filmmakers, Brecht incorporates into his poems and dramas the texts of other writers. His adaptations of Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera,” of Marlowe’s “Edward II,” of Kipling’s ballads and military tales are metamorphic. From the original source they excavate elements marvellously tailored to Brecht’s tone and purpose. Jazz, blues, Negro spirituals, Lutheran German, Elizabethan tragedy, the thieves’ laments of Villon are interwoven in Brecht’s voice.

The best of the letters are “from the workshop.” Brecht wastes little motion on personal concerns. He is no letter writer in the manner of Keats or of Proust. His letters are neither drafts of incipient texts nor introspective meditations. They are blueprints for productions, organizational bulletins, rough-edged polemics against obtuse critics and sloppy executants. Brecht keeps a cold eye on contracts, royalties, foreign rights. He labors to institutionalize and sustain a Communist stage company, a workers’ theatre, a Red cultural front against the mounting Nazi tide. “The trouble with intellectuals is that what starts as feelings ends in a hangover,” he writes to the director Erwin Piscator. Brecht feels at home with designers, stagehands, musicians, cabaret folk. He wears his leather jacket and chews on a wet, heavy cigar. Theory is all very well. (There are cordial, respectful exchanges with the unorthodox Marxist thinker Karl Korsch.) But it is praxis that counts. A new marching song (to the tune of “Tipperary”) “could be sung with a pointer in front of projected photos.” The pointer must be found, the projector must work in the smoky basement or the provincial cinema. Even a crude parable, Stalinist in spirit, such as the “Massnahme” (“The Measures to Be Taken”) can have its tactical, pedagogic uses. The masses are bewildered; the hour is late.

When the hour came, in the spring of 1933, Brecht was able to flee: Prague, Vienna, Zurich, Lugano, Paris, New York. B.B. joined the maelstrom of refugees, of the overnight stateless, of the gypsy intellectuals and artists. With a difference: he was a celebrity. He siphoned out of the Reich his immediate family and members of his entourage and found moneys abroad. He chose Denmark as asylum. The “dark times” had begun. They were to prove productive. Brecht wrestled to achieve a political diagnosis consonant with both dialectical historicism and the actual situation. His inner acrobatics make for fascinating reading. To Korsch in January, 1934:

There are compelling reasons for German fascism, which do not apply to other countries. The bourgeois democracies may look wistfully at the way in which wages can be cut in Germany and the unemployed enslaved, but they also see drawbacks. . . . Fascism is a stiff drink; you have to he chilled to the bone, and a quick coup must have prospects of success. Unfortunately, we still haven’t the faintest idea of the significance of the World War. Its origins remain shrouded in dense fog. The “salvation of Germany” could never have been achieved in the old democratic form. Regimented as it was, the proletariat was no longer capable of either a foreign or a domestic policy. . . . That of course is a very special situation.

Friends and fellow-exiles, among them Walter Benjamin, came to stay with Brecht. “Fear and Misery of the Third Reich,” a ferocious set of stage vignettes, could be performed by refugee troupes and left-front companies outside Germany. There was Paul Hindemith, an early collaborator, to be ironically instructed: “You seem to have tried to set phone books to music.” Neoclassicism and ivory-tower distaste are no longer of any use; they are regressive, but not in the ways of National Socialist reaction and atavistic barbarism. Among Brecht’s callers was Ferdinand Reyher, a Hollywood writer he had known in Berlin. Why not write a film script on the censorship and inquisitorial suppression of rational truths—on, say, the persecution and recantation of Galileo?

Brecht’s “Galileo” was completed in the autumn of 1938, and is the subtlest of his major inventions. Its muted, constrained force, its oddly divided focus—this is a play about the suffocation of free intellectual inquiry and about the sociopolitical irresponsibility of pure scientific pursuits—point to the core crisis in Brecht’s outlook. Neither John Willett’s often nostalgically “Party line” commentary nor the letters here provided tell the whole story. But the main lines are evident. It was during the summer and autumn of 1938 that Brecht distanced himself from official Marxism-Leninism and the realities of the Soviet system. A number of Brecht’s intimates and friends were vanishing into Stalinist camps. His own more inventive works were being attacked as “formalist” or as inappropriate to the concrete requirements of Soviet and Party policies. Brecht may have come to understand the tragic myopia of Stalin’s and the Comintern’s strategy of fighting against socialists—in Spain, in Germany—rather than against Fascists and Nazis. The imminent Hitler-Stalin Pact did not altogether surprise B.B.’s disenchanted eye.

