LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Bertolt Brecht: United States
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In 1941, traveling by way of Helsinki, Moscow, and Vladivostok, the couple settled for six years in California, where Brecht tried vainly to find work in films. In California he wrote The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945), as well as some of his finest songs with Eisler: "Hollywood Elegies" (1942), for example. He worked with Charles Laughton on the adaptation and theatrical production of Galileo (1947). That play aside, virtually none of his work was published or produced in the United States during his lifetime.
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Unfortunately, Brecht's stay in America would not be as successful or as lengthy as he might have hoped. In 1947, during the years of the "red scare," the House Un-American Activities Committee called the playwright to account for his communist activities. Originally, Brecht was one of several witnesses who had refused to testify about their political affiliations. But on October 30, 1947, he appeared before the committee, wearing overalls, smoking a cigar, cracking jokes, and making constant references to the translators who transformed his German statements into English ones he could not comprehend. Although he outwitted his investigators with half-truths and skilful innuendo, Brecht feared the irrational political climate, and shortly after his testimony took a plane to Switzerland, not even waiting to see the opening of his play Galileo in New York.
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As a Marxist socialist, Brecht decided to leave Germany in February 1933, when Hitler took power. He went to Denmark, but when war seemed imminent in 1939, he moved to Stockholm, Sweden. He stayed there for one year. Then Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark, and Brecht felt the need to leave Sweden for Finland where he waited for his visa for the United States until May 3, 1941.
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Oddly, for one who wrote copious theoretical explanations, Brecht rarely referred to his theory during rehearsal, though some of his resulting practice was obviously familiar to the actors (say, the translation into narrative). Brecht claimed that full application of his theory was impossible in the present state of the theatre. As a result, many of the actors of the Berliner Ensemble, when questioned, seemed uncertain what was Brecht's preferred style of acting.
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Brecht left the United States in 1947 after having had to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He spent a year in Zurich, working mainly on Antigone-Modell 1948 (adapted from Hulderlin's translation of Sophocles; produced 1948) and on his most important theoretical work, the Kleines Organon fur das Theater (1949; "A Little Organum for the Theatre"). The essence of his theory of drama, as revealed in this work, is the idea that a truly Marxist drama must avoid the Aristotelian premise that the audience should be made to believe that what they are witnessing is happening here and now. For he saw that if the audience really felt that the emotions of heroes of the past--Oedipus, or Lear, or Hamlet--could equally have been their own reactions, then the Marxist idea that human nature is not constant but a result of changing historical conditions would automatically be invalidated. Brecht therefore argued that the theatre should not seek to make its audience believe in the presence of the characters on the stage--should not make it identify with them, but should rather follow the method of the epic poet's art, which is to make the audience realize that what it sees on the stage is merely an account of past events that it should watch with critical detachment. Hence, the "epic" (narrative, nondramatic) theatre is based on detachment, on the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), achieved through a number of devices that remind the spectator that he is being presented with a demonstration of human behaviour in scientific spirit rather than with an illusion of reality, in short, that the theatre is only a theatre and not the world itself.
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Brecht had a correct understanding of the new social function of this art and of the mission of the socialist writer. This art could not speak the truth in general about society and people, without being directed to someone. He spoke the truth before 'all those for whom this state of affairs (that is to say, capitalist exploitation) was a completely intolerable reality'.
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