Chausseestrasse is a good place to track down the ghost of Brecht, and perhaps even to begin to test - or, at the very least, to challenge - the veracity of that remark. For the last three years of his life, from October, 1953 to July, 1956, Bertolt Brecht, poet and dramaturge, and his much wronged Jewish wife, Helene Weigel, rented apartments at No. 125, for a pittance. Brecht had finally returned to Germany in 1947, after a decade and a half of self-imposed exile. The man who, in his own words, had become accustomed to 'changing countries more often than shoes' had at last come to rest again.

Here is how Brecht described this last home of his in a letter of 1953 to his publisher, Peter Suhrkamp.

I'm now living in Chausseestrasse, next to the 'French' graveyard, where Huguenot generals and Hegel and Fichte are buried; all my windows look out on the cemetery grounds. It's not without its cheerful side. I have three rooms on the first floor of the back building, which like the front building is said to be about a hundred and fifty years old. The rooms are high and so are the windows, which have pleasant proportions. The largest room is about nine meters square, so I can put in several desks for different jobs. Actually the whole place is well proportioned, it's really a good idea to live in houses and with furniture that are at least a hundred and twenty years old, let's say, in early capitalist surroundings until later socialist surroundings are available…

Brecht and his wife are also buried in this cemetery. In fact, Brecht would have been able to see the site of his own future grave from the window of his study. What is more, the two of them are buried, side by side, just a matter of yards away from Hegel and Fichte, those two great, nineteenth-century German philosophers that Brecht mentions in his letter to Suhrkamp.

The self-presentation of the two pairs, in death as in life, could not be more different. Hegel's and Fichte's head stones are monumental and self-aggrandising - Fichte's is a great, rising obelisk. Brecht's head stone is quite unlike any other in this cemetery. His name - nothing but that - is inscribed on what looks like a sharp sliver of untreated rock, which rises to a rough spike. It seems to say: take me as I am, the rough with the smooth - perhaps more rough than smooth - an unadorned man of the people, in death as in life. His instructions about what to do in the event of his death were similarly austere. Here is the letter addressed to the German Academy of Arts, dated 15 May 1955.

To the German Academy of Arts, Attention R. Engel

In the event of my death I do not wish to lie in state or to be publicly exhibited anywhere. No speeches are to be made over my grave. I would like to be buried in the garveyard next to the house where I live, in Chausseestrasse.

           Bertolt Brecht

And so it was to be.

I wonder about all this as I listen to the historian and former student of Humboldt University who is our guide to Brecht's end-of-life, second-floor apartment which overlooks the cemetery on this cold, sunny November day. His name is Dr Jens Ebert, and he is a practising historian, he tells us, an historian of war, he adds - though not a military historian, he also hastens to point out. He has written a book about the effect upon civilians of the German defeat at Stalingrad, for example. Like Brecht, he inclines towards pacifism. He also inclines towards a robust defence of the integrity of Bertolt Brecht whenever Brecht's reputation is challenged.

We had been waiting for some minutes on the landing, outside a white-panelled door, having ascended two flights of stairs. The tour of the apartment would begin on the half hour, a notice attached to that door informed us. Otherwise, everything was uncannily still and quiet. We were the only visitors for the 10.30 am slot.

Dr Ebert came up the stairs at boyish speed, turned the key in the lock, and flung back the door. All of a rush, we were inside Brecht's study, the smaller of the two. All these belongings had belonged to Brecht, I thought to myself, marveling like a foolish child, the chairs with their low-slung leather seats, the solid black telephone, the shelves of books…

Dr Ebert stood back and told us of Brecht's exile - in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and the USA. He described Brecht's interrogation at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee. We talked a little about the war and its aftermath. I told him that the German writer W.G. Sebald, who had lived in England for many years, and later died there in a tragic car accident, had written, in a posthumously published essay, that after the war there was silence from its writers, for many years. 'That is a typical West German point of view,' Dr Ebert replied. 'It is simply not true of the East.' Very few exiles returned to the DDR after the war, he told us. If they came back at all, they settled in the East. According to Dr Ebert, the West, for German writers, was tainted by lingering suspicions of fascism. The East, on the other hand, offered the promise of new beginnings. 'Are you not aware that Conrad Adenauer's private secretary was the very person who was responsible for the Nuremberg Race Laws?'  

