Berlin Avant-Garde Photography in Germany, Brecht wrote a text to inspire Weill, which has just been published for the first time and may be rendered roughly as follows:.
Why is this vision of Berlin im Licht βthe brilliantly lit Berlin of the late Twentiesβso evocative to us today? Looking at modern England we may think we see some obvious reasons in our local echoes of pre-Hitler Germany: the unemployment, the frustration, the hooligan violence, the aimless sexual freedom, the growth of astrology and other nonsense cults, the creation of an intellectual proletariat, the outbursts of racism, and, alas, the new concept of war as national therapy, all of which give the very idea of Berlin in the s an appeal and a relevance which it never had for us at the time.
At the same time there has to be something more to account for the equally strong American curiosity about the same historical and geographical area. For whereas both the books under review originated in Germany, it is primarily the United States to whom their English-language editions are addressed; and here the echoes are not quite the same.
More important than specific parallels, then, is the interest that any advanced society must feel in a culture that faced so many of the problems we still have to solve. If the great Paris avant-garde before established the forms and values that now so largely guide us, Germany in the s began to work out how these could be socially applied and communicated, and adapted to technically and organizationally more developed modes of production.
And at once underlying and overriding all this, there looms the impending disaster of Nazism which not only gave so many of the best artists their desperate energy and cutting edge but brought all their efforts apparently to nothing, leaving the world with a huge question.
