The progressive proletarian writer, singer and actress Margarete
Steffin was born into a working class family on March 21, 1908 in
Rummelsburg, Pomerania in Imperial Germany. Rummelsburg, a part of the
Berlin metropolitan area, was the home of the chemical and photographic
film maker Agfa AG. (The Versailles Treaty ending World War One
officially established the border of Germany with the newly created
Poland 15 kilometers to the east of Rummelsbug.) Margarete Emilie
Charlotte Steffin's father was a construction worker and her mother
took in sewing to produce income. Her parents had two more children,
her sister Herta Frieda, who was born in 1909, and a boy, born Hermann
Wilhelm Albert born, who died shortly after birth in 1913. Her father
was among the first round of draftees conscripted into the German
Imperial Army in August 1914.
The young Margarete was a gifted student. When she was 13, an hour-long
play in verse she wrote for Christmas was produced by three schools.
However, her father did not want her to go on to university (and likely
lose contact with her social class), so she got a job with the
telephone company Deutschen Telefonwerken after graduating. Politically
conscious since a young age, Grete as she was called initially was
attracted to the Social-Democratic faction on Germany's left, a humane
socialism; later, she drifted further to the left and became a
communist and supporter of Joseph Stalin, who had an iron grip on the German
Communist Party from the 1930s onward. Stalin would not allow the
German Communist Party to form a Popular Front with the more liberal
Social-Democrats to resist Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, as Stalin
believed Hitler would bring on the conditions that would trigger a
revolution that would swept the Commnuists to power. It was a fateful
miscalculation for tens of millions of Germans, Russians, and countless
others.
Steffin's involvement in progressive politics enabled her to join
left-wing arts organizations who were at the vanguard of creating art
challenging the bourgeois status quo. Art was intricately intertwined
with politics in this era. It was there she could indulge her passion
for singing and acting. She also worked on putting out a guerrilla
newspaper and took Russian language lessons. For the rest of her life,
she would be a gifted translator, adept at many tongues.
In the fall of 1927, the 19-year-old Steffin began an ultimately
unfulfilling long-term relationship with a young man Herbert Dymkethat
led to her first pregnancy and abortion the following year. Fired from
the phone company for being a left-winger, she got employment as a
bookkeeper at a print shop; on Sundays, she performed solo-recitations.
By the time she was the secretary of the Social-Democratic Lehreverband
in 1930, she had become pregnant again, which was terminated via
abortion.
While working for the "Red Revue" ("Rote Revue") in 1931, she took a
speech technique course taught by Helene Weigel, Brecht's common-law wife, at
Masch, near Hannover, Germany. Introduced into the Brecht circle at
this time, she broke up with Dymke that spring and soon became the
lover and then mistress of Brecht after appearing in the role of the
maid in a production Brecht's "Mother", under the tolerant eye of
Weigel, who was the star of the play.
It is generally known now, though still contested and denied by
believers in the solitary nature of genius, that Steffin played the
central role in Ruth Berlau Brecht's "work shop" of collaborators
between his first major collaborator, Elisabeth Hauptmann (who translated John Gay's
18th century masterpiece Die Bettleroper (1953) that serves as the basis of L'opéra de quat'sous (1931)
("The Threepenny Opera", Brecht's most popular work) for Brecht and may
have, in fact, written as much as three-quarters of the book without
getting proper credit or remuneration, and Ruth Berlau, who took over the
role after Steffin's death in 1941. Liek a great 17th century painter,
such as Rembrandt, Brecht used a circle of collaborators (students and
assistance in Rembrandt's case) to produce the works that he presented
to the world under his own name. For while the collaborators did
research, translation and drafting of texts, it was Brecht, with his
poetic genius, who provided the final strokes or brushwork to create a
final draft (as well as provided any songs or poetry on his own, though
the great poet was not above purloining other's lyrics and presenting
them as his own; Hauptmann most surely wrote the lyrics of the famous
"Alabama Song" as Brecht did not speak English at the time, the
language the song is written in).
For more than 10 years, Steffin served Brecht and his family, including
his wife Wiegel, as secretary (the role usually ascribed to her by
Brecht's acolytes), factotum, political sounding-board, mistress, and
translator, often to the detriment of her own health. Steffin suffered
from tuberculosis, and she often traveled and lived in countries such
as Denmark with insalubrious climates to remain at Brecht's side, as
the leftist author had to flee Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s. She also
maintained relationships with other great thinkers and leftists, such
as Walter Benjamin.
Grete Steffin died of tuberculosis in a sanitarium in Moscow in June 6
1941, in the last days of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact
(Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, was
launched on June 22). Steffin had already raised the money (mostly
through her own translations of other writers' works) and made the
arrangements by which the Brecht family was able to cross the USSR and
go into exile in the United States. Alas, she was never able to join
them, and Brecht's productivity -- that is, the quality of the output
of his workshop -- declined.
She is now regularly credited as a co-author of Brecht's great classics
Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1955), Galileo (1974), and Caucasian Chalk Circle (1973), having provided a great deal of
preliminary text for Brecht, who polished the final output and
presented it as a solo work of his own genius. Steffin collaborated out
of love and out of fealty to the collective principle. However, as John
Fuegi -- the founder of the International Brecht Society -- pointed out
in his iconoclastic 1994 biography "Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics,
and the Making of the Modern Drama ", for the great poet, it was a
one-way street. No only did he not share credit, he didn't share
royalties, which could have made a major difference to Steffin's
impoverished family, who lived in poverty in the Democratic Republic of
Germany (East Germany) after the war.
