The feeling of shy governesses in strange family
circles,
The feeling of debutant actors, who tremblingly stand
close to the prompter’s box.
I lived in the forest, was a railroad official,
Sat bent over ledgers and served impatient
guests.
As a stoker I stood before boilers, my face glaringly lit
by the flames,
And as a coolie I ate garbage and left-overs.
Thus I belonged to you and to all!
Do not, I beg, do not resist me!
Oh, if only it someday could happen,
That we, my Brother, could fall into each other’s arms!
Erich Kästner
(1899-1974)
Erich Kästner, whose biting poetry will remind American readers of Ogden Nash, is a master of two distinct, almost disparate genres of literature. He has delighted millions of youngsters in all parts of the world by his children’s books; his Emil and the Detectives, for example, has gone through countless editions and has been made into a movie several times. His adult books, on the other hand, are highly sophisticated and urbane; the bulk of his poetry, designed to satirize the foibles and vices of mankind, is bold and aggressive in subject matter and sparkles with witticisms.
Kästner’s aim is to introduce a “new objectivity” into poetry. Consequently his poems, of which Entwicklung der Menschheit is typical, are strongly realistic; he deals with all aspects of life, from the sublime to the almost sordid. His rhyme scheme and rhythm are by choice conventional and simple; in order to be as clear and understandable as possible, Kästner rarely makes use of poetic license in the syntactical constructions of his lines. And his language, in the words of his friend and fellow-writer Hermann Kesten, is chemisch gereinigt (dry-cleaned); it avoids “poetic” vocabulary, lest it evoke a wealth of emotional connotations which would run counter to Kästner’s rationalistic purposes. Instead, the poet has recourse to foreign derivatives, technical terms, and a scientific vocabulary.
As a result Kästner’s message — and behind the wit and banter a message is always apparent — is unencumbered and becomes clear immediately. In his novel Fabian, Kästner expresses the conviction that modern man must undergo a moral renascence to survive. This is also the moral of Entwicklung der Menschheit; as in so many of Kästner’s poems, the vaunted advances of man are shown up as hollow gains if contrasted with the simultaneous ethical stand-still.
DIE ENTWICKLUNG DER MENSCHHEIT
Einst haben die Kerls auf den Bäumen gehockt,
behaart und mit böser Visage.
Dann hat man sie aus dem Urwald gelockt
und die Welt asphaltiert und aufgestockt,
bis zur dreissigsten Etage.
Da sassen sie nun, den Flöhen entflohn,
in zentralgeheizten Räumen.
Da sitzen sie nun am Telephon.
Und es herrscht noch genau derselbe Ton
wie seinerzeit auf den Bäumen.
Sie hören weit. Sie sehen fern.
Sie sind mit dem Weltall in Fühlung.
Sie putzen die Zähne. Sie atmen modern.
Die Erde ist ein gebildeter Stern
mit sehr viel Wasserspülung.
Sie schiessen die Briefschaften durch ein Rohr.
Sie jagen und züchten Mikroben.
Sie versehn die Natur mit allem Komfort.
Sie fliegen steil in den Himmel empor
und bleiben zwei Wochen oben.
Was ihre Verdauung übrig lässt,
das verarbeiten sie zu Watte.
Sie spalten Atome. Sie heilen Inzest.
Und sie stellen durch Stiluntersuchungen fest,
dass Cäsar Plattfüsse hatte.
So haben sie mit dem Kopf und dem Mund
den Fortschritt der Menschheit geschaffen.
Doch davon mal abgesehen und
bei Lichte betrachtet sind sie im Grund
noch immer die alten Affen.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MANKIND
These fellows were once squatting in trees,
all covered by hair and with a mean expression.
Then they were lured out of the forest primeval
and the world was paved and buildings constructed
up to the thirtieth story.
There they now sit, having fled from the fleas,
in rooms, centrally heated.
There they now sit at the telephone.
And there yet prevails the very same tone
as there did, back then, in the trees.
They listen to the radio. They watch T.V.
They are in touch with the universe.
They brush their teeth. Their breathing is modern.
The earth is a civilized planet
with flush toilets all over the place.
They shoot their letters via pneumatic tubes.
They hunt and breed microbes.
They endow nature with all sorts of comforts.
They fly straight up into the sky
and for two weeks remain up there.
Whatever’s left over from their digestion,
they use to manufacture sterilized cotton.
They split the atom. They cure incest.
And by stylistic analysis they ascertain
that Caesar had flat feet.
Thus they have, by brain and by mouth,
created mankind’s progress.
But leaving all this aside and
observed under light, they at bottom are
still the same old monkeys.
