by Tom Kuhn
And the dying, in the recesses of the wards
Let out their last rattles in uneven jerks
The rakes walked home, shattered by their exertions.
The freezing blush of dawn, in pink and green
Passed slowly up and over the lonely scene
And murky Paris, rubbing its eyes
Took up its tools again to hand
A worksome old man.
Yes, from time to time I follow . . .
Yes, from time to time I follow these little old women
And one time, as the sun began to set
And turned the lower reaches crimson
One of them found a bench and took a seat
To listen to one of those cheerless brass bands
With which the military flood our parks
On golden evenings when you feel your soul expand
They try to flush some heroism into townies’ hearts.
And she, ramrod still and proud, like she could smell
The clash of sabres, hungrily imbibed the warlike tones.
From time to time her eye blinked open eagle-like, the while
Her brow seemed made for laurels, from Carrara stone.
Egyptian peasant song
(1400 BCE)
Thresh for yourselves, thresh for yourselves
Oxen, thresh for yourselves!
The straw is your fodder, so thresh for yourselves!
We, your masters
Would just like the corn.
Do not weary, do not weary, you oxen!
It’s not so hot, thresh for yourselves, thresh for yourselves!
When, in the age of the housepainter . . .
When, in the age of the housepainter, we
Sat in Dragør by the straits of Öresund
We saw many ships go sailing by, to the left to England
To the right to Germany. But those that went left
Were laden with wood and other cargo. Whereas those that went right
Were so empty that, above the waterline
We could see the red paint of the ship’s hull.
And we said to one another: at least these empty ships
May show off that fair red, the colour
Of the proletarian revolution!
On the decline of love
Their mothers gave birth in pain, but their women
Conceive in pain.
The act of love, it is said
No longer works. The mingling of bodies still takes place, but
The embrace is an embrace of wrestlers. The women
Lift their arms in defence when they
Are caressed by their owners.
The country milkmaid, renowned
For her ability to receive the embrace with
Pleasure, looks with mocking disdain
On her unhappy sisters in their sable furs
Who are paid for every movement of their well-groomed bottoms.
Every creature can do it. Amongst these
It counts for an art.
The patient spring
That has quenched so many generations
Looks on in horror as the last
Wrests the cooling drink with grim determination.
The trowel
I dreamed I was on a construction site. I was
A bricklayer. In my hand
I held a trowel. But as I stooped
For the mortar there came a shot
That struck from my trowel
Half its blade.
Second poem of the dead brickie
On board a ship to Spain
Many comrades gathered
Marching columns over the Ebro
A pause in the fighting. To mow the corn.
The sickle low. The dead brickie
Laughing: we wore it in our buttonholes
One day everything will be as it should. Now we
Already swing it. Marching column.
One day when victory . . .
One day when victory is ours
And now mighty tractors
Plough the land anew
You will find in your soil
The small mortal remains of our comrades.
If you stumble on a Scandinavian long-skull
That may perhaps be
Our compatriot, who
Once hurried to your aid.
For he had heard that the money-men
Were advancing with tanks and bomber squadrons against the people. So
He smuggled himself
To a poet-friend about his Deutschland poems
Of that far country where, for we are weak
We may no longer tread (it isn’t in their power
To disallow the language which we speak)
You talk as one whom love and hate devour
Because he’s found that, by some guileful blandishment
A rival now enjoys his lover’s bed
And he recalls her lips and has her armpits’ scent
As years ago he knew it, swirling through his head.
And when I see how, in so many poems
You pile up stone on stone for old and ruined homes
Rebuilding buildings long torn down, with painful care
Why, then I fear that you forget: your hand
Is reaching for an image, not a land
Your feet tread not the earth, but words and air.
Now the instrument is out of tune . . .
Now the instrument is out of tune
The old scores are worthless
And you will need to strike new chords.
If it weren’t that even stupid things can be well said
That even robbers have sweet songs
Our handiwork below would be more highly respected.
