By Fredric Dannen
No one with more than a passing interest in modern theater can overlook the contributions of the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). In plays such as Mother Courage and her Children and Galileo, Brecht employed what he called a “distancing effect,” using devices such as breaking up the narrative with songs or having his actors speak directly to the audience to shatter the illusion of reality. His aim was to change the audience’s relationship to a play–to provoke detached critical analysis instead of emotional involvement. Tell a theater professional that a play or production is “Brechtian,” and they’ll know exactly what you mean.
My introduction to Brecht began with the joyful discovery of his collaborations with the composer Kurt Weill, with whom he wrote several works for the musical stage, including The Threepenny Opera, which yielded the hit tune “Mack the Knife.” For Kurt Weill, both as an artist and human being, I have nothing but admiration. For Brecht the artist, for reasons I will explain in this column, my admiration is qualified at best.
As for Brecht the human being, trying to find much to admire is a challenging task. The self-styled Marxist who passed himself off as “poor Bert Brecht” wore clothes of fine cloth deliberately tailored to appear shabby, cheated collaborators out of royalties, and hoarded currency in Swiss bank accounts. A refugee of Nazi Germany who spent six years in the United States, Brecht was one of 11 screenwriters called to testify in the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation of communist influence in Hollywood, and the only one to cooperate. The others, the so-called Hollywood Ten, bucked the committee and received jail sentences. Though Brecht was never a Communist Party member, when Carola Neher, an actress for whom he had written lead roles, was arrested in Stalin’s Great Purge of 1936 and died in a gulag prison, he said nothing in her defense. In 1954, Brecht accepted the Stalin Peace Prize.
None of the above has any bearing on what I think of Brecht as an artist, however. If I judged an artist’s work on his or her character or opinions, I would never listen to the music of Richard Wagner, or for that matter read T.S. Eliot or Alice Walker, both rabid antisemites. (Yes, Alice Walker. Look it up.)
Nor am I prepared to condemn Brecht for the currently popular charge of cultural appropriation. Publications like Vox jumped all over Jeanine Cummins for writing the novel American Dirt because she isn’t Mexican, but Brecht gets a free pass for his faux depictions of Chicago, the city in which he set his plays In the Jungle of Cities and Saint Joan of the Stockyards, though he’d never been there. And I’m fine with that. I’m amused that Brecht doesn’t get charged with Orientalism for writing The Good Person of Szechwan or adapting Li Xingdao’s The Chalk Circle. My suspicion is that accusations of cultural appropriation are aimed only at convenient targets. I find the whole concept spurious. To quote the socialist writer Barry Grey, “What is art, if not the interaction of multiple influences of many origins?…The balkanization of art is the end of art.” Amen.
Appropriation means theft, and in art the only kind of theft I recognize is plagiarism. In the 1950s, for instance, two British songwriters stole Elizabeth Cotten’s folk song “Freight Train” and stuck their names on it. Now that is appropriation, plain and simple. And here, finally (I know I’ve taken a while to get to it), is my problem with Bertolt Brecht. He put his name on other people’s work.
I remember the first time I listened to the cast album of the historic off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera, at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street, which featured Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill’s widow, in the role of Pirate Jenny. I reached for the liner notes, looking for acknowledgement that some of the lyrics in the show were taken virtually word for word from two poets whose work I knew well–François Villon and Rudyard Kipling. No mention was made. Not until I got the Grove Press paperback edition of the play and read Lotte Lenya’s foreword did I find admission of the theft. She quoted a “Berlin friend”: “Why deny that Brecht steals? But–he steals with genius.” Well, okay.
The other day I stumbled on an out-of-print book published by Grove Press in 1994, Brecht & Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama, written by University of Maryland Professor John Fuegi. If the thesis of his 732-page book is to be believed, my impression that Brecht was a plagiarist based on a couple of poems considerably understates the truth, which is far worse. Fuegi, who for 20 years edited the Brecht Yearbook, a publication of the International Brecht Society, claims that a great deal of the writing attributed to Brecht was the work of three women: Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, and Ruth Berlau, members of a “writer’s collective” that Brecht supervised. Fuegi’s thesis caused such an uproar that in 1995, the Brecht Yearbook, his former publication, devoted over 100 pages to a multiauthor rebuttal. I have obtained that publication as well, and will soon get down to the enjoyable business of reading both tomes back to back. My conclusions will be the subject of my next column.
