In now reflecting on my father, who died when I was twenty-six, this love, which formed so mammoth a part of his being, was most keenly expressed, I believe, in his poems. Yet my father, who as Hannah Arendt once wrote “staked his life and his art as few poets have ever done,” curiously remains far better known for his plays than for his poetry, especially in English-speaking countries. At the time of his death in 1956, no one, including my mother, Helene Weigel (she would call him “Brecht,” never “Bidi”), had any idea just how many poems he had written, but today we know that he composed over two thousand that encompass the totality of human existence—from nature to politics, including, quite prominently, love and sex. These poems, when they eventually appeared in Germany, became an enormous success, but initially it was not easy to get the love poems published, especially those whose explicitness created some hesitation at the time.

Even as a young girl, I always loved the poems. I remember him writing in the morning on several desks, since he had so many other things simultaneously going on. He was not, you might say, the type to take a shower before breakfast, but would simply put his trousers over his nightshirt and appear in our kitchen, then in Santa Monica, where we lived in the later years of the war, in a white clapboard house at 1063 Twenty-sixth Street. I would get him a cup of coffee or tea, but then he would start working immediately, whether at poetry or plays. I’ve been asked if he read his poems out loud to the family, which he would do only occasionally, very occasionally, only when he’d need a rhyme and would ask me for one, or if we happened to have guests.

From the time I was little, I felt immensely spoiled by my parents, who went to great lengths to make sure that I felt special. Nothing demonstrates this more than the story of our family’s escape from Germany in February of 1933. Just as the Reichstag burned down, Papa lay in the hospital in Berlin, recovering from appendicitis. My mother went to his room and asked what they should do, and he told her they must leave immediately. Perhaps just as serious as his condition was the fact that I was not in Berlin, but with my grandfather in Augsburg. The situation appeared so dire that they could not even wait for me. Even though he was hardly recovered, they left the hospital and took the next train to Vienna, still five years away from the Anschluss. The problem remained how to squire me, a little girl, out of a country whose borders were now patrolled and sealed. Arriving in the Austrian capital, they met up with Irene Grant, an English woman and a Quaker, who had a passport not only for herself but for her young son. It could not have been more perfect. She agreed to help, so I, a three-year-old girl, left Germany as a four-year-old boy, and was reunited immediately with my hugely relieved parents, who then promptly left Austria. We did not go far though, settling in Copenhagen, because my father wanted to remain geographically close to Germany, believing that the German people would come to their senses and soon toss the Nazis out of power.