As I listened, my eyes kept straying towards Brecht's books, which were stacked on shelves at his back, absorbing the names of the authors that Brecht had read. He was a man of eclectic tastes: his shelves included books by Whitman, Faulkner, Tasso, Sterne, Shakespeare, Racine, Schiller, Tolstoy; and also included certain books which are still officially proscribed in Germany: Mein Kampf, for example. Then, in another book case, this one overlooked by four Noh masks, one of which was the evil daimon about which Brecht had once written a poem, there were the Greek and Roman classics. And, needless to say, the collected works of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

Was it permitted to touch, even to examine, one of the books? I asked. Certainly not. Or to take any photographs perhaps? Certainly not.

Dr Ebert explained that many of these books had not been with Brecht during his long years of exile. One, however, had always been his companion. He was alluding to a small, scuffed, brown Bible that lay on its side across other books. It was no larger than the palm of a man's hand. He told us that Brecht had pasted two images into that Bible. Into the front he had inserted an image of the Buddha, and at the back a photograph of a racing car. Brecht adored cars. Why would an atheist such as Brecht want to carry the Bible around with him from country to country? He believed, Dr Ebert explained, that the Bible contained the summary of man's wisdom. As for his being an atheist, well… 'He was pluralistic…' And was he a party member? 'He never belonged to the Communist party, though he would have described himself as a Marxist.' And what else did Brecht always have with him? Dr Ebert pointed to a photograph of Lenin.

Evidence of his wife, Helene Weigel, the actress and director of their theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble, felt curiously absent from these rooms. There was a good reason for this. She had her own apartment on the ground floor. She had at first refused to live with him at this address, and then some kind of a compromise had been reached. 'Every afternoon he would slip a note beneath her door, saying: "would you take tea with me?"' Dr Ebert explained.

'So they did not live together as man and wife…'

'Well, they were of a certain age…'

More evidence of Brecht's pluralism hung on the walls, on either side of the window which overlooked the cemetery. To the left was a scroll containing the poem by Chairman Mao which describes Mao's flight over the Great Wall, transcribed in Mandarin by Yuan Miau-tse, and, to the right, the Confucian scroll which had once brought a poem into being. Here is that poem. It was written in 1937 - or thereabouts - and is translated here by Lee Baxendall.

The Doubter

Whenever we seemed

*

'Was Brecht continuing to write poetry during the last three years of his life?'

'He was always writing poetry, but no more dramas at the end. He wrote a sequence of elegies at his country house in Bucknow, for example, which is a little over one hour from here. As for the theatre, well, he had already written about two hundred dramas...' Many of these had not been staged during his years of exile. There was a lot of catching up to be done.

Brecht's poetry was curiously under-published during his lifetime. Early volumes were not reprinted. He himself seemed to suggest that his poetry and his dramas occupied separate worlds, and that poetry grew in a much more sequestered spot altogether. And yet re-reading the collected poems now, what you notice immediately is how much the poetry has in common, tonally and even thematically, with that great outpouring of plays. With the partial exception of the late Bucknow elegies, written in his country home, his poems often remind you of some of those writers he most admired - Villon, Whitman and even Kipling. They are robustly in and of the world, brash, direct, wordly-wise, pugnacious. They are never ethereally ruminative or preciously self-regarding. Brecht never sounds tentative; he never seems to be gently and quietly nursing his own hyper-sensitivity. The poems possess a great animal vigour - which is consistent with all we know about Brecht the philanderer. This is quite unlike the various strands of lyricism to which we English readers so readily warm. He writes, noisily and pugnaciously, about corpses, assassins, machinery, renegades, opium addicts, whores. He loved popular forms - the ballad, for example - just as much as he hated refined singing. During the Second World War he wrote a whole series of quatrains based on newspaper clippings, which were, many years of controversy later, published as A War Primer. This is no more and no less than politics versified. In short, Brecht liked to shake his fist in your face.

*

And so we passed through into the larger of the two studies. This one contained more than one desk, more than one typewriter, and a round table beside which there was a rocking chair. An image of Confucius oversaw proceedings at this table. Dr Ebert explained that Brecht was always very restless, always working, so that even when he was seated and discussing issues with actors, students, friends, he would need to keep on moving. Hence the rocking chair. Did I know that he had been researching a play about Einstein at the time of his death? I did not know that. Nearby, flanking a tiled stove, were a pair of stone statues of the Apostle John and the Virgin Mary - more evidence of this Marxist atheist's rampant pluralism.

