Is there a German word that means the opposite of “doppelgänger”—not the uncannily mysterious twin, but the secretly matched-up opponent who stands for everything one hates and also hates everything one stands for? If so, Bertolt Brecht could have filled that role for Vladimir Nabokov. It would be hard to imagine two more dissimilar writers inhabiting the same city at the same time. While Nabokov was yearning toward a lost aristocratic past, Brecht was actively championing a proletarian future in which the downtrodden would finally triumph over their exploiters. And where Nabokov kept his politics (if he had any) well under wraps, Brecht wore his on his sleeve—or rather, on signboards thrust in the faces of his audiences.
Brecht, born in Augsburg in 1898, was only a year older than Nabokov, so they were about the same age during those two decisive events of their youth, the Great War and the Russian Revolution. For Nabokov, the former was an important piece of history occurring mainly at a distance while the latter was a permanent tragedy; for Brecht, the situation was almost exactly reversed. Though he never became an official Party member, Brecht was known to sympathize with the Soviet revolutionary cause, and he was to manifest those class sympathies in most of his writing. Still, his left-wing politics did not prevent him from concerning himself with aesthetic matters as well. Like Nabokov, he started out mainly as a writer of poetry, and in the end, ironically, his lifelong efforts in that direction turned out to be much more meaningful for German literature than Nabokov’s early poetic forays were for the Russians.
But it was not as a poet that Brecht came to be known, either in the Berlin of his time or in the wider world. His fate was to be celebrated as a playwright and theatrical collaborator, at first with the dramaturgical innovator Erwin Piscator and then with the composer Kurt Weill. In particular, Brecht’s instantaneous fame arrived shortly after he turned thirty, when his second or third collaboration with Weill, The Threepenny Opera, opened at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on August 31, 1928.
The work’s profound effect on the world that came after it…has been so far-reaching as to obliterate any possibility of seeing or hearing it afresh.
Though some critics and a few audience members were initially taken aback by this odd hybrid—neither opera nor play, neither high art nor cheap entertainment, neither satire nor straight political commentary, but a kind of weird combination of all of them—the production was soon recognized as a major hit. In his capacity as the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag’s cultural reporter, Billie Wilder published a column on October 22, 1928, about visiting The Threepenny Opera’s fiftieth performance, where he observed that the “opera’s enduring appeal owes to a fusion of outrageous wit and social criticism.” He pointed out, correctly, that “Kurt Weill’s music is a large part of that appeal,” and concluded by saying: “There was as much applause for this fiftieth performance as there had been for the first.”
About a month earlier, the aesthetically choosy Count Harry Kessler had also attended the show. “In the evening saw Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper, music by Weill,” he wrote in his diary entry for September 27. “A fascinating production, with rudimentary staging in the Piscator manner and proletarian emphasis (apache style). Weill’s music is catchy and expressive and the players (Harald Paulsen, Rosa Valetti, and so on) are excellent. It is the show of the season, always sold out.”
Later that fall, at a big party given at Piscator’s apartment—an “attractive, bright flat, designed by Gropius,” Kessler can’t help mentioning—he meets the playwright himself. “I was introduced to Brecht,” he notes in his October 30, 1928, diary entry. “Strikingly degenerate look, almost a criminal physiognomy, black hair and eyes, dark-skinned, a peculiarly suspicious expression; very nearly a typical twister. But in conversation he thaws and comes within an ace of being naïve. I told him, apparently to his great delight, stories about d’Annunzio. Superficially, at any rate, he has a head on his shoulders.” Despite that final note of praise, one would hardly have expected the snobbish count to further his acquaintance with the self-styled proletarian playwright, and indeed he did not.
It’s hard to define from a distance exactly what was so special about those early performances of The Threepenny Opera. This is true of any live production, of course, but in this case the problem is exacerbated by history. The work’s profound effect on the world that came after it, in everything from theater to jazz to graphic art to film to television commercials, has been so far-reaching as to obliterate any possibility of seeing or hearing it afresh.
Even in its time, it was viewed as both highly original and an acknowledged copy. Loosely adapted from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, the story is set in an imaginary London inhabited by English-named figures like Peachum, Brown, and Macheath. All the characters are, to one extent or another, criminals (perhaps this was why Kessler associated Brecht’s appearance with them); even the cops are criminals, and in fact the sheriff may be the most corrupt figure of all. The play’s main character, Mack the Knife, is simultaneously attractive and repulsive, and the role works best when neither of those two sides is neglected. That Brecht identified with his imperfect hero can be deduced, perhaps, from the fact that in 1929 he was taped singing Mack’s theme song, “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” in a pitch-perfect two-minute recording. Or maybe what this demonstrates is that by 1929 the song was so famous that even a non-singing author could make a hit out of it. The Weill score, as everyone pointed out, was brilliant, ranging as it did from honky-tonk brassiness to delicate sentimentalism, all with a minor-key tang that gave a fresh memorability to every phrase.
