Like Berg, Kurt Weill, and Paul Hindemith, Brecht was a member of the Novembergruppe, founded in 1918 and dedicated to disseminating a new art appropriate to a new age. Though the group broke up after 1924, when the second phase of life in the Weimar Republic began, the revolutionary spirit, as we have seen, survived. And it survived in style in Brecht. Born in Augsburg in 1898, though he liked to say he came from the Black Forest, Brecht was one of the first artists/writers/poets to grow up under the influence of film (and Chaplin, in particular). From an early age, he was always fascinated by America and American ideas – jazz and the work of Upton Sinclair were to be other influences later. Augsburg was about forty miles from Munich, and it was there that Brecht spent his formative years. Somewhat protected by his parents, Bertolt (christened Eugen, a name he later dropped) grew up as a self-confident and even ‘ruthless’ child, with the ‘watchful eyes of a raccoon.’63 Initially a poet, he was also an accomplished guitarist, with which talent, according to some (like Lion Feuchtwanger) he used to ‘impose himself’ on others, smelling ‘unmistakably of revolution’.64 He collaborated and formed friendships with Karl Kraus, Carl Zuckmayer, Erwin Piscator, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Gerhart and Elisabeth Hauptmann, and an actor who ‘looked like a tadpole.’ The latter’s name was Peter Lorre. In his twenties, Brecht gravitated toward theatre, Marxism, and Berlin.65
Brecht’s early works, like Baal, earned him a reputation among the avantgarde, but it was with The Threepenny Opera (tided Die Dreigroschenoper in German) that he first found real fame. This work was based on a 1728 ballad opera by John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, which had been revived in 1920 by Sir Nigel Playfair at the Lyric Theatre in London, where it ran for four years. Realising that it could be equally successful in Germany, Elisabeth Hauptmann translated it for Brecht.66 He liked it, found a producer and a theatre, and removed himself to Le Lavandou, in the south of France near Saint Tropez, with the composer Kurt Weill to work on the show. John Gay’s main aim had been to ridicule the pretensions of Italian grand opera, though he did also take the odd swipe at the prime minister of the day, Sir Robert Walpole, who was suspected of taking bribes and having a mistress. But Brecht’s aim was more serious. He moved the action to Victorian times – nearer home – and made the show an attack on bourgeois respectability and its self-satisfied self-image. Here too the beggars masquerade as disabled, like the war cripples so vividly portrayed in George Grosz’s paintings. Rehearsals were disastrous. Actresses walked out or suffered inexplicable illness. The stars objected to changes in the script and even to some of the moves they were directed to make. Songs about sex had to be removed because the actresses refused to sing them. And this was not the only way Dreigroschenoper resembled Salomé: rumours about the back-stage dramas circulated in Berlin, together with the belief that the theatre owner was desperately searching for another show to stage as soon as Brecht’s and Weill’s had failed.67
The first night did not start well. For the first two songs the audience sat in unresponsive silence. There was a near-disaster when the barrel organ designed to accompany the first song refused to function and the actor was forced to sing the first stanza unaided (the orchestra rallied for the second verse). But the third song, the duet between Macheath and the Police Chief, Tiger Brown, reminiscing about their early days in India, was rapturously received.68 The manager had specified that no encores would be sung that night, but the audience wouldn’t let the show proceed without repeats and so he had to overrule himself. The opera’s success was due in part to the fact that its avowed Marxism was muted. As Brecht’s biographer Ronald Hayman put it, ‘It was not wholly insulting to the bourgeoisie to expatiate on what it had in common with ruthless criminals; the arson and the throat-cutting are mentioned only casually and melodically, while the well-dressed entrepreneurs in the stalls could feel comfortably superior to the robber gang that aped the social pretensions of the nouveaux-riches.’69 Another reason for the success was the fashion in Germany at the time for Zeitoper, opera with a contemporary relevance. Other examples in 1929–30 were Hindemith’s Neues von Tage (Daily News), a story of newspaper rivalry; Jonny spielt auf, by Ernst Kreutz; Max Brandt’s Maschinist Hopkins; and Schoenberg’s Von Heute auf Morgen.70 Brecht and Weill repeated their success with the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny – like The Threepenny Opera, a parable of modern society. As Weill put it, ‘Mahagonny, like Sodom and Gomorrah, falls on account of the crimes, the licentiousness and the general confusion of its inhabitants.’71 Musically, the opera was popular because the bitter, commercialised sounds of jazz symbolised not the freedom of Africa or America but the corruption of capitalism. The idea of degeneration wasn’t far away, either. Brecht’s version of Marxism had convinced him that works of art were conditioned, like everything else, by the commercial network of theatres, newspapers, advertisers, and so on. Mahagonny, therefore, was designed so that ‘some irrationality, unreality and frivolity should be introduced in the right places to assert a double meaning.’72 It was also epic theatre, which for Brecht was centraclass="underline" ‘The premise for dramatic theatre was that human nature could not be changed; epic theatre assumed not only that it could but that it was already changing.’73
Change there certainly was. Before the show opened, the Nazis demonstrated outside the theatre. The first night was disrupted by whistles from the balcony, then by fistfights in the aisles, with a riot soon spreading to the stage. For the second night police lined the walls, and the house lights were left on.74 The Nazis took more and more interest in Brecht, but when he sued the film producer who had bought the rights to Die Dreigroschenoper because the producer wanted to make changes against the spirit of the contract, the Brownshirts had a dilemma: How could they take sides between a Marxist and a Jew? The brownshirts would not always be so impotent. In October 1929, when Weill attended one of their rallies out of mere curiosity, he was appalled to hear himself denounced ‘as a danger to the country,’ together with Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. He left hurriedly, unrecognised.75