by Tom Kuhn
By a stone the dogs piss on
He gets no tear-water because
People think he’s in heaven.
9
But now he’s burning there in hell
Oh weep, O brothers mine!
Or he’ll stand forever on Sunday
Afternoons at his dog stone.
Poor B.B.
1
I, Bertolt Brecht, am from the black forests.
My mother carried me into the cities
As I lay in her body. And the cold of the forests
Will be in me until my life ceases.
2
In the asphalt city I am at home. From the very start
Provided with every last sacrament:
With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy.
Mistrustful and lazy and in the end content.
3
I am friendly with people. I put on
A bowler hat exactly as they do.
I say: these creatures have a quite peculiar smell
And I say: no matter, I do too.
4
In my empty rocking-chairs in the morning
Now and then I sit down a couple of women
And I contemplate them idly and I say to them:
In me you have someone you cannot count on.
5
Towards evening I gather men around me
We address one another as “Gentlemen”
They sit with their feet up on my tables
And say: things will get better for us. And I don’t ask when.
6
Towards morning in the grey first light the fir trees piss
And their vermin, the birds, begin to scream.
At that hour I drink up my glass in the city and fling
My stub of tobacco away and fall asleep in unease.
7
We have sat, a light generation
In houses said to be indestructible
(For we built the high dwellings on Manhattan Island
And laid the cables that entertain the Atlantic Ocean).
8
Of these cities will remain what went through them: the wind!
The house makes the eater happy: he cleans it out.
We know we are only provisional and
After us will come nothing to write home about.
9
In the earthquakes that are coming I hope I shan’t
Let my virginia go out for any bitter reason
I, Bertolt Brecht, cast into the asphalt cities
From the black forests in my mother early on.
In Part II we again arrange the poems in the two categories “collected” and “uncollected,” the latter being by far the more numerous. The uncollected are divided into three sections, 1925–1926, 1927–1930, and 1931–1933, and between them are placed the two collections Augsburg Sonnets and The Reader for City Dwellers and poems more or less definitely belonging to them. Amongst the later uncollected poems we include an informal grouping of songs and verses associated with two of Brecht’s important epic projects of these years.
Uncollected Poems 1925–1926
Augsburg Sonnets
The Reader for City Dwellers
Uncollected Poems 1927–1930
Songs and Verses from Kuhle Wampe and The Mother
Uncollected Poems 1931–1933
Uncollected Poems
1925–1926
Brecht and Helene Weigel moved to Berlin, to settle there, in September 1924. Already well known, with characteristic self-confidence, Brecht set about shaping German theater to his needs. The poetry of these years is of a piece with all his other work and gives, in some ways, the best access to it. He wants a literature adequate to modernity, facing up to the times, conveying it and affecting it. With an active sort of passivity—a risky sympathy—he becomes the medium through which the excitement, brutality, injustice, struggle, horror, and strange beauty of the city are transmitted. He adds to his stock of forms, techniques, personae, tones of voice, to get the almost overwhelming experience across.
In January 1927 Brecht’s Domestic Breviary appeared. In it there are many poems already angry at the willed injustice of the postwar social order, but the chief feeling of most is an anarchic and amoral lust for life. By the time they were published their author, without ever losing that vitalism, had moved decisively into the world and the obligations of The Reader for City Dwellers. In the summer of 1926, desiring a theater capable of showing how and with what effects capitalism works, he had begun to study the Chicago wheat market, and having consulted an expert on it, came to the conclusion that, except from the point of view of a handful of speculators, it was a total morass (“ein einziger Sumpf”). He gave up the play and began reading Marx. On May Day 1929, from the balcony of his friend Fritz Sternberg’s flat, he saw the Social Democratic government’s police shoot thirty-one demonstrators dead. Such events, and new friendships with, for example, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Walter Benjamin, Erwin Piscator, and Hanns Eisler, as well as sustained collaborative work in the theater with professionals ever more at one with him, clarified and affirmed his own politics in worsening times—the Wall Street Crash, six million unemployed in Germany in the winter of 1932, the steady progress of Hitler’s Nazis. These are the years of Brecht’s collaboration with Kurt Weill on Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera, of the film Kuhle Wampe, the “learning plays” (Lehrstücke), Saint Joan of the Stockyards, and The Mother—in which his soon-to-be lover and indispensable co-worker Margarete Steffin had a part.