The result was a largely private position of some complexity. He did not condemn the U.S.S.R. outright. On the contrary. “The regime, the state apparatus, the Party, its leadership if you will, are developing the country’s productive forces,” he wrote. “They are also being developed by the national form in which the Soviet Union must enter into the decisive struggle. And there you have the class character of international politics. The world civil war.” Brecht’s detestation of bourgeois capitalism remained visceral, his intimations of its impending doom as cheerily anarchic as ever. But much in this prophetic loathing, in both its psychology and its means of articulation, harks back to the bohemian nose-thumbing of his youth and to a kind of Lutheran moralism. His acute antennae told him of the stench of bureaucracy, of the gray petit-bourgeois coercions that prevailed in Mother Russia. Even as Martin Heidegger was during this same time developing an inward, “private National Socialism” (the expression comes from an S.S. file), so Brecht was expounding for and to himself a satiric, analytic Communism alien to Stalinist orthodoxy and also to the simplistic needs of the proletariat and the left intelligentsia in the West. For both men, these internalized tactics were highly generative: of a major philosophy and aesthetics in Heidegger’s case, of preëminent poetic and theatrical creations in Brecht’s.

When the moment came for renewed flight, Brecht acted with phenomenal astuteness. After an interim stay in Sweden and then in Finland, Brecht just before the Nazi assault on Russia (in which his son Frank was to die fighting with the Wehrmacht) travelled across the entire Soviet Union. Keeping a very low profile, this virtuoso of survival then finessed his domestic caravan across the Pacific to Santa Monica and Hollywood. B.B. is said to have replied when Walter Benjamin—himself soon to die a hounded fugitive—asked whether the great playwright would seek haven in Moscow, “I am a Communist, not an idiot.”

America had long been a sort of phonetic source of wonder to Brecht. The mere words “Minnesota” and “Mississippi” rang with ambiguous enchantment and menace. He had felt repelled and magnetized by the “jungle” of Manhattan and by what he read and intuited of the slaughterhouses and crazed winds of Chicago. In Weill’s tunes to Brecht’s lyrics, American elements and syncopations were frequent. The realities of wartime California were somewhat different. There have in recent years been books and plays about the German, Central European, and Jewish refugee lives around Los Angeles. They tell a sardonic tale. Such lions as Thomas Mann held tight-lipped court. Franz Werfel flourished in the dulcet shade of the “Song of Bernadette” (his blockbuster bestseller). Arnold Schoenberg strove bitterly for recognition. (He was refused a Guggenheim.) Lesser fry buzzed and begged, improvised hectically, scrabbled for minor teaching posts, and intrigued against each other with the nastiness of need. Brecht observed the snake pit and trod lightly through it. Once again, stress and marginality proved highly productive.

These are the years of “Mother Courage” (perhaps the most convincing of the full-scale dramas) and of “The Trial of Lucullus,” a radio play later set to superb, neglected music by Roger Sessions. In the midst of Hitler’s victories, Brecht shaped the enigmatic “Good Person of Setzuan,” the wryest of his parables, and “Mr. Puntila,” his dramatization of the theme of master and servant; the Hitler satire “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” accompanied Brecht’s luggage. Who in America but Charles Laughton could truly incarnate the towering, intricate persona of Galileo?

