Is determination a German connection that means the other of “doppelgänger”—not the uncannily mysterious twin, but the secretly matched-up hostile who stands for everything 1 hates and besides hates everything 1 stands for? If so, Bertolt Brecht could person filled that relation for Vladimir Nabokov. It would beryllium hard to ideate 2 much dissimilar writers inhabiting the aforesaid metropolis astatine the aforesaid time. While Nabokov was yearning toward a mislaid aristocratic past, Brecht was actively championing a proletarian aboriginal successful which the downtrodden would yet triumph implicit their exploiters. And wherever Nabokov kept his authorities (if helium had any) good nether wraps, Brecht wore his connected his sleeve—or rather, connected signboards thrust successful the faces of his audiences.
Brecht, calved successful Augsburg successful 1898, was lone a twelvemonth older than Nabokov, truthful they were astir the aforesaid property during those 2 decisive events of their youth, the Great War and the Russian Revolution. For Nabokov, the erstwhile was an important portion of past occurring chiefly astatine a region portion the second was a imperishable tragedy; for Brecht, the concern was astir precisely reversed. Though helium ne'er became an authoritative Party member, Brecht was known to sympathize with the Soviet revolutionary cause, and helium was to manifest those people sympathies successful astir of his writing. Still, his left-wing authorities did not forestall him from concerning himself with aesthetic matters arsenic well. Like Nabokov, helium started retired chiefly arsenic a writer of poetry, and successful the end, ironically, his lifelong efforts successful that absorption turned retired to beryllium overmuch much meaningful for German lit than Nabokov’s aboriginal poetic forays were for the Russians.
But it was not arsenic a writer that Brecht came to beryllium known, either successful the Berlin of his clip oregon successful the wider world. His destiny was to beryllium celebrated arsenic a playwright and theatrical collaborator, astatine archetypal with the dramaturgical innovator Erwin Piscator and past with the composer Kurt Weill. In particular, Brecht’s instantaneous fame arrived soon aft helium turned thirty, erstwhile his 2nd oregon 3rd collaboration with Weill, The Threepenny Opera, opened astatine the Theater americium Schiffbauerdamm connected August 31, 1928.
The work’s profound effect connected the satellite that came aft it…has been truthful far-reaching arsenic to obliterate immoderate anticipation of seeing oregon proceeding it afresh.
Though immoderate critics and a fewer assemblage members were initially taken aback by this unusual hybrid—neither opera nor play, neither precocious creation nor inexpensive entertainment, neither satire nor consecutive governmental commentary, but a benignant of weird operation of each of them—the accumulation was soon recognized arsenic a large hit. In his capableness arsenic the Berliner Zeitung americium Mittag’s taste reporter, Billie Wilder published a file connected October 22, 1928, astir visiting The Threepenny Opera’s fiftieth performance, wherever helium observed that the “opera’s enduring entreaty owes to a fusion of outrageous wit and societal criticism.” He pointed out, correctly, that “Kurt Weill’s euphony is simply a ample portion of that appeal,” and concluded by saying: “There was arsenic overmuch applause for this fiftieth show arsenic determination had been for the first.”
About a period earlier, the aesthetically choosy Count Harry Kessler had besides attended the show. “In the evening saw Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper, euphony by Weill,” helium wrote successful his diary introduction for September 27. “A fascinating production, with rudimentary staging successful the Piscator mode and proletarian accent (apache style). Weill’s euphony is catchy and expressive and the players (Harald Paulsen, Rosa Valetti, and truthful on) are excellent. It is the amusement of the season, ever sold out.”
Later that fall, astatine a large enactment fixed astatine Piscator’s apartment—an “attractive, agleam flat, designed by Gropius,” Kessler can’t assistance mentioning—he meets the playwright himself. “I was introduced to Brecht,” helium notes successful his October 30, 1928, diary entry. “Strikingly degenerate look, astir a transgression physiognomy, achromatic hairsbreadth and eyes, dark-skinned, a peculiarly suspicious expression; precise astir a emblematic twister. But successful speech helium thaws and comes wrong an ace of being naïve. I told him, seemingly to his large delight, stories astir d’Annunzio. Superficially, astatine immoderate rate, helium has a caput connected his shoulders.” Despite that last enactment of praise, 1 would hardly person expected the snobbish number to further his acquaintance with the self-styled proletarian playwright, and so helium did not.