In the first year after its premiere, The Threepenny Opera was performed over three hundred times at the Schiffbauerdamm alone, with another four thousand or so performances taking place at theaters throughout Europe. Still, nothing lasts forever, and by the summer of 1929 the management of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm was ready for another play. And who better to come up with it than Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill?
Happy End, their first collaboration after The Threepenny Opera, opened on September 2, 1929, and ran for less than a week. It was a disaster, both financially and aesthetically. No doubt this can be traced back to numerous flaws, but the main one is that the later opera was just a pale copy of its predecessor. It was set among criminal types in Chicago rather than London, but with similarly lovable/hateful characters presented in a similarly sardonic mode. Worst of all, the songs in Happy End, when they were not just dull and repetitive, tended to sound like faint imitations of Threepenny’s best melodies. Both “Surabaya Johnny” and “The Bilbao Song,” for instance, featured many of the same chord progressions and rhythmic strategies that Weill had already used in “Pirate Jenny” (memorably sung in The Threepenny Opera by Lotte Lenya, the composer’s wife). And whereas audiences had loved these musical phrases the first time around, they didn’t need to hear them again so soon, especially in recycled form.
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Meanwhile, over at Piscator’s rival theater on Nollendorfplatz, something entirely new was happening. Only four or five years older than Brecht, Erwin Piscator had been a major force in the development of the Weimar era’s “epic theater,” the dramatic form which Brecht ultimately took over as his own. Piscator, who practiced his art primarily as a stage manager and director rather than a writer (though he did publish a 1929 book called The Political Theatre), was known as one of Berlin’s cutting-edge theatrical collaborators. He had worked with Brecht and Weill as recently as 1928, involving Brecht in the adaptation of The Good Soldier Schweik and getting Weill to write incidental stage music for Leo Lania’s play Oil Boom, both of which Piscator directed at his own recently founded theater, Piscator-Bühne. Now, however, he drew on a new pair of collaborators—Moholy-Nagy for the set design, Hanns Eisler as the song composer—to help him usher in a new play by Walter Mehring called The Merchant of Berlin.
Mehring, a Berliner born and raised, had built a reputation mainly as a satirist, a poet, and a lyricist responsible for cabaret songs. A declared anarchist and Dadaist, he published many of his short pieces in left-wing papers and magazines like Das Tagebuch and Weltbühne. He was friends with the painter Georg Grosz and, like Grosz, he had a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward the New Objectivity’s advocacy of realism. On the one hand, these two artists supported the need to portray the conditions of life among the disenfranchised and to make a case for the unfairly oppressed. On the other hand, they wanted the freedom to depart from reality into the satiric and the metaphorical. As Grosz put it when speaking with Harry Kessler (in a conversation that took place at that same party where Kessler first met Brecht), “Reality as such does not interest me…what I aspire to is the fabulous. The camera can achieve all sorts of interesting snippets, but never the magical effects of draughtsmanship.” In his own medium—words—Mehring seems to have been aspiring to the same sort of thing.
This was shocking, but of course it was meant to be. And where did one draw the line, anyway, between allowable excess and disruptive public discourse?
Der Kaufmann von Berlin self-consciously alluded, in its title and to a certain extent its plot, to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. It is an echo that any educated German would have heard, because Shakespeare had long since been claimed by Germany as one of its own: Schlegel’s nineteenth-century translations, some Germans insisted, were so good as to transcend the originals. In Mehring’s redone version of the tale, an Eastern European Jew named Kaftan arrives in Berlin in 1923 with only a hundred dollars in his pocket and quickly turns himself into a millionaire by taking advantage of inflation. Like Shylock with his Jessica, Kaftan has a daughter named Jessi whom he adores. Like Shylock, Kaftan is persuaded by a Gentile into making an unwise and ultimately dangerous investment. But unlike Shylock—a fully formed, exceedingly complicated character capable of generating both disgust and sympathy from an audience—Kaftan is more like a caricature, or at any rate a type, intended to represent the whole category of shtetl Jews. Gullible almost to the point of stupidity, easily put upon by the demands and enticements of others, he is the object of nearly unceasing antisemitism, not just as practiced by the Gentiles who trick him, but also on the part of the assimilated Jews he meets in Berlin. In this sense, Mehring’s play is echoing Einstein’s critique of the wealthy German Jews who disdained their poorer Eastern cousins.
