The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht
Page 56
And the land that received us will be no home, but an exile.
Restlessly we sit, as near as we can to the borders
Awaiting the day of our return, watching every smallest change
Across the border, eagerly questioning
Every newcomer, forgetting nothing, relinquishing nothing
And forgiving none of what happened, forgiving nothing.
Oh the tranquillity of the sound cannot deceive us! Even here
We can hear the screams from their camps. After all, we ourselves
Are almost like rumours of crimes that have slipped out
Over the border. Every one of us
Walking in tattered shoes through the crowds
Bears witness to the shame that stains our nation.
But not one of us
Will settle here. The last word
Has not yet been spoken.
Thoughts on the duration of exile
1
Don’t knock a nail in the wall
Throw your coat over the chair!
Why set up for four days?
You’re going back tomorrow!
Leave the little tree without water!
Why plant a tree at all?
Before it’s as high as the doorstep
You’ll be leaving here, happy!
Pull your cap over your face when people come by!
Why turn the pages of that foreign grammar?
The news that calls you home
Will be in a familiar tongue.
Just as the lime peels from the timbers
(Don’t trouble yourself with that!)
So that barrier of violence will crumble to dust
Erected at the border
Against justice.
2
See the nail in the wall, you knocked that in!
When will you return, do you think?
Do you want to know what you believe in your heart?
Day after day
You labour for liberation
You sit in your little room and write
Do you want to know what you think of your work?
See the little chestnut tree in the corner of the yard
To which you lugged that can full of water!
Refuge
An oar lies over the roof. A moderate wind
Won’t carry off the thatch.
In the yard for the children’s swings
There are posts knocked in.
The mail comes twice a day
Where letters would be welcome.
Down the sound the ferries sail.
The house has four doors, to flee by.
And in your country?
In our country, at the turn of the year
Or when a piece of work is done, or on the anniversary of a birth
We share our wishes for happiness and luck
For in our country the pure of heart
Need luck.
He who harms no one
In our country will end up in the gutter
And fortunes
Are only to be had by villainy.
To come by a meal at midday
Calls for the courage
On which elsewhere empires are founded.
No one, unless they’re prepared to look death in the face
Can succour those in misery.
He who speaks untruths is borne in triumph through the crowds
Whereas he who speaks the truth
Needs a company of bodyguards
But will find none.
Driven out with good reason
I grew up as the son
Of well-to-do folks. My parents
Looped a collar round my neck and raised me
In the habit of being waited upon
And schooled me in the art of giving orders. But
When I was grown up and looked about me
I took no pleasure in the people of my class
Nor in giving orders and being waited upon
And I left my class and took up
With the lowly people.
So it came
That they nurtured a traitor, schooled him
In their arts and he
Betrayed them to the enemy.
Yes, I spill their secrets. I stand
Amongst the people and declare
How they deceive, and I foretell what is to come, for I
Am privy to their plans.
I translate the Latin of their corrupt clerics
Word for word into the common language where
It is revealed as hogwash. The scales of their justice
I dismantle and show off
The false weights. And their informers report
How I sit down with the dispossessed when they
Plan the insurrection.
They cautioned me and took away
What I had earned by my own labour. And when I wouldn’t mend my ways
They came to hunt me down, but
In my house they found
Only writings that exposed their assaults
Against the people. So
They issued a warrant against me
Denouncing me for my low disposition, that is
The disposition of the lowly.
Wherever I come I am branded
In the eyes of the haves, but the have-nots
Read the warrant and
Offer me a bolthole. You, I hear them say
They have driven out with
Good reason.
To those born after
1
Truly, I live in dark times!
A trusting word is folly. A smooth brow
A sign of insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet heard
The terrifying news
What times are these, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!
That man calmly crossing the street
Is he not beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?
It is true: I still earn a living
But believe me: that is just good fortune. Nothing
That I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I am spared. (If my luck runs out
I am lost.)
They say to me: eat and drink! Be glad that you have the means!
But how can I eat and drink when
It is from the starving that I wrest my food and
My glass of water is snatched from the thirsty?
Yet I do eat and I drink.
I would like to be wise
In ancient books it says what it means to be wise:
To hold yourself above the strife of the world and to live out
That brief compass without fear
And to make your way without violence
To repay evil with good
Not to fulfil your desires, but to forget them
Such things are accounted wise.
But all of this I cannot do:
Truly, I live in dark times!
2
I came into the cities at a time of disorder
When hunger was ascendant.
I came amongst mankind at a time of uprising
And I rose up with them.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.
I ate my meals between battles
I laid myself down to sleep with the murderers
I made love heedlessly
And I looked upon nature with impatience.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.
All roads led into the mire in my time
My tongue betrayed me to the butchers
There was little I could do. But the powerful
Would sit more securely without me, that was my hope.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.
Our po
wers were feeble. The goal
Lay far in the distance
It was clearly visible even if, for me
Hardly attainable.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.
3
You who will emerge again from the flood
In which we have gone under
Think
When you speak of our faults
Of the dark times
Which you have escaped.
For we went, changing countries more often than our shoes
Through the wars of the classes, despairing
When there was injustice only, and no indignation.
And yet we know:
Hatred, even of meanness
Makes you ugly.
Anger, even at injustice
Makes your voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.
You, however, when the time comes
When mankind is a helper unto mankind
Think on us
With forbearance.
