Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht: The Man Who Told You It Was a Play

On 30 October 1947 Bertolt Brecht sat before the House Un-American Activities Committee and did something none of the Hollywood Ten attempted. He answered every question. He answered them in heavily accented English, at length, with wry jokes, and so unintelligibly that the committee extracted nothing whatever. He denied having joined the Communist Party, which was true. The next day he left the United States and never came back. It was a performance in the exact sense he had spent twenty-five years theorising: the audience could see the mechanism, and it worked anyway.

Augsburg

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was born on 10 February 1898 in Augsburg, to Berthold Friedrich Brecht, who managed a paper mill, and Sophie Brezing. It was a comfortable middle-class household saturated in piety — his grandmother's Pietism and his mother's devotion gave him a biblical fluency that never left his writing, however far left he travelled.

At sixteen he watched his classmates absorbed into the army and nearly got himself expelled for an essay calling *dulce et decorum est pro patria mori* cheap propaganda. To dodge conscription he exploited a medical-student deferment at Munich University in 1917, studying drama under Arthur Kutscher, who introduced him to the iconoclast Frank Wedekind. Drafted anyway in autumn 1918, he served as an orderly in a venereal-disease clinic in Augsburg for the war's final month.

Overnight

*Baal*, his first play, grew out of an argument in Kutscher's seminar in 1918. *Drums in the Night* followed in February 1919. By 1922 the critic Herbert Ihering announced that "at 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany's literary complexion overnight," and that November Brecht took the Kleist Prize for his first three plays. He had already renamed himself Bertolt so that it rhymed with the surname of his collaborator Arnolt Bronnen — a small clue to how he thought about identity.

He married the opera singer Marianne Zoff in 1922; their daughter Hanne became an actress. He moved to Berlin in September 1924 to work as an assistant dramaturg under Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater. His *Edward II*, adapted with Lion Feuchtwanger, was his first attempt at collaborative writing, and *Man Equals Man* (1925–26) was the first product of what became known as the Brecht collective — the shifting group of friends and colleagues on whom he depended from then on.

Threepenny

In 1927 he began working with the composer Kurt Weill. Their remake of John Gay's *Beggar's Opera* as *The Threepenny Opera* opened in 1928 and became the biggest hit in Berlin of the decade, permanently altering what a musical could be. "Mack the Knife" and "Alabama Song" escaped the theatre entirely; Bob Dylan later cited "Pirate Jenny" as the epiphany that reshaped his songwriting.

Around the same time Brecht read Marx. "When I read Marx's *Capital*," he said, "I understood my plays." With Elisabeth Hauptmann he wrote the *Lehrstücke*, austere teaching plays for workers' organisations, and from Erwin Piscator he learned what radical staging could do. He married the actress Helene Weigel in 1930.

Fifteen Years of Elsewhere

He fled Germany in February 1933 and did not stop moving for fifteen years: Prague, Zurich, Paris, then six years at Svendborg on the Danish island of Funen, where Walter Benjamin and Hanns Eisler came to stay. Then Stockholm in 1939, then Helsinki when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, then — on an American visa in 1941 — Santa Monica, in the émigré colony that called itself Weimar on the Pacific.

Exile produced almost everything he is now read for: *Life of Galileo* (1937–39), *Mother Courage and Her Children* (1938–39), *The Good Person of Szechwan* (1939–42), *The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui* (1941) and *The Caucasian Chalk Circle* (1943–45). In California he met Charles Laughton and built the English *Galileo* with him, and wrote *Hangmen Also Die!* (1943) for Fritz Lang — his only Hollywood credit.

The Berliner Ensemble

After a year in Zurich he settled in East Berlin, and in January 1949 he and Weigel opened the Berliner Ensemble at the Deutsches Theater with *Mother Courage*. It became the most influential production company in modern theatre. Brecht rehearsed with obsessive slowness — some productions took six months — and by the 1954–55 season the company had taken the prize for best production at the Théâtre des Nations in Paris.

The theory it existed to demonstrate was epic theatre, built out of Piscator's and Meyerhold's experiments and pointed at dialectical materialism. It refused catharsis. Where conventional drama invites the spectator to feel, Brecht's invites him to judge. The engine was the *Verfremdungseffekt* — stripping an event "of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality" to produce astonishment. The methods were plain: actors addressing the audience, harsh visible lighting, songs that interrupt, placards announcing what is about to happen, text spoken in the third person or past tense. The point was that if the audience could see that the play was constructed, they might grasp that their own reality was constructed too — and therefore changeable.

He kept his Austrian nationality, his Swiss copyrights and his foreign bank accounts. He accepted the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954.

Why Bertolt Is Called a Genius

Brecht is one of the few figures on any list of geniuses whose claim rests on a genuine theoretical invention rather than on execution alone. The *Verfremdungseffekt* is a working idea about how minds process narrative: empathy disables judgment, so if you want an audience to think politically you must first break the spell. He then proved it twice over — in a body of plays that are still performed everywhere, and in a company that taught the world to stage them. Raymond Williams judged his work "the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg"; Peter Bürger called him "the most important materialist writer of our time." His influence ran straight out of the theatre into cinema, shaping Godard, Fassbinder and Straub-Huillet.

The counter-case is unusually serious, and it has two parts. The first is authorship. Brecht's method was collective by design, and the credit was not distributed accordingly: Elisabeth Hauptmann co-wrote *The Threepenny Opera* and *Happy End*, Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau contributed across the exile years, and *Man Equals Man* involved several hands. Fredric Jameson has argued that "Brecht" is best understood as a collective subject rather than a man. Brecht himself came close to admitting it: "Anyone can be creative; it's rewriting other people that's a challenge."

The second is moral. He stayed silent through the Soviet purges and show trials, including the murder in the Gulag of his friend the actress Carola Neher. He initially backed the East German authorities' suppression of the 1953 uprising, then wrote the sardonic "Die Lösung" asking whether it would be simpler for the government "to dissolve the people and elect another" — a poem he did not publish. Fritz Raddatz called his position broken, an escape from the problem of Stalinism. The man who built a theatre to make audiences refuse illusion spent thirty years declining to apply the method to himself.

Legacy

He died of a heart attack in Berlin on 14 August 1956, aged fifty-eight; his biographer Stephen Parker traced the cause to childhood rheumatic fever that had enlarged his heart, and noted his "capacity to turn abject physical weakness into peerless artistic strength." He is buried in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery. Helene Weigel ran the Berliner Ensemble until her own death in 1971. He had written hundreds of poems since 1914, drawing on folk ballads, chansons, Villon and Rimbaud, of which the *Svendborger Gedichte* of 1939 was the last collection published in his lifetime. The plays outlasted the politics, which he might have found instructive.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Threepenny Opera
• Notable work: Life of Galileo
• Notable work: The Caucasian Chalk Circle
• Notable work: Fear and Misery of the Third Reich
• Worked as playwright, lyricist and screenwriter