There were, however, few takers. Despite the understanding of translators and critics like Eric Bentley, Brecht’s demands, the idiosyncrasies of his stage techniques, and the extreme discipline they required from actors and producers proved intractable. Kurt Weill’s “One Touch of Venus” boomed on Broadway. Brecht found himself seeking out little theatres or offering his skills as adapter, reviser, and auxiliary director to such fringe ventures as Elisabeth Bergner’s version of Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi.” Only “Galileo” ever reached the New York stage. Occasional movie scripts and the sale of the rights to the novel version of Brecht’s “Simone Machard” kept the pot boiling, but the princely renown of Thomas Mann, together with Weill’s success, got under Brecht’s skin. So did the perennial, more and more strident miseries of Ruth Berlau. “You seem determined to do everything and neglect nothing to make me really bitter,” he wrote to her. “Do you really want to turn our exile into an endless lovestory with ups and downs, reproaches, doubts, fits of despair, threats, etc. etc.?”

But the root trouble, to be sure, was the false situation Brecht found himself in ideologically. As a Marxist, he saw scant virtues in Roosevelt’s New Deal. What pained him about F.D.R.’s death was that it elevated the detestable Churchill to the apparent leadership of the Western alliance. Shrewdly, Brecht saw through the temporary love feast between the capitalist democracies of the West and the heroic folk of Stalingrad. He knew so much more about “Uncle Joe” than did his entranced California hosts or the fellow-travellers who came his feline way that he anticipated both the incipient Cold War and the surge of right-wing witch-hunts in the United States. Characteristically muffled, Brecht’s letters, even to familiars, give only hints of what must have been his ironic, impatient solitude. When the Un-American Activities Committee and the F.B.I. came knocking—absurdly, Brecht’s links with Gerhard Eisler were thought to have possible bearing on atomic espionage—B.B. was prepared. The Washington hearing took place on October 30, 1947. Brecht landed in Paris on November 1st.

The letters translated in this generous offering allow only incomplete glimpses of the tortuous history of Brecht’s final years. B.B. came home to Marxist East Germany via Zurich. An Austrian passport and a Swiss bank account were the discreet safety net. His beginnings in Paradise Regained were thorny. The place gave Brecht “the creeps.” His flirtations with modernism and formalism in music and theatrical techniques displeased the gray mastiffs of “socialist realism”—as did his constant emphasis on Germany’s tragic past (notably the Thirty Years’ War) and on the general history of the defeated and the victimized (as in “The Days of the Commune”). The official note in the G.D.R. was one of militant optimism, of coercive hope in the Stalinist dawn. Rightly, Party bureaucrats sensed in their most illustrious writer an incorrigible streak of irony, of anarchic clairvoyance. Matters came to a dramatic head during the June, 1953, uprising of the East Berlin workers. Privately, Brecht exulted in the genuine emergence of a politicized working class and felt bitterness at its brutal suppression. In an epigram that went around the world he urged the Party to remedy its situation by “electing a new people.”

Nevertheless, and despite somewhat unctuous outrage in the West, Brecht stoutly refused to condemn the regime or to break with his homeland. Mistakes had been made and would be made in the future, but for Brecht history lay on the side of centralized state socialism. The spurious democracy of mass-consumption capitalism continued to be unacceptable to him. His position bore fruit. Brecht’s own Berliner Ensemble harvested support and recognition. “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” was produced exactly as Brecht wished. Directors, actors, filmmakers from far and wide came on pilgrimage to the Brecht workshops. A Stalin Prize awarded by Moscow shielded Brecht from the jealous chicaneries of East German officiousness. A calm penetrates the late letters, even to Ruth Berlau. Brecht helped prepare a visit to London of the Ensemble and its overwhelming productions of the “Chalk Circle” and “Mother Courage.” These took place, triumphantly, two weeks after Brecht’s death, of a heart attack, on August 14, 1956.

During the night of last June 30th, columns of armored cars, under helicopter cover, churned into what little is left of the G.D.R. carrying millions of freshly printed Deutsche marks. Beyond the smashed Wall, crowds danced and waved Disneyland T-shirts. Nothing in this circus would have surprised Bert Brecht. Nor would the fact that the few who seek out his lapidary tomb in East Berlin are scholars or occasional theatre folk from the “rotten” West.

The best of the poems, the clutch of great plays (in modern drama, only Claudel is of comparable weight) will stay. And the cry of naked pain as it screamed, in perfect silence, out of the open, torn mouth of Helene Weigel in her performance of Mother Courage seems to be getting louder.