hole.
HUAC was a bit before my time, but I remember many years ago I had a HILARIOUS Folkways label LP of one of HUAC's theater of the absurd highlights, the testimony of renowned German playwright Berthold Brecht. At the end of the record, I remember Brecht compared being interrogated by HUAC to being interrogated by the Nazi SS: "The Nazis never would have let me smoke."
Unfortunately, a Google search just now for this material got only 6 hits. One of the hits is a transcript of the hearing, but, sometime since February 2004, the original webpage apparently was erased. Here is an excerpt from the cache:
"Brecht HUAC Stripling translator Search. This is G o o g l e's cache of
http://eee.uci.edu/programs/humcore/HUACBrecht.htm as retrieved on Feb 27, 2004 14:34:34 GMT. G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web.
October 30, 1947
Bertolt Brecht
MR. BRECHT: My name is Bertolt Brecht. I am living at 34 West Seventy- third Street, New York. I was born in Augsburg, Germany, February 10, 1898.
...
MR. STRIPLING: ... Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of any country?
MR. BRECHT: Mr. Chairman, I have heard my colleagues when they considered this question not as proper, but I am a guest in this country and do not want to enter into any legal arguments, so I will answer your question fully as well I can. I was not a member, or am not a member, of any Communist Party.
...
MR. STRIPLING: Mr. Brecht, is it true that you have written a number of very revolutionary poems, plays, and other writings?
MR. BRECHT: I have written a number of poems and songs and plays in the fight against Hitler and, of course, they can be considered, therefore, as revolutionary because I, of course, was for the overthrow of that government.
THE CHAIRMAN: Mr. Stripling, we are not interested in any works that he might have written advocating the overthrow of Germany or the government there.
...
MR. BRECHT: Oh, yes. That is not an article, that is a scene out of a play I wrote in, I think, 1937 or 1938 in Denmark. The play is called Private Life of the Master Race, and this scene is one of the scenes out of this play about a Jewish woman in Berlin in the year of '36 or '37. It was, I see, printed in this magazine Ost und West, July 1946.
...
STRIPLING: Mr. Brecht, may I interrupt you? Would you consider the play to be pro-Communist or anti-Communist, or would it take a neutral position regarding Communists?
MR. BRECHT: No, I would say-you see, literature has the right and the duty to give to the public the ideas of the time. Now, in this play-of course, I wrote about twenty plays-but in this play I tried to express the feelings and the ideas of the German workers who then fought against Hit-ler. I also formulated in an artistic-
MR. STRIPLING: Fighting against Hitler, did you say?
MR. BRECHT: Yes.
MR. STRIPLING: Written in 1930?
MR. BRECHT: Yes, yes. Oh, yes, that fight started in 1923. ..."