Weigel, Helene (1900–1971)

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Weigel, Helene (1900–1971)

Legendary Austrian-born stage actress and theater director who was married to the dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Pronunciation: WHY-gl (g as in go). Name variations: Helen Weigel-Brecht. Born in Vienna on May 12, 1900; died in East Berlin in what was then the GDR in 1971; came from a well-off Jewish family, her father was manager of a textile factory and her mother the owner of a toy store; attended Volksschule in Vienna, 1907–15; attended a Lyzeum (high school) for girls, 1915–18; took acting lessons, 1918; married Bertolt Brecht, in 1929; children: Stefan Sebastian Brecht (b. 1924); Mari Barbara Brecht (b. 1930).

Auditioned with the famous Viennese director Arthur Rundt and made small stage appearances in Vienna (1918–19); acted in Frankfurt, Germany, where she received her first major role as Marie in Georg Büchner's Woyzeck (1919–23); was on stage at various theaters in Berlin (1922–28), where she met Bertolt Brecht (1923); acted at the Staatstheater Berlin (1928–29); married Brecht (1929); emigrated from Germany (1933), first to Prague, then Vienna, Switzerland, and Denmark; traveled to Moscow (1933); emigrated to Sweden (1939), and to Finland (1940); emigrated to U.S. via the Soviet Union (1941); settled with Brecht and their children in California; returned to Switzerland (1947) and settled in the Communist-controlledEast sector of Berlin (1948); cofounded the Berlin Ensemble with Brecht (1949); was a director of the Berlin Ensemble and lead actress in numerous plays (1949–71).

Major roles:

Marie in Georg Büchner's Woyzeck (Frankfurt, 1921–23); Klara in Friedrich Hebbel's Maria Magdalena (Berlin, 1925); Grete in Ernst Toller's Der deutsche Hinkemann (Berlin, 1927); the Widow Bebick in Brecht's Man equals Man (Berlin, 1927); title role in Maxim Gorky's The Mother (Berlin, 1932 and 1951); Therese Carrar in Brecht's Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar (The Guns of Mrs. Carrar, Paris, 1937, and Copenhagen, 1938); title role in Antigone (Chur, Switzerland, 1948); title role in Brecht's Mother Courage (Berlin Ensemble, 1949); Natella in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Berlin Ensemble, 1954); with the Berlin Ensemble in London as Mother Courage (1956) and as Natella at the Old Vic (1965); Mrs. Luckerniddle in Brecht's St. Joan of the Stockyards (1968).

"What one needs is an actress," the struggling, young dramatist Bertolt Brecht told a friend in Berlin on a late summer evening in 1923. Looking out the window, Brecht's friend remarked that the light had just gone on in Helene Weigel's apartment across the square, "I'll call her up and tell her you're coming." Brecht left immediately, and Weigel invited him in. Later that evening, when it became clear that Brecht wanted to spend the night, Weigel fixed a bed for him on the sofa. In the middle of the night, Brecht knocked on Weigel's bedroom door complaining that he was cold. She gave him another blanket.

Upon Brecht's return to Munich shortly thereafter—though he was still married, had a steady girlfriend, and several lovers—he began pursuing Weigel; he wrote letters, invited her to visit him in Munich, and for a trip to Paris and Italy. Despite his claim that he needed "an actress," Brecht did not work with her until years later. According to Weigel, he at first thought very little of her as an actress. She was to develop, however, into the quintessential Brechtian actress, illustrating to perfection Brecht's theory of the drama. On stage, she captivated the audience with her charismatic personality, and her gestures and expressions—at once simple and complex—not only captured a wide range of emotions, but also inspired intellectual skirmishes over the actions of characters she portrayed on stage. A fan once complimented Weigel on her performance by musing that she had not been acting the part of a lower-class mother, but she had become that mother. "No," Weigel answered, "I played her, and it must have been her that you liked, not me." One critic remarked that Weigel accomplished more than just making her audience see and listen. She performed not one art, but many. For instance, Weigel taught her audience that generosity and wisdom are forms of art which could and must be learned.

Helene Weigel was born on May 12, 1900, to a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family in Vienna. Her father managed a textile factory, and her mother owned and operated a toy story. Weigel was brought up in one of the most exciting cities of Europe. At the time, Vienna was the home of Freud and psychoanalysis, of writers such as Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, painters such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka; well known for its intellectual caféhouse culture, Vienna was the city of the waltz, the theater, and the opera. Vienna's haute bourgeoisie, which included a numerous and prosperous Jewish element, was known for its mixture of aristocratic sentimentalism, liberalism, and decadence. However, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire coming toward its end, Vienna was also the site of social and political disintegration, and thus a fertile ground for the development of disparate ideological trends, including nationalism, anti-Semitism, zionism, and socialism.

