Berlin is a city of many beautiful cemeteries. Usually relatively small, they are scattered across the city, some of the older ones virtually at its heart, often surrounded by tenements, back courts, workshops, railway lines; kitchen windows opening out onto panoramas of crowded gravestones and trees. The dead always in sight of the living. Surprisingly, perhaps, many of these cemeteries are still in use today. The plots used and re-used over the decades, the names on the stones bearing witness to a city of immigrants, as all cities are cities of immigrants, immigrants with Slav names, Polish, Russian, Czech, and from every part of German-speaking Europe.
Two of the most beautiful of these Berlin cemeteries are on Chausseestrasse in the old centre of the city. At the end of the Second World War it was included in the eastern Soviet sector, a half-city which in 1949 became the capital of the new German Democratic Republic – East Germany – set up in opposition to the Federal Republic in West Germany.
Directly on Chausseestrasse, separated from it and the whooshing clanking of the passing trams by a brick wall, is the smaller of the two graveyards, the former French or Huguenot cemetery. Forming a semi-circle above the door of the tiny chapel are the comforting and very un-Brechtian words: ‘Nous les croyons perdus, mais ils dorment’ – We think them lost, but they are sleeping. Behind the Huguenot cemetery, but approached from the road by a broad sand and gravel track – there are trees alongside, but it’s not quite an avenue – is the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrich Werder graveyard, usually referred to simply as the Dorotheenstädtische or Dorotheen graveyard. Laid out in the second half of the 18th century just beyond the Oranienburg Gate of the then city wall, this was originally the burial ground of the Dorotheen and Friedrich Werder churches. (The baroque Dorotheenkirche was badky damaged during the Second World War and the ruins cleared afterwards,the neo-Gothic Friedrich Werdersche Kirche is now a sculpture museum.) Situated on the southern side of the River Spree from the cemetery, their congregations included many of the wealthiest and most prominent families of Berlin. Perhaps just as important, the parishes included the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of the Arts and, subsequently, the University, and the members of these institutions also had the right to be to be buried in the graveyard of these churches. Among the older graves here are those of the philosophers Hegel and Fichte, who helped to establish the reputation of the then new Berlin university, and of the great architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. He and his students designed many of the most distinctive buildings in and around Berlin, including the Friedrich Werdersche Kirche built by Schinkel himself.
Brecht’s last home was an apartment, whose windows overlooked both graveyards, on the first floor of 125 Chausseestrasse in a complex of mid-19th century buildings abutting the track leading to the Dorotheen cemetery. He didn’t, in fact, live there very long, from October 1953 until his death in the apartment on 14th August 1956. It was, however, the final destination of his manuscripts, his library and of the objects he had taken with him during the years of exile from 1933 to 1948, like the Chinese scroll picture of The Doubter and a Japanese mask. Both are commemorated in poems written in exile, the one on the mask is an example, in its brevity and memorable turn of phrase, of what made Brecht such a popular and quotable poet.
On my wall hangs a Japanese carving
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.
(The Mask of Evil)
By far the longest-lasting of Brecht’s three marriages was to the actress Helene Weigel, who also had an apartment at 125 Chausseestrasse. After Brecht died she took charge of the Berliner Ensemble theatre until her own death in 1971. Today Brecht’s apartment is a museum, and the building also contains the Brecht archive and the Literaturforum im Brecht Haus, which presents a regular programme of literary and political talks and discussions, often, but not exclusively Brecht-related. A somewhat gloomy restaurant in the basement serves dishes purportedly taken from Weigel’s (Viennese) recipes.
In April 1954 Brecht’s theatre group, the Berliner Ensemble, had finally been allocated the newly restored Theater am Schiffbauerdamm as a permanent home. In 1928 this same theatre had seen the premiere and first run of Brecht’s greatest commercial success Die Dreigroschenoper – The Threepenny Opera with music by Kurt Weill. The Brecht and Weigel home was only a few hundred yards from the theatre, close to the River Spree, likewise only a few hundred yards from the theatre’s rehearsal stage, and not far, either, from a number of other theatres. These included the Deutsches Theater, made famous by Max Reinhardt, where the ensemble had been a guest troupe while waiting for its own theatre, the Volksbühne, the historic home of naturalism and before 1933 closely associated with the Social Democratic Party, the Maxim Gorki Theatre in the former Singakademie, the Komische Oper, the State Opera on Unter den Linden (which was still being restored at the time) and the ruin of the old Court and State Theatre – another of Schinkel’s designs – on Gendarmenmarkt, which would eventually be rebuilt as a concert hall and not as a theatre. Close by, too, were the artists’ club ‘Die Möwe’ (The Seagull), an important meeting place and, also, the government and Party offices and the representative institutions of the new East German state. A few hundred yards to the west [Clärchens Ballhaus!] was the boundary of the eastern and western sectors of the city. In the 1950′s there was not yet an impregnable ‘Berlin Wall’ and Berliners, not least actors and other theatre people, still moved relatively freely between the two halves of the city.
