Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht (February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956) was an influential German dramatist, stage director, and poet of the 20th century.

Cold War and East Germany

In the years of the Cold War and "red scare", the new U.S. House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hounded Brecht for his communist allegiances, and he was soon blacklisted by movie studio bosses. Brecht, along with about 30 other Hollywood writers, directors, actors and producers, was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in November of 1947. He had pledged not to testify but did so anyway. Unlike the ten others who went before him, he was not cited for contempt. He testified that he was not a member of the communist party here or abroad, and was thanked by the Vice Chairman Karl Mundt for cooperating. By this time, Brecht had left the US and was running the Berliner Ensemble theatre in East Berlin. After testifying, he left the US the next day for Europe. He had lived for many years in Moscow after 1933, but not in the other countries mentioned. In April of 1941, he acquired a visa at the US consulate in Finland to come to the US. He then traveled across the USSR by rail to Vladivostok during June. He was allowed to travel in the Soviet Union while officially an enemy alien from Germany while Germany was attacking the USSR that same month. Citizens of the Soviet Union could not travel as freely. He arived in the US in July of 1941 and took out papers to become a citizen in December, but never acted on them. He was regularly in touch with the Soviet Vice Counsel over the next 7 years. His talent was as a playwright/poet and one would expect him to have worked in New York, but instead he stayed in Hollywood. He had few notable accomplishments there.

Related Topics:
Cold War - Red scare - House Unamerican Activities Committee - Blacklisted - House Un-American Activities Committee

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Leaving the United States for Europe, Brecht came to Switzerland where he adapted Sophocles' Antigone, and then was invited to Berlin by East Germany. Horrified at the reinstatement of former Nazis into West Germany's government, Brecht accepted the offer and made East Berlin his home.

Related Topics:
Switzerland - Sophocles - Antigone - East Germany - West Germany

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While Brecht's communist sympathies were a bane in the United States, East German officials sought to make him their hero. Though he had not been a member of the communist party, he had been deeply schooled in Marxism by the dissident communist Karl Korsch, and his communist allegiances were sincere. He claimed communism appeared to be the only reliable antidote to militarist fascism and spoke out against the remilitarization of the West and the division of Germany.

Related Topics:
Marxism - Karl Korsch - Militarist - Fascism - Division of Germany

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But Brecht proved to be almost as uncomfortable for his East German hosts as for the West Germans across the "iron curtain". Brecht did not keep up appearances —he was scruffily dressed and always had a stubbly, unshaven face. East German security guards once excluded him from a Berlin reception being given in his own honor.

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He also found the experience of living in a Stalinist state far different from what he had imagined in exile, when he composed works such as Die Massnahme ("The Measure"), which glorified the self-denying infallible vanguard party, or, more concretely, in "Die Massnahmen", which justified the political decisions made by the Comintern that resulted in the spectacular failure of the revolution attempted in Shanghai in 1927.

Related Topics:
Stalinist - Comintern - Shanghai - 1927

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Brecht showed his more sober appreciation of the impossibility of socialism without democracy in a piece he wrote while living in Berlin in the 1950s, , called "Die Lösung", or "The Solution". This was after the state suppressed a workers' revolt in 1953

Related Topics:
1950s - 1953

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