Brecht and his Jewish wife, Helene Weigel, left Germany on February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag Fire. Friends helped their two children to get out after them. Had they not gone, all would sooner or later have been murdered. The scores of poems that follow here are as much a part of the struggle for a society fit to live in as are any other of Brecht’s works in their different genres. But they are never just the servants of his politics. In their unbounded variety, their liveliness, wit, and endless inventiveness, they exceed his engagement in the particular and necessary cause. They do what poetry is best qualified to do: demonstrate in their very selves that life is “incorrigibly plural.” Of itself, poetry is an act of opposition against any social order that denies the fact of plurality and seeks to coordinate and reduce its citizens into the hateful purism of one big idea.
Anna’s vigil by Paule’s corpse
Paule had died
And Anna sat there
And her life was made null and void
By this bloody awful affair.
And on top of all that, night fell, needless to say.
And there was no avoiding the moon either.
Anna would not have expected that of Paule
She was always the gullible one of the pair.
And now of course it was payback time.
Nothing in life comes free.
And Paule—who else?—was the one to blame
And this here was him all over and to a tee.
Of course, there was nothing he could do about it now
But what could Paule ever do anything about?
His sort live oblivious, like beasts. And tomorrow?
For him tomorrow was always way out of sight.
And now he withdrew behind his rigor mortis!
For ducking out he always did have quite a talent.
Poor Anna, towards dawn with her cheap ciggies
She thought her life wasn’t worth a cent.
Sonnet
What I still knew from earlier was the roar
Of waters or: of woodland somewhere
Beyond the window, but soon I slept and for
A long time I lay absent in her hair
And only know of her, by night all torn asunder:
Something of her knee, a little of the black
And bath-salts-scented hair upon her neck
And what before that time I’d heard of her
Her face, they told me, is one soon forgotten
>
Perhaps because transparent to the sight
Of a thing blank as a page not written on
And yet, they said, her countenance is not bright
She knows she gets forgotten. If she reads this
She won’t know who the woman in question is.
The opium smoker
Who smokes the black smoke we know this of her:
That now she is sworn serf to nothingness
She can’t be raised up or insulted anymore
For her now one third part of life suffices.
She needs no further courage: she grows ugly
(She is no longer kin with her own hair)
Three months from now if she saw herself she
Become very forgetful would not know her.
Since in the smoke her blood gave up its verdicts
She sleeps alone: earth bides her, she costs little.
She is riding now on her life’s thinnest wave.
Only others know she still exists
(By all she does not notice she is biddable)
What helps us all helps her: the thing we crave.
Bidi’s view of the great cities
1
Everyone says it: no question
The cities are growing—and how!
And this petrifaction
Won’t stop now.
2
Because it grieves me
How much already swills
Of the drivel of humanity
Around the aerials
3
I tell myself: a stop
Will surely be put to
The cities when the wind eats them up
And that: pronto.
4
True, light still comes from out there
Such as your papa saw
But the constellation of the Great Bear
Itself isn’t there anymore.
5
And likewise
The Great City itself is finished
And whatever eats at it always
Henceforth will be famished.
6
It won’t get much older
The moon ages too.
You saw the city. With colder
Eyes see it now.
The theatre communist
A hyacinth in his lapel
On the Kurfürstendamm
The young man feels
How empty the world is.
Then on the can
It all becomes clear: he is
Shitting into emptiness.
Bored of the work
Of his father
He goes and besmirches the cafés
Behind the newspapers
His smile lurks dangerously.
It is he who
Will trample this world, like
A cowpat.
For 3000 marks a month
He is eager
To stage the misery of the masses
For 100 marks a day
He’ll demonstrate
The injustice of the world.
