IN SEARCH OF THE LOST BRECHT Twentieth Century Life and Survival Conference participants spent two days doing precisely this

They started talking about Bertold Brecht again in the late 1990s. For some time this spectacular figure was denied a leading role in the world intellectual theater, due, among other reasons, to sociopolitical transformations that could be summed up as the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. I have reasons to believe that returning to Brecht now is explained not only by the formal reason, his birth centennial. Studies of his creative legacy have not been exhausted and certainly cannot end on this jubilee note.

Besides, discussing Brecht these days is quite topical. In his works one finds fear, love, the temptation of power, art, ideology, devotion, and time-serving. More importantly, here one can find some universal explanations to what has happened to man in the twentieth century. After all, abstraction is secondary to realities as any generalities fade compared to the unbearably hard facts, as is the case with Theodor Adorno’s cruel speculation on the subject of “poetry and Auschwitz.”

The passing century has not left men of the arts much in terms of pure choice. Nothing but work under contract or other more or less limiting obligations. This fact seems self-evident. I say “seems,” leaving a small room for doubt. Brecht left none. He purposefully sought and found affiliations, making friends with enemies of his enemies and then using his talent to deceive them. Political aberrations at that period make his left-wing radicalism look like carefree flirting done by a witty man bone-tired of right-wing conservatism.

Be it as it may, Brecht was among those blessed by the stars to escape from cruel regimes (he was fifth on a Nazi death list for dissidents), emigrate, receive visas, then citizenship (say, in Switzerland), write declarations, attack that same “bourgeois democracy” which gave them bread and shelter, and continue his creative experimentation. In Russia, everything was different. Here any opposition ended with an NKVD bullet in the back of the head. Brecht’s responsibility before countless victims of this method of settling political differences remains a topic for debate. Actually, it can be reduced to a minimum; he was not an accomplice but a mute witness. Or maybe deaf. Either way, this definition entails a long chain of double entendres.

Ambiguities apart, hard facts include several collections of verse, an epic theater rejecting the methods of traditional realistic drama, Kurt Weill’s music, and an expressive figure clad in a service jacket a la dictateur. Enough to inspire respect, nay admiration: a goal reached, another attempt accomplished by a man demonizing the cultural domain and rising above it by scorning that very culture. It went down in what we know as the history of art, to cause raised eyebrows and murmured sympathy long afterward.

We, as Brecht’s belated contemporaries, must at all costs establish precisely where we are now and why. The situation has at least several possible outcomes which one would find very exciting to watch with a foreign passport in one’s pocket. All those others denied the privilege of foreign citizenship will have to do with criticizing the climate, geography, postmodernism, reread Brecht, and desperately search for a way to survive.