Word: brecht
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Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht were among the most gifted writers of their time. Artist Max Ernst made surrealism accessible to a generation. The architects-in-exile of the Bauhaus, led by Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, changed the face of the American city. Middle European Physicists Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller became the ambivalent stepfathers of the atomic...
...culture will shift to America. It is my own intention to make my home in your country, and I am convinced that if Europe continues for a while to pursue the same course as in the last two decades, many good Europeans will meet again on American soil." Like Brecht, who went from Germany to Czechoslovakia to Austria to Switzerland to France to Denmark before coming to the U.S., most of these good Europeans carried the fate of the wanderer in their blood. They took off their airs as they put on their work clothes, willing to do anything...
...Refugees," Brecht observed, "are refugees as a result of changes, and their sole object of study is change." For a while these restless minds seemed to be doing Americans' homework for them, analyzing everything from jazz to soap opera to advertising techniques. But the enchantment was one-sided...
This sense of alienation is easy to understand. The subjects of Heilbut's study were, after all, no ordinary group. Most were intellectuals who would have been restless in any culture. It is doubtful, for example, if Brecht ("Wherever I go, they ask me, Spell your name") would have been happy anywhere on earth. Others, like Mann, never really understood the nation they first overpraised, then cursed for being imperfect. Some, like Writer Gerhardt Eisler, were Communists, hypocritical in their horror at the House Un-American Activities Committee. Heilbut's defense of these emigres seems disingenuous: "If Einstein...
...also a malefactor; in Amphitryon, the great Theban commander rages against an impostor "who wants me . .. out of the fortress of my consciousness." This sense of self as an armed camp is one of many traits that make the playwright seem a contemporary of another great admirer, Bertolt Brecht...