Having two working parents, Weigel and her sister were raised with the help of servants. As was common in upper-class, Jewish circles, Weigel was sent to a girl's Lyzeum. The school's director, Eugenie "Genia" Schwarzwald , was a suffragist who believed that given the opportunity girls could achieve as much as boys. To prove her point, Schwarzwald invited professionally successful women to the school. The visits of the popular actress Lia Rosen and the famous Danish writer Karin Michaëlis deeply impressed Weigel and influenced her decision to break out of her sheltered existence and pursue her dream. Against the wishes of her parents, who saw acting as a morally dubious and unstable profession, Weigel decided to conquer the world on stage. With the Austro-Hungarian Empire near its collapse, Weigel left school during the last year of World War I and filched money from her father's pants pockets to pay for her first acting lessons.

In December 1917, Weigel auditioned for the famous Viennese theater director Arthur Rundt. Michaëlis, who was a strong supporter of Weigel, went along for the audition and described later that she had heard in Weigel's voice "the tones of a pipe organ, the rattle of death, the cries of women giving birth, and the joy of love's ecstasy." Throughout her career, Weigel's voice received much attention. It was hailed by some reviewers as "tone hard as steel," or "marked by deep sensitivity of feeling," while others called her the noisiest actress of Berlin, whose horrible screams should be silenced as soon as possible.

In 1918, Weigel made minor stage appearances in Vienna, and in 1919, she moved to Frankfurt, Germany, to join the New Theater, where she played her first major role and reaped her first success as Marie in Georg Büchner's Woyzeck. The Frankfurt newspaper called her a "true talent," and others noted that her acting was carried by her excellent mimics and a "hard tone of voice with discerning eccentricity." While in Frankfurt, she also played the prostitute Anna in Hans Johst's The King, the old woman in Georg Kaiser's expressionist play Gas II, Pauline Piperkarcka in Gerhart Hauptmann's naturalist play The Rats, and Meroe in Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea. Most reviewers noted the vitality Weigel brought to her roles—one reviewer compared her to an erupting volcano—but also thought that her extraordinary talent was in need of discipline and control.

[Helene Weigel was] one of the greatest dramatic geniuses ever born.
—Arthur Rundt

In 1922, Weigel moved to Berlin, where she worked under the direction of Leopold Jessner at the Staatstheater Berlin. Under Jessner, she played many different roles between 1922 and 1929—minor roles in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Goethe's Faust, Part I, and in comedies by Molière; major, challenging roles as Salome in Hebbel's Herodes and Mariamne and the servant girl in Sophocles' Oedipus. From 1923 to 1928, she was engaged by several theaters in Berlin, among them the Schauspielertheater, Deutsche Theater, Renaissancetheater, Centraltheater, Junge Bühne, Lessing-Theater, Volksbühne, and the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Weigel's first role in a play by Brecht was not on stage but in an adaptation of the play Man equals Man for radio in March 1927. She spoke the role of Leokadja Bebick and received positive reviews from critics, although the radio version of the play was generally not well received. In December 1927, she played the same role on stage at the Volksbühne Berlin. Brecht, one critic noted, merely produced words, but coming from Weigel's mouth, these words became so convincing that the audience could not help but believe them.

It came as a great shock to many when Brecht and Weigel married in 1929. Brecht had come to settle in Berlin in 1924. Weigel had given him her own apartment and had found herself another one nearby. At Weigel's apartment, Brecht came and went as he pleased. He had various lovers, was still married, and had a daughter Hanne with his wife Marianne Zoff as well as a son from a previous relationship who was later raised by Austrian relatives of Weigel. Brecht's and Weigel's son Stefan had been born in 1924. By 1928, Brecht was divorced and had led several lovers to believe that they would be the next Mrs. Brecht, among them the actress Carola Neher (1900–1942), the playwright Marieluise Fleisser (1901–1974), and Brecht's co-writer Elisabeth Hauptmann (c. 1900–1962), who, as has been revealed recently, wrote many songs, parts, and poems attributed to Brecht without ever receiving credit or adequate compensation for her work. Both Fleisser and Hauptmann attempted suicide when they heard about Brecht's marriage to Weigel, but both survived.

According to Fleisser, Brecht made it absolutely plain to Weigel "that both he and his work could not get along without other women." Except for occasional crises, Weigel seemed to accept Brecht's promiscuous lifestyle quietly. In the 1940s, while working at the Berlin Ensemble, she pulled aside a young man who showed a romantic interest in one of the actresses working with Brecht, explaining that her husband got upset and distracted when someone pursued one of his love interests. She then politely asked him to leave.

Weigel's and Brecht's daughter Mari Barbara was born in 1930. Between 1928 and 1933, Weigel performed in various Brecht plays: she continued playing the Widow Bebick in Man equals Man under the direction of Brecht; she was an agitator in The Measures Taken and Pelagea Wlassowa in The Mother, a role for which she was praised as the "greatest proletarian actress." It is said that Brecht's turn toward Communism and Marxism and the increasing politicization of his work was due to Weigel's influence. Weigel had been a Communist since her days in Vienna, where she had come in contact with socialist and leftist ideals. She joined the Communist Party in 1929.

