by Tom Kuhn
Herr Zehr had no receipt nor copy either.
For the copy of the receipt in question
Which Herr Patschek wished to see
Herr Zehr—what sort of premier businessman
Does that?—had flushed it down the WC.
A receipt gone down the pan in that manner—
Legally you might as well have shredded it.
And so Herr Zehr had no real grounds to wonder
If for said receipt Herr P. didn’t give a shit.
And thus it came about that Coal and Fertilizer
Face-to-face before the Judge they took their stand
And each desiring to defeat the other
Raised the three fingers of his right hand.
And they spilled their children’s bedtime stories
Busily before this Solomon.
And it interested more or less
(But less far more than more) everyone.
And many were of the opinion: their sort,
Captains of industry, should know
Better than to drag one another before the court
For who knows what’ll come out of it if you do?
For many a cook read in the newspapers
About these goings-on and it troubled her.
Once she was in favour of our entrepreneurs
Being given credit. Not anymore.
Alas, not even such a thing makes any difference
To them in that great world of theirs
For it’s not to our good opinion they owe their existence
But to money, and not to theirs but ours.
Song of the shoe
The day my mother bore me
How could she ever have known
Out of fifty years of hardship
You can’t make a life of your own?
Nor can a shoemaker
Make you a pair of shoes
From two old postcards; no, you
Can’t ask that of him for
The poor man never learned how to.
I went to school in Essen
And learned the best I could
But learning by daylight and lamplight
Against hunger it did no good.
Nor can a shoemaker
Make you a pair of shoes
From two old postcards; no, you
Can’t ask that of him for
The poor man never learned how to.
And I went by train from Essen
And in Ruhrort I got out
Nearly thirty years I was underground
And I came up with nowt.
Nor can a shoemaker
Make you a pair of shoes
From two old postcards; no, you
Can’t ask that of him for
The poor man never learned how to.
They came with blood-red banners
And we saw the black cross there
And that cross for the poor man
Was a heavy cross to bear.
Shod in cardboard shoes
You can’t walk far but suppose
You give each shoe a brown hat
It’s just about possible that
In the shop window they’ll look like shoes.
They give us nothing to eat now
They take the plate away
And instead of food they give us muck
Build us the Kingdom, they say
Nor can a shoemaker
Make you a pair of shoes
From two old postcards; no, you
Can’t ask that of him for
The poor man never learned how to.
A brow of brass
The man with a brow of brass says
Black is black
White is white, he says shamelessly
Only because it was so, he says it was so.
Only because he did, says he did it.
How should we take seriously the man who concerns himself with us?
How should we behave towards the man who gets involved with us?
Who are we, after all? What does it mean to say
We said something?
There is no greater crime than leaving . . .
There is no greater crime than leaving.
What can we rely on in our friends? Not on what they do.
We can’t know what they will do. Nor on their nature. It
May change. Only on one thing: that they do not leave.
Whoever can leave, can’t stay. The man with a leave permit in his pocket
Will he stay when the attack begins? He will perhaps not stay.
When things are going badly for me, he will perhaps stay. But
When things are going badly for him, he will perhaps leave.
Fighters are poor people. They can’t leave. When the attack begins
They can’t leave.
We know about the man who stays. We didn’t know about the man who left. What left
Is something other than what was there.
Before we go into battle I must know: do you have a passport
In your coat pocket? Is an aeroplane waiting for you behind the battlefield?
How many defeats will you survive? Can I send you away?
Then we shan’t go into battle.
Hands off the Soviet Union!
Hands off the Soviet Union!
Comrades, you do the checking! Make haste!
So that no gun, no soldier, no freight wagon
Rides down our tracks into the East.
I have heard you won’t learn . . .
I have heard you won’t learn
From which I assume you must be millionaires.
Your future is assured, it lies
Before you in the light. Your parents
Have seen to it
That at no time will you dash your foot against a stone. Therefore
You’ve no need to learn. Just as you are
So you can stay.
And even if there should be difficulties, the times
So I am told, being uncertain
You have your leaders who will tell you exactly
What you must do to prosper.
