Bertolt Brecht: Was it all an act? Subversive revolutionary or Stalinist stooge with a Swiss bank account? Boyd Tonkin assesses the legacy of Bertolt Brecht 50 years after his death On a raw, bleak morning in early March, I tried to read a poem by Bertolt Brecht in a windswept Docklands square. All around loomed the sort of corporate towers of power that seem designed to illustrate the German writer's lurid images of modern life 'in the jungle of the cities.' From one of these monoliths of money sprang a uniformed guard, polite but implacable, to inform us that a camera with a tripod required a written permit on this very private property that went about masquerading as a public space. No unauthorised poetry here, mate. We were there to shoot part of a video that the Goethe Institute had planned to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Brecht's death in East Berlin - the death, at fifty-eight, of the overtly loyal, covertly cynical godfather of a grim Stalinist state. Gilded in part by the lustre that his quicksilver genius as a poet, dramatist, theorist and director had lent it, the German 'Democratic' Republic staggered on for thirty-three more years. But the detested regime that embalmed Brecht's legacy of scepticism and subversion in the plush tomb of the Berliner Ensemble theatre company could hardly, as the writer mockingly advised in his secret poem 'The Solution', 'dissolve the people/ and elect another'. So, at long last, millions of disgruntled citizens decided that they would not live for another day in the kind of micro-managed scout-camp that even told you… well, exactly where you could and couldn't read a poem. Brecht's imagination feasts from first to last on the ironies and reversals thrown up by history. And those surprises did not stop with the falling walls of 1989. About him, as about the enduring questions of power, art, knowledge and responsibility that drive his work, the last line of a poem on the emigrant's plight written in Hitler's heyday still applies: 'The final word/ Is yet unspoken.' It sometimes seems that suspicion of Brecht's emotional 'coldness' has chilled opinions of him even more than his revolutionary politics. Born bourgeois in Augsburg in 1898, he came to Munich and then Berlin as a tearaway poet and playwright in the social chaos after the First World War. 'The coldness of the forests/ Will be inside me till my dying day', avows a famous poem, 'Of Poor B.B.', on the alienation of his urban life. Yet Brecht learnt to use the cultural confusions of the Weimar Republic with a canny chancer's eye, and in The Threepenny Opera, the collaboration with Kurt Weill that satirically re-wrote John Gay's The Beggar Opera, scored the biggest box-office smash of the period. His never-quite-complete conversion to Communism led to propaganda pieces such as The Measures Taken, before Hitler's rise to power drove him into Scandinavian exile. In those 'dark times' Brecht the artist somehow thrived. As a playwright, he wrote early versions of the plays (such as Galileo, Mother Courage, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle) that still keep his drama alive, and as a poet the exquisite Svendborg lyrics. Then, as one of the exiles who went 'changing countries just as often as we changed our shoes', he ended up in Los Angeles, where friendships with Charlie Chaplin and Charles Laughton were offset by the sunlit hell of work in pitiless Hollywood. After his riddling testimony to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1947, the elusive Marxist returned to heroic status in East Germany, where he ran the Berliner Ensemble with his actress wife Helene Weigel (but still kept his cash in Switzerland). His champions will account for this mismatch between theory and practice by claiming that Brecht the dramatist has vanquished Brecht the dogmatist. So, bury the Marxist and cheer the humanist, they say. Dump the peddler of abstract nostrums and embrace instead the practical backstage wizard who always insisted to his actors that (as one of his theatre poems puts it), 'this is not magic but/ Work, my friends'. After all, his popularity has depended on fertile misreading since 1928, when the ruthless send-up of Weimar cabaret songs that was 'The Ballad of Mack the Knife' leapt off the stage of the Schiffbauerdamm theatre in Berlin to become one of the most-recorded standards in the history of pop music. Everything to do with Brecht comes freighted with a cargo of puzzle and paradox, but his practice did keep faith with his theory in one respect at least. He always urged that the creative to-and-fro of collaboration should shape and change his work as the realities around it mutated. Hence the finest items that bear the 'Brecht' trademark always reflect a long process of testing and tweaking in which many hands and many minds may claim a share. And his theoretical ideas also include the theoretical idea of their own planned obsolescence. In one of the eye-opening conversations recorded by the critic Walter Benjamin during his mid-1930s visits to the Danish island where Brecht hid from the Third Reich, Brecht offers as an artists' maxim: 'Don't start from the good old things, but from the bad new ones.' These tenets still fail to appease those critics for whom Brecht's impenitent public Stalinism (whatever his gnawing private doubts) sticks forever in the craw. Yet in backing a brutal ideology whose benighted simplicities contradict the light and life of his own strongest work, the writer shared a self-betrayal with many of his greatest literary peers. Think of TS Eliot damning the modern urban culture that harbours 'any large number of free-thinking Jews'; or of Ezra Pound broadcasting in favour of Mussolini's Fascism. But the most revealing comparison of all, I think, comes not from the crowd of Modernist giants who flirted with far-right barbarism but from one of Brecht's earliest inspirations: Rudyard Kipling. The young, anarchic Brecht loved Kipling. You can feel the rollicking plebeian rhythms of the latter's verse in his poetry from the 1920s onwards. Kiplingesque parody and tribute unite in a ballad such as the 'Canon Song' from The Threepenny Opera, with its gung-ho squaddie: 'When they come face to face/ With a different breed of fellow/ Whose skin is black or yellow/ They quick as winking chop him into a beefsteak tartare'. At a deeper level, both of these provoking arrivistes take a brash and bold artisan's approach to literature. Both temper political stridency with a lyrical sympathy for undervalued crafts and trades and, above all, for the enduring wonder of the natural world. Crucially, both busy innovators fashioned free-spirited work that still liberates other writers while endorsing a system of high-minded plunder and despotism that brought only hardship and hopelessness to millions. WH Auden, who knew, admired and collaborated with Brecht, wrote in his memorial ode for Yeats that time would 'pardon Kipling and his views'. In literature at least, posterity would favour genius over justice or responsibility - although, in a rather Brechtian twist, Auden later retracted this opinion and deleted the stanza. Two factors inhibit the posthumous indulgence that Brecht craved. First, thousands of Hitler's other enemies fought against the Nazi night from exile without becoming Stalin's stooges. Second, it's hard to think of any other major-league author who lived so long and so brazenly in the knowledge of the fatal chasm between the ideals and realities of the system he promoted. As early as 1938, he admitted (to Walter Benjamin) that what existed in Russia was 'dictatorship over the proletariat'. Yet in 1955 this icon of socialism in art (armed with an Austrian passport and a Swiss bank account) went to Moscow to accept the Stalin Prize, named after the tyrant he privately described as 'honoured murderer of the people'. Vaclav Havel wrote of the duty to live in truth. Brecht lived in a lie, and yet in spite of - or because of? - his parade of hypocrisies, he never stopped creating work that blazes with luminous moments of vision and epiphany. 'In the end,' writes Brecht of Galileo, 'he indulges his science like a vice, secretly, and probably with pangs of conscience'. Replace 'science' with 'art' and he could be writing about his lauded but dishonoured 1950s self. And yet… the great poems, if not the great plays, kept flowing to the last. Boyd Tonkin is literary editor of The Independent. This is a shortened version of the article printed in The Independent, 30 June 2006 © 2006 Independent News and Media Limited