Germany is honouring Bertolt Brecht with fanfare on the 50th anniversary of his death, hinting that the country is ready at last to embrace the playwright and poet as a national hero and forgive him for going to his grave a communist.
There is no ignoring Brecht as theatres from Berlin to Bonn to Hanover dust off his plays, and black-and-white photographs of the author huddled over his Virginia cigar fill the press.
The arts pages are looking for a new epitaph for the man who made audiences in pre-war Berlin sit up with his “epic theatre” and its reminders that they are watching a play and must think about its meaning.
His famous line from 1930, “Change the world: it needs it,” still rings true but many believe his dated Marxist politics have for too long obscured his legacy.
Literature lecturer Irmela von der Luehe from Berlin’s Free University said readers should concentrate on the “compassion and humanism” in Brecht’s writing rather than the communist ideology that made him a hero in East Germany and a traitor in the West until left-wing intellectuals came along in 1968.
“Brecht’s point of view was Marxist, but if we look only at his political faults, we would simply reject him as a fellow traveller of the communists,” she said. “We would stop reading him and that would be wrong. He was immensely modern. He saw that the power of money would rule the world.”
This thought underpins The Threepenny Opera, the ode to the underdog Brecht wrote with Kurt Weill in 1928 that is known for its catchy scoreline and its biting critique of capitalism.
In a poem published the year before, Brecht presciently writes that you must lose yourself in the masses to find your identity.
He saw the writing on the wall as the Nazis took power in 1933 and left Berlin the same year.
Brecht eventually ended up working in Hollywood at the time of the McCarthy witch-hunt for communists. Called to testify, he declared that he was not a card-carrying party member.
When he came home in 1949, it was at the invitation of communist East Germany. He settled in East Berlin within walking distance of his old theatre on the banks of the Spree River, which he reopened as the Berliner Ensemble, and the Dorotheen cemetery where he lies buried.
The theatre was leading the tributes marking the anniversary of his death on August 14 1956 at the age of 58. Director Claus Peymann invited companies from Croatia, France, Hungary, Italy, Japan and Spain to stage Brecht’s works and insists, unkindly to Goethe, that “he is the only genuinely world-famous German dramatist”.
Even Brecht’s hometown of Augsburg in Bavaria, where he was born in 1898 and was disowned for many decades for being an atheist, has staged a four-day theatre festival and an exhibition of his illustrated works.
But the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper this week remarked that though his plays are duly performed, Brecht’s work has never known a true revival and his essence is missing from the stage as German theatre goes through a slump.
“On the stage, even where The Threepenny Opera or Arturo Ui are being performed, Brecht is not to be found any more,” the newspaper said.
It went on to argue that it is Brecht’s poetry with its clean, lyrical lines that survived unscathed. “His poems are political because love is political. And they make us want to be political if that means loving people without explanation.”
Wolfgang Jeske, an editor at Brecht’s publisher, Suhrkamp, said: “Brecht was no communist — even if that was said and is still being said.”
And his biographer, Reinhold Jaretzky, believes that Brecht was a rebel who took to communism as the revolutionary cause of the day, while proving shrewd about collecting royalties and prize money.
French poet and novelist Louis Aragon wryly remarked that Brecht wore a workman’s cap that looked so perfectly proletarian that it could only have been made by a master tailor.
When the workers of East Germany staged their mass uprising in June 1953, Brecht publicly distanced himself and carried on writing. He offered his apology more than 20 years earlier in the poem To Those Born Later when he said: “We who wished the world to be kind, could not, ourselves be kind.” — AFP