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with him. After twenty-three years of believing in their friendship ,
Reyher returned to New York saying that Brecht was now "top dog"
in East Berlin and had "too many people around him, too many
women ."
Friendship was of little interest to Brecht; he devoted all his
social energy to collaboration and to sexual relationships. He never
even took time for making friends with his children , and his relation–
ship with his second wife, Helene Weigel, was mainly a professional
partnership. When they were running the Berliner Ensemble , she
sometimes had to make appointments with him by letter. The
friendships with Brannen, Charles Laughton, and the composer
Hanns Eisler were also based on mutual professional need, and even
the symbiotic working relationship with Caspar Neher-closer than
any of his other relationships with designers, actors, composers, and
directors - was not enough to keep their youthful friendship alive.
After the war they had little contact except over productions.
Brecht went on using the second person plural (while Weigel
used the informal singular) to address actors in the Berliner Ensem–
ble, and even those who were invited to stay at his country house
could never draw him into talking about his childhood . When Eisler
was with him in Augsburg at the house he grew up in, he made no
mention of his mother. Until the end of his life he went on enjoying
the companionship of girls (Isot Kilian , Kathe Reichel, Kathe
Riilicke) and he was jealously proprietary without allowing them
any reciprocal rights. He would telephone them, one by one, early
in the evening and then late, to make sure they were at home . His
working routine was strenuous and austere; his gregariousness was
satisfied by surrounding himself, as he had since boyhood, with ad–
mirers who were more disciples than friends.
Though he neither tried nor needed to keep each girlfriend ig–
norant of the others' existence, something of the old duplicity survived
in his political affiliations . In 1941 he turned down the opportunity
he was offered of settling in the Soviet Union, and he stayed on in
the States for two and a half years after the war ended. In October
1945, when the opportunity to produce
Mother Courage
and
Calileo
in
East Berlin first presented itself, he was more interested in the pro–
duction of
Calileo
with Laughton, and at the end of 1948 when he left
the United States , he decided to make his home outside Germany.
He settled in Zurich. In April 1949, negotiating for an Austrian
passport, he wrote, "I can't just sit myself down in one half of Ger–
many and as a result be dead to the other half." He was granted
