My teenage years can be evoked, as I think they can for a few of my
former classmates at the High School of Music and Art, not by pop music, but by the
street-smart dissonances and raunchy lyrics of The Three-Penny Opera. My
closest friends and I went more than once to see the Brecht-Weill
classic performed in the Village. We listened over and over to the
record, held by its cynical, edgy daring and its erotic overtones—rap
for would-be bohemians in the late 1950s—noting, however, that the
record lyrics were less explicit than the theater version. Our parents
thought it a little “adult” for fifteen-year-olds, but as old leftists,
they generally approved of both the composer and the author. And since
Lotte Lenya was in the cast, we were witnessing living theater history,
which was educational. Later, when an amazing film of the original
Berlin production with the young Lenya turned up, we rushed to see it
and thrilled at its rawness, rudeness, and vitality.

As children of the 1940s, we hadn’t been encouraged to be
Germanophiles, but Thomas Mann fascinated us (except for my best
friend’s unidentical twin sister who preferred Gone with the Wind), and
the self-conscious naughtiness of German Expressionist painting, with
its frank hostility to the status quo, appealed to us as intellectually
pretentious, mildly rebellious New York teenagers; that scratchy,
ecstatic Kokoschka double portrait of the art historian and his wife at
MOMAwas a heavy favorite. But the