by MICHAEL HOFFMAN
Bertolt Brecht by Rudolf Schlichter, 1926 PHOTO/©BeBa/Iberfoto/Mary Evans
Bertolt Brecht: A literary life by Stephen Parker, 704pp. Bloomsbury. £30 (US $39.99).
In August 1956, the month of his death, Bertolt Brecht had a note put up for the actors of his Berliner Ensemble before they set off for London without him to perform Mother Courage, George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer and The Caucasian Chalk Circle: “There is in England a long-standing fear that German art (literature, painting, music) must be terribly heavy, slow, laborious and pedestrian. So our playing needs to be quick, light, strong”. So much of Brecht is there: the adversarial approach, the attention to detail and preparation, the often Chinese-sounding wisdom, the chess player’s mastery of his opponent based on superior understanding. The tour was a triumph, and most of the few good things that happened to Brecht in the English-speaking world date from that time: the association with his English editor and translator, John Willett, and with Willett’s publishers, Methuen; the passionate admiration of the Observer’s theatre critic, Kenneth Tynan; and the sympathy of a generation of English theatre people including Dame Peggy Ashcroft, George Devine and Sam Wanamaker. You might say, Brecht went out in absentia and on a small high.
Because things have got worse for him since, of that there can be little doubt. England and America are, if not quite Brecht-free zones, nevertheless territories where he has persistently been misunderstood, unappreciated, unloved and under suspicion. It is almost what defines them: liberal economics and a dearth of Brecht. (Perhaps if we had had Brecht, we wouldn’t have needed Thomas Piketty.) Yes, there are productions of his plays still from time to time, but almost always tempting fate and against the odds; the poems remain absurdly little known; and the man and his ideas are routinely and casually butchered. He may just about exist as a name, but he is not accorded any warmth or respect. He is certainly not (as he was in his own half-ironic stylization) “der Klassiker”: an example, and an object of fascination and utility.
The Times Literary Supplement for more