By Fredric Dannen
In my column two weeks ago, I wrote about the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), one of the giants of modern theater, and raised a question: Was Brecht, who director Peter Brook called “the key figure of our time,” a plagiarist? More precisely, I asked how serious a plagiarist he was, because there is no question that Brecht stole. Anyone familiar with Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry who reads Brecht’s play “In the Jungle of Cities,” for instance, will immediately spot the theft of Rimbaud’s words, which Brecht demurely called “borrowings.”
But recently, I learned about a heated controversy that had surfaced among Brecht scholars in the mid-1990s about an accusation of literary theft far worse than lifting stanzas from dead poets. In 1994, a Brecht authority named John Fuegi published a book purporting to prove that some of Brecht’s most famous works were largely written by three women who were his lovers and members of a writers’ collective that he supervised. Fuegi’s book, called “Brecht & Company” in the U.S., and “The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht” in the U.K., prompted a lengthy rebuttal by four other Brecht authorities, which was published in the 1995 edition of the “Brecht Yearbook,” a literary journal.
I have long been aware that one of the best-known poems bearing Brecht’s name, “Alabama Song,” set to music by Kurt Weill and memorably covered by The Doors and David Bowie, was written by one of Brecht’s lovers, Elisabeth Hauptmann. Brecht published the poem in English (“Oh show us the way to the next whisky bar…”), a language Hauptmann spoke well, and Brecht barely at all. On The Doors and Bowie recordings, the lyric is unjustly credited to Brecht, with no mention of Hauptmann.
Now, after reading both of Fuegi’s book and the rebuttal, and weighing all the arguments, I believe it is safe to say that Elisabeth Hauptmann is one of the most grievously wronged figures in 20th century literature and that Brecht robbed her of credit and royalties for works falsely attributed to him—a good deal more than just the “Alabama Song.” (Fuegi makes a case that two subsequent lovers, Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau, coauthored significant portions of some of Brecht’s plays, but his evidence is less compelling.) Even Fuegi’s critics do not dispute that Hauptmann wrote at least half a dozen works of short fiction published as “Brecht’s Berlin Stories.” Fuegi provides evidence that Hauptmann made important contributions to several theatrical works bearing Brecht’s name, including “A Man’s A Man” and “The Measures Taken.” Most significantly, Fuegi persuades me that the primary author of the text of “The Threepenny Opera,” the musical theater play that made Brecht rich and famous, was not Brecht, but Hauptmann.
Before I get into that, let me turn to Fuegi’s critics, who make some strong arguments as well. They rightly fault Fuegi’s book for being repetitive, overly speculative, and at times sorely lacking in restraint. The critics list many factual errors on Fuegi’s part, some trivial, some not, but far more mistakes than one expects to find in a book by a respected scholar. (Fuegi was a professor of literature at the University of Maryland and cofounder of the International Brecht Society.)
Yet the critics did not dissuade me from what may be Fuegi’s central assertion—that after the age of 25, while Brecht continued to write some great poetry, he was never able to finish a play entirely on his own, and therefore had to rely on his writer’s collective. Hence, all of Brecht’s theater works but the earliest are collaborations. The only question is just how much authorship credit others deserve for Brecht’s plays.
Fuegi devotes a lot of space to “The Threepenny Opera,” surely Brecht’s most popular work, in good part because of Kurt Weill’s irresistible music and the show’s hit song, “Mack the Knife.” The dramatist Lillian Hellman rated “The Threepenny Opera” one of the “great plays of our time.” It debuted in Berlin in August 1928. The previous winter, friends of Elisabeth Hauptmann in England, where she’d spent part of her childhood, had sent her a copy of John Gay’s 1728 satirical British play with music, “The Beggar’s Opera.” She began translating the work into German and adapting it for a Berlin audience. Brecht was busy with a play he would never complete, called “Fleishhacker,” and, according to Fuegi, unenthusiastic about what would soon become “The Threepenny Opera.”
Brecht’s attitude changed when some theater impresarios he met at a restaurant were uninterested in “Fleishhacker” but intrigued by the “Beggar’s Opera” project. The next day, Brecht gave the producers a few scenes to read, all written by Hauptmann, and was immediately offered a deal. Brecht recruited Weill to write the music and negotiated the terms of the contract. Weill would get 25% of the profits, and of the remaining 75%, Brecht would allot 12.5% to Hauptmann and keep 62.5% for himself. Hauptmann’s share was not even as large as it appeared, because it covered only German rights, while Brecht received royalties from productions around the globe. “The Threepenny Opera” became a worldwide hit and made Brecht rich.
Fuegi believes Hauptmann may have written as much as four-fifths of the text of “The Threepenny Opera,” including the lyrics to one of its wittiest songs, the “Barbara Song.” Brecht undoubtedly wrote the words to “Mack the Knife,” the opening ballad introducing the play’s protagonist, the highwayman Macheath. What about other songs? One of the most compelling is the “Death Message,” sung by Macheath near the end of play from the gallows, where he believes he is about to be hanged. Hauptmann did not write it.Neither did Brecht. It is the “Ballade des pendus” by the 15th-century French poet François Villon.
