Bertolt Brecht’s Collaborators

Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950
by Katherine Hollander (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025)

To say Bertolt Brecht had an eventful life would be an understatement. He fathered four children by three women; enjoyed a dazzling career as a playwright and poet; and, in a life punctuated by two world wars, was exiled multiple times as he zigzagged around Europe to escape his Nazi countrymen. Before he died, at the age of fifty-eight, he’d revolutionized European theater.

Brecht was a precocious child. He claimed that public school bored him and that, during his subsequent confinement in high school, he did not succeed in improving his teachers! As a teenager, he began publishing work in the school newspaper and was nearly expelled for writing an essay ridiculing Horace’s line dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. When barely out of school, he earned a reputation for writing scathing newspaper reviews of local theater productions.

Notwithstanding his cockiness, it was clear he was a gifted dramatist. In 1922, he found success with Drums in the Night, which was produced in Munich. Two years later, he moved to Berlin, where he wrote prolifically, became a Marxist, and further developed the theory of epic theater. The theories and techniques he espoused—the alienation effect, breaking the fourth wall for the sake of political commentary—were revolutionary, and several of his plays, such as The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and her Children, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, remain part of the canon and are still produced today.

But did he do it alone? To what extent did various collaborators co-create the dramatic works? And to what extent were their contributions erased because of the collaborators’ gender and in favor of the great man theory of cultural production? These questions animate Katherine Hollander’s fine study, Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950.

Hollander’s main focus are the years 1933-39. When Germany fell into Hitler’s grip in 1933, Brecht escaped to Denmark with close friends and family: his wife—the actress Helene Weigel—and their two children; his secretary and lover Margarete Steffin; and the philosopher Walter Benjamin. Weigel and Benjamin were Jewish. They took refuge in a thatched house belonging to Karin Michaëlis, a famous Danish novelist. Number 8 Skovsbostrand, in the small coastal community of Svendborg Sound, became a sanctuary. Here Brecht enjoyed one of the most fruitful creative periods of his life as the Marxist ménage co-created numerous plays. Weigel, the actress, worked closely with him; Steffin made editorial suggestions and sometimes co-authored; and Benjamin wrote critiques that explained the theoretical and social foundations of the plays.

They stayed for six years. In that time there were myriad comings and goings. Under the watch of Michaëlis, their benefactor, other émigrés and refugees came and went. Brecht and the others took separate trips, sometimes to Paris, sometimes to London, for gatherings artistic, political, and personal. Their commitments to art and to politics were inseparable, as per Brecht’s dictum: “to think, to write or produce a play, also means to transform society.”

But as Hitler’s power increased, Brecht and his cohort understood that their time in Denmark, a country sharing a border with Germany, was coming to an end. By now, Brecht was a stateless political fugitive with a family. Plagued by nightmares of his kinsmen invading Denmark and finding him, he left for Sweden in 1939. In 1940, they fled to Finland. Their odyssey had begun.

For much of Hollander’s narrative, the war seems relatively far away—an abstraction heard through bulletins on Brecht’s radio and in the echo of shelling from German warships across the water. But now, in the final quarter of the book, the drama increases. As Brecht and his cohort count their dead and see their options narrowing, they know they must escape Europe once and for all. The hopscotching across glamorous cities for work and other assignations is over, the soirées, communal meals, card games, their rustic idyll in the Danish countryside finished. Hitler is cutting a swathe through Europe and his henchmen are on their tail.

In 1940, the noose tightens. Benjamin, Brecht’s collaborator and chess partner, runs out of moves. Stuck on the French-Spanish border with no way through, exhausted from a clandestine trek across the Pyrenees, he fatally poisons himself. Steffin lies dying of tuberculosis in Moscow. She will not see out another year. Meanwhile, Brecht and his family are holed up in Helsinki and then Russia, waiting for visas for Mexico. Weigel is forced to pawn her jewelry to pay for their passage.

Eventually, the family boards a Swedish cargo ship to the USA. They have left almost all of their possessions behind. The ship is held up in Manila for a week while a typhoon passes. As they approach California, Brecht tosses a cache of books overboard—the works of Lenin that he acquired on a layover in Russia. Wise move. Thus cleansed of evidence of his leftist politics, he and his family are allowed into the USA, where they stay until 1947.

