What Weimar Berlin’s Most Famous Plays Revealed About Artistic Freedom

Is there a German word that means the opposite of “doppelgänger”—not the uncannily mysterious twin, but the secretly matched-up opponent who stands for everything one hates and also hates everything one stands for? If so, Bertolt Brecht could have filled that role for Vladimir Nabokov. It would be hard to imagine two more dissimilar writers inhabiting the same city at the same time.

While Nabokov was yearning toward a lost aristocratic past, Brecht was actively championing a proletarian future in which the downtrodden would finally triumph over their exploiters. And where Nabokov kept his politics (if he had any) well under wraps, Brecht wore his on his sleeve—or rather, on signboards thrust in the faces of his audiences. Brecht, born in Augsburg in 1898, was only a year older than Nabokov, so they were about the same age during those two decisive events of their youth, the Great War and the Russian Revolution.

For Nabokov, the former was an important piece of history occurring mainly at a distance while the latter was a permanent tragedy; for Brecht, the situation was almost exactly reversed. Though he never became an official Party member, Brecht was known to sympathize with the Soviet revolutionary cause, and he was to manifest those class sympathies in most of his writing. Still, his left-wing politics did not prevent him from concerning himself with aesthetic matters as well.

Like Nabokov, he started out mainly as a writer of poetry, and in the end, ironically, his lifelong efforts in that direction turned out to be much more meaningful for German literature than Nabokov’s early poetic forays were for the Russians. But it was not as a poet that Brecht came to be known, either in the Berlin of his time or in the wider world. His fate was to be celebrated as a playwright and theatrical collaborator, at first with the dramaturgical innovator Erwin Piscator and then with the composer Kurt Weill.

In particular, Brecht’s instantaneous fame arrived shortly after he turned thirty, when his second or third collaboration with Weill, The Threepenny Opera, opened at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on August 31, 1928. The work’s profound effect on the world that came after it…has been so far-reaching as to obliterate any possibility of seeing or hearing it afresh. Though some critics and a few audience members were initially taken aback by this odd hybrid—neither opera nor play, neither high art nor cheap entertainment, neither satire nor straight political commentary, but a kind of weird combination of all of them—the production was soon recognized as a major hit.

In his capacity as the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag’s cultural reporter, Billie Wilder published a column on October 22, 1928, about visiting The Threepenny Opera’s fiftieth performance, where he observed that the “opera’s enduring appeal owes to a fusion of outrageous wit and social criticism.” He pointed out, correctly, that “Kurt Weill’s music is a large part of that appeal,” and concluded by saying: “There was as much applause for this fiftieth performance as there had been for the first.” About a month earlier, the aesthetically choosy Count Harry Kessler had also attended the show. Weill’s music is catchy and expressive and the players (Harald Paulsen, Rosa Valetti, and so on) are excellent. It is the show of the season, always sold out.” Later that fall, at a big party given at Piscator’s apartment—an “attractive, bright flat, designed by Gropius,” Kessler can’t help mentioning—he meets the playwright himself.