A series of letters discovered in a Swiss cellar reveal how Bertolt Brecht, Germany’s famously uncompromising playwright, fell out with some of the 20th century’s most glittering literary figures, including the novelist Christopher Isherwood.
The letters have never been previously published. For half a century, before Germany’s Academy of Arts acquired them last month, they lay in a garage belonging to a Swiss businessman, Victor Cohen.
Written in the 1940s during his exile from the Nazis, they show how Brecht insulted Isherwood after inviting him for dinner. The evening at Brecht’s Hollywood home began promisingly with Isherwood — the author of Goodbye to Berlin — discussing literature and politics. Later, however, Brecht accused Isherwood of ”selling out”. Isherwood stormed off, the letters reveal, later refusing to translate Brecht’s play The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
”You have to forgive my bitterness at your injured manner, when I suggested that you were ‘bought’,” Brecht wrote two days later, in September 1943. Accusing Isherwood of being ”over-sensitive”’, he went on: ”I’ve also accused the Berlin workers of ‘selling out’, even though they are very close to me.” He signed off: ”I trust you still regard me in a friendly manner.”
Isherwood was not the only artist Brecht offended, the letters show. In another letter Brecht asked WH Auden to work on an adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi. Brecht had already given the job to someone else, who quit on learning of the approach to Auden. (Auden described Brecht as ”a most unpleasant man”.)
When the German director Fritz Lang failed to give a part to Helene Weigel, Brecht’s actor-wife, Brecht told him: ”You are a shabby and scurrilous scoundrel.”
On Sunday Erdmut Wizisla, the director of Berlin’s Brecht Archive, said the letters were the biggest discovery for half a century. Wizisla, who will publish the letters later this year, admitted that Brecht could be ”bilious”. But he added: ”It’s not my impression Brecht went around insulting people. He did relish conflict and he could be very caustic. But he could be conciliatory and tender too.”
He went on: ”Many of the letters were written when he was a foreigner living in the US. These were frustrating years for Brecht. He never really liked America.”
The material includes about 140 letters from Brecht and another 220 written to him. There are also photos and passport documents, dating from Brecht’s brief wartime exile in Finland, as well as unknown manuscript versions of his plays The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.
The collection also includes 36 letters and three telegrams sent by Brecht in New York to Weigel in Santa Monica. The letters, written between 1944 and 1947, reveal the depth of Brecht’s attachment to his wife, who has often been overlooked because of his relationships with other women. ”The letters are sensational. They show how spiritual, tender and open Brecht was with her,” Wizisla said.
Brecht left the United States after appearing before the House committee on un-American activities. Brecht then lived in Switzerland before returning in 1949 to Germany. He died in 1956.
Backstory
Bertolt Brecht was the most influential German dramatist and stage director of the 20th century. He was also a poet. Born in Augsburg in 1898, he achieved success in the 1920s with The Threepenny Opera, his version of The Beggar’s Opera, with songs by Kurt Weill. A passionate communist, he fled Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. Galileo, Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Good Person of Szechuan were all written in exile. He believed his plays should provoke the audience to think and not just identify with the characters. He spent most of the war in the US, then lived in Switzerland before returning in 1949 to Germany and setting up the Berliner Ensemble theatre in East Berlin. He died in 1956. – Guardian Unlimited Â