by Tom Kuhn
But the next day one of his assistants shoots himself in the foot
And has to be carried back, and amongst the possessions
That he sends back after him he discovers
A similar message to his own.
Miller will be missed, he was knowledgeable, as well as cowardly.
Now there’s only Beerman. To take Beerman
The commander left Meekly behind because he was too indecisive
In his management of the workers. But Beerman
Has no gift for construction.
The march on Berlin
O Germany, weak and abused
How are you so in need!
All that you had the Jews
Have taken in guile and greed.
The Goldschmitts and Wolffs
The Goldschmitts and Wolffs.
Germany, once and for all
Would reckon with the profiteers
They were off to break the thrall
Of the Jewish racketeers.
Goldschmitt and Wolff
Goldschmitt and Wolff.
They needed the ticket price
For the train to get to Berlin
But they were as poor as mice
So they had to take out a loan.
From Goldschmitt and Wolff
From Goldschmitt and Wolff.
O Germany, weak and abused
How can you stamp out the Jewish racket
When you’re hungry and confused
And have no cash in your pocket?
They said, we can’t better our lives
We’ll get no satisfaction
Till the night of the long knives
Has cleansed our German nation.
Of Goldschmitt and Wolff
Of Goldschmitt and Wolff.
The apocalyptic horsemen
Out of the East comes a tale: the apocalyptic horsemen
Had cast their blazing fires, and villages were burning
And they came by night or at dusk. Down on the river’s gravel
The bloody riders set to, to water their weary steeds.
(Committed to the old times, they still came riding steeds.)
But the creatures turned their heads: the stream was too choked
Where the dead came floating. Cursing they stood, when from bushes
A woman beckoned and led them, though her gait was uncertain
Whether confused by the fire, or weak in the knees from years of
Hunger, she led them, I say, though the way was uncertain
Through the ruined homesteads of that onetime village
To her own ruined hut. Silent she showed them the well.
Her figure dwarfed beneath the flicker of red glowing skies
Watched as the horses drank the cool refreshing water.
Only when the bloody riders were back in the saddle, did she speak
“Forwards!” she called and cried, with a voice worn thin by age
“Forwards!” she urged them on. “Ride on, ride on, my beloveds!”
This natural thing, work . . .
This natural thing, work, this thing which
Makes humanity a force of nature, work
This thing like swimming in water, like eating meat
This thing like mating, like singing
It has had a bad press through the long centuries and
Into our own times.
He who struggled to turn the wheel against the power of the waves
Straining his muscles to bursting, he
Turned a rudder, that’s true, but he turned it like any peg
Like a wooden frame that might perhaps have driven a mill wheel
Or perhaps have fetched a bucket up from the depths of a well
Or perhaps drove nothing at all. The steersman did not see
How the ship pitched and turned under the pressure of his arm.
It wasn’t his plan to force the change of direction. Between
His work and the goal of his work stood other plans
Unknown to him. He planned only
To eat his fill before nightfall.
He who loaned his muscles for strange adventures
Dispossessed himself even of his arms: estranged
He looked down on them, hesitantly tensed them, would they still hold?
Oh, if they slackened: he was lost! His breadwinners
Were flagging! Those who fed him and whom he fed!
No more did he plan, the sweating labourer
Than the twig plans that turns in the wind
Or the paddle wheel that falls into the water, and
Must sink.
According to plan
He sets his body in motion
Arms and legs, head and hand. So
He takes from the earth what he needs. So too
The earth consumes him.
And he knows what he’s doing. In his head
The bridge is completed, now he builds it.
The emigration of the poets
Homer had no home
And Dante was forced from his.
Li-Po and Tu-Fu strayed through civil wars
That swallowed 30 million people.
They threatened Euripides with court proceedings
And stopped up the mouth of the dying Shakespeare.
François Villon was visited by the muse
But also by the police.