It’s hard to specify from a region precisely what was truthful peculiar astir those aboriginal performances of The Threepenny Opera. This is existent of immoderate unrecorded production, of course, but successful this lawsuit the occupation is exacerbated by history. The work’s profound effect connected the satellite that came aft it, successful everything from theatre to jazz to graphic creation to movie to tv commercials, has been truthful far-reaching arsenic to obliterate immoderate anticipation of seeing oregon proceeding it afresh.
Even successful its time, it was viewed arsenic some highly archetypal and an acknowledged copy. Loosely adapted from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, the communicative is acceptable successful an imaginary London inhabited by English-named figures similar Peachum, Brown, and Macheath. All the characters are, to 1 grade oregon another, criminals (perhaps this was wherefore Kessler associated Brecht’s quality with them); adjacent the cops are criminals, and successful information the sheriff whitethorn beryllium the astir corrupt fig of all. The play’s main character, Mack the Knife, is simultaneously charismatic and repulsive, and the relation works champion erstwhile neither of those 2 sides is neglected. That Brecht identified with his imperfect leader tin beryllium deduced, perhaps, from the information that successful 1929 helium was taped singing Mack’s taxable song, “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” successful a pitch-perfect two-minute recording. Or possibly what this demonstrates is that by 1929 the opus was truthful celebrated that adjacent a non-singing writer could marque a deed retired of it. The Weill score, arsenic everyone pointed out, was brilliant, ranging arsenic it did from honky-tonk brassiness to delicate sentimentalism, each with a minor-key tang that gave a caller memorability to each phrase.
In the archetypal twelvemonth aft its premiere, The Threepenny Opera was performed implicit 3 100 times astatine the Schiffbauerdamm alone, with different 4 1000 oregon truthful performances taking spot astatine theaters passim Europe. Still, thing lasts forever, and by the summertime of 1929 the absorption of the Theater americium Schiffbauerdamm was acceptable for different play. And who amended to travel up with it than Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill?
Happy End, their archetypal collaboration aft The Threepenny Opera, opened connected September 2, 1929, and ran for little than a week. It was a disaster, some financially and aesthetically. No uncertainty this tin beryllium traced backmost to galore flaws, but the main 1 is that the aboriginal opera was conscionable a airy transcript of its predecessor. It was acceptable among transgression types successful Chicago alternatively than London, but with likewise lovable/hateful characters presented successful a likewise sardonic mode. Worst of all, the songs successful Happy End, erstwhile they were not conscionable dull and repetitive, tended to dependable similar faint imitations of Threepenny’s champion melodies. Both “Surabaya Johnny” and “The Bilbao Song,” for instance, featured galore of the aforesaid chord progressions and rhythmic strategies that Weill had already utilized successful “Pirate Jenny” (memorably sung successful The Threepenny Opera by Lotte Lenya, the composer’s wife). And whereas audiences had loved these philharmonic phrases the archetypal clip around, they didn’t request to perceive them again truthful soon, particularly successful recycled form.
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Meanwhile, implicit astatine Piscator’s rival theatre connected Nollendorfplatz, thing wholly caller was happening. Only 4 oregon 5 years older than Brecht, Erwin Piscator had been a large unit successful the improvement of the Weimar era’s “epic theater,” the melodramatic signifier which Brecht yet took implicit arsenic his own. Piscator, who practiced his creation chiefly arsenic a signifier manager and manager alternatively than a writer (though helium did people a 1929 publication called The Political Theatre), was known arsenic 1 of Berlin’s cutting-edge theatrical collaborators. He had worked with Brecht and Weill arsenic precocious arsenic 1928, involving Brecht successful the adaptation of The Good Soldier Schweik and getting Weill to constitute incidental signifier euphony for Leo Lania’s play Oil Boom, some of which Piscator directed astatine his ain precocious founded theater, Piscator-Bühne. Now, however, helium drew connected a caller brace of collaborators—Moholy-Nagy for the acceptable design, Hanns Eisler arsenic the opus composer—to assistance him usher successful a caller play by Walter Mehring called The Merchant of Berlin.
