Four Walls and a Roof: Brecht, Huac and Today's Émigrés
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- Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué perform "Four Walls and a Roof" at Studio theatre, Edinburgh, until 17 August — an illustrated lecture treating Brecht's exile as a frame for thinking about contemporary displacement from Beirut to Berlin.
- Bertolt Brecht coined the phrase "cold execution" to describe how the US government in the Huac era could destroy artists not by killing them but by blacklisting them from work, cutting them off from what kept them alive.
- The performance is accompanied by pianist Henrik Kairies, who sings songs by Brecht and composer Hanns Eisler.
- Brecht left Germany shortly after the 1933 Reichstag fire, taking eight years and crossing land and sea to reach the US — then got back to Europe in a single day once US authorities finished questioning his communist affiliations.
- Majdalanie and Mroué, both émigrés from Beirut to Berlin, read their script in a casual, un-actorly style and use the piece to argue that homeland means more than the "four walls and a roof" of the title, however one defines it.
- The lecture draws a direct parallel between the Huac's demand for yes-or-no certainty and its suppression of Brecht's prepared commentary on Nazi free-speech crackdowns, and what the artists see as a new far-right intolerance today.
Why it matters: By staging Brecht's own eight-year flight bookended by a one-day return, the performance insists that 'cold execution' by political machinery — blacklisting, exclusion, the refusal of nuance — is not a closed Cold War chapter but a live parallel to today's far-right resurgence. For émigré artists making the work, the play itself becomes evidence that homeland is a contested idea, not a fixed address.
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