RONALD HAYMAN
429
Austrian citizenship, but with his stockpile of unproduced scripts
and with his untested theories of acting and producing, he needed a
company and, if possible, a theater of his own. Neither would have
been put within his reach in the West, but when his Berliner Ensem–
ble was formed, he was hoping to establish moorings for it in all the
principal harbors of the German-speaking theater. When the German
Democratic Republic was proclaimed in October 1949, he had to give
up this hope. But in November, when Wilhelm Pieck took office as
the first president of the new republic, the newly fledged Austrian
citizen saluted him with a poem entitled, "To My Countrymen."
Brecht's name was of considerable propagandist value to the
regime, which invested heavily in the new enterprise, but his freedom
was circumscribed. He worked for months on forging Nordahl
Grieg's play about the Paris Commune of 1879,
Defeat,
into
The Days
oj the Commune,
but he was not allowed to produce it, and later it was
banned by the Party.
Four years after the company had been created, he still had no
theater, and the Ensemble was appearing only three nights a week at
the Deutsches Theater.
It
was particularly unfortunate for Brecht
that proletarian dissidence in East Germany was moving toward the
same kind of spontaneous uprising he had praised in
The Days oj the
Commune
just at the moment that the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm
was to become available: it had been occupied by the Volksbuhne,
for which a new theater had been built. Since the beginning of 1953,
Brecht's relationship with the Party had deteriorated, and rumors of
friction had leaked into West German newspapers. On June 15,
1953, he wrote to Walter Grotewohl, the minister-president, sug–
gesting that one way of quelling "these nonsensical rumours of
discord" would be to announce that the theat:.'!r would be taken over
by the Ensemble. No answer, of course, had arrived by the 17th,
when Red Army tanks were used against the rebellious crowds, and
Russians machine-gunned strikers when stones were thrown at the
police. But Brecht had to choose between expressing solidarity with
the workers or supporting the government that had the fate of his
theater in its hands. As usual, he did what was expedient.
It
is convenient to treat his development as though there was no
continuity between the pre-Marxist cult of intensity and the an–
tiheroic plays he wrote in exile, but this is to ignore a tendency which
was apparent long before his conversion to Marxism. The second
version of
Baal
(1919) is not only less subjective and self-pitying, but
also less autobiographical than the first (1918); the third (1926), titled