Albrecht Haushofer
(1903-1945)
In the night of April 25, 1945 — when the Russian army had already ringed Berlin — a group of fourteen political prisoners were taken from their cells in the Moabit Prison and told that they had been set free. Hardly had they crossed the prison gate into long-awaited freedom when all fourteen were brutally shot down by a detachment of SS-Guards. The next day when relatives came searching for the dead, they found among them a prisoner who held clutched in his hands a notebook with poems, the Moabiter Sonette. The poet was Albrecht Haushofer, a young professor at the Berlin Graduate School of Political Science who had been imprisoned for a few months as early as 1941 for daring to raise his voice against Hitler in the midst of the latter’s period of greatest victories. Although Haushofer was firmly convinced that “as evil incarnate, Hitler must come to a bitter end,” he sought to further Hitler’s downfall more actively by participating in a resistance group which planned to assassinate the Führer. Arrested again in 1944, when the plot was uncovered, Haushofer felt that his only guilt lay in not having “realized earlier his duty of castigating more vehemently evil as evil.” Throughout the Moabiter Sonette rings Haushofer’s love of mankind and his devotion to the German people. He felt that he would have been a “criminal, had he not planned from his conscience for the tomorrow of his people.”
The poem included in this selection is of special interest because it is addressed to his father, the famous Professor Karl Haushofer, whose science of geopolitics and political philosophy had a strong influence on Hitler’s expansionist plans. Karl Haushofer committed suicide in 1946.
DER VATER
Ein tiefes Märchen aus dem Morgenland
erzählt uns, dass die Geister böser Macht
gefangen sitzen in des Meeres Nacht,
versiegelt von besorgter Gotteshand,
bis einmal im Jahrtausend wohl das Glück
dem einen Fischer die Entscheidung gönne,
der die Gefesselten entsiegeln könne,
wirft er den Fund nicht gleich ins Meer zurück.
Fur meinen Vater war das Los gesprochen.
Es lag einmal in seines Willens Kraft,
den Dämon heimzustossen in die Haft.
Mein Vater hat das Siegel aufgebrochen.
Den Hauch des Bösen hat er nicht gesehn.
Den Dämon liess er in die Welt entwehn.
THE FATHE
R
A tale profound from Eastern lands
narrates to us that spirits of foul power
rest captured in the ocean’s night,
sealed up by anxious hands of God,
until just once in a millennium, a chance
grants to a fisher the decision,
who could unseal the fettered spirits
if he at once not cast back his find into the sea.
This chance was given to my father.
It once reposed within the power of his will
to push the demon back into confinement.
The seal my father did break open.
He did not see the breath of evil.
He let the demon drift into the night.
Bertolt Brecht
(1898-1956)
Brecht’s fame has been firmly established by the sensational international success of the musical play The Threepenny Opera (the brilliant score is by Kurt Weill). Since 1928 this corrosively funny satire on the rottenness of bourgeois morality and soulless utilitarianism has delighted audiences in Berlin, New York, Paris, and London. But Brecht is even more eminent as the originator of a new theory of the drama, the Epic Theater, and as the creator of his own company, the Berlin Ensemble, whose performances of his plays Mother Courage, The Good Woman of Setzuan, and Galileo have won wide acclaim in Germany, London, and Paris.
One of the most gifted, original, and controversial German poets, Brecht’s often devastating poetic vigor sprang from an urge to social protest marked by leftist, if not Communist, leanings. After years of political exile from Nazi Germany he returned to East Germany to become one of its leading cultural spokesmen. Shortly before his death he seems, however, to have run into political trouble. Although his opera Lukullus received a standing ovation on the opening night, it was withdrawn only to reappear purged of its utter and absolute condemnation of all war; new lines proclaimed a defensive war as an acceptable, indeed even noble enterprise.
As a poet, Brecht excelled in adapting the down-to-earth sauciness of ballads and folksongs and in formulating snarling and catching lines whose acid humor is never quite free from despair. And always, beneath the political and cynical Brecht, there is the inner man, the humanist Brecht who believes that man is naturally good, that he must make an effort to be evil, as he proclaims in his revealing poem, Mask of Evil. For man, he observes both cynically and despairingly in The Threepenny Opera, would like to be good, “but circumstance won’t have it so.”
The same note of agonized hopefulness in the midst of de-humanized existence appears in the original (Hauspostille-) version of the poem “On the Friendliness of the World”: the world may be cold and cruel, but: “Perhaps, my friend, you did not matter to a lot of people. But many others wept over you, too.”
Brecht, the ruthless and cynical unmasker of life with a soft spot in his heart, is also apparent in “Recollection of Marie A.” At first this is just one more sentimental elegy on young and lost love. But abruptly the poet jolts us with a characteristic Brechtian twist: his coldly cynical confession that he cannot remember what love is nor the face of the girl. (Or has he suppressed it because the thought of her now being a dowdy matron with seven children would spoil his memory?) Even the kiss would be long forgotten were it not for that cloud, “so very white and so immensely lofty.” Yet beneath this pose of oddly-combined sentimentality and cynicism, we sense the deeper Brecht, the human being and poet, whose image of the cloud, winging its way over the transitory, lends permanence and lasting beauty to the recollection of Marie A.
