BRECHT AND AMERICA — THE NEW ATLANTIS

Bertolt Brecht surely knew better.

In his mind he had been to America many times as a young man. To live there was quite another matter. When Hitler's advancing troops forced him to flee Europe in 1941, he was a mature man with few illusions about the fabled "New Atlantis" of his youth. But necessity and lack of options compelled him to come and stay from 1941 to 1947. Out of that exile experience arose some of his most significant works. It also brought out the worst in him as he fought to maintain himself in an alien culture. He spoke of this period as his "exile in paradise" and wondered how long it would last. In American exile Bertolt Brecht, whose dramas are said to have done more to shape the modern theater than any playwright since Ibsen, suffered more financial deprivation, greater intellectual and emotional isolation, and more resounding failure and indifference toward his genius than he had known for years, or would know again in his lifetime.

After Hitler came to power, Brecht initially chose exile in Europe. But it was probably inevitable that one day he would come to the land of his youthful fantasies. He had grown up in a generation of Germans born around the turn of the century that was fascinated by and eager to imitate anything American. No sociologist can accurately measure what the idea called "America" did to the consciousness of a certain youth counter-culture in Germany. For many this exotic word carried a thousand overtones: gangsters and flappers; boxing and the latest dance steps; Prohibition and Charlie Chaplin films; auto racing and labor violence; jazz and Wild West films; an inventive language full of slogans that entered the vocabulary of many German youth; runaway technology that transformed radios, airplanes, gramophones, and automobiles from minor miracles into accustomed conveniences. All of these and anything practical, useful, experimental, or new were considered "American." "America" was in the air. In Germany, books about its life and culture proliferated. Publishers rushed to translate any title that sounded as though it came from the mythical continent.

"America," at least the exotic land conceived by the German imagination and transmitted by its popular media of the twenties, presented to Brecht and many of his generation an exciting alternative to a Europe which they thought to be depleted of its imaginative resources. Speaking for that generation in 1920, he wrote a poem about "blonde, pale Germany." He labelled it the "carrion pit" of Europe and announced that its young people had directed their creative powers elsewhere:

In the young men you
have not corrupted
America awakens.

The same year his diary notes: "How this Germany bores me." Bewailing his lot of living in a mediocre land with its obese middle class and languid intelligentsia, he asks: "What's left? America!" (GW XX, 10)

This young man considered many of the traits he associated with America to be compatible with his own personality, or with the way he wanted to mold it. In America's sober pragmatism and toughness, combined with its imagination and vitality, he found a reflection of his own desire for toughly realistic behavior designed to challenge the existing world. The fascination boxing held to this young scarecrow, who had been hospitalized for malnutrition in 1922, bespoke the "hard bravado of soft youth" so characteristic of his early years. Boxing, to Brecht's thinking the quintessential American sport, symbolized life in the modern age. His play In the Jungle of the Cities, a portrayal of the "struggle of everyone against everyone" in a mythical Chicago, emphasized his obsession with contemporary life as a struggle between combatants. Beneath Brecht's interest in the cold-bloodedness of American gangsters, robber barons, and similar "tough guys" lay a clear desire to identify. In all probability this facade concealed a sensitive makeup. Just as his well-known theory of epic theater attempts to reduce emotion on the stage in favor of reasoned analysis, in his personal life Brecht generally tried to eliminate or escape from feeling in favor of what he called a "rational" mode of thought or behavior. Everything from his leather jacket, short cropped hair, and ubiquitous cigar, to his Anglicized name (he changed the German "Berthold" to "Bertolt" and went by "Bert") cultivated this image that he worked so hard to maintain.

For Brecht and his contemporaries, America of this period stood for a mode of modern experience rather than for a geographical location. He intentionally stylized or exaggerated America as the locale in his plays In the Jungle of the Cities, Mahagonny, Happy End, St. Joan of the Stockyards, The Flight of the Lindberghs, The Bread Shop, and in the unpublished dramatic fragments The Man from Manhattan, Dan Drew, The Fall of the Paradise City Miami, and Joe Fleischhacker, as well as in the fragmentary libretto Prairie and many poems and short stories set in America. Most critics agree that many of these settings are little more than Americanized portrayals of life in Berlin. Just as gross exaggeration to make a point was an important facet of his personality, so the inclination to mythologize or remove the familiar to exotic places became essential to his art. This, too, was part of his theory of "estrangement." Elizabethan dramatists before Brecht often set their tragedies of revenge in Spain or Italy (which were practically indistinguishable in the popular mind) because of preconceived English attitudes toward these exotic lands. For Brecht, America fulfilled a similar function — it evoked preconceptions as well as a fascination in his audience based on an America that Germany of the day had invented for itself. To critics who faulted him for a fixation based on second-hand experience, he declared self-assuredly in a poem from his "Reader for Big-City Dwellers" written around 1926:

