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At the beginning of the Great Depression, Eugen Berthold Brecht, who called himself Bert, decided to be a strictly Leninist communist.

In any case, he already lived in more communardic love relationships.

In 1926, under the title “North Sea Crabs”, he had happily told of ditch pigs that ravaged the apartment of a comrade who had become a Bauhaus snob;

now he worked on Slatan Dudow's film “Kuhle Wampe”, in which a family is expelled from the apartment and has to move to the arbor colony, where there is solidarity with the proletariat.

At the world premiere in Moscow in May 1932, no one could believe that the comrades could have it as good under capitalism as the film shows.

Back in Germany, Brecht had to experience that the Nazis received 37.4 percent of the vote in the July elections and made up the largest parliamentary group.

But he hoped for a united front between the KPD and the SPD, in order to turn everything around, and on August 8th bought a house on the Ammersee.

He had always loved to be at the lake.

A train drove there from Augsburg.

There he had impregnated seventeen-year-old Paula Banholzer in 1919, he had repeatedly taken vacations there, had worked with Kurt Weill in Utting on the finish of the “Threepenny Opera” in 1928, and had last vacation in Schondorf in 1931 with Helene Weigel and the children.

And now he had bought the two-story house in Utting, Im Gries 3, from the retired police colonel Josef Ritter von Reis.

A place for the dream of a beautiful life: Utting am Ammersee

Source: picture alliance / dpa

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The beautiful property cost 11,400 marks back then, six times the annual income of an average employee.

Brecht got the money from his father, who took out a mortgage on the property.

Brecht committed himself to repayment in installments of 2000 marks at five percent interest, probably from the income from the "Threepenny Opera".

He liked it here very much.

He moved in straight away, with Helene Weigel and the children, plus his lover Margarete Steffin, Slatan Dudow as a guest, and Hanns Eisler was also to come.

He encouraged Bernard von Brentano to settle nearby.

The view from Utting to the other side of the lake, to the Andechs monastery

Source: picture alliance / dpa

In a poem Brecht raved about the old trees, about the “pond with the mossy carp”, about the hedges and the white rhododendron bushes, about the spruce trees, about the well-laid out garden, the boundaries of which one could not see.

The beauty in the changing light of the times of day.

“The house was beautiful too.” The noble wooden stairs, mighty stoves, oak benches and tables, iron handles, whitewashed walls.

"Every room is different / and each is the best!"

Utting am Ammersee

Brecht stayed until September 20th.

Seven wonderful weeks.

The only ones he spent there.

"We did not experience the change of the seasons, surely delicious, because / After seven weeks of real wealth we left the / property, soon / we fled across the border." He already wrote this in another house, in exile.

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After the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, they hurriedly fled.

Via Prague, Vienna, Lugano and Pari they reached Denmark, where one year and one day after that Brecht signed a new contract of sale for the house on the Ammersee, now for a fisherman's house on the Sund near Svendborg, Skovsbostrand 8. They could not stay there either .

Fortunately, it did not go to Moscow, but to the USA.

In 1952, now in the GDR, Brecht will acquire a villa with a gardener's house in Buckow, on the Schermützelsee - today's Brecht-Weigel memorial.

The house in Utting remained in the family until 1953 thanks to legal finesse and the efforts of Theo Lingen.

It is said that all life as a writer is paper.

In this series we provide counter-evidence.