by Tom Kuhn
No one should be except generals and fascists.
I know where they are.
Write them down, officer.
The young people camped out two days in the open fields, from early Tuesday till early Thursday. It came to real battles in which the police used rubber truncheons and the young people defended themselves with the poles of their banners and flags. But there were conversations too.
A policeman asks the young people about their experiences in the German Democratic Republic
So what things did you see then
That you don’t see over here?
Young workers and peasants, men and women
Who are students over there.
And what things were you shown then
That you won’t see over here?
New works and the people own them
Workers, students and activists together on the shop floor.
But that won’t last much longer.
What did you see on the land?
New farms, new people working there
Who once stood cap-in-hand.
What to do in this confrontation
Since it’s my livelihood?
Put down your truncheon, policeman.
Don’t buy your bread with blood.
The Ten Thousand encircled there organized themselves forthwith according to their Länder, elected leaders and set up groups for cultural activities. They began with efforts to educate the policemen, performing their dances for them and crying: “We salute our friends in the West German police force!”
Dance song
Somewhere there’s a border
Runs through forest and fields and I guess
It must be in the middle of Germany
For in German they won’t let you pass.
Barriers and trenches
What use are they?
Watch us dancing
Over them and away.
Boldly we crossed the border
At night, over mud-flats and bog
And every village and town next morning
Was blue with the blue of our flag.
Barriers and trenches
What use are they?
Watch us dancing
Over them and away.
And the sky over trench and wire
Is blue whatever you do
And the flag that waves over here, over there
The flag of youth is blue.
Barriers and trenches
What use are they?
Watch us dancing
Over them and away
Whenever their dealings with the police allowed it, they spoke of the great Peace Congress in Berlin and of what they wished to do for peace.
What the children ask for
No more houses in flames.
No bombers, not even in dreams.
Let night be for sleep and let life
No longer be lifelong strife.
No more mothers who grieve.
Leave the living alive.
All building together
We’ll trust one another.
What the young can do
The old can too.
Kettled outside Herrnburg, cared for in their camp by the land behind them, abused by the warmongers in the land ahead of them, between the new and the old, some became dispirited. Then the more resolved lifted up the less certain and those who knew lifted up those who did not. All leaving the Herrnburg kettle were changed by being there.
Song to refresh the spirits
Tell the brothers and sisters
That we have gone from here.
What use are yesterday’s papers
Or the winds that blew last year?
So cut your hair
Though it suited you.
A new year’s coming through.
Our esteemed oppressors
Are dead as the deadest moons.
The lickers, the bowers and scrapers
Have crawled back under their stones.
So cut your hair
Though it suited you.
A new year’s coming through.
And all their bloody slaughter
And all their squalid deals
We’ve nothing but contempt for
We play by different rules.
So cut your hair
Though it suited you
A new year’s coming through.
To us, the new ways of thinking!
To us, all that is young!
And greetings from Joseph Stalin
And greetings from Mao Tse-tung!
So cut your hair
Though it suited you.
A new year’s coming through.
The Bonn police could not prevail against the steadfastness of the Ten Thousand. These, before in proper formation they crossed the border, were visited by Pioneers and asked to invite the youth of West Germany to the German Democratic Republic.
Invitation
Rose and trellis
And through the apple boughs
The new housing shows.
If you came
We’d show it you.
The Siemens-Plania furnaces
And the new SC Dynamo
You’d like that too.
And the Walter Ulbricht Stadium
And May Day
Do come.
Before setting off, the young people were warned by the police not to show their flags or sing any songs as they passed through Lübeck.
The police warn the FDJ not to sing as they pass through Lübeck
When you come near Lübeck town
Put your blue flags away
Or in Lübeck town it might get known
New times are on their way.
And when you pass through Lübeck town
Let’s have no singing there
For the Lübeckers might not be immune
To the tune and the words they hear.
And when you’re there in Lübeck town
Let’s have no laughing either
Or the good Lübeckers might too soon
Wake from their slumber.
And when you’re leaving Lübeck town
Be sure you don’t speak a word
Or the Lübeckers this revolves around
They might be sore afeared.
Whilst the Ten Thousand were demonstrating for peace, there on the Petersberg and in Bonn on the Rhein, Germany was to be traded for war.
Lampoon
Near Bonn on the Rhein two little old men have sat down
Two wicked old men in a world gone beyond their ken.
Two wicked old men, tricky whispering men
Wish to turn back the wheel of history again.
Schumacher, Schumacher, your shoe is too small
It will not fit Germany, not at all, not at all.
Adenauer, Adenauer, show us your hand
For thirty pieces of silver you’re selling our land.
Near Bonn on the Rhine, two wicked old men
Are dreaming a dream of blood and steel.
Two wicked old men, tricky whispering men
Want to cook up their pottage on the fires of the world once again.
Schumacher, Schumacher, your shoe is too small
It will not fit Germany, not at all, not at all.
Adenauer, Adenauer, show us your hand
For thirty pieces of silver you’re selling our land.
On Thursday at six in the morning the Ten Thousand marched through Lübeck. They sang their songs loud and planted their FDJ flag on the roof of the railway station. They were victorious.
The FDJ answer the Bonn police
But what is new must defeat what is old
The waters of the Rhine are always new
And the Germany we fight to build
It will be new and not like now.
The army cook’s song
There’s nothing beats a pipe—
That’s the flag I follow.
You take the gir
l, you take the cash
But leave me my tobacco.
For friendship is a childish dream
And love’s a pack of lies
So leave me to my cutty pipe
She keeps me young and wise.