Lucretius, the one they called
“The beloved”, was banished
So Heine too, and so too Brecht
Who fled beneath the Danish thatch.
The power of the workers
On one particular day, in all of Spain
The workers shut down the factories. The locomotives
Stood cold on the lines. The houses
Were without light, as were the streets. The telephones
Were a tangle of wires, with no use. No longer
Could even the grafters rely on the police. Instead
The masses spoke for themselves. For three long days
Those who service the great apparatuses showed themselves
To be their masters. The workers, no longer working
Showed their strength. The fruitful acres
Were suddenly no more than stony fields. No one
Could be warmed now by the coal left in the mines, or kept warm
By the unprocessed wool. Even the policemen’s boots
Would fall apart and find no successors.
Then
Disunity broke the power of the rebellion, but even then
The orders of the bosses to end the strike
Could not reach the masses for days: for the locomotives
Were without steam, the post offices abandoned. So even then
We could still see
The great power of the workers.
The Koloman Wallisch Cantata
Emil Fey the Home Guard general
Crossed himself three times and cried:
Now’s the time for the grand clear-out
Like never before:
Hand over the guns
From the old monarchy’s last war!
That was at the weekend.
The orders went out.
The guns lay oiled and ready
In every worker’s house.
They lay under the coal in the cellar
In the rafters and under the floors
They lay by the railwayman’s cottage
Under the old blackthorn.
Sixteen years they’d lain there
Keeping the peace
But who came knocking that twelfth of February
But the Dollfuss police.
They came with their lorries
But entry wasn’t free.
Their peace is heavy again with war.
Over the border the Third Reich
Is flexing its muscles. Obscured by the smoke plumes
Of the armaments-works hands that had long been
Withou
t work are busy again: they’re making
Ammunition. From the party premises
Of the workers and the union headquarters
No one calls out “Stop!”, for there
Sit the scum in their brownshirts
And in their blackshirts
And over the Alps sit more of their kind. The big-mouth
Ersatz Caesar in the Quirinal
Dreams his Abyssinian dream and calls for
The grand clear-out.
When they disarm the people
Then war is sure to follow.
So when they came for the guns
The guns went rat-a-tat-tat
For the only defence against
That enemy is counter-attack.
They came in Linz and they came in Graz
And they came in Bruck an der Mur
And for every attack on the workers
They got their noses bloodied and more.
The whole of Monday in Bruck
The battle went every which way
But the barracks were clear of gendarmes
By the end of that day
And there sat Koloman Wallisch
The workers’ secretary.
CHORUS:
Koloman Wallisch, the fighter
The carpenter’s son from Lugoj in the Banat
The miner, the ceramics worker, the construction worker
The soldier, the man who redistributed the estates
Of Count Pallavicini, the friend of the peasants
Koloman Wallisch, the fighter.
READER:
And where was he schooled?
CHORUS:
The workers’ club in Lugoj
READER:
And who founded that club?
CHORUS:
A sailor from the Battleship Potemkin
The workers are on patrol
The children run along after
And the lanes of Bruck echo
With the boots of the new masters.
Over the radio Vienna is calling:
It’s a cold and rainy night
There’s calm in the Vienna Neustadt
In Graz the ringleaders are in flight.
The wounded listen in silence
The rain keeps drumming down
And the loudspeaker reports
In Bruck the fighting’s done.
CHORUS:
They’re lying through their teeth!
The five-tongued fibbers:
One tongue is fatherly.
One schoolmasterly.
One is that of the common man.
One of the minister.
One of the butcher.
They’re lying through their teeth.
We looked each other in the eye:
Was it serfdom or freedom?
Was Austria’s Volk victorious
Or was it already beaten?
Koloman Wallisch
Went to the railway station.
It was a night like any other
The trains coming and going
And Koloman Wallisch saw
Now we were fighting alone
And Koloman Wallisch sat
Down on the kerbstone.
CHORUS:
We are like dogs
Who scrap for a bone.
