Bertolt Brecht - a literary life

670 Pages·8.213 MB·English

by  Stephen Parker

Bertolt Brecht
Baal grew up within the whiteness of the womb
With the sky already large and pale and calm
Naked, young, endlessly marvellous
And Baal loved it when he came to us.
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Hymn of Baal the Great’
As the thinking man was overtaken by a great storm,
he was sitting in a big car and took up a lot of space.
The first thing he did was to get out of his car. The
second was to take off his jacket. The third was to
lie down on the ground. Thus reduced to his smallest
magnitude he withstood the storm.
Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Herr Keuner
Bertolt Brecht
A Literary Life
Stephen Parker
Stephen Parker is Henry Simon Professor of German at the University of Manchester
and was Leverhulme Research Fellow, 2009–12. His publications include Sinn und Form:
The Anatomy of a Literary Journal, with Matthew Philpotts (2009), The Modern
Restoration: Re-thinking German Literature 1930–1960, with Peter Davies and Matthew
Philpotts (2004), and Peter Huchel: A Literary Life in 20th-Century Germany (1998). He
contributed to Brecht on Art and Politics (2003).
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prelude: Eugen Brecht Goes out to Play
Part 1 Lyrical Awakening
1 The Brechts 1898–1903
2 Church, School, Sickness 1903–12
3 Precocity 1912–14
4 The Heroism and the Madness of War 1914–16
5 Bert Brecht and his Friends 1916–17
Part 2 Dramatic Iconoclast
6 To be the Greatest Dramatist 1917–18
7 The Medical Orderly and the Revolution 1918–19
8 The ‘Lost’ Brecht Sons 1919–21
9 Brecht in Love 1921
10 Cold Chicago 1921–2
11 The Theatrical Genius 1922–4
12 At the Watershed 1924–7
13 Monumental Success 1927–8
Part 3 Marxist Heretic
14 To be a True Comrade: Surviving the Storm as the Smallest Magnitude 1928–9
15 Government by Emergency Decree 1929–31
16 Solidarity with the Working Class 1931–3
17 Into Exile from Nazi Germany 1933
18 Svendborg 1933–4
19 London, Moscow and New York: Stanislavsky’s Pre-Eminence 1934–6
20 Anti-Fascism and the Show Trials 1936–8
Part 4 Chastened Survivor
21 Survival in an Age of Reaction 1938–9
22 Flight Eastward to the West 1939–41
23 Disgust 1941–2
24 Ever the Enemy Alien 1942–5
Part 5 Contentious Master
25 After the Dark Times – The Cold War 1945–7
26 Hydratopyranthropos Surveys the Wreckage 1947–9
27 The Quest for Acclaim: Issues of Authority 1949–51
28 Leadership Struggles: Correcting the Heretic? 1951–3
29 The New Age of the Theatre 1953–6
Notes
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
The material base for a study of Bertolt Brecht’s life and work, already remarkably rich,
has been transformed since the end of the Cold War. Alongside the publication of the 30-
volume Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Werner Hecht has compiled a vast chronicle of
Brecht’s life and Jan Knopf has edited a five-volume Brecht handbook, with authoritative
contributions from a team of leading scholars. The biographies of the women with whom
Brecht had long-term working and sexual relationships – principally Sabine Kebir on
Helene Weigel, Elisabeth Hauptmann and Ruth Berlau, Hartmut Reiber on Margarete
Steffin – have greatly enriched our understanding. Among other recent works, Erdmut
Wizisla’s account of Brecht’s relationship with Walter Benjamin – made available in
English by Nicholas Jacobs’s Libris – and Jürgen Hillesheim’s study of the young Brecht’s
aesthetics stand out, as do Ronald Speirs’s essays in the Brecht Yearbook and John White’s
study of Brecht’s dramatic theory. I have benefited greatly from this formidable body of
scholarship and from the opportunity to read the manuscript of one of the latest additions
to it, David Barnett’s history of the Berliner Ensemble. David has kindly allowed me to
cite archival material not yet in the public sphere
The two archives in Germany dedicated to Brecht’s life and work, the Bertolt Brecht
Archive in Berlin and the Bertolt Brecht Research Centre in Augsburg, have been
indispensable. At the latter, I have enjoyed the support and advice of Helmut Gier and
Jürgen Hillesheim, at the former of Erdmut Wizisla and his staff, particularly Dorothee
Aders, Iliane Thiemann, Anett Schubotz and Helgrid Streidt. I have also drawn upon
archival material from the following: Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Bundesarchiv, Berlin;
and Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. I should like to thank the staff from
these institutions for their help.
Brecht in English has long been synonymous with Bloomsbury’s extensive list in its
Methuen Drama imprint, which was developed with great energy and scholarly innovation
over many years under the founding general editor, John Willett. I am delighted that,
thanks to the present general editor Tom Kuhn and Bloomsbury’s Senior Commissioning
Editor Mark Dudgeon, this first English-language biography of Brecht in two decades is
appearing with Methuen Drama. I have, of course, used Methuen’s translations whenever
possible. Where translations are not available, I have used my own except for Sabine
Berendse and Paul Clements’s excellent, forthcoming translation of the conversations
which Sabine’s father Hans Bunge conducted with Brecht’s friend Hanns Eisler. Mark
Dudgeon has been a superb editor, mediating relations with the Brecht Estate and
providing judicious advice at all stages in the project’s development. I have been
extremely fortunate, too, with my principal readers, Henry Phillips, Ronald Speirs, Peter
Thomson and Tom Kuhn. Their enormous acumen and experience relating not only to
Brecht but to literary and theatre studies in general have not only added a great deal of
specialist knowledge but have helped me to navigate some difficult terrain. I am hugely
indebted to Henry, Ron, Peter and Tom. This is not an official biography. However, I