Both Brecht poems for this anthology were selected by Lotte Lenya, who together with her husband, Kurt Weill, knew the poet well during every stage of his literary career.
ERINNERUNG AN DIE MARIE A.
1
An jenem Tag im blauen Mond September
Still unter einem jungen Pflaumenbaum
Da hielt ich sie, die stille bleiche Liebe
In meinem Arm wie einen holden Traum.
Und über uns im schönen Sommerhimmel
War eine Wolke, die ich lange sah
Sie war sehr weiss und ungeheuer oben
Und als ich aufsah, war sie nimmer da.
2
Seit jenem Tag sind viele, viele Monde
Geschwommen still hinunter und vorbei.
Die Pflaumenbäume sind wohl abgehauen
Und fragst du mich was mit der Liebe sei?
So sag ich dir: Ich kann mich nicht erinnern
Und doch, gewiss, ich weiss schon, was du meinst.
Doch ihr Gesicht, das weiss ich wirklich nimmer
Ich weiss nur mehr: Ich küsste es dereinst.
3
Und auch den Kuss, ich hätt’ ihn längst vergessen
Wenn nicht die Wolke dagewesen war
Die weiss ich noch und werd ich immer wissen
Sie war sehr weiss und kam von oben her.
Die Pflaumenbäume blühn vielleicht noch immer
Und jene Frau hat jetzt vielleicht das siebte Kind
Doch jene Wolke blühte nur Minuten
Und als ich aufsah, schwand sie schon im Wind.
RECOLLECTION OF MARIE A.
1
Upon that day in the clear-skied month September
Beneath a sapling plum tree, quietly
I held her there, my quiet, wan beloved one
Within my arms just like a lovely dream.
And over us in the fair sky of the summer
There was a cloud on which I gazed for long
It was so very white and so immensely lofty
And when I looked up, it was gone.
2
Since that day so many, many months
Have floated down and floated past.
The plum trees probably were felled
And if you ask me what’s become of love?
I’ll answer you: I cannot recall
And yet it’s certain I do know what you mean.
But, truly, I no longer can recall her face
I just recall: I kissed it then.
3
And that kiss too I would have long ago forgotten
Had not the cloud been present there
That I recall and always will recall it
It was so white and came from high above.
Perhaps those plum trees still bear blossoms
And that woman now may have her seventh child
That cloud, however, blossomed just for minutes
And when I gazed up, faded in the wind.
VON DER FREUNDLICHKEIT DER WELT
1
Auf die Erde voller kaltem Wind
Kamt ihr alle als ein nacktes Kind.
Frierend lagt ihr ohne alle Hab
Als ein Weib euch eine Windel gab.
2
Keiner schrie euch, ihr wart nicht begehrt
Und man holte euch nicht im Gefährt.
Hier auf Erden wart ihr unbekannt
Als ein Mann euch einst nahm an der Hand.
3
Und die Welt, die ist euch gar nichts schuld:
Keiner halt euch, wenn ihr gehen wollt.
Vielen, Kinder, wart ihr vielleicht gleich.
Viele aber weinten über euch.
4
Von der Erde voller kaltem Wind
Geht ihr all bedeckt mit Schorf und Grind.
Fast ein jeder hat die Welt geliebt
Wenn man ihm zwei Hande Erde gibt.
ON THE WORLD’S FRIENDLINESS
1
Unto this earth full of cold winds
You each came as a naked child.
Freezing, you lay without the least possession
When some woman gave you swaddling clothes.
2
To you called no one, no one wanted you
And people did not fetch you in a fancy carriage.
Upon this earth you were unknown,
When some man took you by the hand.
3
And the world, it doesn’t owe you
anything:
If you want to leave it, no one will hold you back.
Perhaps, my friend, you did not matter to a lot of people.
But many others wept over you, too.
4
Away from earth, full of cold winds
You all depart begrimed with scab and filth.
Almost each one has loved this world
When two handfuls of earth are given him.
A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST
A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST
CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART, Wassily Kandinsky. Pioneering work by father of abstract art. Thoughts on color theory, nature of art. Analysis of earlier masters. 12 illustrations. 80pp. of text. 5 x 8½.
0-486-23411-8
CELTIC ART: The Methods of Construction, George Bain. Simple geometric techniques for making Celtic interlacements, spirals, Kells-type initials, animals, humans, etc. Over 500 illustrations. 160pp. 9 x 12. (Available in U.S. only.)
Introduction to German Poetry Page 9