Mehring, a Berliner calved and raised, had built a estimation chiefly arsenic a satirist, a poet, and a lyricist liable for cabaret songs. A declared anarchist and Dadaist, helium published galore of his abbreviated pieces successful left-wing papers and magazines similar Das Tagebuch and Weltbühne. He was friends with the creator Georg Grosz and, similar Grosz, helium had a somewhat ambivalent cognition toward the New Objectivity’s advocacy of realism. On the 1 hand, these 2 artists supported the request to represent the conditions of beingness among the disenfranchised and to marque a lawsuit for the unfairly oppressed. On the different hand, they wanted the state to depart from world into the satiric and the metaphorical. As Grosz enactment it erstwhile speaking with Harry Kessler (in a speech that took spot astatine that aforesaid enactment wherever Kessler archetypal met Brecht), “Reality arsenic specified does not involvement me…what I aspire to is the fabulous. The camera tin execute each sorts of absorbing snippets, but ne'er the magical effects of draughtsmanship.” In his ain medium—words—Mehring seems to person been aspiring to the aforesaid benignant of thing.
This was shocking, but of people it was meant to be. And wherever did 1 gully the line, anyway, betwixt allowable excess and disruptive nationalist discourse?
Der Kaufmann von Berlin self-consciously alluded, successful its rubric and to a definite grade its plot, to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. It is an echo that immoderate educated German would person heard, due to the fact that Shakespeare had agelong since been claimed by Germany arsenic 1 of its own: Schlegel’s nineteenth-century translations, immoderate Germans insisted, were truthful bully arsenic to transcend the originals. In Mehring’s redone mentation of the tale, an Eastern European Jew named Kaftan arrives successful Berlin successful 1923 with lone a 100 dollars successful his pouch and rapidly turns himself into a millionaire by taking vantage of inflation. Like Shylock with his Jessica, Kaftan has a girl named Jessi whom helium adores. Like Shylock, Kaftan is persuaded by a Gentile into making an unwise and yet unsafe investment. But dissimilar Shylock—a afloat formed, exceedingly analyzable quality susceptible of generating some disgust and sympathy from an audience—Kaftan is much similar a caricature, oregon astatine immoderate complaint a type, intended to correspond the full class of shtetl Jews. Gullible astir to the constituent of stupidity, easy enactment upon by the demands and enticements of others, helium is the entity of astir unceasing antisemitism, not conscionable arsenic practiced by the Gentiles who instrumentality him, but besides connected the portion of the assimilated Jews helium meets successful Berlin. In this sense, Mehring’s play is echoing Einstein’s critique of the affluent German Jews who disdained their poorer Eastern cousins.
The crippled hovers betwixt the fantastical and the realistic. The terrible ostentation of 1923 and the emergence of the nationalist question are portrayed successful their existent colors, but some the grade of profiteering and the engineering of right-wing coups are exaggerated for effect. Mehring’s characters see petty criminals, unscrupulous lawyers, Galician Jews, Freikorps heavies, section and planetary businessmen, Prussian generals, and the mundane citizens inhabiting the streets of Berlin’s aged and alternatively dingy center. Nobody comes disconnected well; if anything, the snooty German Jews astir look much vicious than the right-wing plotters, who are presented arsenic mercenary and power-hungry alternatively than ideological.
The publication itself is filled with the connection of its clip and place, including Berliner gutter slang and high-society clichés, casino code and capitalist jargon, spoken Yiddish and literate German. The Yiddish is really truthful prevalent, particularly successful the dialogues betwixt Kaftan and his daughter, that it’s not wide a mean German theatre assemblage could person understood those parts. The daughter, incidentally, is simply a tuberculosis diligent successful a Swiss sanatorium (shades of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, which had appeared to large acclaim lone 5 years earlier). Her aesculapian destiny is utilized by Kaftan’s deceivers to lure him into their trap, though again, this imaginable root of quality feeling receives nary affectional enactment from Mehring’s satiric style.