Brecht chose to be buried in the Dorotheen Cemetery: an island of continuity and calm (its trees growing again) in a city still full of ruins. No doubt, as a Marxist, he also liked the thought of marking his place in German culture alongside Hegel, the great promoter of the dialectic in the study of philosophy and history, and a profound influence on Karl Marx and a whole generation of radical intellectuals, who developed Hegel’s method in ways in ways of which he would scarcely have approved. Brecht, at any rate, was not buried with the martyrs of revolution and the Socialist and Communist leaders at Friedrichsfelde Cemetery far to the east of the city centre. In any case he wasn’t even a Party member and never had been.
The grave is on the first path to the right off the main track, with the Huguenot cemetery behind it. In the shelter of two brick walls at right angles, overshadowed by a large maple tree, are two unhewn grey granite boulders, the taller one simply marked Bertolt Brecht 1898-1956, the lower broader one bearing only the name Helene Weigel. The pairing suggests a monogamous harmony, a couple grown trustingly old together, which was very far from the reality of Brecht and Weigel’s life. On the next parallel path, close together, Hegel and Fichte. Also nearby are the graves of other writers and writers who made a commitment to the German Democratic Republic, to ‘building Socialism on German soil’ (or who at least believed that the best, progressive German republican and cultural traditions were much more likely to be continued in East than in West Germany.) Among them are Heinrich Mann, who died still in the United States as he was about to leave for East Berlin, but whose ashes were later interred here; the novelists Anna Seghers and Arnold Zweig, the writer and poet Stephan Hermlin, the poet and GDR minister Johannes R. Becher, the graphic artist John Heartfield, the scholars Werner Krauss and Jürgen Kuczynski. By choosing this final resting place close to the centre of Berlin, Brecht set an example which others wished to follow, establishing a kind of Socialist cultural pantheon in the Biedermeier setting of the Dorotheen cemetery.
Also buried here, however, are a number of Brecht’s collaborators and friends, including some he had already known and worked with in the 1920′s. Hanns Eisler, perhaps the most brilliant of the composers with whom Brecht worked, is directly opposite Brecht and Weigel. A little to the left of Eisler are the graves of the more pedestrian Paul Dessau and of his wife, Ruth Berghaus. She succeeded Weigel as director of the Berliner Ensemble, from 1971 to 1977, and was to prove much more talented and innovative in developing Brechtian theatre. She was forced out by the Brecht heirs and subsequently made an even greater name for herself in the West as an opera director. Further along: Erich Engel, a theatre and film director with whom Brecht had worked as early as 1922/23. Although half-Jewish, Engel had remained in Germany throughout the Nazi years. He joined Brecht in Berlin as soon as the latter returned. Brecht trusted Engel, who had himself been a radical theatre reformer, more than any other director of his work, and it was he who took over Brecht’s last production (The Life of Galileo) at the Berliner Ensemble, when the latter became too weak to continue. A little further away is Arnolt Bronnen, a buddy and fellow playwright when Brecht was beginning to make his way in Berlin in the 1920′s. Like Brecht he was a young man on the make with big ambitions and a big mouth. Unlike Brecht he moved sharply to the right and by the late 20′s was an active Nazi, even becoming a speech writer for Goebbels; he later recanted, returned to the Left, came back to East Berlin from Vienna at the beginning of the 1950′s, becoming finally a noted theatre critic for the Communist press. Also nearby: the Bulgarian Slatan Dudow, who co-directed the film Kuhle Wampe with Brecht in the early 1930′s, and the stage director Wofgang Langhoff, who helped keep Brecht’s name as a playwright alive in Europe with productions at the Zürich Schauspielhaus.
