by Tom Kuhn
This fruitful period was brutally interrupted by Nazism. In 1933, the day after the Reichstag Fire on February 27, Brecht left Germany with his young family, at the beginning of what was to be a fourteen-year exile. He settled near Svendborg on the Danish island of Fyn, just thirty miles from the northern coast of Germany. Cut off from German publics and publishers, he began to compile further collections of poems and hesitantly started writing for the theater again. He traveled about a great deal throughout the 1930s, to Moscow, Paris, London: to promote his plays, to participate in political events, and to consider alternatives for himself and his family. In the autumn of 1939 war broke out and, as German troops advanced through northern Europe, Brecht retreated, first to Sweden, then Finland. He continued writing. The European phase of his exile saw the composition of an important body of theoretical essays, the first anti-Nazi writings, satirical poems—especially the great Svendborg Poems—and the plays Mother Courage, Arturo Ui, and the first versions of Life of Galileo and The Good Person of Szechwan.
In 1941 Brecht crossed Stalin’s Soviet Union by the Trans-Siberian Railway, and, with his family, took a steamer to California. In the States he felt considerable alienation from his surroundings, and he found it hard to maintain and develop contacts. He tried in vain to establish a foothold in Hollywood. He tracked the progress of the war in Europe and the Middle and Far East and compiled a vigorous anti-war critique in various media. Remarkably, despite the obvious problems of being a writer and dramatist in exile, it was in exile that Brecht developed perhaps his most characteristic voice and style and wrote most of the works for which he is now famous.
In 1947, immediately after a hearing at the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee, which was charged with uncovering communist elements in the Hollywood film industry, Brecht flew back to a devastated and divided Europe, first to Switzerland, where he prepared a version of Antigone for the stage and published his fullest statement of theater theory, the Short Organum on the Theatre. After some negotiation, he and Helene Weigel were offered the opportunity to run their own theater in East Berlin, the company that was to become the Berliner Ensemble. Here Brecht experienced the foundation of the German Democratic Republic and, having always been a profane and iconoclastic outsider, now had to negotiate a position as a foremost cultural representative, albeit a critical one, of the struggling republic. He devoted himself above all to the establishment of his theater and to the training of a new generation of actors, writers, and directors. As throughout his life, he continued writing poems.
Brecht died at a comparatively young age in 1956, on the eve of the Berliner Ensemble’s London tour.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
David Constantine is a freelance writer and translator. His most recent volume of poetry is Elder (2014); his fourth collection of short stories, Tea at the Midland, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013. Among his translations are Goethe’s Faust, Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Writings of Heinrich von Kleist, and poems and plays by Brecht.
Tom Kuhn teaches at the University of Oxford where he is a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He works on twentieth-century drama and German exile literature and has been, since 1996, editor of the main English-language Brecht edition. In that role he has enjoyed a privileged overview of the translation and reception of Brecht’s works. Major publications include Brecht on Theatre and Brecht on Art and Politics.
Translation copyright © 2019, 2015 by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine
Underlying copyright © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag
All rights reserved
First Edition
All translations first published in the present volume, except for those published in Love Poems (2015)and in periodical pre-publication.
Acknowledgments are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Yorker, and Grand Street.
Texts by Brecht originally published as indicated in the Notes, where the P-date represents the date of first publication, as far as known, and in Bertolt Brecht, WERKE, Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (vols 11–15: GEDICHTE 1–5), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin and Weimar 1988–1993.
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