After Hitler's rise to power, Weigel, Brecht, and their children left Germany in February 1933, traveling to Prague and Vienna before settling for a short time in Carona, Switzerland. In June, they moved to Denmark and lived at first at Michaëlis' estate in Thuro and then bought their own house in Svendborg. Weigel could not work in Denmark; she did not speak Danish and lived in a village without a theater. Dissatisfied

with her forced retirement from the stage and eager to help in the anti-Nazi efforts, she traveled to Moscow that autumn. There, she fell ill and had to cancel her planned appearances on Soviet radio. Sick and without money, Weigel asked Brecht in a letter to come to Moscow. He declined, and Weigel had to borrow money to make her way back to Denmark. In October 1937, Weigel played Therese Carrar in Brecht's The Guns of Mrs. Carrar at a guest engagement in Paris. In 1938, she played two parts in the Paris opening of Brecht's 99%.

By 1939, Hitler's Third Reich was expanding rapidly, and the Brecht-Weigel family no longer felt safe in Denmark. In April, they moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where they applied for American immigration visas, and then went on to Helsinki, Finland. Their visas for the U.S. finally arrived in May 1941, and they left Helsinki for the Soviet Union. The family bought tickets for the last five places on the Swedish freighter Annie Johnson, sailing from Vladivostok for San Pedro, California. On the night of June 21–22, the German army attacked the Soviet Union, and the Annie Johnson was to be the last passenger ship to leave for America for years to come.

The Brecht-Weigel family settled in Santa Monica, California, where Brecht became involved with Hollywood and the movie business. Weigel devoted her time to raising her children and providing her husband with a comfortable home. She could not establish herself in Hollywood, where successful actresses had to be young and beautiful. Weigel lacked conventional beauty, spoke English with a heavy German accent, and was in her 40s. However, she did play a role in the film version of Anna Seghers ' The Seventh Cross, which also featured Spencer Tracy and Jessica Tandy .

In November 1947, Brecht and Weigel left California and moved to Switzerland. In Chur, she played Antigone in Brecht's version of Sophocles' play. Some reviewers criticized Brecht's choice for the part, maintaining that Weigel's age should have precluded her from playing the youthful Antigone. While in Switzerland, Weigel and Brecht began to assemble a team and concentrated on finding the right stage for the many works that Brecht and his faithful workers had completed in exile. In 1948, the Soviet authorities extended an invitation to Brecht and Weigel. They were offered financing for the production of Brecht's Mother Courage in the Soviet-controlled East sector of Berlin. With Weigel in the title role, the play was a huge success. Deeply moved, the audience sat silently, then stood up and applauded to exhaustion. A Soviet critic saw the play's final scene as a "terrifying symbol of the tragic fate of an entire people." Overnight, Weigel became a legend, now commonly identified as Mother Courage.

In February 1949, when Weigel was given several offices at the Soviet-German cultural club in Berlin, she set out to establish a theater company under her direction, with Brecht serving as head artistic advisor. In April, the ruling Socialist Unity Party approved the creation of a theatrical ensemble under the management of Helene Weigel. The ensemble was the culmination of Brecht's efforts to establish the "epic theater." In contrast to the traditional, Aristotelian theater, the epic theater depicts events not as fate, but as historically constituted processes. Instead of empathy and pity for the fate of a hero, Brecht wanted to raise critical awareness about the conditions prompting a character's actions. The epic theater calls for a new type of actor and actress and a new type of audience. The style of acting is subdued, oscillating from highly affected stylization to naturalistic gestures. The fragmentation of the drama's plot is enhanced by the interspersion of songs and declarations. The emphasis of Brecht's plays lies not upon what happens, but upon how it happens. The audience is expected to view the play with critical distance, examining and judging the characters for their actions rather than identifying with their suffering.

Weigel became the model actress of the epic theater. She illustrated Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, the alienation effect, by seeming to stand beside the character without identifying with it. However, in her perfection of the epic principles, Weigel unwillingly undermined them. She was so successful in her roles that she mesmerized the audience, thus putting into question its critical distance. In the fall of 1949, the Berlin Ensemble made its debut with Brecht's Mr. Puntila and his Man Matti in the newly formed German Democratic Republic. In 1951, Weigel once again played the part of Pelagea Wlassowa in The Mother; in 1952, she reprised the role of Teresa Carrar, and, in 1954, Natella in The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

After Brecht's death in 1956, Weigel continued her work with the Ensemble, taking Mother Courage to London in 1956 and The Caucasian Chalk Circle in 1964. She became Brecht's sole heir and guardian of the posthumous papers. Before she died in Berlin in 1971, Weigel received numerous medals and titles from the government of the GDR. Unfortunately, Weigel was not a writer; she did not keep a diary and did not write many letters. Her papers are housed in the former GDR, and to this day little is known in the West about her life. With the opening of the Wall, more researchers will gain access to information housed in East Berlin Archives, and it is to be expected that Weigel's career and life will be more fully explored in the future.