At the outermost limit of this petrified choreography, in the most distant corner of the cemetery, close by Hannoversche Strasse, on which there is no entrance, lie two of Brecht’s most important collaborators (and lovers), Elisabeth Hauptmann (1897-1973) and Ruth Berlau (1906-1974). Elisabeth Hauptmann had played a crucial role in initiating the writing of The Threepenny Opera, when she noticed the success of a 1926 revival of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera in London and translated the text for Brecht. Much later, after his death, she was the first editor Brecht’s work. The relationship with the Danish Ruth Berlau was one of the most intense and sustained of Brecht’s liaisons and also had as its legacy a number of works. The rather dismissive consignment of the two women to the edge of the graveyard, far away from the famous men, or women formally legitimated by marriage to men, almost seems to confirm the arguments of those who have accused Brecht of plagiarising and exploiting his collaborators, especially women (even though their contributions are credited in the German editions of the works). The tragi-comic position of the two women, facing one another, rivals in death as in life, is perhaps better explained by the influence and role of Brecht’s ‘official wife’, Helene Weigel, in East Germany after his death. Bitterly and proudly she declared: “Now it’s my Brecht”. Official GDR policy was concerned to put Brecht beyond criticism, to monumentalise him. Brecht and Weigel were presented as a great partnership, and Weigel was enshrined, somewhat paradoxically given the nature of the play itself, as the ‘Mother Courage’ of the young state. The libertinism of Brecht and his circle did not fit very well with such an image. And so Weigel’s competitors were banished as far away from Brecht’s and her resting place together as was possible without actually putting them out on the street.
What the presence of all these collaborators, surrounding him even in death, indicates very strikingly, is Brecht’s ability to gain and keep loyalty and friendship. (Even the doctor, Otto Müllereisert, who verified Brecht’s death, had already been part of his secondary school clique at home in Augsburg, as had Caspar Neher, both a close friend and most favoured stage designer, which was not his only talent.) If Brecht during his schooldays had never been the most academically successful pupil, he had always been at the centre of a gang, and remained so for the rest of his life (even if the gang could be called a team, a collective or an ensemble). It was the ideal way to work in the theatre, for one thing, and he loved to debate and create by way of discussion and was never shy of taking up suggestions or advice. Nevertheless he always remained the boss, whose unmistakeable style, tone, themes and questions make up the works of poetry, drama, prose and theory we know today as ‘Brecht’.
Of course, for all the names we see gathered around Brecht in the Dorotheen cemetery, the great majority of those who worked with him are not here.
In the early 1940′s, at the beginning of his period of exile in southern California, Brecht wrote a number of poems about the ‘missing’ of those years, as Nazism spread murderously outwards from Germany across Europe. Among the less familiar is this short and untitled one:
“where is benjamin, the critic?
where is warschauer, the radio man?
where is steffin, the teacher?
(the critic)
benjamin is buried at the spanish border.
(The radio man)
warschauer is buried in holland.
steffin is buried in moscow.
I drive past the bomber wharves of Los Angeles.”
(Walter Benjamin, the great Marxist critic and historian had, in the course of the 1930′s become both a friend and one of the best, sympathetic critics of Brecht’s work; Frank Warschauer had been one of Brecht’s closest friends in his early days in Berlin; Margarete Steffin, who died of TB in Moscow as Brecht and his family escaped from Europe by travelling across the Soviet Union and the Pacific to the US West Coast, had been a close collaborator, a stimulus and a lover – My general has fallen/My soldier has fallen//My pupil has gone away/My teacher has gone away, he wrote of her. He concludes another poem, Casualty List, with the lines Some/These death fetched. Others/Left me for the necessities of life/Or luxury.)
