This chapter examines Bertolt Brecht’s complicated and fraught relationship with his homeland Germany. Brecht was always attracted by the adventure of foreign lands and was particularly fascinated by the cultures of the United States and East Asia. He was devastatingly critical of Germany and its cultural traditions, and during the Hitler dictatorship he was one of the fiercest intellectual opponents of Nazism, producing some of the most articulate and best-known literary and cultural attacks on Hitler’s Third Reich. Brecht also severely criticized what he, together with Friedrich Engels, referred to as “deutsche Misere” (German misery), i.e. the slavish fealty of German intellectuals to political power. However, during the Third Reich and later Brecht also insisted on the hope for a certain kind of German normality and nonjingoistic patriotism that recognized the qualities and achievements of other nations and peoples. For this reason, Brecht’s conception of a national feeling that is also open toward other cultures has the potential to be of use in today’s multicultural Germany.

This article provides an introduction to the volume, briefly relating the primary aspects of Bertolt Brecht’s life and writing and exploring particularly his importance as a writer for the German language. Brecht was the most influential playwright of the twentieth-century worldwide, and modern theater would be unthinkable without his plays and theoretical concepts such as estrangement/distanciation. Brecht was also one of Germany’s greatest poets and a distinguished writer of prose. As a prime example of Brecht’s cultural influence, the article explores the impact that Brecht and his use of language had on Bob Dylan, the Nobel Prize-winning singer-songwriter from the US, who testifies eloquently in his memoirs to the extraordinary effect that Brecht had on him as a young man. The introduction also examines some of the key controversies involving Brecht, including above all controversies about his revolutionary politics and his approach to collaboration and sexual morality. Brecht was not a hero but a flawed human being, and he himself was well aware of his own imperfections. He wanted to use his art and his work in order to create a world in which flawed human beings, in spite of their imperfections, could still lead decent lives of dignity and humanity.

WHEN ANNA SEGHERS returned to Germany in 1947 and settled in the Soviet zone of occupation, the literary world was already eagerly anticipating her arrival. Seghers's great anti-Nazi novel Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross), which had appeared in Mexico in 1943 and in the United States a year later, was considered so important for postwar German literature that the country's leading cultural-political weekly, Sonntag, had begun publishing it in serialized form in its first issue, on July 7, 1946. The novel dominated subsequent issues of the newspaper for most of the rest of the year, finally reaching its conclusion—the famous words “All of us felt how ruthlessly and fearfully outward powers could strike to the very core of man, but at the same time we felt that at the very core there was something that was unassailable and inviolable”—on December 15.

Partly as a result of the fame of this novel, Seghers was hailed as a genius when she arrived in Germany less than a year later. In the pages of Die Weltbühne, a key literary-cultural biweekly that had been intentionally (re)created to remind its readers of the Weimar-era journal of the same title, the former anti-Nazi resistance fighter and writer Jan Petersen, a long-time comrade of Seghers, called her the “shaper of our era” and proclaimed that the role of a writer with such creative power would be crucial for serving the cause of “truth and bringing it closer to people.” Seghers's work, he believed, could, “for hundreds of thousands … for millions of readers, make the confusions of our chaotic era clearly visible, thus transforming the seemingly insoluble into a profound, path-breaking understanding, which” would be “the only basis for conscious and intentional action.” The editors of Die Weltbühne greeted Seghers's arrival in Germany enthusiastically and declared Petersen's article to be not only the first overview of the writer's work ever published but a necessary response to the problem that, at this point, few members of the German reading public had access to Seghers's writing of the previous twelve years, since books by Seghers had been banned during the Nazi period.

This readable and attractive book is an overview of the relationship between Bertolt Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger between the year 1919, when the aspiring young playwright Brecht first appeared unannounced at Feuchtwanger's Munich door—he had brought an early draft of the play that later became known as Trommeln in der Nacht, and Feuchtwanger was impressed not only by the quality of the writing but also by the shabbiness of Brecht's outward appearance— and 1947, when Brecht paid a farewell call to Feuchtwanger at the latter's mansion, Villa Aurora in Santa Monica, California, shortly before his trip to the East Coast to be interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Even after Brecht's departure for Europe the day after his interrogation in Washington, DC, Brecht remained in contact with Feuchtwanger until his death nine years later, in August 1956. Feuchtwanger wrote to Brecht's widow Helene Weigel expressing consternation at his younger friend's death: “es fällt mir schwer, mich zurechtzufinden in einer Welt ohne Brecht. Wenn ich an Rückkehr nach Europa dachte, dachte ich immer zuerst an Brecht. Als er sich hier auf der Terrasse des Hauses von mir verabschiedete und darauf drängte, daß doch auch ich bald käme, war ich sicher, daß wir uns nicht auf lange trennten. Brecht war mir trotz aller Gegensätzlichkeiten sehr nahe” (153).

Although the two writers never became close enough friends to use the familiar “du” form of address with each other, preferring instead the more formal “Sie,” they had great respect for each other and also consulted and collaborated with each other on a number of important literary projects. Feuchtwanger's help was crucial for Brecht in his Munich years, when the older, more experienced, and better-known writer helped smooth Brecht's entry into the literary and theatrical world of the Bavarian capital. Together the two writers worked on plays like Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England and, much later, Die Gesichte der Simone Machard. Likewise, Feuchtwanger appears to have been the first to suggest to Brecht that he name his modern adaptation of John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728) Dreigroschenoper.

What Is “East German Literature,”and Who Are “East German Authors”?

THE TITLE CONTAINS A KEY TERM that may need clarification: “East German literature.” This was already a relatively problematic term prior to 1989, since it was so difficult to define. Did “East German literature,” for instance, include the literature of former GDR citizens who went to the west, such as Uwe Johnson, Günter Kunert, Sarah Kirsch, or Wolf Biermann? And even when it was written by citizens of the GDR who remained in the GDR, to what extent could one speak of “East German literature” as something separated from that larger sphere of literary activity known as “German literature?” These were not easy questions to answer even before 1989. Now, almost three decades later, they have become doubly complicated, since the GDR no longer exists as a state. A writer like Thomas Brussig (born in 1965), who has had a major impact on the literary picture of East Germany since reunification, does not even want to be called an East German writer. He would like to think of himself primarily as a German writer.

No doubt for Brussig part of the reluctance to be seen as an “East German” writer comes from resistance to the GDR literary establishment's attempt to create a canon of “DDR-Literatur,” as exemplified most prominently in the eleventh volume of the history of German literature put out by the Marxist think tank Institut für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK der SED (Institute for Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the SED) in 1976. In that volume Horst Haase designated GDR literature as “sozialistische Nationalliteratur der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik,” arguing that this literature was “fest gegründet auf das Leben und Wirken der werktätigen Menschen in der sozialistischen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und auf die Existenz des internationalen Sozialismus/Kommunismus” and that it existed in energetic opposition to the purported imperialism of the Federal Republic of Germany and other capitalist states (Haase et al. 1976, 21, 28). Writers like Christa Wolf, whom Brussig sees as having supported the East German state in a conformist way, may have found entry into this volume as part of the East German canon, but Brussig would hardly like to see himself in such company.