Brecht's War Primer: the "photo-epigram" as poor monument

Afterimage, March-April, 2003 by David Evans

What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image. In the illustrated magazines the world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has become entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it (21).

That is, the illustrated press encourages the very amnesia which war memorials are intended to combat. Unhappy the land that needs monuments and Brecht's dissatisfaction with them is conveyed in the poem The Carpet-Weavers of Kuyan-Bulak Honor Lenin. The poor artisans from a small town in Turkestan wished to honor the deceased Soviet leader. Initially they planned to erect a plaster bust, but eventually, they decided to use the money to buy petroleum to treat a local mosquito-infected swamp:

So they helped themselves by honoring Lenin, and

Honored him by helping themselves, and thus

Had understood him well (22).

War Primer can be understood as an homage to a leader who had little time for traditional monuments. In Brecht's project there are no heroes, no statues, no stone, no bronze, nor even the impermanent plaster favored by Lenin for an abandoned series of temporary monuments to teach revolutionary, proletarian civics. Instead, he uses paper images cut out of newspapers and magazines. For Krakauer, such photographic ephemera are an aid to forgetting. For Brecht, however, they have a potential use value. Combined with his epigrams, the carefully selected images become poor monuments, an aid to critical remembering.

DAVID EVANS teaches the history and theory of photography at The Arts Institute at Bournemouth and The Surrey Institute of Art and Design, His publications include John Heartfield: AIZ/VI 1930-38 (New York: Kent Fine Art, 1992).

NOTES

(1.) Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel (Berlin: Eulenspiegel Verlag, 1955); Brecht, War Primer (London: Libris, 1998).

(2.) Ruth Berlau, "Preface" In: Kriegsfibel op cit, no page number. (This text is omitted in the English-language version.)

(3.) Bertolt Brecht, Arbeitsjournal (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp verlag. 1973).

(4.) Brecht, Journals 1934-1955 (London: Methuen, 1993)

(5.) P.V. Brady, "From cave-Painting to 'Fotogramm': Brecht, Photography and the Arbeitsjournal", Forum for Modern Language Studies, 14:3, July 1978, pages 270-282.

(6.) Bertolt Brecht, "On Gestic Music in: John Willett, ed; Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1964), page 105.

(7.) Walter Benjamin, "What is Epic Theatre? [Second Version]" in Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London NLB, 1973), page 21.

(8.) Roland Barthes, "Diderot, Brecht, Elsenstein" in: Barthes, Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana, 1977), pages 69-78. It is worth noting that Barthes' concluding remarks on a new type of are beyond the tableau are interesting, but not relevant to the discussion here.

(9.) Journals, op cit, pages 103-4.

(10.) Journals, op cit, page 206.

(11.) Journals, op cit, page 106; War Primer, op cit, photo-epigram 27. (the translation in War Primer is marginally different.)