They have read the writings of those
Who know the truths
That are valid for all times
And the remedies that will always help.
Having so many on your side
You don’t need to lift a finger.
Of course, if things were otherwise
You would need to learn.
Song of the class enemy
And if we stormed a mountain
Against an enemy
When the fight was ended
You’d be higher up than me.
And if in the fight they flung us
Down into the pit
You’d be lying on the surface
And I’d be at the bottom of it.
Do not trust your hearing . . .
Do not trust your hearing
Do not trust your sight
You see darkness
But perhaps it’s light
The top beasts
When Herr Keuner, the Thinker, heard
That the best-known criminal of New York City
A bootlegger and mass murderer
Had been shot like a dog
And buried quite without pomp and circumstance
He declared it to be nothing short of astonishing.
Has it come to this, he said
That not even the criminal can be sure of his life
And not even the man who will stop at nothing
Has any success?
Everyone knows that they are done for
Who value their humanity.
But those who have got rid of it?
Are we to be told that a man who has escaped from the depths
Will perish on high?
Bathed in sweat, the righteous start up in their sleep at nights
The softest footstep terrifies them
Their good consciences pursue them eve
n while they sleep
And now I hear: not even the criminal
Can sleep easy anymore?
Is this not bewildering?
What times do we live in?
A simple bad deed, so I hear
Gets you nowhere.
Nobody now prevails
With just one murder.
Two or three acts of treachery before lunch:
Everyone was prepared to commit them.
But what use is being prepared to
When all that matters is being able to!
Nor will it suffice to hold no firm beliefs:
The deed is what counts.
So even the ruthless man
Goes to his grave without noise.
Since his kind were too numerous
He is not noticed.
How much less his grave would have cost him
When he was bent on making money.
So many murders
And such a short life.
So many crimes
And so few friends.
Had he been without means
They could not have been fewer.
How in the face of such occurrences
Shall we not lose heart?
What further plans must we make?
What further crimes think up?
It is not good when too much is demanded.
Seeing such things, said Herr Keuner
We are discouraged.
On February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag Fire and just two and a half weeks past his thirty-fifth birthday, Brecht left Germany in a hurry. His reputation was such that he would have been in mortal danger had he stayed. His closer family and associates followed. They would never return to that Germany; the political, social, and physical world after 1945 was transformed beyond recognition. This third Part contains the poems of just the first five years of Brecht’s exile, years that he spent in Europe, mostly living on the Danish island of Fyn, just outside the little fishing town of Svendborg. In this period, his creative spirit fueled by political fury but cut off from much meaningful work in the theater, he produced an exceptional body of political poems. The climax is the great collection Svendborg Poems, which occupies the last third of this Part, and looks back over the 1930s. Before that we have the largely uncollected poems, punctuated by some of our own informal groupings.
Uncollected Poems 1933–1934
Songs from Round Heads and Pointed Heads
Uncollected Poems 1934–1936
Poems for Margarete Steffin, 1932–1937
Poems from the German War Primer Complex
Uncollected Poems 1936–1937
Some Poems for Ruth Berlau
Poems on Señora Carrar
Uncollected Poems 1937–1938
Svendborg Poems
Uncollected Poems
1933–1934
The poems of the years 1933–38 track Brecht’s angry response as he watched events unfold in Germany and reflected on his own experience of political exile. The Reichstag Fire, the book burnings, the raging political brutality, the Night of the Long Knives, the Nuremberg Laws, the anti-Semitic actions, the Anschluss of Austria: they all feature here. He casts about internationally too, especially in the context of visits to London, Paris, Moscow, and New York, and as he observes the Spanish Civil War from afar. As well as the more serious excoriations of the Nazis and the celebrations of any sign of political resistance, he writes calls to arms, marching songs, children’s rhymes, and satires directed against Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler himself is seldom named; Brecht calls him “the drummer-boy” (der Trommler) or, more often, “the housepainter” (or “dauber”: der Anstreicher). Hitler twice applied to study as a painter and was rejected by the Vienna Academy in 1907 and 1908, and for a time he worked as a painter-decorator; Brecht enjoyed the metaphorical implication of the politician who whitewashes, paints over the cracks in the façade, but does not address any of the structural (social) problems.
