In 1940, seven agonizing years later, we had, it seemed, become a family of permanent exile. Rather than having returned proudly to a restored democratic country, we continued to languish in Denmark, the situation far worse than anyone had imagined. Germany had already invaded Poland, England and France had declared war on the Nazis, and by this time the Danish-German border was anything but secure. You’d think that given the gravity of the political situation as well as the parade of refugee artists and visitors who needed to see Papa, he would have known little about my inner life, but an essay, which he simply called “Barbara,” written some time while in Denmark in 1940, suggests just the opposite. “Barbara—ten years old—is as thin as a sparrow in March,” he writes of this bookworm of a daughter, who even then found chocolate wonderful. “She has a tiny face with vibrant blue eyes,” he observes. “She is a strange creation, wild as a small hurricane, tender as Belgian lace. She can almost draw blood with her questions and is particularly generous in voicing her opinions.” Even though I’ve always thought that I take far more after my mother, I have to admit that the occasionally irascible, sensitive free spirit whom he describes as his daughter may take far more after him than I might care to admit.

Our lives as exiles continued to pose challenges, long after our move to the States and even after the end of the war, but Papa always went back to his poetry, which clearly must have been very important to him, since it took up so much of his time. My mother, Helene Weigel Brecht, who after our return to Berlin was one of the great actresses in the world and was known to everyone as Heli, recognized the value of his poetic work. In addition to looking after Papa’s Berliner Ensemble as its director (Intendant), Heli, whom father had originally met in the theater in Berlin, also took control of his literary legacy, and was determined to make the poems better known. When she died in 1971, my half sister and brother came to me, and though I was sick in bed, told me, “Barbara, you are not doing anything much, so please take care of Papa’s work.”

It seemed to all of us quite natural that I, like my mother, would be good in taking care of such things, although some people were furious that a woman could decide what could and could not be done with the plays. Despite the prominence of these plays, I’ve also devoted a great deal of time to getting all of Papa’s poems in print, and would constantly ask my colleagues which poems had not yet been published, whether because of political or prudish caution (the love sonnets, for example, were left out of the original publication). Over time, the poems—which he deliberately wrote so clearly and simply that even the nodding donkey that he kept on his desk could understand—have multiplied, so much so that they now form, I’m proud to say, an important body of twentieth-century German poetry.