In Utrecht once in May
True as I’m standing here
For a horse of mine a woman bid
A ham and nothing more.
I bit on my cutty pipe
No deal, Madame, I says.
So leave me to my cutty pipe
She keeps me young and wise.
Song for peace
Peace on this earth of ours
Peace on the ground we till
And may it always belong to
Those who till it well.
Peace be in our homeland
Peace be in every town
And may those who laboured enter
A place they call their own.
Let peace be at home in our house
And home in the house next door.
Peace to the peaceable neighbours
So we prosper here and there.
Peace to the Lincoln Memorial
Peace to Moscow’s Red Square
To Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate
And the flame of the flag up there.
Peace to Korea’s children
To the comrades on Neisse and Ruhr
Peace to the New York chauffeurs
And the coolies of Singapore.
Peace to the peasants of Germany
And the peasants in the Great Banat
Peace to the good and the learned
Of your city, Leningrad.
Peace to the wife and the husband
And the old and the infants too.
Peace to the sea and the dryland
For we thrive if they do.
On a Chinese tea-root lion
The evil fear your sharp claw.
The good take pleasure in your grace.
That
I’d like to hear said
Of my poem.
Brother horse . . .
Brother horse, how you off for fodder, for fodder?
And how’s your father, and how’s that good lady your mother?
Thanks for the oats, usually cabbage is all I get
And tonight I’m not feeling quite right in myself, I must admit.
Any chance tonight there’d be room in your stall for me?
Just for tonight, you know, and just for a bit of company.
On the rebuilding of the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus
Here you staged plays in rubble not long ago
Act now in this fine house not to pass the time away.
From You and Us in peace now may We grow
This house and many another be here to stay.
Song about happiness
The ship makes over the sea
The mariner dreams of land
Along the pale horizon
Many golden houses stand.
Stoke fire in the boiler room
Steer true where you want to be
You’ll pass through every tempest
And cross the whole wide sea.
And as the mariner dreams
Of a good and pleasant town
So we know that every ocean
Meets with a shoreline.
So come with willing hands
Heart and soul be there
Happiness wants fighting for
Unsought, it won’t appear.
Work’s not an affliction
For those who are not slaves
It’s milk and cloth and shoes and books
Like wind in the sail: it moves.
The work has gifts to give you
Calls you, is standing by
It needs your industry and thought
To thrive and multiply.
The child wakes in the cradle
Loudly lets you know
Milk it needs and white bread
And to be in health and grow.
The child cannot stay little
Even if it wanted to
That’s why it cries so loudly
For milk and bread from you.
The seed becomes a tree
Foundation stone a home
And once the house and the tree are there
Garden and town will come.
And because our mothers
Did not bear us for sorrow
We’ll live the life of happiness—
This, one and all, we vow.
But once we were resolved at last . . .
But once we were resolved at last
In our own strength to put our trust
And build a better life than ever before
Struggle and toil did not dismay us anymore.
The twig of blossom . . .
The twig of blossom
I shall no longer
Place in his Chinese vase.
The road
Down which he no more comes
Is a road like any other now.
May my window be blind:
The man who took me in . . .
The man who took me in
Has lost his house.
The man who played for me
His instrument was taken from him.
Will he now say:
I am the bringer of death
Or: Those who took everything from him
They are the bringers of death?
Germany 1952
Oh Germany, how poor and torn . . .
Rent inwardly asunder.
Under a cold dark sky
One part trades blows with another.
You once had farmlands rich
Your towns made proud display:
If only you could trust yourself
The rest is child’s play.
A happy encounter
On Sundays in June among the new growth of trees
The villagers looking for raspberries
Hear women and girls from the technical college
Reading out passages from their textbooks
On dialectics and childcare.
Looking up from their textbooks
The students see the village people
Plucking the raspberries from the canes.
You are exhausted after long hours of work . . .
You are exhausted after long hours of work
The speaker repeats himself
He speaks long and laboriously
You, in your tiredness, do not forget:
He is speaking the truth.
It is better to live . . .
It is better to live
Even badly.
Crippled, you can ride
Missing one hand, you can drive cattle
Deaf, you can fight and be useful
Being blind is better
Than burned to ash.
No one gets any good thing from a corpse.
A happy occurrence
The child comes running
Mother, fasten my apron!
The apron is fastened.
Not so we’ll hate one another . . .
Not so we’ll hate one another do we have hearts
Not so we’ll murder one another do we have hands
But for mutual aid in bearing
The burden of our brief and arduous lives.
Oh the trivial differences
Between the clothes that cover our poor bodies
Between our inadequate languages
Between our laughable customs
Between our imperfect laws
Between our imperfect opinions
Oh all these trivial differences
That separate the atoms we call human beings from one another
Let them not become the signals for hatred and persecution.
Unhappy occurrence
Here is a dwelling that is built for you.
It is spacious. It is weatherproof.
It is just right for you, step inside.
Carpenters and bricklayers
Plumbers and glaziers
Approach, hesitantly.
Rain among the pines
Do not speak. I cannot hear any human words among the trees
But I hear new words spoken at a distance by drops on leaves.
Listen. It is raining from the strewn clouds
Raining on the salty scorched tamarisks
Raining on the pines that are rough and flaking
Raining on the heavenly myrtles, the bushes of shining broom
The enraptured flowers, the dense, the joyous, the illustrious juniper
Raining on our faces, reflectors of heaven.
It is raining on our naked hands, on our light clothes, on our freshening thoughts
The lovely story that beguiled you yesterday and beguiles me today.
Rain is falling on the lonely greenery with a patter that lasts
And changes in the air as the body of the different leaves dictates.