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The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht

Page 40

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

 

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