The shrillest Stalinest - playwright Bertolt Brecht

The Shrillest Stalinist

AS TENS of thousands fled East Germany, provoking the worst crisis of the German Communist regime since 1953, America, under a strange enchantment, honored the man who was the East German regime's most servile artistic defender: Bertolt Brecht.

Brecht's Threepenny Opera, which played recently in Washington and now has moved to New York in a remarkably lusterless production starring the English rock star Sting as Mack the Knife, had a substantial political impact (quite lost on American audiences today) in its original Berlin run in pre-Hitler Germany. Brecht was, throughout his lifetime, the most subservient Stalinist artist ever, and it is not inappropriate to weigh his politics in assessing his plays.

When I interviewed him in East Berlin in the 1950s, he told me he wanted audiences to emerge from his "epic" or "non-Aristotelian" theater not experiencing catharsis or "pity and fear" (Aristotle's words), but thinking hard and debating politics. I did nothing to reveal my own opinions, and Brecht told me he wanted to be remembered for having enlightened the people about their social and economic circumstances--to be remembered, in sum, for his politics. He unhesitatingly attacked the 1953 demonstrators--precursors of the reform movement now sweeping the entire Soviet empire--as "fascistic, warmongering rabble." Moreover, he effusively thanked the Soviet armed forces for their "swift and accurate intervention." Nor did he lift a finger to help a single one of the young German actors and assistants from the Berliner Ensemble, his theater company, who were arrested during the 1953 protests.

Lofty-spirited rock singers, cabaret intellectuals, and students at the Yale Drama School who consider Brecht's kindergarten Marxism so daring don't seem to know the first thing about the man's life. It doesn't take much daring, after all, to write anticapitalist plays in East Berlin (with an Austrian passport, a West German publisher, and a Swiss bank account).

The original production of Dreigroschenoper in 1928 was in strict obedience to the Moscow policy of the day, which forbade cooperation with any elements of German society attempting to resist the rise of the Nazis. With the show's scathing contempt for the "bourgeoisie" and the whole of what enemies of German democracy called Das System, Brecht did his bit to undermine confidence in the Weimar Republic and help replace it with--Adolf Hitler. No other playwright can make this claim.

But Brecht was not only an obedient Stalinist. In his life he displayed an almost singular cowardice. It goes without saying that, leaving Hitler's Germany, Brecht didn't resettle in the joyous Soviet worker's paradise he'd been touting so rapturously from Berlin, but crossed the Soviet Union like a shot, preferring instead to endure the capitalist corruption of Pacific Palisades, California. A German former mistress of Brecht's who chose to stay in Moscow was later arrested. Friends besought Brecht to intercede, but he would not, and she disappeared forever into the Gulag. For no matter how close the tie, Brecht never helped anyone.

Brecht only returned to Communist Europe and (East) Berlin after World War II, when the authorities, after much courting, made him East Berlin's royally subsidized Dramatist Laureate with his own magnificent theater, unlimited resources, sixty actors, in all a staff of 250. The regime got its money's worth. Brecht followed every zig and zag of the Party line, always, without the slightest qualification, even with zeal; but, mysteriously, his reputation in the West never suffered (unlike other artists and writers under Moscow's control). Perhaps it was that he became known in the West only during the cold war, which in a perverse way operated to his advantage. While still in Hollywood in 1947, Brecht was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but didn't plead the Fifth Amendment. A member of the Communist Party, of course, he simply lied and denied it. But any enemy of HUAC, by the American artistic standards of that and even subsequent decades, was thought to be a pretty fine fellow.

Paul Johnson feels that the influence of Brecht derived from his command of a large-scale, state-subsidized theater. But this tells us little about Brecht's appeal in the American theater (particularly the American university theater), where many found his Marxist harangues heady, fearless, and exhilarating.

The cold war was still on when I met Brecht, living in luxury in East Berlin, but de-Stalinization was aborning, a development Brecht furiously opposed. I made a disrespectful remark about the great Stalin to Brecht's daughter Barbara (who'd been raised in California), prompting her to storm off in a rage. I perhaps made a habit of this, because one night in East Berlin, Ruth Berlau, one of Brecht's mistresses, chased me down a staircase screaming "Filthy American pig!" which was quite fun.

The current production of Brecht's Threepenny Opera is appalling. Sting's acting and singing, without the miracles of digital recording, are painfully amateurish. Most of the rest of the cast are quite comparable. I personally have never doubted that the fabulous success of the Dreigroschenoper was due to the wonderful music of Kurt Weill, who eventually tired of "setting Karl Marx to music." Brecht's poetry and language in German have a special expressionist flavor, but his plays are wooden, stilted, and browbeating. An unconscionable number are adaptations of other men's plays, Threepenny Opera being a reworking of John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera. The theme of Brecht's version is that capitalists and criminals engage in the same predatory, vicious behavior--not exactly a fresh idea, nor a very moving one coming from a man who was a fawning toady of Stalinism. The best verses in the original Dreigroschenoper were lifted by Brecht straight from a current German translation of Francois Villon's Ballade des Pendus. (Brecht was compelled to share his royalties with the Villon translator.) The worst lines describe life under the repugnant bourgeois monster, capitalism: "A man can only live by resolutely/Ill-treating, beating, cheating other blokes./A man can only live by absolutely/Forgetting he's a man like other folks." As opposed, you see, to Stalin's Gulag--fully operative at the time of the original Berlin production--which imprisoned an astounding 9 per cent of the Soviet population but where guards presumably treated inmates with exquisite kindness. In the show's last number, Mack the Knife passionately curses "the coppers, sons of bitches," witless tools of the capitalist oppressors. A new translation, vaulting toward modernity (the Village Voice translator assures us we are very "close" to Brecht), rhymes "happy" with "crappy."

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.

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