In the spring of 1956, Bertolt Brecht was living at number 125 Chauseestrasse at the northern periphery of central Berlin. He was working on an adaption of John Millington Synge's Playboy of the Western World and reading Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It was 30 years since he had written Mannist Mann, which was seen recently in Dublin. By the time his theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble, performed his Playboy, Brecht was dead.
The house at Chauseestrasse was a final refuge for Brecht. From the large room on the top floor where he worked, he looked out on the Dorotheen Cemetary and the grave of his hero, Georg Hegel, the philospher. Now Brecht lies alongside him with Heinrich Mann not far away. When Brecht lived there, after 1953, he had but a short walk down the Freidrichstrasse to what is now the Bertolt-Brecht-Platz and his theatre. He directed the company in partnership with wife, Helene Weigel. Although their marriage was over, Helene lived with him in the house on Chauseestrasse for his last years. She occupied the first floor while he lived on the top. There were two doorbells.
Helene was Austrian and today, the restaurant which constitutes the ground floor of the Brecht-Haus serves Austrian specialities reputed to be her recipies.Bertolt Brecht was not a native Berliner. He was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, in 1898, the son of a paper mill manager. He studied medicine and worked as a medical orderly in the first World War, where he became passionately anti-militaristic. By 1924 he was living in Berlin, the city of theatres. He cannot have known how portentous his play, Mannist Mann, would be. It is a play about the surrender of identity where the chief protagonist Galy Gay, a poor Irish dock-porter, wittingly allows himself to be changed into anything society wishes. He becomes the machine-made man, the ultimate social conformist.
Given that he was reflecting on the human condition at this level, it was hardly surprising that Brecht had to leave Germany soon after the accession to power of Adolf Hitler. But before he did, he had considerable success with many of his plays and especially with his musical The Threepenny Opera. In May, 1933, the Nazis burned his books. He was in exile, and it lasted for 15 years.
In May, 1941, Brecht got a US visa. Since leaving Germany he had lived in various European countries and Russia. Then, though remaining an unreconstructed, unreformed, unregenerate Marxist, he ended up in southern California. He never settled. But he made friends with Charlie Chaplin and Charles Laughton. In October, 1947, Brecht was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities where he could truthfully answer that he "was not and never had been a member of the Communist Party". They did not ask him if he was a Communist. A master of ambiguity, Brecht enjoyed himself immensely. The dialectical approach was, after all, his metier. And the Committee loved it. In 1948 he was back in Berlin. A sharply divided Berlin, but Berlin all the same. Like many of the returning intellectuals, he settled in the East.
Authorised to set up the Berliner Ensemble by the government of the German Democratic Republic, Brecht spent much of his time wandering around Berlin, watching the women piling up bricks in neat arrangements. "The dump near Potsdam", is how he described the city in this period. It was full of ghosts and some of the ghosts had miraculously survived. They gathered together in a battered shed opposite the Deutsches Theatre on Max Reinhardtstrasse where the door was always left open. It was to be a theatre for the people; to help them repair the damage caused by the perversion of their emotional lives during the years of the Third Reich.
The house on Chauseestrasse and the Dorotheen Cemetary together with the Deutsches Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble are only a part of this literary landmark. The pilgrim will want to explore the whole of the Scheunenviertel (the barn quarter) from Weidendammerbrⁿcke to the Rosa Luxemburgstrasse, bearing in mind that long before it was a Bohemians' paradise it was the old Jewish Quarter. On Rosa Luxemburg-Platz stands Max Reinhardt's Volksbuhne Theatre. Here the great impresario brought the works of Heinrik Ibsen and August Strindberg to the people of Berlin in the early 1900s, while Edward Martyn was doing the same for the people of Dublin. In a way both were blazing a trail for Bertolt Brecht.