A Life’s Work Curtailed? The Ailing Brecht’s Struggle with the SED Leadership over GDR Cultural Policy

Summary

Securing the Presence in East Berlin of such an iconic socialist artist as Bertolt Brecht was both a major coup for the leaders of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1949 and a major headache. Given the same opportunity just two years later, they would probably have declined. Brecht was the most prominent of the German artists who returned to the GDR from exile to participate in the construction of a first German socialist state. However, during the later years of the Weimar Republic and his subsequent exile from Nazi Germany, Brecht already had major differences in his aesthetic theory and practice with artists and cultural politicians who sought to represent an orthodox position for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) by means of the doctrine of Socialist Realism. In his capacity as editor of the Moscow journal Das Wort during the Great Terror, Brecht — himself in Danish exile — clashed in a sectarian struggle with the “Moscow faction,” most notably his co-editor Georg Lukács and other influential figures such as Alfred Kurella and Fritz Erpenbeck. When Brecht had to flee Scandinavia in 1941, he pointedly chose to take refuge not in Moscow, where friends such as Carola Neher had been imprisoned, but in California, where he remained as a “western émigré” until his return to Europe in 1947. When Brecht moved from Switzerland to Berlin in 1949, the stage was set for the resumption of the sectarian struggle within the new context of the Cold War. As before, major areas of contention were the treatment of the German cultural heritage and dramatic theory. While Brecht engaged in a critical interrogation of the deutsche Misere, the wretched path of German history that had reached its nadir in Hitler’s Germany, the SED leadership expected artists to provide exemplary, uplifting narratives from the socialist heritage in support of the new state, contrasting the GDR with an unregenerate West.

Throughout the Cold War, the restricted access to records in the obsessively secretive and security-minded GDR drastically impaired our understanding of Brecht’s struggle with the SED’s leadership and cultural politicians. There was frequent speculation in the West that Brecht’s last seven years in the GDR must surely have contributed to his early death on 14 August 1956, aged just fifty-eight.