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Just weeks after the 1929 Wall Street crash, German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem about the rise and fall New York. It could have been written about last year’s economic crisis. The World’s Alex Gallafent looks at how Brecht’s work hits the mark nearly 80 years later.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  This was the scene in Frankfurt, German today.  Investors hit by last year’s collapse of Lehman Brothers protested their loss of savings.  They marched outside the company’s former offices.  One man shouted, “Criminals. Bank robbers.”  Lehman Brothers fold one year ago today.  The crisis that engulfed the firm has caused to question, well, the whole kit and caboodle: capitalism.

MICHAEL MOORE: We’re seeing the end of capitalism.  The end of capitalism as we know it, and I say good riddance.

WERMAN: That was filmmaker Michael Moore speaking last year with CNN’s Larry King.  Moore’s upcoming movie has an ironic title, “Capitalism:  A Love Story.”  But it’s just the latest blast against capitalism.  Decades ago German playwright Bertolt Brecht had his say in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Brecht wrote about New York.  It’s as if he was writing last year.  The World’s Alex Gallafent has the story.

ALEX GALLAFENT: Weeks after the crash Brecht put pen to paper and came with this:  A poem called The Late Lamented Fame of the Giant City of New York.  At the start, New Yorkers are on top of the world.

ROBERT COHEN: What people they were, their boxers the strongest, their inventors the most practical, their trains the fastest, and also the most crowded, and it all looked like lasting a thousand years.  For the people of the City of New York, put it about themselves that their city was built on the rock and hence indestructible.

GALLAFENT: Sounds familiar and it becomes more so as the poem goes on.  Wall Street crashes.  New York City goes into free fall.

COHEN: What a bankruptcy.  How great a fame has departed.  What a discovery that their system of communal life has placed the same miserable flaw as that or more modest people.

GALLAFENT: 2009 is plenty different from 1929, but not entirely different according to Robert Cohen, a professor at New York University.

COHEN: I think the comparison is unavoidable.

GALLAFENT: Brecht had never visited his New York when he wrote his poem, but that didn’t stop him from having an opinion about the place. The poem was shaped by Brecht’s admiration for Karl Max.

COHEN: It is a vision of capitalism that kind of in the waves the way Marx describes it, which has its high moments and then constantly self-destructs, rebuilds itself, and this kind of cyclical vision kind of reveals its logic.  If we read the poem today and we see the obvious parallels.

MARC SILBERMAN: For people like Brecht, the collapse in 1929 was a confirmation of suspicions of market capitalism had a destructive power.

GALLAFENT: This is Marc Silberman who studies the work of Bertolt Brecht at the University of Wisconsin.  For Silberman Brecht’s doubts about capitalism emerged from a specific time and place, Germany in the 1920s.  After the trauma and defeat of the first World War, Germany embarked on a bold experiment in constitutional democracy, the Weimar Republic.  But while Germany’s politics were changing, other aspects of life were stagnant.

SILBERMAN: Brecht was living a Weimar, Germany that was completely burdened by tradition.  Dress codes, cultural values, ideals and so on.

GALLAFENT: So young artists like Bertolt Brecht and her composer collaborator Kurt Weill looked elsewhere for inspiration.  They looked west.

SILBERMAN: For many of the intellectuals, middle-class people who felt constrained, America was a breath of fresh air.  The United States seemed like the place where everything was possible.

GALLAFENT: Before Brecht came to criticize America, he loved America and the fruits of American capitalism.

COHEN: Anything from Fordist industrial production to dancing girls dancing in steps, which is kind of version of an industrialized form of dance.  Music, gestures, and attitudes that Germans imagined Americans have like being cool, being dramatic.

GALLAFENT: Brecht devoured American culture, American thought.

SILBERMAN: He read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Frank Norris, The Pit.

GALLAFENT: And he put America, his imagined America center stage in his writing. Mix a cocktail of Brecht, Weimar, Maxism and America and you get things like this.

MARILYN MANSON: [Singing Alabama Song]

GALLAFENT: This is Marilyn Manson’s cover of Alabama Song written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.   The original features in an opera called The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.  It’s a parable of capitalism.  Mahagonny is an imaginary city in Alabama.  Coincidentally, the state that Lehman Brothers got its start back in the 19th Century.  It’s a city of pleasure.  At the start, that’s shown to be a good thing.  You can buy anything, everything you want, but as the opera develops, prosperity gives way to savage greed.

SILBERMAN: What we find is a kind of market capitalism where everything is defined by money.  Everything can be bought including human relations.  Market capitalism is shown to destroy all social connections.

GALLAFENT: In Mahagonny, capitalism is cut throat.  The city is like a net cast out to snare edible birds.  But by the end of the opera, the city itself is destroyed.  It’s a harsh depiction of capitalism.  But Brecht didn’t see that as the end of thing, says scholar Marc Silberman.

SILBERMAN: This is an intimate part of Brecht’s thinking.  I believe that moments of crisis, moments of destruction are also possibilities for developing something new.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We have a once in a generation chance to act boldly and turn adversity into opportunity and to use this crisis as a chance to transform our economy for the 21st Century.

GALLAFENT: Now, don’t believe everything you hear.  President Obama is not a Marxist.  He believes in the apparatus of capitalism and the power of the markets.   The President spoke on Wall Street yesterday.  He had strong words for a rebounding financial industry.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The old ways that led to this crisis cannot stand, and to the extent that some have so readily returned to them, underscores the need for change and change now.  History cannot be allowed to repeat itself.

GALLAFENT: Bertolt Brecht’s Germany became Hitler’s Germany.  The writer fled to a new home, California.  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

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