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Looking for Bertolt Brecht in Berlin
My travel itinerary in Berlin, looking for traces of the German playwright and poet’s life
Click here to read in Portuguese | Clique aqui para ler em português
I was under 20 when I met the work of the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, and it was love at first poetry. At that time, I visited a library at Paço da Liberdade, in Curitiba, with some regularity. There, I devoured the books of a collection of Brecht’s complete theater — I wanted that collection so much for me! At that time, I found it to sell for around US$50, but as I was an unemployed journalism student, that was a lot of money. I never saw that collection for sale again.
Everything I read from Brecht touched me as if he spoke directly to me. They were words with a particular sweetness, at the same time as crude as the society he criticized. I saw myself in it: in his words, I found mine, which existed here without me knowing. As I read his theater, I thought about how he could summarize the story he was going to tell from beginning to end, yet I could get involved with each line as if I were inside the scene without knowing what was coming next.
I was in love, not only with the literature that this man wrote but (and perhaps, mainly) with his political engagement. In…
