Living for Brecht: The Memoirs of Ruth Berlau

The author recounts her life as an actress and her twenty-year relationship with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, and describes Brecht's relationships with actors and fellow writers of the day.

A Danish play director and translator (1906-1974), who considered herself to have been "a 120% party communist," here describes her 22-year collaboration and infatuation with poet-playwright Bertolt Brecht, by whom she bore a child. Confirming Brecht's purported statement to her, "You are the most generous person I have ever met," this sentimental book is factually less than reliable. Still, it will be useful to students of Brecht's career, for it reveals much about his power over people, his writing habits (he found it difficult to work without a collaborator), his addiction to cigars and women, his cowardice, illogical antipathies, dislike of small talk, inability to maintain intimate friendships. A persistent, demanding, unpredictable woman, Berlau "lived only in extremes," and she died lonely and deserted.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.