Ben Hecht and George Grosz

By George Grosz, around 1918

The links between Berlin and Hollywood are numerous. Billy Wilder, Carl Laemmle, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubisch, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Michael Curtiz, Anatol Litvak, Josef von Sternberg. 

Here is one more to add : Ben Hecht.

Ben Hecht 1894 –1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. A journalist in his youth, he went on to write some of the most entertaining screenplays and plays in America. He received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some seventy films. Among them : Scarface, The front-page, Viva Villa, Gunga-Din, Wuthering Heights, Spellbound, Notorious, but also Gone with the Wind.

So, what connection could Ben Hecht have had with Weimar Berlin ?

Hecht started his career as a journalist for a Chicago newspaper. In 1920, they sent him to Berlin to cover the revolutionary movements in post-war Germany. There, he met George Grosz, at that time a Dadaist. The biting satire in Grosz’ works inspired the Chicago journalist, whose style may have changed as a consequence of those early Dada-contacts in Berlin.

"The young artist, (Grosz) nearly the same age as Hecht, was just beginning to make his reputation as an upstart leftist satirist in the difficult early years of Germany’s recovery from humiliating defeat at the end of the Great War. Hecht was among those responsible for first introducing Grosz’s work in America at this point in the artist’s career. Contact with the Berlin Dada group as well as with Grosz was to be reflected in some of Hecht’s own writings in the early 1920s after his return to Chicago from Germany."

By Jerry D. Meyer, in Caxtonian, March 2012

From "Caxtonian", issue of March 2012