An Irishwoman's Diary

With his close-cropped hair, habitual leather jacket, tough-guy demeanour, complex private life and fondness for nasty small cigars, the dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht quickly fitted into the Bohemian arts scene of 1920s Berlin. Years later, when called before the House of Un-American Activities in 1947, he acquitted himself with a combination of wit and ambiguity. But for all his apparent cosmopolitanism and flamboyantly "proletarian" lifestyle, this "dweller in cities" remained an Ausburger, returning regularly to the small Bavarian town where he was born 100 years ago today.

Brecht's enduring influence on 20th-century theatre is as significant as Picasso's on art or Stravinsky's on classical music. He revolutionised modern theatre. Yet even in Germany, as well as throughout Europe and America, the extent of that influence was delayed until the 1950s by the impact of totalitarianism as well as by his personal exile. And just as Beckett's legacy may ultimately rest with his novels, Brecht's poetry and songs could in time overshadow his canon of 44 published plays.

Medical orderly

The son of a worker in a paper mill who later became its owner, he was born into a war generation but did not see action. Although he was eventually conscripted in 1918, his weak heart and his father's intercessions restricted his role to that of a medical orderly at a local hospital and he continued to live at home. Rudolf Caspar Neher, a friend who later became the closest of his theatrical collaborators, served on the Western Front and at Verdun. The two corresponded throughout the war, about which both were sceptical. The war trauma which so shaped Brecht's generation as well as influencing the culture of the Weimar Republic was something he felt protected, rather than excluded, from.

Even by the age of 10 his views on war were formed for life, as was a tendency toward muted rebellion. At Ausburg Grammar School he faced near expulsion for displaying a dismissively anti-patriotic tone in a compulsory essay on the theme: "It is a sweet and honourable thing to die for one's country."

In 1917 he arrived at Munich University to study medicine. Far more important for him, though, was the theatre seminar he attended. Within a year he was writing theatre reviews and had completed Baal, his first play. Drums in the Night soon followed and in 1920 he first experienced Berlin's theatre world. His early efforts to become part of it, however, were interrupted by a spell in hospital, suffering from malnutrition. Meanwhile, the Munich University authorities had finally lost patience and ended his half-hearted student career. While the first productions of Baal and his third play, In the Jungle of Cities, were being staged, Brecht and his circle were acutely aware of the emergence of Hitler's National Socialists. Always dedicated to the theory of theatre, particularly his concept of "epic theatre", Brecht also epitomised the playwright as director.

First major success

Once he had shed his early interest in expressionist parody, he devised an aggressively modernist style of staging. By his 30th birthday he had had his first major success with The Threepenny Opera in collaboration with Kurt Weill. Brecht had also married the actress Helene Weigal (with whom he had had a child before divorcing his first wife). Later she became an outstanding Mother Courage.

Based on an 18th-century English play, John Gay's Beg- gar's Opera (1728), Brecht's drama, set in a mock-Victorian Soho, brilliantly satirises the bourgeois morals of the Weimar Republic. Drawing on the highly politicised German tradition of cabaret, Brecht - by then a fledgling communist - approached the writing of it with a specific didactic purpose. The play's enduring popularity in commercial bourgeois theatre is only one of several Brechtian ironies. Weill's score represents one of the earliest and most exciting attempts to integrate jazz with theatre. Two years later, the first performance of their next collaboration, Mahoganny, outraged the Nazis. Political change was gathering momentum. In 1933, the Nazis came to power and Brecht realised it was time to leave. On the night after the Reichstag burnt to the ground, he fled Berlin, initially to Prague, before moving on to Vienna and Zurich, and then settling on a Danish island. The autobiographical themes of his early work which had been replaced by satire were now supplanted by poetry dominated by images of flight and exile.

When Denmark was invaded, Brecht moved on, first to Finland, then to Santa Monica, California. Mother Courage premiered in Switzerland in 1941 and Charles Laughton's portrayal of the title role in Life of Galileo confirmed that play's success. But anti-communist paranoia sent Brecht back to Switzerland in 1947.

Survivor and optimist

At the close of Mother Cour- age, the indomitable old lady, her three children dead, tugs her cart across the stage, concluding: "Wherever life has not died out/ It staggers to its feet again." Admittedly, she is a consummate pragmatist. Nor does Brecht confer her with any understanding of the deeper implications of war. She is, however a survivor and an optimist, qualities shared by Brecht, a European artist who fled, worked elsewhere and later returned - founding the Berliner Ensemble in 1949. Political and satirical intent underlies much of the work of this committed Marxist; yet its diversity, comic genius and dazzling songs help to deflect charges of polemicism.

As late as 1954, Brecht still feared that audiences missed the underlying message of Mother Courage and Her Chil- dren. "Undoubtedly the play was a great success; that is, it made a big impression . . . but I do not believe, and I did not believe at the time, that the people of Berlin - or of any other city where the play was shown - understood the play. They were all convinced that they had learned something from the war; what they failed to grasp was that, in the playwright's view, Mother Courage was meant to have learnt nothing from her war." War, Brecht insisted, "teaches people nothing." While preparing to bring Mother Courage and The Cau- casian Chalk Circle to London, Brecht died suddenly on August 14th 1956. The tour went on.