Rather than America, Berlin’s playwrights turned to the Soviet Union for inspiration. Like Moscow, Berlin spawned a number of theater collectives that produced topical works with a left-wing slant. Among them were the groups led by Erwin Piscator, who in the early 1920s had thrown off the multihued colors of Dada in favor of the solid red drapery of communism. Determined to promote the communist cause via the theater, Piscator staged an agitprop production entitled Revue Roter Rummel for the KPD’s 1924 election campaign. In the following year he directed a documentary about the German revolution of 1918/19 called Trotz Alledem! (In Spite of Everything), a phrase made famous by Liebknecht. It employed film clips along with stage action, a device that became standard in Piscator’s documentary theater. While thumping for the KPD, Piscator also worked for the Volksbühne, but quit in disgust when it tried to trim his radical sails. With the support of a newly rich businessman whose wife hoped to act in his plays, the playwright rented the Theater am Nollendorfplatz and launched a “dramaturgical collective” to mount socially progressive works. In 1927/28 he directed four productions, each of which explored new theatrical territory. His production of Schweik (based on Jaroslav Hasek’s antiwar novel, The Good Soldier Schweik) featured two treadmill stages and sets by George Grosz. A play about skullduggery in the oil business called Konjunktur included music by Kurt Weill. Among these plays only Schweik made money, and the businessman-patron, whose wife never did get to act, withdrew his support. The collective shut down.
In 1929 Piscator was back. Somehow he found the funds to return to the Theater am Nollendorfplatz with a production of Walter Mehring’s Der Kaufmann von Berlin, a play about an impoverished East European Jew who comes to Berlin and makes millions during the inflation. It had sets by Lászlê Moholy-Nagy and songs by Hanns Eisler, a sometime collaborator with Brecht. In one of the numbers, The Song of the Three Street Sweepers, the performers do away with some garbage of the inflation era—a pile of currency, a steel helmet, and the corpse of a Freikorps soldier— while singing “Crap: Chuck It Out!” To conservatives in the audience, it was the play that should be chucked out, and it folded after a short run.
Among Piscator’s most ardent champions in Berlin was the weekly journal, Die Weltbühne, which, in addition to theater, film, and music criticism, offered topical fiction, political commentary, and social satire. At one time or another, it employed just about everyone who was anyone in Weimar Berlin’s left-wing literary community. The editor during the later years of the Republic was Carl von Ossietzky, a native Hamburger who had become a passionate pacifist and internationalist before taking a job with the Berliner Volks-Zeitung in 1919. In 1927 he took over at the Weltbühne, then at the peak of its notoriety. Ossietzky’s Weltbühne became increasingly purist in its left-wing attachments. In 1929, when the SPD-controlled Berlin police suppressed a Communist May Day demonstration that was designed to embarrass the Socialists, the paper sided completely with the Communists, demanding the dismissal of the Socialist chief of police. This demand was at once obtuse and quixotic, as was the journal’s nomination of Hein-rich Mann for president of the Republic in 1932, which even Mann rejected as ridiculous. Ossietzky did not get along with Die Weltbühne’s best writer, Kurt Tucholsky, who had a much more realistic appreciation of Weimar’s political landscape. With his agonized love-hate for his native land, Tucholsky was a kind of latter-day Heinrich Heine. Like that great poet, he was haunted by a sense of futility regarding his effectiveness as a political educator; he worried that he and his paper were having little impact outside a narrow circle of Berlin sophisticates. And, native Berliner though he was, he came to despair for the German capital itself, seeing it as self-satisfied and complacent. “Berlin,” he concluded, “combines the disadvantages of an American metropolis and a German provincial city.” In the end, Tucholsky understood that Die WeltMhne’s relentless carping at Weimar from the left was aiding and abetting those who attacked the Republic from the right. After Hitler’s seizure of power he fled to Sweden, where, in despair over his and his colleagues’ failure to avert the worst, he took his life.
Kurt Tucholsky
