Hauptmann Contra Fuegi

(East) German author Sabine Kebir wrote I Didn’t Ask for My Share: Elisabeth Hauptmann’s Work with Bertolt Brecht as a polemic against John Fuegi’s much debated Brecht and Co. While Fuegi’s quasi-feminist grandstanding on behalf of the women exploited by Brecht in effect drowns out their own voices, Kebir lets Hauptmann speak for herself.

Kebir, the first person to thoroughly examine the Hauptmann Archives at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, introduces previously unknown notes and letters, as well as Hauptmann’s sketchy journal of 1926, written in the second year of her relationship with Brecht, a heady, hectic period of intense interaction with Berlin’s antibourgeois artists and intellectuals, and published here for the first time. But most revealing are lengthy excerpts from tapes of interviews with Hauptmann for a 1972 documentary about her, made one year before her death, which were not used in the film.

Fuegi, like a zealous lawyer, prevents the women he ferociously constructs as Brecht’s brutalized victims from talking, afraid perhaps (and with good reason) that they might come out with something that would undermine his text’s moralistic advocacy. Kebir’s approach suggests what this “something” might be, namely: the threat they pose to his global capitalist ideology. Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margaret Steffin, and Ruth Berlau were members of the Communist Party. They were drawn to the collective of artists, writers, and intellectuals around Brecht because it offered a creative collaboration that reflected, and even promised to accelerate, the socialist project of social, intellectual, and sexual emancipation. And the collaborative process of developing a play was and still can be—as many of us involved in it know—great fun that’s intellectually challenging, stimulating, and sexy.

These were women openly interested in sex, sexual experimentation, and autonomy in relationships free of ownership claims, including claims to mental property and sexual partners. Open marriages, triangular and bisexual relationships were part of the social utopia they pursued. That their emancipatory project collided with their own more traditional needs and expectations led, in some cases, to great personal pain. But to portray them solely as tragic victims of sexual exploitation is to deny them the autonomy they strove for and belittle the process of change they sought to set in motion. Their radical political and personal choices posed a threat in their own times and threaten to erode Fuegi’s Ken Starrish moral politics. A good citizen of PC, global capitalist America, he appropriates these women as victims in order to eliminate them as threats.

Consider that most Brechtian subject, money. Hauptmann’s financial sloppiness had its roots in a striving for autonomy, both of mind and body, a refusal to offer oneself up for sale. Earning a living was kept strictly separate from creative involvement. Mental prostitution was equal to physical prostitution. Exploitation was a result of financial dependence. Mind and body were not for sale. Ironically, this approach was still based on the Romantic utopia of transcendent creativity and passion and perpetuated the Romantic (and highly marketable) notion of (male) genius—as Brecht was quick enough to realize. Paradoxically, it was one of the contradictions that made relationships with Brecht so excruciatingly painful but also difficult to break. By and large, women were still excluded from the cultural market. Under the circumstances, participation in the Brecht collective in the service of a larger “third cause” still offered a viable alternative to domestic drudgery and jobs available to women.

“Giving is easier for me than bargaining with a person about money. When the time comes that I don’t have anything left to give, they can bury me,” Hauptmann wrote to Brecht regarding compensation for her advisory role in Eric Bentley’s translations. Sometimes she complained to third persons rather than directly addressing the debtor. During her exile in the United States, she struggled to establish herself as a writer and to earn a living as a teacher. She didn’t contact Peter Lorre, who was in debt to her. Instead, she wrote to Walter Benjamin, “Lorre has made it big in Hollywood and in the press, but my faith that anyone would make the slightest move to help is totally gone. I don’t even muster the courage to write to him, although he owes me money.” Back in East Berlin, in a prolonged state of depression, she refused payment from Suhrkamp for her editorial work on Brecht’s plays in preparation for publication. Before the construction of the Berlin Wall, she passed an opportunity to open a bank account in West Berlin, where her fees could have been deposited in West German marks.

After Brecht’s death, her ambivalence about her contributions to his work continued. When the Akademie der Künste planned a historic critical edition of Brecht’s work (which didn’t materialize), she refused the offer to be credited, together with Helene Weigel, as editor. “Two women [zwei Weiber: Hauptmann uses a common, contemptuous term for women] on the front page looks sort of small to me for such a grandly designed historical-critical edition. Helli’s [Weigel’s] rights of control can come up somewhere else and my name can appear in another, more appropriate place,” she wrote to Hans Bunge, then director of the Brecht Archives. Suhrkamp Verlag, the publisher of the West German Gesamtausgabe, credits itself as editor “in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann,” though she, in fact, edited Brecht’s poems and plays. Suhrkamp licensed the rights to its grand edition to the East German Aufbau Verlag for publication in the East. With Helene Weigel having the final say over editorial decisions, there were four parties involved in a project riddled with political maneuvering.

Anyone who ever tried to get the production rights to a work by Brecht has experienced the political quagmire that often led to denial of translation and/or performance rights, cancellations of projects, and interference with the staging. Hauptmann vigorously policed such endeavors, particularly in the West, where productions that aimed at turning Brecht’s political/social critique against the Communist system would endanger not only the continued publication of the collected works but the operation of the Berliner Ensemble. Her protective, highly problematic attempts at editorial censorship surpassed even Weigel’s.

The woman who emerges from her own notes and letters is caught in contradictions that have to do with personality as much as with the restrictions, expectations, and finally the cataclysmic events of her times. In the end, Kebir falls into the same trap as Fuegi. Hauptmann is not portrayed on her own terms but defined through her relationship with Brecht. Conceived, as it was, as a response to Fuegi, Kebir’s book serves as an illuminating companion piece to his and should be translated into English.

Speaking of translations: The German version of Fuegi’s Brecht and Co. was published last November as the “authorized, expanded and corrected version by Sebastian Wohlfeil.” With its 1086 pages, including 2153 footnotes, it is nearly 300 pages longer than the original American edition. Most, though not all, of Fuegi’s most blatant errors and insinuations have been eliminated. Shui Ta is no longer Shen Te’s lover (perhaps the most telling mistake in the original version, as Erika Munk pointed out in her review in the Nation). It is no longer insinuated that Brecht’s housekeeper Mari Hold, rather than Helene Weigel, was Stefan’s mother. The fashionable Austrian ski resort St. Anton is still erroneously located in Switzerland, which is like placing Aspen in British Columbia. But these are minor quibbles. What’s disconcerting is that readers without knowledge of German will continue to be misinformed by the uncorrected, unamended American publication.

In his epilogue to the German edition, Fuegi addresses without acknowledgment some of Kebir’s arguments in regard to the social, cultural conditions affecting Hauptmann’s choices. It is noteworthy that this crusader on behalf of women and the credit due them never referred to Kebir’s previous articles and books on Brecht’s collaborative process.