by Tom Kuhn
And if there was a single German regretted the fighting.
The great deceiver lay under the chancellery ashes
Two, three flat-browed corpses, all with ’taches.
Field marshals lay rotting in gutters, impenitent
And butcher asked butcher to issue the sentence.
The cocks fell silent, wild vetch by the roadside.
The doors were closed. The roofs open wide.
Envoi
Is this how the last tablet must read
The shattered one, the one with no readers?
The planet will burst asunder
Those it brought forth will destroy it.
To live together, we could only come up with capitalism
With physics we came up with something more:
Now it was, to die together.
Brecht and his family were still in Santa Monica when the Second World War ended. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki intensified his pacifism (already expressed in the poetry he wrote during the First War) and radically altered his view of his still unfinished play Galilei. After the bombs, he has his chastened hero warn of a time when the gap between scientists and the rest of humanity will be so wide that their cries of jubilation over some new achievement will be answered by cries of horror from everyone else.
On October 30, 1947, Brecht appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Feigning an even worse English than he was capable of and answering the committee’s questions with great wiliness, he got through unharmed and left the United States the following afternoon for Le Bourget on the first leg of his long and cautious return to Berlin. He had the stateless exile’s deep mistrust of the state; he kept his options open; schemed and maneuvered for a sure footing; all the while knowing what he must do: deploy his gifts, in the time still allowed him, for a better social order than either of those championed by the vanquished and the victorious. Returning to Berlin via Paris, Zürich, Salzburg, and Prague, with an Austrian passport, after fifteen years enforced absence, Brecht began a last phase of life which may justly be called tragic.
In this final Part of our volume we have separated the uncollected poems into two unequal halves and between them placed the Buckow Elegies, which were shaped by Brecht into a collection but not published as such until after his death. The caesura of the whole period was the uprising of June 17, 1953—saying which, we do not suggest any flat division of good and ill, innocence and experience, faith and doubt either side of that event. Brecht’s situation was conflicted and ambivalent from the start. The uprising made it more so, and very clear.
Uncollected Late Poems
Buckow Elegies
Uncollected Poems 1953–1956
Uncollected Late Poems
One introduction will serve both halves. The poems in them are of a piece, and readers will soon notice any shifts of subject, emphasis, and tone before and after June 17, 1953. The variety of topics—and of perspectives on certain central topics—is still great. And in this final phase Brecht continues in the lifelong habit or productive strategy of borrowing other people’s work and through rereading, translation, and adaptation turning it to uses of his own. That is his characteristic way of thinking and writing, which is to say his way of being in the world: to arrive at his own “belongings” through sympathetic, skeptical, or downright polemical dealings with the belongings of others. Thus here, he makes his ‘Freedom and Democracy’ through a poem—‘The Masque of Anarchy’—by the poet he called “my brother,” Shelley.
Often and very poignantly in these last poems Brecht writes as individual and exemplar. Coming home into the ruins of Berlin; and when his manuscripts and his few totemic possessions arrive almost miraculously from Moscow and Sweden; and when he, the believer in the possibility of peace and justice and the common good, faces the fact of failure, he is at once the particular person and the exemplar of the general experience of that catastrophe, those hopes, and that defeat. The very late and unfinished poem ‘And I always thought . . .,’ heartrending in its admission that his own words have not succeeded, implies the general human fear that reason is not powerful enough against unreason, that we are stuck in a time when reasoned argument will not prevail, will not even get a hearing.
