Bertolt Brecht has come to exemplify the dilemmas faced by German socialists of his generation. The popular revolution he fought for failed to materialize, and when the opportunity arose to create a socialist state in the ruins of the Third Reich, the project did not command the support of the majority of its citizens. In the years that followed, Brecht struggled with the challenge of defending and improving a socialism that was ordained from above and implemented by politicians who did not necessarily view him as an ally. The question of the compromises that he may have made, both politically and personally, has drawn other writers to his life in the GDR as a subject for new literature. Günter Grass depicts Brecht as a hypocritical theater director, whose obsession with the politics of the playscript blinds him to the needs of workers on the streets, while Jacques-Pierre Amette presents him as an aging Lothario caught in a web of Stasi intrigue. These fictional responses to the GDR Brecht share similarities with the accounts offered by anticommunist critics, who have displayed a tendency to cast him in what Loren Kruger calls a “cold war melodrama,” a term which captures the rhetorical excess that characterizes some discussions. Tony Calabro goes so far as to compare Brecht with Adolf Hitler and Erich Honecker, while Oliver Kamm describes him as a propagandist “for an orthodox Communism that followed every twist of Stalin’s whims,” a view that would have surprised the East German cultural politicians who dealt with Brecht in the early 1950s. While anticommunist criticism of Brecht can be traced back through the Cold War to the Weimar Republic, these critics are intervening in a debate about what becomes of the socialist icon after the end of the socialist state. This is one of the questions that the present volume seeks to address.

Brecht’s decision to settle in East Berlin clearly had major consequences for the ways in which his legacy was constructed and mediated over the following forty years, and it continues to influence international perceptions of his work in the twenty-first century. Even so, we need to be careful not to project the state’s cooption of Brecht as an orthodox socialist icon back onto him as a historical individual.