On the death of a criminal
1
I hear that God has called that person home.
Cold, he was carried to “the place from where
No stairway climbs into an upper room”.
But then all things continued as before.
It may be true that one has been called home
Still, though, we are left with plenty more.
2
Now we are rid of that one, so I hear
And he cannot continue as he was
He will no longer be our murderer
And that is all that can be said, alas.
It’s true we may be shot of him, however
I know of many who are still with us.
The girl with the wooden leg
I was run over at the tender age
Of fourteen by a hackney carriage
Lucky really—it gave me a fright
And one leg they had to amputate
One leg—it didn’t seem all that much to worry about
But that one leg even today gives me a lot of trouble
People don’t think it quite natural
My auntie gave me some lemonade right away
But it still ached a bit, I’m sorry to say
It was all right at first, for the novelty
First few weeks in the flats they addressed me very respectfully
One leg, hard to believe, I was only
Fifteen and because of that leg my face had wrinkles in
And now, just twenty, I’m one of the old women.
The dead colonial soldier
1
They wash the ones in dinner jackets
Before they stuff them in the earth
There’s nothing in their pockets
When they’re in their berth!
2
This one here knew nothing of his path below!
No one will miss his sort
His mouth is open; see how years ago
He had a tooth pulled out.
3
But now there’s a tarpaulin
Against the flies over his face
(In the book of the fallen
His debts won’t find a place.)
4
Boots and tie and knife
They go back to the corps
With his gun they’ll retake
All the land to distant shores!
5
A hundredweight of earth
Is thrown over him, and there’s a tree
So close you could spit on it
That he never got to see.
6
Round his neck he’s got his dog tag
Good that he’s got that on!
So he once he had a name
Now it can be forgotten!
7
His face is covered, but his leg!
His trouser shredded by a force untold
His leg lies like a slaughtered pig
We know: now he’ll not feel the cold.
I hear . . .
I hear
They are saying on the markets that I sleep badly
My enemies, they say, are already setting up house and home
My women are putting on their Sunday best
At my door those people are waiting to see me
Who are known to be kind to the unfortunate
Soon
It will be said that I have stopped eating
But am wearing new suits
But worst of all:
I myself have noticed
That in my dealings with people
I am harder now.
Yes, friends, now the grass is all eaten up . . .
Yes, friends, now the grass is all eaten up
And word is going round the continents that life
Is no longer worth living
The races are old, expect nothing more of them
The little planet is nimble and picked to the bone
It’s all over and done with, for a while there was some chatter about it
Nothing more. We are
Merely a late little generation of eyewitnesses
And the age will be called
The Age of Rubber
Love poem
Unsummoned waiting in the uncouth house
For something, so he feels, that has set out
And shifts itself towards this uncouth house
And has in the open now its first night out
He checks the shack, to be sure it’s really empty
And will tomorrow be no more lived in than today
Only a place, and so that only he
Will be there he even puts the moon away
Suppose it could not tell the right direction
Tonight the learner’s learning goes astray
He thinks maybe he too must sleep or when
It’s at the door it might take fright and go away
Come with me to Georgia
1
Behold this town, and see: it’s old
You remember how lovely it once was
Now don’t observe it with your heart, but cold
And say: we’ve had enough.
Come with me to Georgia
Where they’re building a new town
And when one day this town is old
Why then we’ll move on.
2
Behold this woman, and see: she’s spent
Remember how she used to look
Now don’t observe her with your heart, but cold
And say: we’ve had enough.
Come with me to Georgia
Where there are new women
And when one day these women are old
Why then we’ll move on.
3
Behold your opinions, and see: they’re old
Remember how good they once were
Now don’t observe them with your heart, but cold
And say: we’ve had enough.
Come with me to Georgia
Where there are new opinions
And when one day these opinions are old
Why then we’ll move on.
Song of a family from the Prairies
1
We had a farm on the Prairies
Horses, an automobile and fields of wheat
Things are bad here, said Billy
But in Frisco they’ll be better