Brecht tries his hand as a Hollywood screenwriter, but hampered by his poor English, he meets with little success—just one screenplay produced. Then McCarthy’s Red Scare arrives. Brecht is forced to testify. While he names no names, the show trial spooks him enough to leave the following day, high-tailing it on a plane to Paris. After the war, he and Weigel return to Berlin where they co-found the Berliner Ensemble, ensuring his legacy. His work, and Weigel, his principal actress, are finally back on stage. But Brecht’s health deteriorates. He dies of a heart attack on August 14, 1956.

To return to the questions that animate the book, to what extent were Brecht’s collaborators sidelined? Hollander has dug into the Brecht archives and found not the lone genius springing sui generis into existence, but an artistic collaborator who worked time and time again with an ensemble of brilliant minds. She posits that Brecht’s co-creators (Mitarbeiter in German) have received short shrift. Their names are barely recognizable to us, if at all. As a corrective, Hollander describes the collaborative methods used in Brechtian drama and the closeness of the working relations of the half dozen people, mostly women, who coalesced around Brecht. She rescues these women from the background, providing excellent biographical sketches and focusing on the professional and personal qualities they brought to the collaboration. They valued Steffin for her working-class roots and her gifts as a writer and actress. She is described as “rigorous and highly organized […] as editor, translator, [and] administrator” (p. 89). Weigel “brought her dramatic talent, ingeniously pragmatic attitude, and […] humane and creative values” to the group (p. 48).

Inevitably, Hollander’s arguments rely on a lot of speculation. In a close collaboration, it can be difficult for even the creators to know which person originated an idea or developed a theme. Furthermore, as the years pass, the research grows more difficult. All the protagonists and witnesses are dead. Brecht was born in the nineteenth century. He’s been gone for seventy years. You could put AI to work analyzing large corpuses of writing in order to decipher who wrote what, but even that would likely be inconclusive, such was the melding of minds and writing over many years.

The other point is that the alchemy of theatrical collaboration in particular is hard to gauge. Many theatrical works exist in two modes: the performance and the written version. The former is always a collaboration, a team effort; the latter less so. Hollander writes, in the conclusion: “the Mitarbeiter […] were mediocre at best about preserving their collaborative methods or presenting them to a wider public.” But the fact is that while preservation and presentation are the priorities of scholars like Hollander, the artists themselves simply didn’t care. They were interested in making art, not documenting their methods.

While Hollander does a fine job of rescuing from obscurity the women in Brecht’s creative life, there is a lacuna at the heart of this book. Kurt Weill was a composer who collaborated on some of Brecht’s most famous works and though he is deeply associated with Brechtian drama, possibly more so than any other person, he is almost totally absent from this book, mentioned just twice.

Weill was a good match for Brecht. The composer believed that the arts should serve a social purpose, and the two men collaborated with immediate success on The Threepenny Opera, as well as other masterworks such as Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. They were bound together artistically and politically until Brecht went too far left for Weill. (Weill is rumored to have said to his wife, “I can’t set the Communist Party Manifesto to music.”) Even though the two men never lived together in exile, Weill’s absence from the book is notable.

I have a couple of quibbles. Out of Africa, by Karen Blixen, is a memoir, not a novel (p. 76). Another concerns the small number of photos. We do get a good glimpse of the interior of the thatched house in Denmark where the Mitarbeiter took refuge, and there’s a quite marvelous photo of Karin Michaëlis deep in conversation with Helene Weigel on page 208, but there might have been more. Weigel was a legendary actress and interpreter of Brecht (at seventeen, with a creased dress and dirty handkerchief, she dazzled seasoned pros at an audition), but we don’t see any photos of her on stage. We are told about the beauty of femme fatale Ruth Berlau but never get to see for ourselves. Even Brecht—skinny, bespectacled, an unlikely seducer—barely appears among the photos.

The book concludes with a lively coda that covers Brecht’s death, the afterlife of his work, and the afterlives of the Mitarbeiter. The Berliner Ensemble—the theater company that he and Weigel founded in 1949—lives on to this day. Walter Benjamin’s fame grew after his death. There is a Margarete Steffin Street and a Helene Weigel Square in Berlin. Michaëlis, the Danish novelist-benefactor who provided refuge for so many Jewish artists, hasn’t regained her literary fame, but is now resurrected through studies like the one under review. She comes across as a secular saint, a paragon of forbearance and kindness. The protector of countless exiles, after enduring her own exile in the US, she eventually returned to Denmark to die. On her gravestone is written hun kom hjem—“she came home.”