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PARTISAN REVIEW
with a new geographical frontier to separate fascists, conservatives and
socialists from Communists. In Western Germany, outspokenly conserva–
tive or reactionary regionalist parties, such as the Bavarian Party and
the Hannoverian "Guelf" German Party, are now more amply repre–
sented in the Bonn Parliament than the Communist Party. In Eastern
Germany, the non-Communist parties are not only powerless but have
even been disavowed, because of their collaboration with the Commu–
nists, by the West-German parties which bear the same names. At the
opening session of the West-German Parliament, a German Party dele–
gate dared voice the old federalist, anti-Prussian and Guelf demands that
a Holy Roman Empire be revived voluntarily and that all German–
speaking areas, including Austria, be invited to join it.
The split in Germany's political life is less obvious in its literature
and arts, perhaps because so many German artists and writers now
claim to be unpolitical or identify democracy with the freedom, denied
to them under Hitler, to live in an ivory tower. Even the East-German
Communists have, in the past year, been forced to make some allowance
for this trend:
Sinn und Form,
a luxuriously-printed new East-German
literary periodical, publishes the works of non-Communist writers and
also non-political works by a few Communists. It has thus published
writings by a number of distinguished German and Austrian political
exiles, including the late Walter Benjamin, Hermann Broch, Max Hork–
heimer and Theodore Adorno, as well as non-political work by such
outspoken Communists as Pablo Neruda, Bert Brecht and Stefan
Hermlin.
Bert Brecht indeed enjoys, in Berlin and in Eastern Germany, a
peculiar artistic freedom: he seems to be the only dramatist, director,
or producer who is not expected by the Communist press to conform
in every detail to the Moscow doctrines of Socialist Realism. Since his
return to Germany, Brecht has already produced, at the Deutsches
Theater in Eastern Berlin, two plays of his years of exile:
Die Mutter
Courage,
one of those ballad-like lyrical dramas which the author,
flouting all critical traditions, insists upon calling "epic," and
Puntila
und sein Knecht,
a nearly classical comedy. An oddly seventeenth–
century and baroque quality underlies in both plays their very expression–
istic stylization that still reminds one of the
,neue Sachlichkeit
and the
Gebrauchskunst
of the Weimar Republic. Brecht's plays, in a city
starved of new German plays and already beginning to weary of
translations, however good, were most successful with the more sophisti–
cated audiences. Their success indeed reveals the fallacy of Brecht's
Stalinist notions of a "proletarian" success. I myself saw
Mutter Cour-
