by ANTHONY DANIELS
Bertolt Brecht, the German poet, playwright, and Marxist
Is Bertolt Brecht one of those few of whom we should wish to know everything? I confess that as I read this giant biography—600 pages, so closely printed that each of them is equal to one and a half normal pages—I thought of Macaulay’s review of Edward Nares’s Memoirs of the Life and Administration of the Right Honourable William Cecil Lord Burghley . . . [title truncated due to length]:
Unhappily the life of man is now threescore years and ten; and we cannot but think it somewhat unfair in Dr. Nares to demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence.
There is no objective answer to the question I have posed: for it depends on one’s assessment of Brecht’s literary or historical importance. A figure can be important for good or bad reasons, of course; the latter, alas, is perhaps the more frequent. It does not follow from the fact that one does not really like Brecht’s work that one does not want to read about his life. Still, 900 ordinary pages are an awful lot, and, I suspect, beyond the need or desire of most literate people to know about their subject.1
As this book makes absolutely clear, Brecht’s treatment of women was appalling. One would not have to be a feminist to be revolted by his lack of scruple and his hypocrisy. His treatment of women did not consist merely of promiscuity, a harmless enjoyment of many sexual partners who happily took part in the game, as it were. It consisted of repeated and serial betrayal of women, exploitation of them, and unconcern as to whether or not they became pregnant by him (he couldn’t be bothered with contraception). The story of his first child, Frank, who never took the name Brecht, was tragic in the extreme:
Brecht would officially recognize Frank [as his child] the next year, but he would never have regular contact with his first child, let alone have a close relationship with him. Nothing could stand in the way of Brecht’s struggle for success. It emerged that Frank had been born with a very nasty physical defect, a malformed anus, which meant that he could not retain his faeces. The problem dogged him all his life, impairing his psychological as well as physical development.
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