Brecht, the Berliner Ensemble, and the British Government

Abstract

barely a month before he was to resign, the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, sent a brief, angry memorandum to the Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home. Referring to recent newspaper articles critical of the denial of UK visas to two East Germans, he sarcastically questioned the role of NATO policy in determining the provision of British visas to East German nationals. Macmillan went on to complain that 'I was not consulted about this [refusal], nor was the Cabinet, if I remember right. But it's the kind of thing that interests the public far more than other more important problems.' 1 This was not a case concerning Cold War international espionage or potential national security risks. It concerned, rather, the denial of visas to two members of the world famous Berliner Ensemble, then directed by Bertolt Brecht's widow, Helene Weigel, to enter Britain and attend the 1963 Edinburgh Festival. Indeed, this was not the first time that members of the Berliner Ensemble had been secretly prevented from attending the Edinburgh Festival, but rather marked the peak of a decades-long campaign to disrupt tours of Brecht and the Ensemble to Britain.As a prominent German communist intellectual and, later in his career, a leading cultural icon for East Germany, Brecht was a figure of obvious interest to western governments and their security services, keen as they were to monitor any potential communist subversion at times of heightened political tension. This was most notoriously manifested during Brecht's time in America, between 1941 and 1947, during which the FBI compiled a dossier of almost four hundred pages on Brecht, consisting of reports ranging from routine enquiries into his communist connections and activities to paranoid investigations of supposed secret messages transmitted in films of his work. 2 These investigations culminated in Brecht's remarkable appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in which he fervently denied being a communist, and decreed that any revolutionary agitation found in his work was down purely to anti-Hitler sentiment and poor translation. This resulted in Brecht being thanked by the ntq 22:4 (november 2006) © cambridge university pressIt is well known that Bertolt Brecht, during his time in the United States of America, attracted the surveillance of anti-communist forces, with Brecht's sly testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities becoming one of his most famous public performances. Recently declassified files from Her Majesty's Government reveal that Britain, too, undertook extensive campaigns to monitor and censor Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble. James Smith considers material from British governmental agencies such as MI5, the Foreign Office, and the Cabinet Office, which detail the activities undertaken by the British government concerning Brecht and the Ensemble. Such activities took the form not only of monitoring Brecht and his circle, both in Britain and overseas, but also of active attempts to block the visits of Brecht and the E...

A history of the Berliner Ensemble

“…The news of the refusal began to leak around the time of the Profumo affair in 1963, and the government found itself overwhelmed by 'a wave of negative publicity'. 21 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan felt that decisions that should have been taken by the UK were instead being 'bullied' out of them by the FRG. 22 Against the backdrop of this pressure, the National Theatre invited the BE to London in January 1964.…”