Dr Ebert was right though. Brecht pulsed with energy, from first to last. His letters positively spit with wit, vulgarity, sarcasm, the sheer, no-holds-barred ebullience of being alive. He could not bear the dullness of officialdom. Eight days before his death, he posted a notice on the Bulletin Board of his theatre, addressed to his comrades, thundering ahead into a future that was to be so cruelly denied him:

To the Members of the Berliner Ensemble

For our London season we must bear two things in mind. First, as most of the audience won't know German, we shall be offering them a mere pantomime, a kind of silent film on the stage. (In Paris we had an international festival audience - and we played for only a few days.) Second, the English have long dreaded German art (literature, painting and music) as sure to be dreadfully ponderous, slow, involved and pedestrian.

So our playing must be quick, light and strong. By quickness I don't mean a frantic rush; playing quickly is not enough, we must think quickly as well. We must keep the pace of our runs-through, but enriched with a gentle strength and our own enjoyment. The speeches should not be offered hesitantly, as though offering one's last pair of boots, but must be batted back and forth like pingpong balls. The audience should be made to see that a collective of many artists (an ensemble) is engaged in a common effort to bring stories, ideas, feats of skill to the audience.

   Good work!

                        brecht

*

And then, distributed about the second study's various table tops, there were the large bowls, one of pewter, another of copper. Those were for the mountains of cigar ash, which never stopped growing. Brecht smoked cigars, quite fat ones, all the time - as did his wife. Perhaps the most curious thing of all in this room was the large desk with what looked like a large, arched cubby-hole cut into it, at the bottom, dead centre. 'That is where his dog would sit,' Dr Ebert told us. Hanging on the opposite wall, directly within his dog's line of sight, was a poster by Picasso, dated 1953, with the dove of peace at its centre, encircled by an inscription - 'La Paix pour tous Les Peuples - in several languages. Brecht had written to Picasso about this poster on 13 November 1953:

Dear Comrade Picasso,

I am the director of a theatre in East Berlin, the Berliner Ensemble, I wish to ask your permission to use your magnificent poster design for the [-] for publicity purposes, especially at the university in West Berlin. I must confess to you that we have been using your dove as our curtain emblem ever since the theatre was founded. With heartfelt admiration for all your beautiful and useful work.

   With socialist greetings,

   Yours…

*

Off his study was the small bedroom containing the bed - it looked surprisingly, if not disappointingly, small, as the beds of towering legends often tend to do - in which Brecht died, at the age of 58, of a heart attack. We were not allowed to enter this room. Beside its entrance stood a book case which contained bound volumes of Neues Deutschland and a chess set, reared up on its end. Brecht was passionate about chess.

Downstairs, we entered the apartment of Helene Weigel. The door by which we entered was white - and padded with what looked like a kind of white, swollen plastic covering. Dr Ebert told us that she could not abide noise. This lovely room, which overlooked a small garden, was full of displays of elegant silver spoons and, behind locked glass doors, an abundance of Meissen tableware. All bought from flea markets, we were told before we asked. Nearby was her kitchen - they had the service of a cook - which contained the very latest of hobs. It was long and designer-conscious for its day.

Gas and electricity in one, Dr Ebert told us.

When we stepped outside into the late morning sunshine of the cobbled courtyard that runs in front of the side of the building, Dr Ebert mentioned that this was where Brecht kept his West German car, a forerunner of the BMW - he so loved his cars - which he had managed to obtain thanks to his long friendship with Johannes R. Becher, the minster of culture who had once, back in the 1920s, been an expressionist poet.

'It seems to me that Brecht's socialist ideals went hand in hand with a bourgeois lifestyle,' I tell Dr Ebert. I had hinted I thought as much earlier in our conversations, but this was the first time I had expressed the thought quite so baldly.

He became agitated. Brecht was quite unlike Thomas Mann, he reminded me. He was not a man of aristocratic tastes. He did not live in Zurich. He did not collect fine things - paintings, for example - for their own sake. He was utterly dedicated to his work, and the fact that he had some money was due to the fact that by this time in his life, he had gained an international reputation as a playwright, and he was receiving royalties….

'Are you partial to Mann's work, Dr Ebert?'

'Not especially.'

In order to find our way back to Chausseestrasse, we had to walk through the cobbled courtyard which runs along the side of the building. Brecht's car would have rumbled over these cobbles. I glance up at the windows out of which Brecht himself would once have looked, staring past the top of my head at the cemetery's fussy monuments, with perhaps an expression of impassioned disdain on that face of his, which may or may not, with its unrefined features, have been the face of an evil man.