The shrillest Stalinest - playwright Bertolt Brecht

National Review, Nov 24, 1989 by Richard Grenier

In those bygone days in East Berlin, I concluded my interview with Brecht thinking he was so small-minded, self-satisfied, and wedded to leaden propagandizing for Communism that in the West he would remain forever obscure. (At one point, he'd called Shakespeare his forerunner in the "bourgeois revolution.") I felt as if I had been on a visit to Albania, dreary, grey, depressing, a place the world might never hear from again. I certainly never expected to see a President of the United States hobnobbing happily backstage with the cast of a show whose author (and his plays are full of it) was a Stalinist lickspittle. Does George Bush even know this? Probably he thinks that the Threepenny Opera is "just entertainment." And that there's no business like show business.

Mr. Grenier is a columnist for the Washington Times and (London) Sunday Telegraph. His novel, The Marrakesh One-Two (1984), is still in print from Penguin.