Intellectuals by Paul Johnson

Author:Paul Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

Adenauer, Adenauer, show us your hand

For thirty pieces of silver you sell our land, etc.

This won him the GDR’s National Prize for Literature (First Class). He made himself available to be shown to visiting dignitaries and gave them a set speech denouncing West German rearmament. He signed protest telegrams. He wrote marching songs and other poems for the regime.

There were occasional rows, usually over money-for instance with the East German state film company over Mother Courage. The regime rejected Kriegsfibel at first as ‘pacifist’, but gave way when he threatened to bring the issue before the Communist-controlled World Peace Council. But as a rule it was Brecht who yielded. His 1939 play The Trial of Lucullus, originally written for radio as an anti-war diatribe, was set to music by Paul Dessau and a production planned to open on 17 March 1951 at the East Berlin State Opera. The regime became alarmed by the advance publicity. They decided it, too, was pacifist, and while it was too late to stop the production they reduced it to three performances and issued all the tickets to Party workers. But some were sold on the black market to West Berliners, who came and applauded wildly. The two remaining performances were cancelled. A week later the official Party paper, Neues Deutschland, published an attack under the heading: ‘The Trial of Lucullus: the Failure of an Experiment at the German State Opera’. The fire concentrated on the music of Dessau, described as a follower of Stravinsky, ‘a fanatical destroyer of the European musical tradition’, but the text was also criticized for ‘failing to correspond to reality’. Brecht as well as Dessau was summoned to a party meeting which lasted eight hours. At the end of it Brecht dutifully spoke up: ‘Where else in the world can you find a government which shows such interest in artists and pays such attention to what they say?’, and he made the alterations the party requested, changing the title to The Condemnation of Lucullus, while Dessau rewrote the music. But the new production on 12 October still did not satisfy. It was, said Neues Deutschland, ‘a distinct improvement’ but still lacked popular appeal and was ‘dangerously close to symbolism’. Thus condemned, it disappeared from the East German stage, though Brecht got it put on in the West.35

The real test of Brecht’s Faustian bargain came in June 1953, when the East German workers staged an uprising and Soviet tanks were brought in to suppress it. Brecht remained loyal, but at a price; indeed he cunningly used the tragedy to strengthen his own position and improve the terms of the bargain he had struck. When Stalin died in March 1953 Brecht was under growing pressure from the East German authorities to conform to Soviet arts policy, at that time boosting Stanislavsky’s methods, which Brecht hated. Neues Deutschland which reflected the views of the State Commission for the Fine Arts-where Brecht had enemies and which was running a campaign against his Ensemble-warned that Brecht’s company was ‘undeniably in opposition to everything Stanislavsky’s name stood for’.

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