Poems 1913-1956

New Internationalist, June, 1998

...being both a diary of daily events and a commentary on world affairs.

THIS year sees the centenary of the birth of the German playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht. For some academics and fellow-travellers of the right, such an anniversary, following on from the `ending' of the Cold War, has signalled open season on Brecht. Shrill biographies have appeared in which wild accusations of misogyny and plagiarism are made.

These recent attacks have in common a strong ideological motivation; Brecht the unrepentant Marxist must be cut down to size now that global capitalism is the only game in town. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the toppling of the statues must be followed by the humbling of this socialist icon.

In this atmosphere of nouveau-McCarthyism, it is illuminating to look beyond the pseudo-debate over whether Brecht's well-known collaborative working methods amounted to theft and instead concentrate on the bedrock of his craft; the neglected and little-known poetry.

From his earliest days, poetry poured out of Brecht, jotted down on scraps of paper as he wandered the streets of his home town of Augsberg. Many of these early poems, such as the rumbustious Ballad of the Pirates or the deliberately schmaltzy Remembering Maria A were written with musical accompaniment and, indeed, many made their way as songs into his first play, Baal. The success of his second play Drums in the Night led to Brecht's move to Berlin where he wrote the poetic series The Impact of the Cities. Throughout the early 1930s, as the Nazis tightened their grip on power, poetry for Brecht became an increasingly polemical tool, a means of expressing his political opposition and rallying resistance. Often he was spurred to write by news items, as he explains in Bad Time For Poetry:

Inside me contend

Delight at the Apple tree in blossom

And horror at the house painter's* speeches

But only the second

Drives me to my desk.

[* Hitler]

When, in 1933, Brecht was forced into exile in Scandinavia and later the United States, poetry remained the constant thread in his life. At a time when his books were burned in Germany and he was seldom able to stage his plays, poetry was at once a diary of everyday events, a commentary on world affairs and a chance to test and expand ideas and theories. The poems of these exile years are astonishingly tautly written, often turning on a single telling image or detail. They are also the most compelling in terms of their humanity and empathy; the poet struggling to encompass in words the horrors of war sweeping across the continents:

The old see the young die

The foolish see the wise die

The earth no longer produces, it devours

The sky hurls down no rain, only iron

It is undeniable that these darkest days of war saw Brecht's best work as a poet. At the war's end he returned to a divided Germany, founding the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre company dedicated to performing his plays. In these last years Brecht was circumspect - to say the least - in his comments about the communist rulers of East Germany, torn between party loyalty and deep scepticism. Only after his death in 1957 did pieces critical of Stalin and the East German regime see the light of day, most famously the poem The Solution:

After the uprising of the 17th June

The Secretary of the Writer's Union

Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee

Stating that the people

Had forfeited the confidence of the government

And could win it back only

By redoubled efforts.

Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

Reading these works, it becomes clear how the theatrical and musical collaborations - with Weill, Eisler, Elizabeth Hauptmann and others - were built upon the superstructure of the poetic writing. As John Willet and Ralph Manheim say in the introduction to their definitive collection of his poetry, `More painfully (and more powerfully) than in any of his stage works, he was writing the tragedy of our time.'

Peter Whittaker

Poems 1913-1956 by Bertolt Brecht, edited by John Willett & Ralph Manheim (Methuen, 1976) ISBN 0 413 487903.