On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill had declared: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” That was the Europe Brecht came home to. The most obviously public and political of his poems in this last period are his several responses to the rapidly shifting—deteriorating—relations between the Allied powers and the hardening into East and West. Rearmament (hastened by the Korean War), the founding of the two German states, the competition between them, the irreconcilable ideologies, these are determinants of much of Brecht’s writing as he settles in Berlin. Never an easy man to deal with, he was with caution and many reservations favored and promoted by the East German state. They did not want him moving West (they knew about his passport). And what he wanted was a theater, an ensemble, the funding, finally to stage entirely to his satisfaction the plays which for fifteen years he had been writing largely, as he put it, “for the desk drawer.” He thought no play of his finished until he had staged it. Many poems in this period have to do with his theater, his loyal troupe, the dramatis personae themselves, how he wanted them acting. The poems make a clarifying commentary on the praxis of theater, the home of which, after March 1954, was the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Further, in these years, he continued the conscious effort, begun in exile, to define and expand a distinctly socialist literary tradition. Thus ‘Tschaganak Bersijew, or The cultivation of millet’ and ‘Report from Herrnburg’ may be understood as additions to a canon of heroes and heroic deeds (an earlier example in that genre would be ‘The Moscow workers take possession of the great Metro’ of Svendborg Poems). If we have our doubts now about the soundness or efficacy of that project with that material, very likely Brecht had such doubts himself, but overrode them in a bid to give shape and form to those possibilities of human behavior in a newly imagined social order. Throughout his life he had written against the grain of the times and events. And he continued to do so, to the bitter end. In late June 1956 he received the account of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, at which Khrushchev had denounced Stalinism. He began dealing with that; but did not live to see the October revolution in Hungary crushed by Soviet troops. And in among so much that was, so to speak, forced upon him by the times and the place, Brecht continued to celebrate the pleasures of being human. Best testimony of that undefeated self-expression are the love poems in all their variety of form and tone of voice.
Uncollected Poems 1945–1952
War has been brought into disrepute
I hear it is being said in respectable circles
That from the moral point of view the Second World War
Did not come up to the First. The Wehrmacht
Is said to deplore the means by which the SS
Effected the extermination of certain peoples. In the Ruhr
It seems, the captains of industry regret the bloody razzias
That filled their mines and factories with slaves. The intelligentsia
So I hear, condemn the industrialists’ demand for such slave workers
And their shabby treatment. Even the bishops
Are distancing themselves from this way of waging war. In short
On all sides there is a feeling that unfortunately
The Nazis have done us a disservice and that war
Of itself a natural and necessary thing, by being conducted
On this occasion in so heedless and indeed inhuman a fashion
Has been, and will be for quite some time
Discredited.
Germany
Indoors there’s death by pestilence
Outside there’s death by cold.
So where shall we go now?
The sow has soiled her own manger
That so
w is my mother
O mother mine, O mother mine
What have you done to me?
Pride
When the American soldier told me how
The well-fed daughters of the German bourgeoisie
Could be bought for tobacco, and the petty bourgeois girls for chocolate
The starving Russian slave workers, however, were unbuyable
I felt a pride.
The Nuremberg Trial
The American correspondents complain
About the indifference of the German population in the face of
The revelations about war crimes. How would it be if these people
Knew all about their own ruling class and simply
Could not yet, even now, see how
To rid themselves of the criminals?
The writer feels betrayed by a friend
What the child feels when its mother goes off with a strange man.
What the carpenter feels when overcome by giddiness, the sign of ageing.
What the painter feels when the model won’t come and the picture is unfinished.
What the physicist feels when he discovers a mistake far into the sequence of experiments.
What the pilot feels when, over the mountains, the oil pressure falters.
What the airplane, if it felt, would feel when the pilot is drunk.
The fine fork
When the fork with the fine horn handle broke
The thought went through my head that, deep inside
It must always have had a flaw. With effort
I recalled to my memory
My pleasure at the unblemished, flawless.
Once
Once this living in the cold seemed fine
To me, the chill to me my lively muse
Bitterness was sweet, the world was mine
I held the cards, it was for me to choose
Should Sire Darkness ask me in to dine.
From a deep cold well I drew my succour
The void around seemed merely room to grow.
From time to time a rare and brilliant flicker
Cut through the natural darkness. A brief glow.
But I, grim father, was the quicker.
On inequality Hard though it is to uncover it
Granted, the better are simply those whom life has been kind to.
Early their children lie in airy rooms, and the nursemaids
Feed them the best and wash their bodies with care and attention
First with the tepid, and then the cold water after.
Thus they raise their young athletes. But into the mouths of the poor
Shattered mothers stuff just whatever they come by
Beer to the crying infant, in the hope he may sleep
Or, when they’re grown bigger, they send them out to the dark yards
Where they grow up amongst other plants of the shadows.
And, as their bodies, so too their minds suffer neglect.
Cheap food for the body, cheap shoes, cheap knowledge.
Lightly, as if never touching the ground . . .
