Biography
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 The Beggar's Opera (1953) that serves as the basis of The Threepenny Opera (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.
