The following article was written by Lion Feuchtwanger two months before his death for a BBC program produced by John Willett about Brecht. Feuchtwanger submitted his contribution on audiotape for the program which was aired on October 31, 1958.
Brecht was passionately fond of debating. He especially like to debate about which method and approach would be the most fertile one for creating good literature. In the course of our intimate collaboration, I realized more and more clearly that the origin of his creations were the gestures and the word. Story, plot, continuity did not matter to him: what mattered to him, was the right situation, the right gesture, the right word.
He visualized the gesture, out from the gesture grew the word, and out of the word grew the character.
He search frantically for the right word to fit the gesture. Not only had the meaning of the word to be to the point; beyond that, its sound had to fit the situation and the character, and beyond that, the word had to be light and elegant. "Elegant" was a favorite adjective of his. Sometimes it happened that , after weeks of hard work, he concluded from our failure in finding a particular word that the whole work was a failure, and he insisted that we should tear it up, and start from scratch.
He spared not effort to find the right word. 'le mot juste,' our word, his word. Once, in Munich, while we were working on the Life of Edward the Second and, all day long, had looked in vain for a certain right word, he came running to my house in the middle of the night, whistled under my window, and shouted triumphantly: "I found it."
He was unhappy that the German language had become so cheap and threadbare in the course of the two World Wars and the Hitler time. The pre-war German language had become obsolete, the contemporary language was intolerably vulgar. Occasionally, he would lament: "When Horace expresses the most commonplace thought and the most trivial feeling, it sounds magnificent. This is because he worked with marble. We German writers of today have to work with mud." Brecht used a much coarser term.
Sometimes we quarreled bitterly about the turn of a phrase. He was totally unconcerned with the rules of grammar. When I pointed out that this or that line of his offended an elementary rule of grammar, he liked to paraphrase a famous saying: "Ego, poeta Germanicus, supra grammaticos sto." (I, a German poet, stand above the grammarians.)
Martin Luther, the greatest language creator the Germans produced, looked "into the people's mouth" and adopted their way of talking. But the language coming out of the people's mouth when Brecht started to write, did not offer anything to him. He had to create his language out of nothing. He did it. It is thanks to him that the German language today can express feelings and thoughts which it could not express when Brecht began to write.
It is obvious that the full power of Brecht's language can hardly be captured in a translation. The English translations I know are good, some of them excellent. And I am happy that they enable English audiences to appreciate the significance and the greatness of Brecht's play writing and of his poetry.
The impatient poet Brecht wrote the first poems and the first plays of the Third Millennium. It is gratifying that time gradually caught up with him, and he lived just long enough to witness it. But if today's generation can sense the scope of his significance, the full grandeur of his work will be appreciated only by those who come after us.
By Lion Feuchtwanger, written October 4, 1958.
This exhibit was created by Marje Schuetze-Coburn, Feuchtwanger Librarian, at the University of Southern California.
February 1998.