should like to thank Brecht’s daughter, Barbara Brecht-Schall, for reading the manuscript,
giving advice and, together with the Suhrkamp Verlag, granting permission for the use of
quotations. Others have kindly commented on drafts: David Barnett, Sabine Berendse,
Steve Giles, Matthew Philpotts, my son Fred and my daughter Cara, who has also supplied
the index and helped in the selection of photographs, Nick Foulds, Steve Hall, Geoff
Carter and, from the perspective of a medical practitioner, Dave Gilbert. Wolfgang
Frühwald, Martin Durrell, Ritchie Robertson, Ian Kershaw, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and
John White gave strong support and encouragement at the outset. A particular delight was
seeing Brecht’s house of exile in Svendborg, Denmark, beautifully restored by the town
council, which one of its trustees, Joergen Lehrmann Madsen, kindly showed me round.
The Brecht Archive kindly supplied photographs. I should like to thank the following
rights holders for granting permission to use photographs: ullstein bild – Zander &
Labisch for photograph 10; Chris Drinkwater for 11; the Brecht Archive for 1–9, 12–17,
20, 22, 24 and 25; Hilda Hoffmann for 18, 19 and 21; and, Suhrkamp Verlag for 23 and
26. Quotations are reprinted by permission of the publisher from Walter Benjamin,
Selected Writings, Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
Copyright 1999 and 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, as follows:
volume 2, 1927–34, translated by Rodney Livingstone, and Others, edited by Michael W.
Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, pp. 784–6 and p. 789; and, volume 3, 1935–8,
translated by Edmund Jepcott, Howard Eiland, and Others, edited by Howard Eiland and
Michael W. Jennings, p. 337.
This study could not have been written without the Major Research Fellowship which
the Leverhulme Trust awarded me in 2009–12. I should like to thank Leverhulme for its
generous support and the University of Manchester for enabling me to complete the work
without interruption by drawing on accumulated study leave. Maj-Britt and Victor, Cara
and Fred, have had the pleasure of listening to my ideas as they have developed. This
book is dedicated to my mother, Mary, and my late father, Bob.
Stephen Parker, Manchester
June 2013
Introduction
The cataclysmic events which twice engulfed Europe and much of the planet in war and
mass suffering during the dark times of the early to mid-twentieth century still cast an
ominous shadow upon our world. Meanwhile, in the theatres of war the killing goes on.
That would not have surprised the subject of this study, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), a
trenchant opponent of war, whose play Mother Courage and her Children (1939) presents
the deeply contradictory motivations informing human behaviour at the fault line of
barbarism and civilisation. That great work has its place within a vast body of writing,
principally drama and poetry, which reveals a rare artistic sensibility, capable of
assimilating the most shockingly gross human actions and of presenting them with cool,
analytical precision. Writing to his son Stefan during US exile from Nazi Germany, Brecht
reflected that the First World War had been the seminal experience for his generation,
demanding the adoption of an ‘INSENSITIVITY (indestructibility, resilience) which
greatly pre-occupied us when we were young’.1 Brecht explained that he and his friends
had
treated the subject of insensitivity, coming out of a great war, quite personally. How could one become insensitive? The
difficulty, not immediately apparent, was that society, awakening in us the wish to be insensitive, simultaneously made
productivity (not only in the artistic sphere) dependent on sensitivity, i.e. the productive person had to pay the price of
vulnerability.
Out of that predicament shared with a generation damaged by war, in the 1920s Brecht
created works notorious for their aggressive, amoral cynicism which have come to define
our image of the young Brecht. Surprisingly for an artist of such iconic standing, the
sensitivity and vulnerability which Brecht and his friends felt compelled to cover with a
skein of insensitivity have received much less attention. Brecht’s own evolving attitude
towards the self, which assumed ever more self-effacing, impersonal forms, obscured the
issue, as did the ideological prism through which critics generally viewed Brecht
following his espousal of Marxism amidst the contested belief systems of the twentieth
century. As a result, our understanding of Brecht as the artist which beyond all things he
supremely was has remained strikingly impoverished.
The life story was a favourite Brechtian mode of dramatic enquiry. Conceived in that
spirit, this study aims to achieve a fresh understanding of Brecht’s life and work by
considering the ramifications of his letter to his son, exploring an artistic sensibility
simultaneously sensitive and inured to sensitivity. That paradox is of a piece with the
complexity, idiosyncrasy and sheer contrariness which critics have generally recognised in
Brecht. As a young man he coined for himself the term ‘melancholeric’, capturing a play
of extremes between Saturnine brooding and exuberant excess.2 Similarly, his friend
Caspar Neher drew him as Hydratopyranthropos, The Water-Fire-Man, who embodied the
most contradictory elements possible. In his work, Brecht aspired to parabolic clarity, only
to undercut it with ironic inversion and sarcastic provocation. Asceticism and hedonism
were co-present, as were arrant recklessness and the obsessive control of feelings. Peter
Thomson remarks that Brecht was a man who ‘combined timorousness and combativeness
as few people have’.3 Untangling the mass of contradictions is a task suited to literary
biography, a mode of enquiry alternating between empathy for its subject and critical
distance. Max Frisch adumbrates the direction which this study must then take: ‘Only in a