All About Brecht

He seems all right... but was he really a psychopath? In its review of a new Brecht biography, The Partnership, Jacket Copy takes the case:

The German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) inspired extremes of loyalty and antipathy. Brilliant, charismatic and seductive, he was professionally unreliable and personally deceptive. He broke hearts at will and took credit for work not his own. The charisma arguably enabled all the rest.

Just how exploitative Brecht was, as a man and an artist, remains an unsettled question. John Fuegi's controversial 1994 book "Brecht & Co.: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama" portrayed the playwright as cruel, misogynistic and hypocritical — even psychopathic. Fuegi attributed much of Brecht's dramatic production to talented, infatuated and eventually disillusioned or discarded lovers.

In "The Partnership: Brecht, Weill, Three Women, and Germany on the Brink," Pamela Katz, a screenwriter and novelist, adopts a less strident view — of both the authorship imbroglio and Brecht's admittedly complicated love life. Her account is readable, engaging and fair-minded, perhaps to a fault. It is also occasionally romanticized and repetitive.

Katz focuses on the creative alliance between Brecht and the avant-garde composer Kurt Weill (1900-50), both looking to challenge established aesthetic forms and a society they found economically unjust and morally bankrupt. Their greatest legacy remains "The Threepenny Opera," a 1928 musical play that both critiqued and enraptured Weimar Germany. The work owed a debt (how great is debatable) to Brecht collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann, along with assorted poets and John Gay's 18th century original, "The Beggar's Opera." Together, Brecht and Weill (and Hauptmann) also produced a song cycle and a full-scale opera about the corrupt, sinful town of Mahagonny, the satirical musical play "Happy End" and a ballet with songs titled "The Seven Deadly Sins."

Plenty of women populate Katz's narrative — these were sexually licentious times, and even the mostly loyal Weill strayed, taking up with the wife of his set designer. The eponymous three, however, are actress Lotte Lenya, Weill's wife and the most celebrated interpreter of his songs; Brecht's (second) wife, actress Helene Weigel, who managed the Berliner Ensemble, dedicated to Brecht's plays, after his death; and Hauptmann, Brecht's indispensable writing partner and intermittent lover.

Read on at Jacket Copy.