The German plagiarist

STIPIMM: “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” by Julia Ward Howe

This is the first of what will probably be several entries related to the play that Bridget was most recently involved with, “Brecht on Brecht” (I like to pronounce it as though I was hocking a loogie each time I say “Brecht.” First, I want to talk about Bertolt Brecht, the man.

Over the summer, I got to digest a fair percentage of the information that Bridget also had to take in as she prepared to be the dramaturge for the play. I read a biography of him by Klaus Volker and read most of his major plays. I cannot claim to be as sizable an expert on B.B. as Bridget, but I certainly know plenty about him.

There are two things that I think really set Brecht apart from others, as both a person and an artist. The first (I’ll tackle the second in tomorrow’s entry) is that he was, shall we say, a chronic borrower of other people’s ideas. Brecht habitually, from the time he was a teenager, appropriated other people’s works and incorporated them into his own, usually without any attribution or recognition. The most notable example is his most famous work, “The Three-Penny Opera;” it is almost taken for granted now that it was mostly written by his longtime collaborator and lover, Elizabeth Hauptmann. Not only did Brecht not give her proper attribution (which Hauptmann put up with for the sake of her beloved B.B.), but after he died, his true widow fought giving Hauptmann any proceeds from the royalties of the work.

A saying that got thrown around a lot this summer at the lake as we learned about Brecht was: “Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.” And it’s true that there’s little that hasn’t been done in one fashion or another sometime in the past. But there’s a line between being inspired by a text and outright lifting things from it. What’s the difference, you say? One requires a lot more work and thought. It's almost as though he was an editor, bringing disparate parts together into great works. A worthy effort yes, but hardly the work of genius. He has more value than say, the famous play “The Blue Room” by David Hare, which is essentially a translation of Arthur Schnitzler’s “La Ronde.” (sorry, but saying it's "freely adapted" from the original play doesn't let one off the hook; how he is able to hold copyright on a derivative work and make so much money off of it is something I can’t understand… but I digress).

One could say that Brecht’s casual attitude toward the notion of copyright and authorial ownership is simply an expression of his larger attitudes toward the world in general, which believed in socialism and collective ownership. That may be, but if Brecht were really so concerned about collective work, why was he so adamant about being the only writer credited on his plays?

In “Brecht on Brecht,” there’s a passage by B.B. called “Questions from a Worker Who Reads” which talks about how the wars and great monuments of history are always attributed to great men, who got to their position through the work of the people under them, often soldiers and slaves.

        Young Alexander conquered India.
        All by himself?
        Caesar beat the Gauls.
        Not even a cook to help him with his meals?
        Philip of Spain wept when his Armada
        Went down. Did no one else weep?
        Frederick the Great won the Seven Years War.
        Who else was the winner?

Brecht himself was guilty of this sin, and the hypocrisy of that passage made me smile both times I saw the play.