Brecht: from Hitler to Hollywood
From the Website Useful Stooges
https://usefulstooges.com/
In the eyes of many, Bertolt Brecht
(1898-1956) was one of the great modern playwrights. He has been called
“without a doubt the most important and influential dramatist of the twentieth
century worldwide.” He was a central figure in the culture of the Weimar
Republic – in other words, 1920s Germany, the Germany that was still reeling
from the loss of World War I, that was struggling with economic depression and
hyperinflation, and that had been plunged into in political confusion by the
advent of Communism on its eastern border and the effort to maintain a working
democratic government in Berlin in the face of a rising tide of Nazism. The
Threepenny Opera, his 1927 collaboration with composer Kurt Weill (it included
the famous song Mack the Knife), was the most successful German theatrical
event of the decade.
Brecht’s plays – the first of
which was produced in 1922 – were outrageously experimental and aggressively
political. Working with legendary producers Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator,
Brecht spat in the face of the very concept of the “well-made play,” the
sympathetic hero, the happy ending. Indeed he spat at a broad range of human
concepts and behaviors, such as ordinary decency and respectability and honor.
But one thing he didn’t spit at was the Soviet Union. After he’d spent some
time reading Marx and following the actions of the Kremlin, Brecht became a
Communist, and in his plays he celebrated collectivism, dictatorship, the idea
of a strongman ruling over his subjects through the use of terror.
Then, in 1933, Hitler was elected
chancellor of Germany. The night after the Reichstag fire, Brecht hightailed it
to Prague. (As the critic John Simon has put it, “Brecht…like the heroes of
most of his plays, was no hero.”) Hitler banned his plays. Meanwhile Brecht, as
one account puts it, “bounced around from Prague to Vienna to Zurich to the island
of Fyn to Finland.” In May 1941, his U.S. visa came through and he fled to the
New World. Like many European artists and intellectuals who had a Nazi target
on their backs, he settled in Santa Monica, California, and tried to make a
career as a Hollywood screenwriter.
That didn’t work out. Part of the
reason was that Brecht, a radical propagandist with a consistently offbeat
approach to drama, was the last playwright in the world who could conceivably
be capable of writing a marketable Hollywood movie. Another part of the reason
was that Brecht’s contempt for Hollywood – where he stayed for a total of six
years – knew no bounds. Having escaped a country in the grip of Nazism, he
despised the place he had come to and had no gratitude whatsoever toward Americans
for having taken him in. Exemplary of the gulf between Brecht and the movie
studios – and, for that matter, with American audiences – was the fact that he
actually wanted to make a movie based on the Communist Manifesto.
“Could there be anything more
anachronous,” wrote Charles Marowitz about German playwright Bertolt Brecht‘s
wartime sojourn in southern California, “than a fiery Marxist and
anti-naturalistic poet-playwright making the rounds of Hollywood Studios
hawking screen outlines to the likes of the Jack and Harry Warner and Harry
Cohn? Brecht in Los Angeles was more than a fish out of water; he was more like
a beached whale.”
Brecht hated L.A. In a poem, he
compared it to Hell – this during the war, while Europe was one big battlefield
and slaughterhouse. In southern California, he wrote, “something ignoble,
loathsome, undignified attends all associations between people and has been
transferred to all objects, dwellings, tools, even the landscape itself.”
Apparently missing gray, grungy Berlin, he even accused the L.A. sun of
shriveling writers’ brains. One perceptive biographer has described it this
way: instead of approaching his new surroundings like a truly inquisitive
writer, eager to plumb the heart and mind of a strange new place and perhaps
even learn something from the experience and grow as a man and an artist,
Brecht didn’t “examin[e] life in America to adjust his model of it” but was
instead constantly eager to find things about the city, and the country, that
confirmed his Marxist, anti-American biases.
“Dante himself could not have found an apter
inferno for Brecht than Southern California,” critic John Simon has written,
noting Brecht’s view of Tinseltown as “Tahiti in metropolitan form” and his
view of America as a nightmare of capitalism, obsessed with buying and selling.
In a poem called “Hollywood Elegies,” Brecht wrote: “Every day, I go to earn my
bread / In the exchange where lies are marketed, / Hoping my own lies will
attract a bid.” He managed to contribute to one film, emigre genius Fritz
Lang’s 1943 anti-Nazi tale Hangmen Also Die!, although Brecht didn’t get screen
credit.