For Mehring—who was himself a Jew, though ne'er a practicing one—The Merchant of Berlin may person been a mode of penning astir antisemitism, not lone arsenic a wider societal occupation but besides arsenic it manifested itself wrong the Jewish assemblage of Berlin. For Piscator, who came astatine it from a powerfully Marxist perspective, the play was fundamentally astir class. Presenting the enactment connected a four-level signifier that stratified the antithetic elements of society, helium emphasized the relation of the currency nexus successful undermining quality relations. Not that helium had to contort the publication to bash so, for Mehring purposely sets his enactment successful 1923 to item the instability caused by utmost inflation. In a play erstwhile currency itself has nary fixed value, everyone’s presumption is astatine risk: adjacent the rich, whose wealth usually insulates them, find themselves floundering successful quicksand, unsure from 1 infinitesimal to the adjacent erstwhile they mightiness beryllium sucked under. That Kaftan happens to ain American dollars alternatively than German currency turns retired to beryllium important to his success, though helium lone realizes this aft naïvely showing disconnected his wealth successful a pub successful bid to get work from the antisemitic owner.
When the enactment premiered connected September 6, 1929, the ungraded it caused was contiguous and substantial. Mehring was accused successful antithetic newspapers of promoting some pro-Jewish agitation and antisemitic hatred speech. Under Joseph Goebbels’ guidance, the paramilitary Sturmabteilung—the storm-troopers, different known arsenic the SA—held a monolithic protestation successful beforehand of the theater. In addition, Goebbels wrote and distributed a pamphlet called “To the gallows!” that explicitly attacked Mehring and his play. And contempt immoderate subdued and perchance mixed defenses offered by different Berlin writers (one of his chap satirists, Kurt Tucholsky, praised him arsenic “the archetypal level implicit Berlin”), Mehring yet considered it indispensable to permission Germany, archetypal for Paris and past for Vienna.
The Goebbels pamphlet issued connected this juncture seems to person disappeared, but different of his 1929 screeds, published nether the satiric rubric “Those Damn Nazis,” tin supply thing of its flavor. “The Jew is the origin and beneficiary of our slavery. He has misused the societal misery of the wide masses to deepen the dreadful divided betwixt close and near of our people,” Goebbels wrote. “The Jew caused our problems, and lives from them…He has ruined our race, corrupted our morals, hollowed retired our customs and breached our strength…Where helium finds filth and decay, helium surfaces and begins his butcher’s enactment among the nations…The Jew is uncreative. He produces nothing, helium lone haggles with products…He has someway stolen everything helium deals in.” At 1 point, arsenic if harking backmost to Shakespeare, the pamphleteer seems to reply Shylock’s despairing “Hath not a Jew eyes?” by admitting that “the Jew, aft all, is simply a quality being. Certainly, nary of america doubts that.” But having conceded this much, helium past takes it back: “We lone uncertainty that helium is simply a decent quality being…If idiosyncratic slaps your parent successful the face, bash you say: ‘Thank you! He is aft each a quality being!’ That is not a quality being, it is simply a monster. Yet however overmuch worse has the Jew done to our parent Germany, and is inactive doing today!”
This was shocking, but of people it was meant to be. And wherever did 1 gully the line, anyway, betwixt allowable excess and disruptive nationalist discourse? In aboriginal September of 1929, things inactive appeared sufficiently stable, some economically and politically, for this benignant of theater-driven ungraded to beryllium viewed arsenic conscionable different facet of the edgy Berlin atmosphere. Yes, Goebbels’ connection was surely hateful, but nary reasoning idiosyncratic work specified stuff. And true, the thoroughfare demonstrations were sometimes frightening, if you happened to beryllium successful the incorrect spot astatine the incorrect time. But were the bulk of Berlin’s citizens disquieted astir what each this mightiness mean successful the agelong run? Did they deliberation Mehring’s fantastical and exaggerated imaginativeness of antisemitic, corruption-driven governmental coups could ever go a reality? Not a chance.
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From Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times by Wendy Lesser. Copyright © 2026 by Wendy Lesser. Reprinted by support of HarperCollins Publishers.
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