The plot hovers between the fantastical and the realistic. The severe inflation of 1923 and the rise of the nationalist movement are portrayed in their true colors, but both the degree of profiteering and the engineering of right-wing coups are exaggerated for effect. Mehring’s characters include petty criminals, unscrupulous lawyers, Galician Jews, Freikorps heavies, local and international businessmen, Prussian generals, and the everyday citizens inhabiting the streets of Berlin’s old and rather dingy center. Nobody comes off well; if anything, the snooty German Jews almost seem more vicious than the right-wing plotters, who are presented as mercenary and power-hungry rather than ideological.
The script itself is filled with the language of its time and place, including Berliner gutter slang and high-society clichés, casino speech and capitalist jargon, spoken Yiddish and literary German. The Yiddish is actually so prevalent, especially in the dialogues between Kaftan and his daughter, that it’s not clear a normal German theater audience could have understood those parts. The daughter, incidentally, is a tuberculosis patient in a Swiss sanatorium (shades of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, which had appeared to great acclaim only five years earlier). Her medical fate is used by Kaftan’s deceivers to lure him into their trap, though again, this potential source of human feeling receives no emotional support from Mehring’s satiric style.
For Mehring—who was himself a Jew, though never a practicing one—The Merchant of Berlin may have been a way of writing about antisemitism, not only as a wider societal problem but also as it manifested itself within the Jewish community of Berlin. For Piscator, who came at it from a strongly Marxist perspective, the play was essentially about class. Presenting the work on a four-level stage that stratified the different elements of society, he emphasized the role of the cash nexus in undermining human relations. Not that he had to contort the script to do so, for Mehring purposely sets his work in 1923 to highlight the instability caused by extreme inflation. In a period when cash itself has no fixed value, everyone’s status is at risk: even the rich, whose money normally insulates them, find themselves floundering in quicksand, unsure from one moment to the next when they might be sucked under. That Kaftan happens to own American dollars rather than German currency turns out to be crucial to his success, though he only realizes this after naïvely showing off his money in a pub in order to get service from the antisemitic owner.
When the work premiered on September 6, 1929, the scandal it caused was immediate and substantial. Mehring was accused in different newspapers of promoting both pro-Jewish agitation and antisemitic hate speech. Under Joseph Goebbels’ guidance, the paramilitary Sturmabteilung—the storm-troopers, otherwise known as the SA—held a massive protest in front of the theater. In addition, Goebbels wrote and distributed a pamphlet called “To the gallows!” that explicitly attacked Mehring and his play. And despite some subdued and possibly mixed defenses offered by other Berlin writers (one of his fellow satirists, Kurt Tucholsky, praised him as “the first plane over Berlin”), Mehring ultimately considered it necessary to leave Germany, first for Paris and then for Vienna.
The Goebbels pamphlet issued on this occasion seems to have disappeared, but another of his 1929 screeds, published under the satiric title “Those Damn Nazis,” can provide something of its flavor. “The Jew is the cause and beneficiary of our slavery. He has misused the social misery of the broad masses to deepen the dreadful split between right and left of our people,” Goebbels wrote. “The Jew caused our problems, and lives from them…He has ruined our race, corrupted our morals, hollowed out our customs and broken our strength…Where he finds filth and decay, he surfaces and begins his butcher’s work among the nations…The Jew is uncreative. He produces nothing, he only haggles with products…He has somehow stolen everything he deals in.” At one point, as if harking back to Shakespeare, the pamphleteer seems to answer Shylock’s despairing “Hath not a Jew eyes?” by admitting that “the Jew, after all, is a human being. Certainly, none of us doubts that.” But having conceded this much, he then takes it back: “We only doubt that he is a decent human being…If someone slaps your mother in the face, do you say: ‘Thank you! He is after all a human being!’ That is not a human being, it is a monster. Yet how much worse has the Jew done to our mother Germany, and is still doing today!”
This was shocking, but of course it was meant to be. And where did one draw the line, anyway, between allowable excess and disruptive public discourse? In early September of 1929, things still appeared sufficiently stable, both economically and politically, for this kind of theater-driven scandal to be viewed as just another aspect of the edgy Berlin atmosphere. Yes, Goebbels’ language was certainly hateful, but no thinking person read such stuff. And true, the street demonstrations were sometimes frightening, if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But were the majority of Berlin’s citizens worried about what all this might mean in the long run? Did they think Mehring’s fantastical and exaggerated vision of antisemitic, corruption-driven political coups could ever become a reality? Not a chance.
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From Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times by Wendy Lesser. Copyright © 2026 by Wendy Lesser. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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