Lightly, as if never touching the ground and obedient to
A ghostly drumming, the two ill-fated souls
The princely brothers stepped onto the stage and commenced
To be, in that arena ringed with light. And the arrangement
Held the groups in pleasing balance and, whirring like knives
Unerring and trembling in the target
The sentences fell, but groupings and cadence held
Poised between long-remembered coincidence and
Half-forgotten design. Quickly the watch was decided
The spy procured, the thinker hired, and with frozen smiles
The embarrassed court heard the princely brothers
Strenuously urge their sister to be chaste, the lovely one
Urged to protect her virginity. Swift farewell. The embrace
Not offered, yet still refused. Alone
The chaste one stands, forswearing
Chastity.
The theatre, place of dreams
For many the theatre is a place where
Dreams are manufactured. Your actors are regarded as
Narcotics salesmen. In your darkened houses
People are transformed into kings and perform
Heroic deeds with no attendant risk. Gripped by enthusiasm
For themselves, or filled with self-pity
People sit in happy distraction, forgetting
The difficulties of everyday life, as fugitives.
You stir up all sorts of stories with your skilled hands, so that
Our spirits are roused. And for that purpose you take
Incidents from the real world. It is true, were someone
To come in on this, with the noise of traffic still in his ears
And still sober, he would hardly recognize
Up there on your boards, the world he has just left behind.
And equally, stepping out of your houses afterwards, he
Once more a lowly being and no longer the king
Would no longer recognize the world and would struggle to
Come to terms in real life.
For many this activity seems innocent. Given the base
And monotonous nature of our lives, they say
Dreams are very welcome. How should we endure it all without
Dreams? But this, dear actors, is how your theatre
Becomes a place where we learn to endure
The baseness and monotony of life and to renounce
Great deeds and even pity for
Ourselves. You, however
Show us a false world, heedlessly stirred up
As dreams show it, transformed by desire
Or distorted by fear, you miserable
Deceivers.
Showing must be shown
Show that you are showing! In all the different attitudes
That you show, when you show how people comport themselves
You must not forget the very attitude of showing itself.
All these other attitudes must be grounded in the attitude of showing.
This is how to practise: before you show how
Someone commits a betrayal, or is possessed by jealousy
Or concludes a deal, look first
At the spectator, as if you were about to say:
Now pay attention, this man is betraying someone and this is how he does it
And like this when possessed by jealousy, and this is how he dealt
When dealing. In this way
Your showing will preserve the attitude of showing.
Of proffering what has been worked out, of dispensing and then
Always moving on. In this way you show
That you show what you’re showing every evening, and have often shown it before
And your playing will acquire something of the weaving of a weaver, something
Craftsmanlike. And all that which belongs to showing
Namely that you are always striving to make spectating
Easier, to grant the best insight into
Every event—this too you must make visible!
Then
This act of betrayal, this conclusion of a deal,
This being possessed by jealousy, all of this one-off and particular, will acquire something
Of a daily activity, such as eating, greeting or
Working. (For you are working too, are you not?) And behind your
Figures you yourselves will remain visible, as those who
Perform them.
He who but imitates . . .
He who but imitates, and has nothing to say
About that which he imitates, is like
A poor chimpanzee who imitates the smoking of his tamer
Yet does not actually smoke. Never
Can thoughtless imitation
Be a true imitation.
In the natural shyness of childr
en . . .
In the natural shyness of children
Who refuse to dissemble when playing theatre
And in the reluctance of workers
To gesture wildly when they want to
Show the world as it is
So that we may change it
In all this is expressed that it is beneath the dignity of human beings
To deceive.
You must never slough off from the peasant . . .
You must never slough off from the peasant
What is peasant about him, nor from the landowner
What is lord, so that they
May be simply human beings, like you and I
And their feelings something we can share in, you and I.
For even you and I are not the same
And merely human, insofar as we are peasant or lord.
And who says that feelings must be shared?
Let the peasant be peasant, actor
And you, you remain an actor too! And let your peasant
Be different from every other peasant
And your landowner too should be distinguished
From all other landowners, for however much they differ
From their peasants, who are themselves so very different
They have in store a very similar fate for them all, or have
In time to come, a very similar fate in store from them
So that once more the peasant is a peasant, the lord a lord.
Purging the theatre of illusions
Now in your crumbling houses the people can only wait
Addicted, for the happy ending of some entanglement