ABSTRACT
Brecht was by no means alone in his decision to return to ‘anti fascist’ Germany. Many other Communists or fellow-travellers in the arts had already made the return journey or did so in the early 1950s. Brecht’s friends Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau, both composers, were among them, as were the film director Slatan Dudow and the painters Lea Grundig and Horst Strempel and the famous poster propagandist John Heartfield. There was a plentiful supply of writers - Arnold Zweig, Anna Seghers, Ludw ig Renn, ‘K uba’ (Kurt Barthel), Erich
Arendt, Stephan Hermlin, Hans Marchwitza, Jan Petersen, Bodo Uhse and M ax Zimmering. All of these and many others returned from the United States, M exico, Britain, Switzerland or Palestine. From exile in the Soviet Union came another group who decided for the Soviet Zone-Johannes R. Becher, W illi Bredel, Eduard Claudius, Theodor Plievier, Erich Weinert, Gustav von Wangenheim and Friedrich Wolf. Others emerged either from the ‘inner emigration’ or from the concentration camps. Am ong the more prominent were writers Bruno Apitz, Günther Weisenborn, Ehm W elk and, briefly, Hans Fallada who died in 1946. Other talents from the theatre and the cinema, from publishing and painting, remained in Soviet-occupied Berlin believing the battered city would remain the capital o f Germ any and would therefore offer the best employment prospects. Taken together, this army without uniforms represented a formidable array of talent at the disposal of the Soviet M ilitary Administration and the emerging s e d .