With few exceptions, the people
Brecht met on the West Coast, including fellow members of the emigrant
community, couldn’t stand him. The novelist Thomas Mann (Death in Venice),
according to Simon, “considered Brecht a party-liner and a monster.” Drama
critic Eric Bentley said he lacked “elementary decency.” The poet W. H. Auden,
who translated and collaborated with Brecht, labeled him “odious.” For Auden,
Brecht was “one of the few people on whom a death sentence might be justifiably
carried out”; the poet even added: “In
fact, I can imagine doing it to him myself.” The philosopher Theodor Adorno
“claimed that Brecht spent two hours a day pushing dirt under his fingernails
to make himself look proletarian; George Sklar called him a ‘real Hitler,’ who
reflected the very Germany he had reacted against.” Screenwriter Albert Maltz,
a fellow Stalinist, “found him contentiously arrogant and made more repulsive
by his bodily stench (he disliked bathing).” British actress Elsa Lanchester,
who was married to Charles Laughton and who was no dummy, cannily observed that
Brecht “was anti-everything, so that the moment he became part of a country, he
was anti-that country.”
Yet while he savaged America in
general and southern California in particular, Brecht said nothing negative
about the USSR. Thanks to well-off and influential admirers of his work, he had
managed to make it to America; but he made no effort to save anybody else from
Hitler – or from Stalin.
fter World War II, the House
Un-American Activities Committee caught up with Communist playwright Bertolt
Brecht, who’d fled his native Germany when Hitler took power and spent the war
being tortured – namely, by what he saw as the hellish vulgarity of southern
California. On October 30, 1947, he appeared before HUAC, accused of having
written “a number of very revolutionary poems, plays, and other writings.”
While denying (correctly) that he was a
card-carrying member of the Communist Party, he managed to avoid confessing
that he was, in fact, a believing Communist. In any event he ended up being let
off the hook, and the next day he left the country.
Almost exactly a year later, he
returned to his homeland for the first time in fifteen years, settling in East
Germany, where he was lauded as a local hero. For all his theoretical
enthusiasm for Communism, however, and his eagerness to accept all the goodies
that the Berlin government was prepared to hand over to him, Brecht was cynical
enough not to convert the money he’d earned (and continued to earn) in the Free
World into into soft Warsaw Bloc currency; instead, he banked his cash in
Switzerland – a decision that enabled him to live high on the hog the rest of his
life, a beneficiary of capitalist largesse surrounded by people immured in
Communist poverty. He also made sure to hang on to an Austrian passport that
he’d acquired after the war.
But none of these lingering links
to the bourgeois West kept the East German government from treating Brecht as a
national treasure and as an iconic Communist author. In Berlin, he was given
his own theater. In 1955, the USSR awarded him the Stalin Prize, its own
equivalent to the Nobel Prize. In return, Brecht – who, as we’ve seen, carped
constantly about the evils of California sunshine – was an obedient subject of
the commissars. Champions of Brecht have emphasized his quiet complaints about
various aspects of governance behind the Iron Curtain. These defenders distort
the record. Stalin was one of the great monsters of human history, and Brecht
had a pretty good knowledge of what he was doing and had done – but he never
raised his voice in criticism of Uncle Joe. On the contrary, he outspokenly
supported some of Stalin’s most brutal acts.
He was, to quote John Simon,
consistently “deferential” toward Communist leaders – and cowardly in his
readiness to gang up on the system’s victims. Hanns Eisler, composer of the
GDR’s national anthem, had a sister who was no fan of Stalin, and Brecht’s
verdict on her was heartless and unequivocal: “The swine has to be shot.”
Brecht’s own wife was Jewish, but he didn’t complain about the Soviets’
treatment of Jews, either. His habit of sucking up to GDR authorities is
reflected in a shameless, toadying letter to party leader Walter Ulbricht,
written after the armed suppression of a popular uprising: “History,” Brecht
wrote, “will pay its respects to the revolutionary impatience of the Socialist
Unity Party of Germany….At this moment I must assure you of my allegiance to
the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.”
Bottom line: however opposed
Brecht may have been to Nazism, he chose to sit out the war in America – all
the while constantly running down his hosts and neighbors, whose valiant sons
were putting their lives on the line to liberate his homeland. And as fierce as
his opposition to Nazism, apparently, was his nauseating readiness to kowtow to
the Soviet variety of totalitarianism. Brecht – who died in 1956, a year after
gratefully accepting the Stalin Prize – ended his life a useful stooge for
Communism, as thoroughly barren of heroism as were the characters in his grim,
misanthropic plays.