This Part contains poems from the years 1938–1945. There is no great collection that dominates, but there are some informal and unpublished groupings. We have organized the material like this:
Studies
Uncollected Poems 1939–1940
Steffin Collection
Songs for Life of Galileo, Mother Courage, The Good Person of Szechwan, and Other Plays
Poems for Margarete Steffin, 1938–1941
Children’s Crusade 1939
Uncollected Poems 1941–1942
Chinese Poems
Hollywood Elegies
Uncollected Poems 1943–1945
The context, of the growing threat and then reality of world war, is abundantly clear. In 1938 the Brechts were still living in Denmark, and they stayed there as long as they sensibly could. In April 1939 there began a series of upheavals, as the family and Brecht’s associates fled before the growing tide of fascism, first to the Swedish island of Lidingö, just northeast of Stockholm. Then, just a year later, German troops overran Denmark and began to invade Norway, and the Brecht team moved on to Finland, where they lived both in Helsinki itself and on the country estate of the writer Hella Wuolijoki to the north in Marlebäck. Throughout these years, the energies of Helene Weigel were essential: mobilizing friends, finding accommodations, improvising conditions in which Brecht could work, even maintaining some semblance of family normality. Again just a year later, in May 1941, the family received immigration visas for the United States, and in August, after a journey via Moscow and Vladivostok, they moved into a house in Santa Monica on the Southern California coast. There they stayed until 1947. Brecht made frequent trips to New York, where Ruth Berlau, who traveled with them, had a flat, but otherwise he saw very little of America outside Los Angeles.
Studies
One of the striking features of Brecht’s work in these years is the intensified engagement with the literary and poetic tradition. These sonnet “studies,” in the context of the so-called “Expressionism Debate” then being conducted by German writers in exile, all take a critical look at some canonical texts. Needless to say, Brecht’s readings are polemically slanted. He first gathered them into a collection in 1938, then added to it till 1940, and they were only published as a collection in 1951. We have added to Brecht’s selection another four sonnets written around the same time and in similar spirit.
On Dante’s poems to Beatrice
And even now above her dusty tomb
Whom he was not allowed to have but stalked
With shuffling steps whatever ways she walked
The air we breathe still shivers at her name.
For he commanded us to think of her
And wrote such verses for her that indeed
We cannot help but heed them and concede
How beautiful his praises of her are.
Oh the perniciousness that man inspired
By praising with such mighty praises what
He only ever looked at, never tried!
For since he sang her he had only eyed
What looks nice crossing the street, is never wet
Counts as an object fit to be desired.
On Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Within this idle bloated body of a man
Reason presents itself as bad illness
For there unarmed among his ironclad clan
Stands the parasitical thinker in undress.
Until they bring him to hear Fortinbras
Drumming a thousand idiots to gain
A patch of ground so small it won’t contain
The heap of them when they are carcasses.
Only then does Fatty manage to see red.
He sees that he must end his hesitation
And do something, which is to say: shed blood.
So we nod grimly hearing at curtain-fall
That he was likely, had he been put on
To have proved most royal.
On Kant’s definition of marriage in his Metaphysics of Morals
High time, I think, and needful to impress
On people once again what marriage (Kant says) is:
A contract to reciprocally possess
And use each other’s sexual organs and capacities.
I hear of parties to the contract who are dilatory.
Some even—I believe this to be true—
Have kept their sexual organs out of play:
The law has loopholes easy to slip through.
There’s nothing for it but to go to court
And have the unused sexual organs seized.
The offending partner then will perhaps be pleased
To scrutinize the contract as he ought.
And if he won’t comply he may be sure
He’ll have the law-enforcer at his door.
On Lenz’s bourgeois tragedy The Tutor
This is Figaro on our side of the Rhine!
The gentry take instruction from the rabble
Who seize power there, here they become respectable.
There it’s a comedy and here more pain, no gain.
Instead of books, poor man, he’d rather be
Perusing what’s in his rich pupil’s blouse
And in this Gordian quandary he goes
For broke on his own person, as a lackey.
When he has grasped that as his organ rises
So does—and out of reach—his meagre daily pelf
Then he must choose and then indeed he chooses.
His belly rumbles but he thinks more clearly.
He whines, mutters, blasphemes, castrates himself.
The poet’s voice breaks as he tells this story.
On Schiller’s poem ‘The Bell’
I read that fire is a friend of ours
So long as it is mastered and confined
But that, allowed its freedom, it devours.
I wonder what it was he had in mind.
What is it he urges you to bring to heel?
This, as he says, most useful element
And civilizing, though itself beyond the pale—
I ask what sort of element he meant.
This fire, this daughter of Nature, she
Who stalks your streets with her red bonnet on
Unleashed now, who, I wonder, can she be?
No longer the good old maid of yesterday.
Perhaps you dealt too kindly with this person?
I see she has asked you, What about my pay?
On Schiller’s poem ‘The Bond’
O noble times: humans behaving well!
One man owes another man something
Who, though a tyrant, grants an interval
And lets him travel to his sister’s wedding.
The bondsman stays. The debtor leaves the land.
It happens that Mother Nature, naturally
Offers him more than on
e way out but he
Persists, returns, redeems his bond.
Contracts are sacred when men act like that.
In such an age you can give guarantees.
And if the debtor’s keen to pay his debt
Your hands around his throat need scarcely squeeze.
And then besides it turns out after all
The tyrant wasn’t so tyrannical!
On Goethe’s poem ‘The God and the Bayadere’
O cruel surmise of Siva, our Great God
That whores in pleasure houses when they squeal
In the ecstasy they are required to feel
Don’t mean it. Oh that would be too bad!
How beautifully does he who knows the story’s heart
Sing of the sole girl he felt sorry for
Who said she’d die for him and not ask more
Than the price agreed between them at the start.
Harshly he tested did she also love him.
The text expressly says he caused her pain . . .
Six he had tried already, she alone
The seventh, shed real tears when she lost him.
But how he then rewarded her! The envy
Of all, he raised her up to him at the finale.