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1 - Brecht’s Germany: 1898-1933

from Part I - Context and Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2007

Peter Thomson
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
Glendyr Sacks
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

The only one among all of them who really struck me was Brecht, thanks to his proletarian costume. He was very lean, with a hungry face to which his cap gave a slightly crooked look; his words were wooden and clipped. Under his gaze you felt like a worthless heirloom, and he, the pawnbroker with his piercing eyes, was appraising you. He said little; you never learned the result of his appraisal. It seemed unbelievable that he was only thirty . . . I grumbled about the advertisements with which Berlin was infested. They didn't bother him, he said; advertising had its good side. He had written a poem about Steyr cars, and got a car for it . . . With this confession, produced as though it were a boast, he brought me down and silenced me . . . 'He likes driving,' said Ibby, as though it were nothing. To me . . . he seemed like a murderer; I was remembering 'Die Legende vom toten Soldaten', and he had taken part in a copy-writing contest for Steyr cars! 'He's still flattering his car,' said Ibby, 'he talks about it as though it were a lover. Why shouldn't he flatter it beforehand, so he can get one?'

Bertolt Brecht anno 1928 (as encountered by Elias Canetti): the son of the provincial middle classes with the airs of a big-city proletarian, the enemy of capitalism transfixed by the best and worst of American culture, the pioneer of a revolutionary aesthetic who claimed he wrote only for money, the man who treated fast cars like women and women like cars, and yet contributed through his work to the movement for women's reproductive freedom. In his contradictory character, a character to a large extent self-created, Brecht epitomised the ambivalences of a Germany which, during his first thirty-five years, made the move from the provincial margins of European culture to become the capital of the twentieth century.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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