Ted, thanks for all that input. You obviously love this subject enough to have learned a whole lot about it.

And I do appreciate your comparison of postwar Berlin to post-Katrina New Orleans. But Brecht had a choice between West and East Berlin, did he not? Or perhaps, if early enough, among four zones of occupation, American, British, French, and Russian? Or was it really that necessary that he return not only to his home city, but to his original neighborhood?

I certainly know that one can be more-or-less "leftist" without embracing Stalinist-type authoritarianism. And, having been born in the USA in 1947, I have no idea how Europe in the late 40s would have "felt" to a grown-up artist like Brecht, but still... I can't help but have doubts about the judgement of anyone with his wealth of options to have freely chosen to settle in the East at that time.

Smacks of a romantic attachment to the theory of Marxism in the face of a much harsher reality, where the "dictatorship of the proletariat" had long since proven to be no better than any other form of dictatorship. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and anyone who has assumed the powers of a dictator has long ago ceased to be any kind of "regular guy" prole.