Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin: A Scrapbook of the Twenties by Wolf von Eckardt, Sander L. Gilman, and: Brecht As They Knew Him ed. by Hubert Witt, and: Brecht Chronicle by Klaus Volker (review)

Books in Review Bertolt Brecht's Berlin: A Scrapbook of the Twenties. Wolf von Eckardt and Sander L. Gilman. Anchor Press/Doubleday, 170 pp., $15.00 (hardcover). Brecht As They Knew Him. Edited by Hubert Witt. Translated by John Peet. International Publishers, 243 pp., $1.95 (paperback). Brecht Chronicle. Klaus Volker. Translated by Fred Wieck. The Seabury Press, 209 pp., $3.95 (paperback). James Leverett Legends are produced so efficiently nowadays that one becomes simultaneously numbed by the facility of the process and unsettled by its implications. The methods used are a peculiar mixture of elevation and leveling by which personality is blown up and achievement ground down. When this machinery is wheeled out to do its work on an artist and thinker of Bertolt Brecht's caliber, one becomes, at the very least, worried . Can he be saved from denaturing biographies and selfcongratulatory reminiscences? Must what he touched and where he lived be frozen into shrines? The three books under consideration here include a biography of sorts, a collection of reminiscences, and a portrait of a city. Happily, they generally avoid the kind of myth-making mentioned above; two of them are directly useful in dispelling some of the misconceptions surrounding Brecht. All three fill in yawning gaps of information available to Englishspeaking readers. In Europe, notably in Germany, the dynamism of the man has been too often forgotten as he has undergone the ultimate refrigeration of becoming a classic. In the twenty years since his death, academics have 93 spawned a cycle of pro- and anti-Brecht works, and even a Brecht redivivus. Some fight to keep his work alive, yet the greatest obstructions often come from his colleagues and even his family. Brecht is a legend in America, too, but of a special native variety. In the sixties, the V-effekt was the topic of many intense conversations among theatre experimentalists. Little seemed to come from the talk except the conviction that Brecht was very important. Productions of his plays were either manicured to fit commercial requirements or rendered so bleak and self-consciously difficult to incorporate the demands of aesthetic "distance" that audiences obligingly insured their own by staying away. Both plays and playwright remained shrouded in clouds of misconception and misinformation and there they still largely remain, forming an isolated, gray eminence. Only recently, with such productions as Andrei Serban's Good Woman of Szechuan, Richard Schechner's Mother Courage, and Richard Foreman's Threepenny Opera, has New York (I am not able to speak for the rest of the country) seen exciting, stageworthy Brecht. These ventures succeeded because their directors did not crawl to the playwright on their bellies, fumbling in theoretical morass on the way. Instead each found a kinship between the author's voice and his own. The results were original, authentic, entertaining, and provocative. America, it seems, is becoming more susceptible to Brecht. After the experimenting and talk of the sixties, we now have theatre people who can grasp his complexities-political, ethical, aesthetic-and render them for an American audience. More important, perhaps a decade of war, depression, and scandal has battered an audience sensible to the very complexities that were previously meaningless to it. Europe had the man in the flesh, at the height of his powers, when he had his own theatre; it still has many who worked with him. America has usually had to content itself with written and second-hand accounts and little demonstration. It is our great loss that the Berliner Ensemble never performed here in its heyday. This situation accounts for an apparent rift between theory and practice which professors create and students fall into . Whether this or that play can be harnessed to a certain bit of theory is not the point in assessing Brecht's achievement. What is important is that theory and practice always exist in a dynamic, dialectical relationship within the context of his total work. It is true that this interrelationship can be demonstrated to an extent by text-theory analysis: for example , Galileo is less representative of the epic theatre than Caucasian Chalk Circle. But the dialectic, the true engine which powers all the plays, does not become...