Verse-wright, just consider
Of the exploited there are so many:
And since they too pay
Even if very little, it will still be worth
Writing the truth.
If we want to stand the test before the lowly
We must not, of course, write in a folksy manner.
These folk
Are not folksy.
For the dependable . . .
For the dependable, whose mouth the police held shut
For the undaunted, who built the shelter with the thatched roof facing south
For the friendly and wise one, who made the children both friendly and wise
For the warm-hearted one
Critique of Michelangelo’s Creation
1
That picture that he made of the Creation
I don’t get it. How could he believe those dreams?!
It’s taking human delusion to extremes!
He gave it such inapt consideration.
2
Of course the man is dead, and God forbid
I should despise a man who’d come again
Before the afterworld to explain
Just why on earth he acted as he did.
3
And so the picture shows how God disposes
Mankind on granite, where he then decays
Instead of God decaying while man stays?
4
A swindle! How could he believe such dreams?
It’s taking human delusion to extremes!
All for the nice proportions he discloses!
The painter’s (presumptive) answer
1
What you from me, a dead man, get is this
What he could squeeze from error, but in order
To bequeath to error. I painted but a tithe
Of what I wanted, yet ten times what I saw
You
See but one hundredth of it all.
2
Because he found himself upon a rock, he thought
His whole life through that rocks were safety.
His only thought at all was to be safe.
But in truth, only that is safe which has no footing.
Whatever lives is not yet
finished simply. God
Alone is transient, passing through.
That’s why I painted him as he escapes.
As if he created on the wing. And painting him so
I don’t believe I’ve done anything worse than he
When he created me.
In praise of forgetting
Forgetting is good!
How otherwise should
The son part from the mother who nursed him?
Who lent him the strength of his limbs and
Who now only restrains him from testing that strength.
Or how should the pupil leave the teacher
Who lent him his knowledge?
Once the knowledge is dispensed
The pupil must go his way.
At the old house
New occupants are moving in.
If those who built it were still there
The house would be small indeed.
The tiled stove heats the room. No one
Remembers the potter. The ploughman
Will not recognize that loaf of bread.
How, without the forgetfulness of night which washes away all traces
Should a man rise in the morning?
How should he, six times beaten to the ground
Rise up a seventh time
To turn over the stony ground, to fly
Into the threatening skies?
The frailty of memory lends
Strength to man.
Soliloquy of an actress putting on her mask
I am to play a drunk
Who sells her children
In Paris, at the time of the Commune.
I only have five lines.
But I also have a walk to do, along the street.
And I shall walk as a person liberated
A person whom no one wanted
To liberate, except from drink, and I shall
Look about me, like drunks do, fearing
Lest they are followed, so I shall
Look around at the audience.
I have weighed my five sentences like documents
You wash with lemon juice to see if there are not, beneath the obvious writing
Other, secret letters. I will speak each one of them
As an accusation
Levied against myself and all who look on me.
If I were thoughtless I would make myself up
Like an old drinker simply
Squalid or sick, but I
Shall walk on stage as a beautiful woman now wasted
With yellow skin, once soft, now ruined
Desired once, now loathsome
So that everyone asks: who
Did this?
And the seventeen-year-olds were carried in . . .
And the seventeen-year-olds were carried in like frozen quarry from the hunt
Fed with bran-bread at a time when they should have been growing
Under their thin sack-cloth blankets they had never been able
To warm their lungs, so now they died
Filling the school halls with their rasps; leaving behind
A world unconquered. For the mightiest nation on this earth
Sewed them up in paper and consigned to the earth those who were too weak
To be sent out against the guns.
Neither the coalfields of the Saar nor those of Poland
Had they been able to fetch back for those who had sent them out
And now their masters had to put up, swearing, with the considerable cost
Of paper, bran and sack-cloth.
