A Recollection of Berthold Brecht
HOOK, SIDNEY
WRITERS and WRITING A Recollection of Berthold Brecht By Sidney Hook THERE SEEMS to be a growing curiosity about the personality of Berthold Brecht. Attempts are being made to picture him as a...
...I thought I had misheard...
...All he did was to smile at me in a nervous sort of way...
...I had originally met him at some meetings conducted by Karl Korsch toward whom Brecht seemed very friendly...
...He had the air of a politically sophisticated man and enjoyed an almost unlimited credit for political understanding...
...Brecht was very witty about Jerome’s cultural pretensions, his political crudity and stupidity, called him an “owl without wisdom...
...When I recovered, I asked him: “Why...
...In those days I was full of the subject...
...He put his glass down, rose, took his hat and coat and left...
...I turned to Brecht and asked him why, if he felt the way he did about Jerome and the other American Communists, he collaborated with them, particularly in view of their unqualified endorsement of the events in Moscow...
...I was in no mood to listen to continued complaint that Jerome was “an idiot about the theater...
...Bert Brecht is the only man to whom I handed his hat and coat and showed the door despite my admiration for his poetic and dramatic talents...
...I got up, went into the next room and fetched his hat and coat...
...The second time Brecht called with the Korsches and all he talked about was the stupidity of the Communist cultural “Commissar,” V. J. Jerome, who had been assigned to work with him and a group of Communist actors in producing, or arranging to produce, one of his plays...
...They never reached the level of considered argument...
...The conversation was general and the only thing I recall was our unanimous criticism of the role that the Communist theory of “social-fascism” had played in bringing Hitler to power in Germany...
...and he calmly repeated, “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die...
...and made other unflattering comparisons between him and the lower members of the animal kingdom...
...He was rather moody and began another tirade against Jerome...
...The first time he came, after telephoning me, I believe Oscar Sidney Hook is chairman of the Graduate Philosophy Department at New York University and a leading writer on philosophical, educational and political affairs...
...Attempts are being made to picture him as a person whose humanism made him writhe in the collar of orthodoxy...
...but since he combined them with a furious critique of the Kautskian tendencies of German Social Democracy, the German Communists were puzzled by him...
...I couldn’t believe my ears...
...At that time Lange was a left Socialist and had organized a political group in Poland whose outlook was very close to that of the American Workers’ party...
...I should like, therefore, to contribute, for whatever it is worth, an account of my own brief experience with him...
...I did not see Brecht again until he visited me at my home in the United States in the mid-’30s...
...He shrugged his shoulders and replied that the American Communists were a Misthaufen and worse, and that only the Russian Communists amounted to anything...
...The Moscow Trials were in the offing...
...But I argued that one was responsible for the other, and that he knew as well as I that the American Communists, like the German Communists, were merely foreign errand boys and clerks for the Kremlin...
...Lange was also visiting but I am not certain of this...
...The Kirov assassination had been followed by widespread arrests of members of the political opposition and all the signs indicated that a bloody purge was being planned for leading personalities who had incurred Stalin’s disfavor...
...He had sat in on some of my classes at New York University and was the Communist party’s big gun in the attack on my Marxist heresies...
...His own remarks on politics were desultory and expressed in a bantering, humorous vein...
...The third time Brecht came alone...
...I never saw him again...
...His expulsion from the party had been signaled from “on high” by Gregory Zinoviev himself before the latter’s downfall...
...It was difficult to avoid discussing it with politically knowledgeable people...
...I spoke about some of the political figures whose arrest had been reported and assumed that Brecht felt somewhat as I did about these arrests—not so strongly perhaps, but certainly that they were a travesty upon justice...
...His heresies were legion...
...I was stunned by his words...
...Professor Hook is a contributor to THE NEW LEADER, Commentary, Partisan Review and the New York Times Magazine...
...This was a familiar gambit at the time...
...Korsch was a “leftist” critic of the Soviet Union, the Comintern and the German Communist party...
...I was then living on Barrow Street in New York City...
...I asked: “What are you saying...
...In the eyes of the orthodox, this put Korsch beyond the pale...
...I got to know Brecht in 1929 in Berlin...
...I waited but he said nothing even after I repeated my question...
...I could speak with some authority about Jerome’s mind or rather lack of it...
...Then he said, in words I have never forgotten, “As for those, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die...
...My wife accompanied them, but I remained...
...The conversation came to an end when Brecht and the Korsches had to leave to see the play (or a rehearsal...
...When he saw me with his hat and coat, he looked surprised...
...The fact that he attended these meetings and was a friend of Korsch was in itself evidence of political heterodoxy from the Communist point of view...
...I knew something about Jerome...
...Neither of us said a word...
...When I returned he was still sitting in his chair holding a drink in his hand...
...Brecht was on good personal terms with the official German Communists despite his professions of intellectual contempt for them...
...It was the Kremlin and Stalin himself who were responsible for the arrests and for the planned infamies against the victims...
...Among his many works are Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933), From Hegel to Marx (1936), Reason, Social Myths and Democracy (1940), Common Sense and the Fifth Amendment (1957) and Political Power and Personal Freedom (1959...
Vol. 43 • October 1960 • No. 39
