Almost every study (for example, Fassmann, Haas, Dort, Weideli) which has made use of the available material* —usually either too intensively or too superficially—says that Brecht first appeared in print, with both poetry and prose, during August, 1914, in a daily newspaper in his native city, the Augsburger Neuesten Nachrichten. Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (which is his real name) or Bert(h)old Eugen as he signed his material at that time, was 16 years old, attended the Augsburg Realgymnasium, the “Blue Cap,” and there studied Latin with enthusiasm, French with distaste, and all other things with unmistakable indifference. He does not seem to have been a frequent source of pleasure to his teachers.

I require no tombstone, but
If you require one for me
I wish it to be inscribed:
He made suggestions. We
Accepted them.
By such an inscription we should
All be honored.
Brecht (Collected Poems, Vol. VII)

On February 10, 1968, Brecht would have celebrated his seventieth birthday. It makes one realize how young he died on August 14, 1956 and how rapidly, since he died, he has acquired the status of an established international classic; and yet, ten years earlier, in 1946, he was little more than an unknown and neglected German exile tramping the streets of Los Angeles and New York in search of recognition.

When the Berliner Ensemble came to Paris to play Mother Courage for a second time in 1957, the photo-journalist Pic took pictures of the entire production with a telephoto lens. Thanks to this, we possess a true photographic history of Mother Courage, something quite novel, I believe, in theatre criticism—at least for France. This succession of about one hundred photographs dealing with a single play is not only very fine in itself (for Mother Courage is a fine story); it is also of great value for those who want to reflect on the theatre. For what the photographs reveal is precisely what was brought out by the production details. But the details are at the same time the meaning, and it is because Brecht's theatre is a theatre of meaning that its detail is so important.

In the preface to his most famous theoretical essay, the Little Organon for the Theatre, Brecht in part retracted his early vituperations against aesthetics, which in the 1920's had led him to ask (as the title of an article of his goes): “Shouldn't we liquidate aesthetics?” With the growing maturity and complexity of his poetry and plays, the feedback from practice to theory which was a permanent feature of Brecht's work led him to recognize that those vituperations —which he never wholly abandoned —were directed at the bourgeois German aesthetics of his epoch, at “the heirlooms of a depraved and parasitic class” (SzT VII.8), and not at a philosophical and sociological discipline dealing with the pleasing and the beautiful (mainly in art), as such or as a whole. For, by the end of the 193O's, Brecht had in his lyrics and dramas, as well as in his theoretical writing, recognized that his own work was also pleasurable —if pleasure were no longer opposed to learning.

Bert Brecht set out in 1935 on his first voyage to America. He sailed on a dingy, if not black, freighter, from Denmark, where he lived during several years of exile from Hitler's Germany. His destination: New York and the opportunity to collaborate in a production of The Mother at the Theatre Union, the most famous American socialist theatre.

Brecht had had few chances to see his work done since his emigration. He worked with productions in Copenhagen and Paris, but the reputation of American left theatre stood much higher, with enthusiastic theatre groups in dozens of large and small cities seeking good “social plays,” in response to the depression crisis. Friedrich Wolf, a fellow German emigre playwright, declared sweepingly in International Literature that New York left theatre was “without exaggeration the strongest and most outstanding outpost of the Left Theatre in all the capitalist countries.” (Wolf's Sailors ofCattaro was being done at Theatre Union.) Brecht had doubts.

In the prologue, two Grusinian kolkhozes determine the ownership of a valley to which they both claim to have a right. It goes to those who administer it best: those who irrigate it so that it can bear fruit. Members of two kolkhoz villages assemble in a valley in the Caucasian mountains. They contemplate the rubble of a destroyed village. With them is an expert from the capital under whose direction a discussion takes place. The farmers stand and sit in groups—separated according to their kolkhozes—to the right and the left of the expert. They drink wine and smoke. Later the famous singer Arkadi Tsheidse is summoned.

Much has been written about Brecht in this country, some—though not enough—of his theoretical writings have been translated, and most of his plays have been published in English. From all of this, people quite naturally get the idea that Brecht was primarily a poet and playwright. But, although this is true, in order to understand Brecht the playwright one ought to know Brecht as a man of practical theatre—as a director. Brecht's influence on the theatre of his time stems mainly from the productions he created at the Berliner Ensemble; Germany's theatre has changed totally since he did his exemplary work during the early and mid-fifties in East Berlin. The new movement in England— The Royal Court, Peter Brook and Peter Hall, Kenneth Tynan, to mention a few names only—would probably have been vastly different if the Berliner Ensemble had not presented his work in London in 1956, and again in the sixties, and Giorgio Strehler in Italy and Roger Planchon in France have been deeply influenced by what, and how, Brecht created in Berlin. Though Brecht had worked for the theatre nearly all his life, as a critic first, then as a playwright and director, it was not until 1949 that he found a permanent place for his experiments, a company, and later a building, which he could form into the ideal instrument for his ideas, a theatre which was a laboratory, a place for investigation, analysis, and construction of models.

With a few admittedly great exceptions, writers of drama criticism and aesthetic theory are up against a mystery when they deal with Brecht. The solution cannot be found within the confines of the aesthetic or the academic, but so abhorrent is any venture outside this realm to those who inhabit it that they have devised a special method: mystification. Whatever is an enigma for the theorists must be inherently enigmatic. Decisive questions fly back and forth in the Olympian heights, where the air is thin: Is the enigma of Brecht on the right or on the left? Is Brecht more mysterious as a Communist or as a Man? Can people in Leipzig or Munich better understand the meaning of all the things Brecht did not write? Where are the acrostic punctuation marks which Brecht used to tell us what he really meant? Is the late Brecht more Brecht or less Brecht than the early Brecht? Is Brecht really Brecht at all or was he his own double? Should you read Brecht's own writings to understand him? Did Brecht identify with Mack the Knife or Galileo?

There were nine of Brecht’s plays in the Moscow repertoires during the 1966-67 season — has any city in the world equalled this? Acceptance of Brecht was long in coming, however. There were some early Brecht productions in Moscow: The Threepenny Opera, directed by TaiVov at the Kamerni Theatre in January 1930; selections from Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, staged at the Lenin Komsomol in September 1941. Then nothing, until 1958. Brecht's plays were neither socialistic nor realistic enough for the Stalinist era.

Brecht's influence is to be seen everywhere on the European stage. The peripatetic critic has a wide choice of Brechtian patterns to observe and record—stagecraft, acting, ideas about society, re-interpretation of history—but the one that I find of particular interest is a school of playwriting. It is natural enough that in the English-speaking world we identify principally Brecht's English disciples—John Osborne, Robert Bolt, John Arden; it takes us a little longer, since most of us wait for translations, to discern and interpret the Brechtian vogue on the continent where, possibly, truer disciples are writing their plays.

The fight for survival in the regional theatre begins and ends with a fight for quality. So far, on a trek to the West, Southwest, and Northeast, through 46 theatres in all the possible shapes of professionalism from one paid director to 50 non-Equity paid actors, from university to workshop, I have seen far too little of it. The country is crawling with competence. But from the adequately done Twelfth Nights through the passable Volpones, there is a great aching dearth: nothing is excitingly good or excitingly bad. Nothing horrified me; nothing delighted me. There is very little life out there at all, either generative or even reproductive — the kind of museum life that sends an audience out into the night visibly affected by some longdead playwright's world.