BRECHT AND AMERICA — THE NEW ATLANTIS

Bertolt Brecht surely knew better.

In his mind he had been to America many times as a young man. To live there was quite another matter. When Hitler's advancing troops forced him to flee Europe in 1941, he was a mature man with few illusions about the fabled "New Atlantis" of his youth. But necessity and lack of options compelled him to come and stay from 1941 to 1947. Out of that exile experience arose some of his most significant works. It also brought out the worst in him as he fought to maintain himself in an alien culture. He spoke of this period as his "exile in paradise" and wondered how long it would last. In American exile Bertolt Brecht, whose dramas are said to have done more to shape the modern theater than any playwright since Ibsen, suffered more financial deprivation, greater intellectual and emotional isolation, and more resounding failure and indifference toward his genius than he had known for years, or would know again in his lifetime.

After Hitler came to power, Brecht initially chose exile in Europe. But it was probably inevitable that one day he would come to the land of his youthful fantasies. He had grown up in a generation of Germans born around the turn of the century that was fascinated by and eager to imitate anything American. No sociologist can accurately measure what the idea called "America" did to the consciousness of a certain youth counter-culture in Germany. For many this exotic word carried a thousand overtones: gangsters and flappers; boxing and the latest dance steps; Prohibition and Charlie Chaplin films; auto racing and labor violence; jazz and Wild West films; an inventive language full of slogans that entered the vocabulary of many German youth; runaway technology that transformed radios, airplanes, gramophones, and automobiles from minor miracles into accustomed conveniences. All of these and anything practical, useful, experimental, or new were considered "American." "America" was in the air. In Germany, books about its life and culture proliferated. Publishers rushed to translate any title that sounded as though it came from the mythical continent.

"America," at least the exotic land conceived by the German imagination and transmitted by its popular media of the twenties, presented to Brecht and many of his generation an exciting alternative to a Europe which they thought to be depleted of its imaginative resources. Speaking for that generation in 1920, he wrote a poem about "blonde, pale Germany." He labelled it the "carrion pit" of Europe and announced that its young people had directed their creative powers elsewhere:

In the young men you
have not corrupted
America awakens.

The same year his diary notes: "How this Germany bores me." Bewailing his lot of living in a mediocre land with its obese middle class and languid intelligentsia, he asks: "What's left? America!" (GW XX, 10)

This young man considered many of the traits he associated with America to be compatible with his own personality, or with the way he wanted to mold it. In America's sober pragmatism and toughness, combined with its imagination and vitality, he found a reflection of his own desire for toughly realistic behavior designed to challenge the existing world. The fascination boxing held to this young scarecrow, who had been hospitalized for malnutrition in 1922, bespoke the "hard bravado of soft youth" so characteristic of his early years. Boxing, to Brecht's thinking the quintessential American sport, symbolized life in the modern age. His play In the Jungle of the Cities, a portrayal of the "struggle of everyone against everyone" in a mythical Chicago, emphasized his obsession with contemporary life as a struggle between combatants. Beneath Brecht's interest in the cold-bloodedness of American gangsters, robber barons, and similar "tough guys" lay a clear desire to identify. In all probability this facade concealed a sensitive makeup. Just as his well-known theory of epic theater attempts to reduce emotion on the stage in favor of reasoned analysis, in his personal life Brecht generally tried to eliminate or escape from feeling in favor of what he called a "rational" mode of thought or behavior. Everything from his leather jacket, short cropped hair, and ubiquitous cigar, to his Anglicized name (he changed the German "Berthold" to "Bertolt" and went by "Bert") cultivated this image that he worked so hard to maintain.

For Brecht and his contemporaries, America of this period stood for a mode of modern experience rather than for a geographical location. He intentionally stylized or exaggerated America as the locale in his plays In the Jungle of the Cities, Mahagonny, Happy End, St. Joan of the Stockyards, The Flight of the Lindberghs, The Bread Shop, and in the unpublished dramatic fragments The Man from Manhattan, Dan Drew, The Fall of the Paradise City Miami, and Joe Fleischhacker, as well as in the fragmentary libretto Prairie and many poems and short stories set in America. Most critics agree that many of these settings are little more than Americanized portrayals of life in Berlin. Just as gross exaggeration to make a point was an important facet of his personality, so the inclination to mythologize or remove the familiar to exotic places became essential to his art. This, too, was part of his theory of...