On Really Existing Anti-Americanism - Hoover Institution

Hoover Classics : Berman hcberman ch3 Mp_81 rev0 page 81
Really Existing Anti-Americanism
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States in the war against Saddam Hussein. Of course,
Brecht, who cultivated a tough-guy image, felt some affinity
with the masculine brutality that he associated
with England, but this predisposition stood increasingly
under the ideological censor of standard anti-militarism
and Communist dogma. Trying to come to grips with
England, however, he gradually overcame this resistance,
at least partially.
In order to understand England, the writer Brecht,
not surprisingly, read literature and history. In a remarkable
journal entry of February 2, 1940, he reports on
his reading Thomas Macaulay’s essay on the early eighteenth-century
poet Joseph Addison. It is here that Brecht
encounters the liberal revolutionary England, in the
wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, with its burgeoning
public sphere in which literature took on a
prominent role. As Macaulay put it, “Now the press was
free, and had begun to exercise unprecedented influence
on the public mind. Parliament met annually and
sat long. The chief power in the State had passed to the
House of Commons. At such a conjuncture, it was natural
that literary and oratorical talents should rise in
value.” 6 It is hardly surprising that Brecht, the advocate
of an engaged literature and a political theater, would
find this cultural model appealing, in constrast to what
Macaulay disparaged as the “servile literature of
France,” 7 with its deep dependence on the power of the
6. Thomas Babbington Macaulay, “The Life and Writings of Addison,”
in Macaulay, Essays on Milton and Addison (New York: Longmans,
Green, and Co., 1900), 112.
7. Ibid., 115.