One rainy afternoon in October 1924, 26-year-old Bertolt Brecht stops by a friend’s house for tea and meets her roommate, Elisabeth Hauptmann. She is reticent with him—she’s suffering from a cold—but he notices how closely she listens. It’s the same way he listens to people. Brecht calls her the next day. He demands to know why she was so rude. That evening they take a walk in the nearby Grunewald.
She’s bookish, quiet, and around his age, working as a freelance writer and translator. She’d moved to Berlin a couple years earlier for the cousin of a child she’d nannied. The relationship didn’t work out, but she was happy to have made it out of her sleepy North German hometown. She’s a methodical researcher, a native English speaker, her artistic instincts are good, and she’s flattered by Brecht’s attention and then respect. When they’re working together and she tells him no, he abandons an idea immediately.
Read Full Article »