Born: 24 August 1906, Denmark
Died: 15 January 1974
Country most active: Germany
Also known as: Ruth Lund
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
In his 1994 book, Brecht & Co, scholar John Fuegi challenged the legacy of playwright Bertolt Brecht, asserting that the vast majority (about 80 percent) of Brecht’s output was actually the work of his romantic partners and “collaborators,” particularly Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau, and Marieluise Fleißer. Fuegi argues that Steffin wrote at least eight of the plays Brecht took credit for, including Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, Life of Galileo, and early drafts of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. He notes that all the manuscripts are in Steffin’s handwriting, and draw from source material written in French, which Brecht could not read. Fuegi accuses Brecht of stealing not only the credit, but also the royalties that should have been due to the women, publishing as his own dozens of shorter plays and stories written entirely by various lovers and plagiarising from foreign works most of what he didn’t steal from his associates.
The description for the book asserts, “Brecht’s first violent, homoerotic plays, though noisily provocative failures at the box office, brought him praise from adventurous critics. In Berlin in the 1920s, Brecht found someone who would change not only his life but world theater: Elisabeth Hauptmann, who wrote over 80 percent of The Threepenny Opera in exchange for time in Brecht’s life and in his bed. Yet her name often disappeared from the printed text, as well as from other plays and poems.”
Although countless critics and academics who love Brecht deride Fuegi’s conclusions, the mainstream media was much more receptive to his assertions. Among the favourable reviews were “One of the most important critical studies of the century,” (New York Magazine), “This biography is fascinating in its diversity of detail and portraiture of a period,” (The Economist) and inclusion on The New York Times Notable Books of the Year list. When his book was published, Fuegi told the Washington Post that he had deliberately chosen a mainstream publisher rather than going to an academic one because he knew the Brecht loyalists would never let it go to print in a peer-reviewed setting. Fuegi had previously published pieces of his findings in academic journals and found that his fellow scholars consistently treated each occurrence of theft or plagiarism as an exception, rather than looking at the broader picture they added up to.
More importantly, it is undeniable that Brecht was a well-documented plagiarist, using other artists’ work without permission or credit, such as the poetry of Verlaine and Rimbaud in the 1927 play, Jungle of Cities. These were also brilliant, creative women that Brecht is known to have worked with, and he was inarguably a womaniser, likely with the misogyny and manipulative nature that generally accompanies such behaviour. It’s simply not far-fetched to question just how much the women relegated to the roles of “collaborator” actually contributed to the works in his name, particularly when the scholar in question spent 25 years compiling his information, with access to vast amounts of original documents and interviews with primary sources—including Hauptmann herself—and who founded the International Brecht Society in 1970 and edited its annual journal for almost 20 years.