Svendborg Poems
Svendborg Poems is one of the great collections of political verse, in any language and in any tradition. In the bold sweep of six very distinct “chapters” Brecht analyzes the politics of fascism, passes judgment, celebrates resistance, urges further resistance. Although the terms of reference are relentlessly those of his contemporary world, nonetheless the poems, individually and in dialogue together, retain an extraordinary capacity to draw the modern reader into the exchange, both as a reflection on history and as an exhortation to intervene in the wrongs of our own societies.
The idea of a collection of exile poems goes back to 1933. Indeed there had already been a collection of Songs, Poems, Choruses in 1934 (Lieder Gedichte Chöre, Éditions du Carrefour, Paris), which we have chosen to pass over, as it assembles only poems that were published or collected elsewhere. Then there were plans for a Poems in Exile, which never came to fruition but would have included many of the same poems as Svendborg Poems and so constitutes something like a first draft. Parts of the proposed collection were swiftly published, including the sections ‘War Primer’ and ‘German Satires’ (the latter described as intended for radio broadcast) in 1937 and 1938 in the German-Soviet periodicals Das Wort and International Literature (both Moscow). A first version of the Svendborg Poems itself was typeset by Wieland Herzfelde’s Malik-Verlag in Prague in 1938, but destroyed when German troops overran the city. In Scandinavia and with the rescued proofs, Ruth Berlau and Margarete Steffin managed to negotiate a small print run with a Copenhagen printer, which then bore the imprint: Malik-Verlag, London, 1939. Two of the poems in the ‘Chronicles’ section date back to before 1933, but all the rest date from the mid- to late 1930s.
Brecht himself compared this collection with his Domestic Breviary and registered an astonishing aesthetic impoverishment: “Capitalism has compelled us to fight. It has laid waste to our surroundings. I no longer walk ‘in lonely contemplation in the woods’, but amongst police spies” (Journal, September 10, 1938). Brecht forces us to acknowledge that loss—he returns to it time and again in the poems themselves—but there is also a paradoxical gain. Above all in this collection, Brecht develops a voice that can stand up to political barbarism with precision and determination. He gives us a model, he sharpens our own political consciousness, and he helps us to find our bearings in a grim political world.
From my refuge beneath the Danish thatch, my friends
I follow your struggle. In these pages I send you
As I have before, a few words, startled from their hiding places
By bloodied visions above the sound and through the bushes.
Use whatever reaches you with caution!
Yellowed books, fragmentary reports
Are my resource. Should we meet again
I’ll take my studies up again, gladly.
Svendborg 1939
I
GERMAN WAR PRIMER
In the higher echelons
To talk of food is considered low.
That’s because: they have
Already eaten.
The lowly must depart this life
Without ever having enjoyed
The good meat.
To reflect, on fine evenings,
Where they have come from and
Where they are going, they are
Too exhausted.
They still have not seen
The mountains and the ocean
When their time is up.
If the lowly don’t
Think upon their lowliness
They will never rise higher.
The bread of the hungry has been eaten
The meat is long gone. Uselessly
The people have sweated.
The laurel groves
Have all been felled.
From the chimneys of the munitions factories
Smoke rises.
The housepainter speaks of the great times that are coming.
The forests are still growing.
The fields are still producing.
The towns are still standing.
The people are still breathing.
In the calendar the day is not yet marked.
Every month, every day
Is still free. One of those days
Will be marked with a cross.
The workers cry out for bread.
The traders cry out for markets.
The unemployed used to go hungry. Now
The employed go hungry.
Hands that lay inactive are stirring again:
They are making shells.
Those who take the meat from the table
Preach contentment.
Those for whom the offering is destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who have eaten their fill speak to the hungry
Of the great times that are coming.
Those who are leading the Reich to the abyss
Say that ruling is too hard
For the ordinary man.
The bosses say: peace and war
Are made of different stuff.
But their peace and their war
Are like wind and storm.
War grows from their peace
Like a son from his mother
It bears
Her terrible features.
Their war kills only
What their peace
Has left over.
When over the loudspeakers the housepainter talks of peace
The road menders look down on the motorways
And see
Concrete, knee-deep, destined for