The sheer quantity of poems is striking. Brecht had relatively little practical opportunity to work in or for the theater in these years, and to a certain extent he turned to other genres—prose narratives as well as poems. The very few and small-scale experiences of his own work in the theater between 1933 and 1938—The Mother in New York, Round Heads and Pointed Heads in Copenhagen, and Señora Carrar’s Rifles in Paris and Copenhagen—became significant occasions for further reflection on the nature of the theater, in both essays and poems. We have interrupted the chronological flow of uncollected poems with small groups of the songs from Round Heads and Pointed Heads; a selection of poems that belong in style and thrust with the ‘War Primer’ (the first part of Svendborg Poems) but which did not make it into that collection; a first group of poems for Brecht’s collaborator, Margarete Steffin, and another belonging to the first years of his relationship with the Danish theater practitioner and writer Ruth Berlau, whom he got to know in 1935; and finally a series of poems reflecting on Helene Weigel’s performance as Señora Carrar. All three of these women, who played such a great role in Brecht’s life and creative practices, will reappear in the next and final Parts.
The personal is never far from these poems. We hear clearly the voice of the exiled political intellectual. But it is significant that Brecht does not linger on the personal traumas and difficulties, or retreat into self-absorption; instead, in these poems as throughout his creative life, he continues restlessly to seek for an audience, for a receptive audience, and for a path to some productive political dialogue.
I searched long for the truth . . .
1
I searched long for the truth about the way people live with one another
It is a life so tangled and hard to comprehend
I laboured hard to understand it, and then
I spoke the truth, just as I had found it.
2
When I had spoken the truth that was so hard to find
It became a common truth that many repeated
(And not so hard to find after all).
3
Shortly after, people came in multitudes with borrowed pistols
And fired off blindly at anyone too poor to wear a hat
And they herded everyone who had spoken the truth about them and about those who bankroll them
Out of the country in that fourteenth year of the semi-Republic.
4
They took away my little house and my car
Hard earned as they were
(My furniture I was just able to rescue!)
5
And as I crossed the border I thought:
More than my house, I need the truth.
But I need my house too. And since then
The truth is like house and car to me.
And it has been taken from me.
The ballad of the Reichstag Fire
1
Thirteen years the drummer ranted
That the Commune had to fall
All the crimes that they’d committed—
Though there’d been no crimes at all.
2
Little drummer-boys started to grumble
Something’s got to give, it’s time.
Those benighted Commie criminals
Just won’t commit a crime.
3
By the Spree one winter’s morning
They heard the Führer declare:
There’s a Reichstag Fire in the offing
I can feel it in the air.
4
On that fateful Monday evening
Flames leapt high above the town.
And the crime screamed out to heaven
The culprits? Nowhere to be found
5
Then a hapless youth was taken
In trousers of rough cord
In his hand and bound in linen
Was a Communist Party card.
6
From the youth they drew a confession
Yes the Commies pulled the stri
ngs
They had paid him, but first they’d thrashed him
And a lot of nastier things.
7
And the boy with lips so pallid
He confessed quite eagerly
He was nothing but a puppet
Of the radical SPD.
8
Yet he’d left the Communists
Let his membership expire
So that many people doubted
That he’d really laid the fire.
9
Had the party card been planted?
What was he really doing that day?
And what was it the SA wanted?
No one asked and they didn’t say.
10
To set fire to such a building
Would take at least a dozen men
For it burned in twelve separate places
And was largely built of stone.
11
In amongst those dozen bonfires
Stood a dozen SA men
And they pointed with blackened fingers
At the sallow youth again.
12
It was all down to the Führer
That the plot was brought to light
And more yet was then uncovered
And gave many sleepless nights.
13
In the house where, at the hearing
It was clear, the plotters passed
Lived a certain Mr Göring
Who knew nothing, or wasn’t asked.
14
Then we heard the Reichstag President
Had sent all his staff away
And himself was not in residence
