Bertolt Brecht — Hollywood Elegies

February 10, 1898, Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany–August 14, 1956, East Berlin, German Democratic Republic

Bertolt Brecht arrived in Southern California after eight years of flight and found a landscape that looked like paradise while Europe burned. Living in Santa Monica among German-speaking exiles, he tried to sell stories to Hollywood, worked with Fritz Lang and Charles Laughton, and renewed his partnership with Hanns Eisler. The poems he called Hollywood-Elegien turn oil derricks, swimming pools, screenwriters, actresses, fighter planes, and the commerce of the dream factory into one acid picture of American abundance. Their jokes are quick, but exile’s unease never leaves them. Related California poems address expensive gardens, eviction, news from the Soviet front, and friends sinking under displacement. This volume presents the German sequence with John Willett’s complete translation, later English versions, and companion poems, recovering Brecht’s Los Angeles years as a compact drama of luxury, war, collaboration, and survival.

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Catalogue

The Los Angeles Left in the McCarthy Era

Associations

Film and Hollywood HUAC and the Blacklist Left, Labor, and Socialism McCarthyism Migration and Exile Screenwriting World War II, Fascism, and Exile

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Brecht, Bertolt. Hauspostille. Propyläen, 1927.

———. Svendborger Gedichte. Malik-Verlag, 1939.

———. Gedichte im Exil. 1940; posthumous editions supply titles for several untitled texts.

———. Hollywood-Elegien. Typescript, 1942. Akademie der Künste, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv, BBA 16/57.

———. Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913–1956. Edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Methuen, 1976.

———. Die Gedichte von Bertolt Brecht in einem Band. Suhrkamp, 1981; 9th ed., 1997.

———. “Four Poems.” New Left Review, no. 40, Nov.–Dec. 1966, pp. 51–55.

———. “Hollywood Elegies” and “On the Term of Exile.” Translated by Adam Kirsch. Poetry, vol. 198, no. 3, June 2011, pp. 247–49.

———. Baal. Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1922.

———. Trommeln in der Nacht. Drei Masken Verlag, 1922.

———. Die Dreigroschenoper. Felix Bloch Erben, 1928. Based on John Gay through Elisabeth Hauptmann’s German translation; music by Kurt Weill.

———. Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. Music by Kurt Weill. Premiered Leipzig, 1930.

———. Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe. Written 1929–31.

———. Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches. Written in exile, 1935–38.

———. Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. Written 1939; premiered Zurich, 1941.

———. Leben des Galilei. Multiple versions, 1938–55; English stage version developed with Charles Laughton in California.

———. Der gute Mensch von Sezuan. Written 1938–40.

———. Der kaukasische Kreidekreis. Written in the United States, 1944.

———. Buckower Elegien. Written 1953.

Eisler, Hanns. Hollywooder Liederbuch. Edited by Oliver Dahin, Peter Deeg, and Manfred Grabs. Deutscher Verlag für Musik / Breitkopf & Härtel, corrected reprint.

Works About the Author

“Library of Congress – Bertolt Brecht.”.

“Akademie der Künste – Bertolt Brecht biography.”.

“Akademie der Künste – Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv.”.

“Arts in Exile – Hollywood Elegies typescript (1942).”.

“Breitkopf & Härtel – Hanns Eisler’s Hollywooder Liederbuch.”.

“Poetry Foundation – June 2011 issue PDF.”.

“Hampsong Foundation – Hanns Eisler song texts and translations.”.

“FBI Vault – Bertolt Brecht.”.

“Smithsonian Folkways – Brecht before HUAC.”.

“Wikisource – Brecht HUAC hearing transcript.”.

“USC Libraries – Weimar on the Pacific.”.

“WorldCat – Bertolt Brecht.”.

“Internet Archive – Bertolt Brecht.”.

“HathiTrust – Bertolt Brecht.”.

Akademie der Künste. “Bertolt Brecht” and “Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv.” Institutional biography and archive description.

Bahr, Ehrhard. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. University of California Press, 2007.

Bohlman, Andrea F., and Philip V. Bohlman. “(Un)Covering Hanns Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook.” Danish Yearbook of Musicology, vol. 35, 2007–08, pp. 13–29.

Esslin, Martin. Brecht: A Choice of Evils. Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1959; revised editions.

Ewen, Frederic. Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art and His Times. Citadel Press, 1967.

Fuegi, John. Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. Grove Press, 1994. Its strong attribution claims remain debated, but it helped force attention to Brecht’s collaborators.

Hayman, Ronald. Brecht: A Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.

Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method. Verso, 1998.

Latimer, Quinn. “Kalifornienträumen: Bertolt Brecht’s Los Angeles Poems and Other Sunstruck Germanic Specters.” East of Borneo, 2011.

Lyon, James K. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton University Press, 1980.

“Four Poems by Bertolt Brecht.” New Left Review.

Parker, Stephen. Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014.

SurveyLA. Literature, Writers and Residency in Los Angeles, 1929–1980. City of Los Angeles, Department of City Planning, 2018.

Thomson, Peter, and Glendyr Sacks, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. Cambridge University Press, 1994; 2nd ed., 2006.

Workman, Stanley Edward, Jr. Hanns Eisler and His Hollywood Songbook: A Survey of the Five Elegies and the Hölderlin Fragments. DMA dissertation, Ohio State University, 2010.

Stefans, Brian. “Los Angeles Poetry from the McCarthy to the Punk Eras.” A History of California Literature, edited by Blake Allmendinger, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 260–80.