Volume 28, Number 1 · February 5, 1981
Brecht in Asphalt
By Robert Brustein
Brecht's America
by Patty Lee Parmalee
Ohio State University Press, 350 pp., $25.00
Bertolt Brecht in America
by James K. Lyon
Princeton University Press, 408 pp., $19.95
Bertolt Brecht experienced at least two different Americas in his lifetime—the one provided him with images, the other fired his rage. As a young man in Berlin, writing his early poems and plays, Brecht used America as the chief stimulant of his urban imagination—a dream country, a phantom nation, a generous supply house of metaphors for a poetry of the city which, in savagery and terseness, remains virtually unequaled in the twentieth century. After the Nazis acknowledged the power of his poetry by forcing him to leave Germany in 1933, Brecht spent fourteen years in exile, six of them (1941 to 1947) in the America that had so intrigued him in his youth. His stay effectively dispelled any remaining illusions about the country he had once called the 'New Atlantis.'
Review, 2918 words
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