I hear you say:
He talks about America
He doesn't understand anything about it
He was never there.
But believe me
You understand me very well when I talk about America
And the best thing about America is:
That we understand it.
(GW VIII, 286)

But there was much that Brecht did not understand. As he came to understand America better, its glamour began to fade. After reading Frank Norris's The Pit, he tried unsuccessfully in 1926 to write a play about the Chicago Wheat Exchange. Not understanding its workings, he immersed himself in Marx's economic theory. This reading triggered his interest in that ideology. As his Marxist convictions solidified after 1926, his enthusiasm for America waned. Convinced that the Marxism of Soviet Russia represented the system of the future, he turned to that country as the utopia America once symbolized. Yet the myth of America never let go of his imagination, and he continued to locate plays there. But by 1930 America had come to embody capitalism in its most highly developed, sinister form. Now "America" stood for a doomed country and system. A poem written that year under the impact of the Great Depression, "Forgotten Fame of the Metropolis New York" (GW IX, 475), refers to it mordantly as "God's own country." The poem goes on to describe the collapse of American culture from the perspective of a future observer reflecting on the now-forgotten center of capitalism. Little wonder that Brecht waited so long to come to America, or that he came so reluctantly.

NEW YORK, 1935

On February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, Brecht joined hundreds of artists and intellectuals who fled Germany for fear of their lives. Later he insisted that he had been number five on a Nazi death list. That story probably had its origin in his imagination, but clearly he was in jeopardy. After a flight that took him through Prague and Vienna, he stopped briefly in Switzerland and in Paris before beginning nearly six years of exile in Denmark on the island of Fyn near the town of Svendborg. With him were his wife and his two children, eight-year-old Stefan and three-year-old Barbara. Soon two women collaborators joined the family on a more or less permanent basis — Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau.

On April 13th, six weeks after he fled Germany, an English-language version of his Threepenny Opera opened at New York's Empire Theatre in a weak production that closed after twelve performances. This was not his first work to reach America. That occurred on April 4, 1931, when Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra performed The Flight of the Lindberghs with Kurt Weill's music. In Salem, Massachusetts, an unidentified school also produced Brecht's and Weill's He Who Says Yes in 1933, while in New York City that year the Music School of the Henry Street Settlement House performed the same opera. Yet Brecht remained essentially unknown in America. The failure of his Threepenny Opera in New York galled him, for he recognized that theatrical success in America meant New York City. To an exile without his own stage, Broadway, in spite of its reputation for commercialism, stood for real audiences and live performances. And Brecht preferred living theatergoers to the audience of posterity for which many exiles were writing. For the next fourteen years, the notion of conquering Broadway became an obsession.

The first opportunity for a New York performance came when the composer Hanns Eisler, who had collaborated with Brecht on several plays in the thirties, made a tour of the United States early in 1935. Highly regarded in leftist circles, Eisler had urged the Executive Board of the New York Theatre Union, the most famous "workers' theater" of the day, to perform Brecht's dramatic adaptation of Gorki's novel Mother. The Theatre Union, whose advisory and executive boards consisted of a cross-section of Stalinists, Trotskyists, socialists, and liberals, was known as a leftist theater that followed no party line. Its aim was to present plays with a progressive, socially conscious message at drastically reduced ticket prices to as wide an audience as possible, which ranged from labor unions to upper-middle-class New York theater patrons. Mother had that kind of message, and the Theatre Union quickly decided to produce it.

Set in Russia at the turn of the century, Mother portrays the radicalization of Peleagea Vlassova, mother of a metal-worker named Pavel. Initially hostile to her son's involvement in the revolutionary movement, she is gradually drawn in when she distributes leaflets to help him to avoid arrest. After taking part in a peaceful demonstration where Pavel is arrested and sent to Siberia, she learns to read, helps striking peasants, and runs an illegal press in her apartment. Her son escapes from Siberia and is shot, and she carries on alone. When the World War breaks out, she is beaten up for protesting it, but continues to resist. At one point she is seen arguing against the war with women waiting in line to surrender their copper kettles for the war effort. The play ends as she carries a red flag during an anti-war demonstration in the winter of 1916.

In mid-1935 the Theatre Union, which was enthusiastic about using the play, wrote Brecht in Denmark. After some delay he finally agreed to a production, whereupon Paul Peters of the Theatre Union translated and adapted Mother for American audiences. Production was started and a copy of the translation was mailed to Brecht. When he saw it, he exploded. In his view, Peters had transformed his play into the kind of hypnotic theater he abhorred. The result appeared to be something resembling a well-made "naturalistic" play, instead of what he had written as a loosely structured "epic" piece.

