Bertolt Brecht: The Unread Statement
[The statement is reprinted here exactly as given in Hollywood on Trial by Gordon Kahn. In the album Brecht before the Un-American Activities Committee (Folkways, FD 5531), a lightly edited version of the same text is used. The original German was not published until the collected works came out in German in 1967. From which it would seem that the original (anonymous) translator had made some mistakes. For example, the last sentence should read: “Art can make such ideas clearer and even nobler.” But it would also seem that the editors of the German edition have made at least one deletion-of the sentence: “We applied for American citizenship (first papers) on the day after Pearl Harbor.”]
I was born in Augsburg, Germany, the son of an industrialist, and studied natural sciences and philosophy at the universities of Munich and Berlin. At the age of twenty, when participating in the war as a member of the medical corps, I wrote a ballad which the Hitler government used fifteen years later as the reason for my expatriation. The poem Der tote Soldat (The Dead Soldier) attacked the war and those wanting to prolong it. I became a playwright. For a time, Germany seemed to be on the path of democracy. There was freedom of speech and of artistic expression. In the second half of the 1920’s, however, the old reactionary militarist forces began to regain strength.
I was then at the height of my career as a playwright, my play Dreigroschenoper being produced all over Europe. There were productions of plays of mine at Berlin, Munich, Paris, Vienna, Tokyo, Prague, Milan, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Budapest, Warsaw, Helsinki, Moscow, Oslo, Amsterdam, Zurich, Bucharest, Sofia, Brussels, London, New York, Rio de Janeiro, etc. But in Germany voices could already be heard demanding that free artistic expression and free speech should be silenced. Humanist, socialist, even Christian ideas were called “undeutsch” (un-German), a word which I hardly can think of without Hitler’s wolfish intonation. At the same time, the cultural and political institutions of the people were violently attacked. The Weimar Republic, whatever its faults had been, had a powerful slogan, accepted by the best writers and all kinds of artists: Die Kunst dem Volke (Art Belongs to the People). The German workers, their interest in art and literature being very great indeed, formed a highly important part of the general public of readers and theatre-goers. Their sufferings in a devastating depression which more and more threatened their cultural standards, the impudence and growing power of the old militarist, feudal, imperialist gang alarmed us. I started writing some poems, songs and plays reflecting the feelings of the people and attacking their enemies who now openly marched under the swastika of Adolf Hitler.
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