When we have nothing to eat
We bite each other to death.
Snarling and snatching
We fight for the best place in the team
All the while we drag the sled for our enemy.
When the whip falls
Each dog hates the next dog.
And whoever the master feeds first
Will always protect him.
Oh, the wild dog’s best breaker
Is a broken dog.
CHORUS 2:
Who is easier to deceive than we?
Those who are always deceived
Are the easiest to deceive.
We throw our pennies together
And go without food come evening
And hire ourselves someone to stand up for us.
But he sets a hat on his head
And betrays us to our masters.
He comes back down to fetch our pennies
And spins us a tale
And laughs aloud as he turns to go.
But we believe him
And go without food that evening.
When we are at the end of our tether
They tell us: next year
You may sit down at the table.
And we drag ourselves onwards
But next year
Is always beyond our reach.
CHORUS 3:
He who lives well
Lives off us. Who lives long
Outlives us.
Who builds his house on our backs
Builds on rock.
With his lice and the lice of his lice
He lives off us. The fields he enjoys
Are tilled by us. The meat he enjoys
We go without.
When the whip falls from his hands
Because he is sick from so much looting
We sit at his bedside as his doctor
And when his teeth rot and fall out
We plug the gaps with gold
So that he can eat, so that he can beat us.
CHORUS 4:
We look like the old
Who have lived their lives already:
Their deeds are done
Their words are spoken.
What are they still waiting for?
Who can hope for anything of those who are so exhausted?
The world is out of kilter.
Will we be able to reset it?
CHORUS 6 QUIETLY:
The world is out of kilter.
We will reset it.
The seventimes disunited
Will be united the eighth time.
The seventimes defeated
Will the eighth time be victorious.
Towards midnight the scouts report
A sight that turns our blood cold:
Into Bruck from all directions
The heavy howitzers roll.
Dollfuss, the Christian Chancellor
Prepares to break bones
And the kyrie eleison
Once more intones.
Guns against howitzers
Is slaughter, not a fair fight
So our men decided on retreat
That very same night.
They made it to the mountains
That morning going on eight.
They take flight by night
They’re on the run by day
Pursued in their own land like
The huntsman’s shivering prey.
Wallisch and his men are watched
By aeroplanes over the mountains
The Christian Chancellor takes
Possession of the heavens.
His peasants won’t sell to the Reds
Or share their bread and oil
The march presses on to Frohnleiten
Whose very name is toil.
That February the spring
Was making an effort to come
But then when it arrived
This time it came too soon.
That Tuesday dawned dull
The rain cold and the skies grey
And shoes soon come apart
When the leather’s worn away
That Tuesday was long and hard
And many fell by the way.
Not a few left their machine guns
Lying by the road
Those who brought up the rear
Carried double the load.
READER:
Whosoever stays at home when the struggle begins
And lets others fight on his behalf
Must look out; for
He who does not share in the struggle
Will nonetheless share in the defeat.
He who seeks to evade the struggle
/> Cannot evade this struggle; for
He who has not fought for his own cause
Will fight for the cause of his enemy.
The march reached the mountain meadows
This was the final fray
A small brigade surrounded
By military array.
And when they launched the assault
They played a dirty game
For they drove our captive comrades
Before them as they came.
And our men groaned and shouldered
Rifles and took aim.
Time and again they set our own kind
Against us, and even to do the driving
Time and again they use our own kind.
We are the hangmen and the victims
Forge the block and lay our heads on it.
“Mother, where is our father?”
“He’s fighting for the Reds.
Sleep, my child, sleep.”
“Mother, where are the dead?”
“Mother, where is our father?”
“He’s shooting at the Reds.
Sleep, my child, sleep.”
“Mother, where are the dead?”
When the last bullet was fired
They pulled on their skis to flee
But Wallisch wasn’t from these parts
And didn’t know how to ski.
A peasant in the fields
Gave him bread and meat