By the time Brecht received the controversial translation, the Theatre Union could not turn back from its production. An exchange of letters explaining each side's viewpoint got nowhere, and the Theatre Union finally dispatched Manuel Gomez to Denmark, where he negotiated a verbal agreement with Brecht which he thought gave the Theatre Union production rights. After initially refusing for financial reasons, the Theatre Union reluctantly agreed to pay Brecht's passage to America. As eager for a New York performance as the Theatre Union was to do it, Brecht apparently construed assurances that the play could be modified during rehearsal to mean he would get his own way once he was there. Not knowing the playwright, Theatre Union members miscalculated by thinking that on their own ground they could control him. But they had as little concept of Brecht's epic theater style as they had of his personality.

To Theatre Union officials, Brecht's primary qualifications appear to have been his achievements as a Marxist dramatist and the popular success of his Threepenny Opera in Europe. But they were ignorant of his reputation for controversial behavior as a director who insisted on the last word wherever he was involved in a production of his own plays. This reputation for troublemaking sprang in large part from his perception of himself as a pioneer in a new type of theater. Some years earlier he had begun to promote a new kind of "epic" theater, as he called it, which he opposed to conventional or "Aristotelian" theater. With enormous conviction of his own ideas, he began a frontal assault on the entire western mode of thinking about and viewing theater as it existed in the early twentieth century. Though he continued to refine and restate his theories, he remained to the end a maverick and innovator in the theater. Of course Brecht had his forerunners, and often he was quite willing to acknowledge his debt to them. But just as frequently he conveyed the impression that the theories he propounded were totally original. With characteristic self-certitude he called himself the "Einstein of the new stage form." If he was contentious, it was principled contentiousness, with one end in mind — to inaugurate precisely and perfectly his own style of theater in an alien world. Today we know he was right, but in 1935 the Theatre Union was unprepared for his dramatic ideas or his means of implementing them.

In coming to New York, Brecht clearly hoped to introduce his name and theories to the theater world. On board the S.S. Acquitania he wrote an autobiographical poem entitled "When the Classic Departed on Monday, October 7, 1935, Denmark Wept" (GW IX, 559). With characteristic brashness he compared himself to Columbus about to embark for the New World. Noting that America represented the most advanced country in everything, he wondered if it was prepared for his new kind of "learning play." The answer was not long in coming.

From the moment he and the young director, Victor Wolfson, met at the pier on October 15th, they struck up a strong mutual dislike. Rehearsals had already begun, but Brecht found nothing to his liking. He proceeded to demand changes in everything from the script and the sets to the actress portraying Peleagea Vlassova. The Theatre Union acceded to some of his demands, including the one for a new lead, but in the process Brecht antagonized nearly everyone associated with the production. Writing to Helene Weigel in Denmark early in November he admitted that by exercising a "nice little dictatorship" he had managed to restore the script to its original version. But he failed to realize how badly the situation had deteriorated, and how far he was from resolving differences.

Albert Maltz, a member of the executive board, remembers how Brecht constantly badgered Wolfson. He thundered out "in a voice that would have humiliated the fight announcer at Madison Square Garden" that "'this is shit.' ... We had in our midst a screaming banshee. ... I can still hear ... his Prussian drill master's call, Sitzung, i.e., meeting. We often had several a day." Brecht's pet phrases for the actors and their acting (Das ist Scheisse! Das ist Dreck! i.e., "That's shit!" "That's crap!") required no translation after the first time, and his tantrums triggered several fights a day, each of which demanded a council of peace. Erroneously assuming that the Communist Party controlled the Theatre Union, he at one point appealed in vain to V. J. Jerome, the party's chief cultural officer, for binding arbitration. In little more than two weeks from the time he signed a contract with the Theatre Union, his behavior was considered so abusive that on November 8th he and Eisler were finally thrown out of the theater after the most recent victim of his insults, a pianist, threatened to "break every bone in his body."

From an apartment he shared with Elisabeth Hauptmann at 225 West 69th Street, Brecht continued to bombard the Theatre Union with letters and phone calls threatening court action and withdrawal of his script if it ignored his wishes. In a letter of November 9th he reserved for himself "the right to take whatever steps are necessary ... because of the threat of physical violence by a pianist whom I justifiably criticized." He went on to assert that his contract secured him the rights to "give instructions to the director." Perhaps he had in mind the oral agreement made with Gomez in Denmark, but his written contract with the Theatre Union said nothing about this. On the other hand, the Theatre Union did not construe any agreement made by Gomez to mean interference with their adaptation, regardless of how they altered it. And there was the rub, for in his eyes they had butchered it.