Among those not in the ‘last gang’ are the many who never returned from American exile (some ceasing to be ‘exiles’). Like Peter Lorre, whom Brecht begged to join the Berliner Ensemble: Rich or poor/Healthy or sick/Forget everything/And come. (Lorre may have reckoned that it would be difficult to maintain his drug habit in postwar Berlin); Lion Feuchtwanger, who early on recognised Brecht’s talent, fictionalising him in the novel Success as far back as 1929, who was refused US citizenship because of his politics and was afraid he would not be allowed to return to the United States if he left; and, of course, Kurt Weill. He and Brecht had already quarrelled before Hitler came to power. Genuinely friendly relations were never re-established, partly because Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife, heartily disliked the ‘genius’. Nevertheless, in the United States Weill twice set Brecht poems in something like his ‘old’ style, rather than his American musical one. Weill never returned to Germany, though Lotte Lenya visited and performed there after her husband’s death in 1950. The great Jewish actor Alexander Granach died in late 1945 in New York as he was about to return to Europe. Karl Korsch, the Marxist politician and theorist and something like a mentor to Brecht, likewise never returned, also dying in the United States, in 1961. Among those who had not emigrated was the great comedian Karl Valentin. A profound influence on Brecht (as on Samuel Beckett), though not remotely a Marxist or an intellectual, he was never likely to be prised away from Bavaria and Munich. And then there were other more tragic cases (besides those already mentioned above): like the actor and director Kurt Gerron, the Tiger Brown of the first production of The Threepenny Opera; Jewish, he went to Holland after the Nazi seizure of power and was overtaken there by the German invasion in 1940. He was deported to Theresienstadt in 1944, organised a cabaret, and was then forced or persuaded to work on the notorious Nazi propaganda film The Führer Gives a City to the Jews. After completion of the film he was transported to Auschwitz and gassed on arrival. Or there was Carola Neher: luminously beautiful as Polly Peachum in G.W. Pabst’s film of The Threepenny Opera, she made the wrong choice of partner in the Soviet Union and disappeared in the Gulag in the late 1930′s. And others for one good reason or another are simply buried elsewhere, the singer and actor Ernst Busch in a cemetery in the Berlin district of Pankow, Caspar Neher in Vienna(?).
In recent years there have been further burials of the prominent and famous on the Dorotheen cemetery. They include Rudolf Bahro a Marxist dissident in the GDR and later a founder of the Green Party in West Germany, the writer and film-maker Thomas Brasch, the film-maker Frank Beyer, and in 2003 the remains of the philosopher and social theorist Herbert Marcuse, who had died in 1979, were finally laid to rest here. There have also been figures who will still be associated with Brecht, for example the great Marxist critic Hans Mayer, who had been forced to leave East Germany in 1963, and who repeatedly wrote on Brecht. Above all, there’s the playwright Heiner Müller. His very appearance drew on Brecht as model and anti-model, as did his plays, at once exemplary in their deployment of the dialectic method, yet also increasingly dense, and at times opaquely poetic. He was perhaps Brecht’s greatest student as a dramatist, but no epigone. He died in 1995 shortly after taking over the Berliner Ensemble as sole director.
I went to the Dorotheen cemetery for the first time more than twenty years ago. On that occasion someone had left a half-smoked cigar on top of Brecht’s gravestone – photographs of Brecht often show him, even as a young man, with a cigar – just as one might respectfully place a pebble on a Jewish grave. Last year, in November 2005, when I visited, there were plenty of pebbles, as well as carnations, on the large, square block on Hanns Eisler’s grave (he was Jewish). There were roses on a number of stones, including a yellow and a red one for Ruth Berghaus. The Jewish custom of putting down pebbles had meanwhile spread, however, to the graves of those who were by no means Jewish by birth. Perhaps because in a post-Christian society the placing of a pebble can seem a more appropriate act than laying flowers, suggestive of a belief in resurrection, which will often simply be allowed to wither and wilt and decay messily. Also it’s often easy enough to pick up a pebble and place it down – though pebbles are hard to find on the sandy paths of the Dorotheen cemetery. There is of course the oddity and irony, that the Dorotheen cemetery, a nominally Christian graveyard has come to be the resting place not only of so many Communists and ex-Communist Leftists, free thinkers and revolutionaries, but that a considerable number of them were, at the very least, born into Jewish families.
At any rate, whatever form the markers of respect take, if we see them as indications of rising and falling stock or reputation, then Brecht’s no longer stands so high for visitors to the Dorotheen cemetery. Now he had been accorded only a few pebbles. In contrast on Heiner Müller’s plot, with its striking rust-red iron stela, designed by Jannis Kounellis(?) and reminiscent of a Moslem burial column, there are pebbles, roses and an empty packet of Cohiba cigars. (Müller was buried with a full box of Montecristo Havannas, smoking probably killed him, but now he can keep on doing it without any more worries.) On my previous visit a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses of the kind the playwright used to wear had been laid down in the right-hand corner of the plot. And the time before that there were three cigars (and a rose).
It was a quiet overcast November day, the smell of leaves and damp earth, the birch trees almost leafless. I was alone, observed only by a tabby cat with very long whiskers, keeping at a cautious distance from me, slipping under the evergreen bushes.
(The last part of ‘The Brecht Gang’ was first published in the 2010 Catalogue of Seagull Books, Calcutta.)
Category >> Books & Authors