Brecht In America

BRECHT IN AMERICA. Before he arrived there, the young Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) had some fixed views about America. For him, it represented capitalism’s virility and energy as well as its triviality and ruthlessness. Yearning for the new, he recognized in this America opulent waste and widespread misery, but he loved the gambling, jazz, skyscrapers, tough gangsters, and lack of sentimentality. An avid reader, he also relished writers such as Walt Whitman, Jack London, Bret Harte, Carl Sandburg, Frank Norris, and Sherwood Anderson. By the mid-1920s, America became the catalyst for Brecht’s turn to Marx’s Capital in an effort to understand the irrationality of the Chicago commodity market while writing his unfinished play Joe Fleischhacker.

Many of his plays written prior to 1933 are set in a mythical America: In the Jungle of Cities, Lindbergh’s Flight, The Bread Store, Happy End, St. Joan of the Stockyards, and the opera libretto Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny with music by Kurt Weill. America served Brecht as a model of capitalist exploitation and alienation of labor, which he translated into allegories of class struggle and religion as linked ideologies. Setting his plays in remote places was a technique he honed to produce distance, for both the audience and himself. This practice also allowed for the stylization and simplification that highlighted the contradictions and social relations of his own German reality.

Brecht’s dialectical thinking encountered American pragmatism during his first visit to the United States, a stay that lasted four months during the fall, 1935. The Theatre Union in New York City had invited him for its production of The Mother (1932), a joint project with the better-known composer of the play’s songs, Hanns Eisler. The collaboration collapsed almost immediately. Committed to socialist realism and Stanislavki’s psychological realism, this leftist ensemble was expecting a straightforward stage adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s novel. Instead, Brecht insisted on critical thinking rather than uplifting revolutionary messages, a demand that led to both the dramatist and composer being banned from the theater and debarred from the opening night. This disappointing experience anticipated Brecht’s mistrust of American Communists, including Sidney Hook and Victor Jerome, who seemed to consider him a hard-liner and Stalinist.

When Brecht and his family arrived in California in 1941 as refugees from Nazi Germany, he kept his distance from the kind of leftists he had encountered in 1935, including those in the Committee for Exiled Writers within the League of American Writers. Instead he relied on his exiled friends: Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, Fritz Kortner, Erwin Piscator, Heinrich Mann, and Hanns Eisler; and on new friends Charlie Chaplin, W. H. Auden, Eric Bentley, Aldous Huxley, and Ferdinand Reyher. Without his usual collaborators and work-related discussions, he completed only four plays during his six-year exile in the United States, and he wasted a lot of time writing dozens of movie script drafts that yielded only one film, Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (1943), based on Brecht’s screenplay with music by Eisler.

Suspected of being a communist and an agent of the Soviet government, Brecht was under FBI surveillance from 1943 until 1956. He was also called to testify before HUAC in a legendary performance on 30 October 1947. The next day Brecht flew to Europe and never returned to the United States. Yet he learned an important lesson: his aesthetic views were incompatible with the conventions and practices of the commercial entertainment theater and cinema of the 1940s. As a result, he failed in the short term by insisting on doing things his way, but in the long term he achieved posthumous reception and even greater influence.

Brecht’s most dedicated American translator and promoter was critic and playwright Eric Bentley. They first met during Brecht’s California exile, and Bentley regarded him as the future of American theater. Responsible for the Grove Press edition of Brecht’s works, as well as for many essays, books, and recordings about him, this anti-Soviet leftist was not his only translator and advocate. Marc Blitzstein ushered in the first Brecht hit with his Off-Broadway Threepenny Opera adaptation that became the longest running musical at the time (from 1954 until 1961). In the 1960s avant-garde directors discovered Brecht’s Epic Theater as a tool for addressing topical political issues and as an alternative to the suffocating naturalism dominating American stages. Judith Malina’s production of Brecht’s 1923 Chicago play In the Jungle of Cities at the experimental Living Theater in 1960 led the way, followed by Richard Schechner’s Performance Group and R.G. Davis’s San Francisco Mime Troupe. George Tabori’s potpourri of translated scenes, songs, and musings about the theater and society, called Brecht on Brecht, introduced the breadth of the writer’s work in 1961/1962.

By the 1970s Brecht had his breakthrough in the newly established regional theaters, in non-profit and college theaters, and among academic circles. The International Brecht Society was founded in the United States in 1971, beyond the Cold War competition of the two Germanies, and began publishing the Brecht Yearbook. The emergence of feminist theory and criticism marked a new level of engagement. While some found the female characters in his early plays too stereotyped (prostitutes, abused wives and lovers, etc.), others were attracted to those characters who demonstrate a subversive agency in oppressive conditions. Still others recognized the radical potential of his critique of conventional realism to undermine gender stability as a crucial resource for women actors and directors interested in the concept of gender as performance. Meanwhile, feminist playwrights such as Maria Irene Fornes, Anna Deavere Smith, and Cherrie Moraga adapted Brecht’s strategies for portraying class struggle to gender struggle in order to expose the arbitrary nature of gender essentialism. By the twenty-first century Brecht had become a classic, among the few “foreign” dramatists – such as Moliere, Chekhov, and Ibsen – regularly performed on American stages.

Parmalee, Patty Lee. Brecht’s America. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981.

Lyon, James K. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Diamond, Elin. “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” The Drama Review 32.1 (1988): 82-94.

International Brecht Society Website. https://web.archive.org/web/20070117022852/http://german.lss.wisc.edu/brecht/