Julie Kalani Smith and Dr. James K. Lyon, German and Slavic Languages
As I began researching Ruth Berlau’s life, I encountered repeated references to Berlau’s beauty, always accompanied by the suggestion that it was her looks that attracted German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s attention. Berlau was one of a long line of women whom Brecht drew into his orbit, but most critics seem to agree that Berlau lacked the literary and secretarial skills of her predecessors Elisabeth Hauptmann and Margarethe Steffin. In contrast, Berlau is often regarded as an eccentric, overly aggressive woman, who was Brecht’s lover and follower, but not his equal. Despite, or perhaps because of this widespread but superficial assumption, my research was focused on the search for Berlau as a person and an author in her own right.
Through extensive reading and research in the Berlau and Brecht Archives in Berlin, I have come to the conclusion that Berlau was a match for Brecht, after all. She lived a full professional life, in connection with, but not dependent on, Brecht, despite the language difficulties she faced by leaving her native Denmark to follow Brecht into exile. She was the only one of Brecht’s female collaborators to publish not just one, but two novels in her own lifetime (Hauptmann and Steffin’s writings were published posthumously). She published a novel, entitled Videre (Further), in Copenhagen in 1939 and a collection of stories in 1940. When she met Brecht in 1933, Berlau was an actress at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, a freelance journalist, the wife of Dr. Robert Lund, a Communist, and the driving force behind an independent Worker’s Theater. It was, in fact, in search of material for this Worker’s Theater that Berlau went to meet Brecht, in the first year of his exile from Nazi Germany.
At the Royal Theater in 1930, Berlau had played the role of Anna Balicke in Brecht’s Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night). During her first visit to Brecht, she stole his only copy of his adaption of Gorki’s play Die Mutter (The Mother), which she then translated, and produced with her Worker’s Theater in 1934. Berlau used all of her connections in Copenhagen society and theater circles to win supporters for Brecht. She was the influential one in this situation, and she did all she could to ensure Brecht’s success in Denmark. When Brecht had fled to Sweden and then Finland, and the Nazis invaded Denmark, Berlau left everything behind to follow Brecht.
While still in Denmark, Brecht collaborated with Berlau on her second book, a collection of stories entitled Ethvert dyr kan det (Every Animal Can Do It), which appeared just before the Nazi invasion in 1940 under the pseudonym Maria Sten. It was not translated into German until 1989, and then not in its entirety. The story that was omitted, because it lacks, according to Klaus Völker, the humor and the narrative form of the rest of the stories (1), is coincidentally also the story that, according to Berlau (2), Brecht formulated himself. Jedes Tier is a remarkable novel for its time, for it concentrates on the needs of women, and how men are socialized to fail them. Eros is the prevailing theme of the book, and the title story deals with a group of women who have been killed in an accident and, in the morgue, exchange tales of they were failed sexually by their husbands and lovers. The writing is energetic and fast-paced. I was not yet able to get a copy of it in Danish, and the German edition was translated by Regine Elsässer, but even in translation, the characters are vivid, and it is easy to relate to their experiences.
In Finland and in the first years in America, Berlau collaborated with Brecht on such pieces as Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti, Leben des Galilei, as well as Die Gesichte der Simone Machard. Brecht was slow to give credit and the extent of Berlau’s contributions to these plays is still disputed. Her writing in Danish is crisp and colorful, but her written and spoken German were broken enough for some scholars to claim that she could not have contributed to Brecht’s dramas, which are written in perfect German. Berlau recognized no language barriers, however. She continued writing stories and newspaper articles in Danish throughout her time in America. Within a few years, she had mastered enough English to try her hand at writing short stories. She seemed eager to accommodate the American taste in drama, as the manuscripts of her play “Time for a change? or School for Charme” reveal. Here, the theme of dissatisfied women reappears, but this time, the solution is that “[sic] one hawe to lern to take to be insolted: keep smiling! turn everything into sexappeal” (3). Berlau did not abandon her feminist ideals, as this irony demonstrates, but she was capable of adapting to her circumstances.
My archival research revealed that Berlau had planned a book in German, which was never published. It was to bear the title Zwischen Wolkenkratzern. It is a collection of stories about Berlau’s real and fancied adventures in New York City, as a cleaning woman, bartender, photographer, blind florist, circus clown, and on and on. Berlau’s stories reveal a powerful, humorous imagination, and an ability to convey her passion for life through the written word, regardless of language difficulties. Her papers contain dozens of stories, articles, journal entries, and sketches in German, Danish, English which all reveal Berlau’s wit and sense of irony.
Until her death in 1974 in a hospital in Berlin, Berlau continued to commit her emotions and memories to paper, in both German and Danish. She gave interviews about her life with Brecht, wrote articles for Scandinavian newspapers, and gave lectures to students about the theater. She had suffered a nervous breakdown in New York in 1945, and the electro-shock treatments weakened her mind, but she fought valiantly to remain, as much as possible, a grand dame.
I have only begun to discover the many sides of Ruth Berlau, the woman and the writer. Already I have found much to dispel the myth of her literary incompetence, and I will continue this project by analyzing her writing in the context of her circumstances. I have written two research papers about Brecht’s female collaborators and Berlau herself for my faculty mentor, Dr. James K. Lyon, but when the shadow of her relationship with Brecht is lifted, there is still much to be discovered and revealed about the remarkable person and author Ruth Berlau.
Works Cited
- Völker, Klaus. “Brennend, aber nicht verzehrt?” In: Berlau, Ruth. Jedes Tier kann es. Mannheim: Persona Verlag, 1989. Footnote p. 158.
- Berlau, Ruth. Brechts Lai-Tu. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1985. P. 63.
- Brecht-Archiv, Document #1958/57.