Brecht - hated by Fascists, Nazis and the Supporters of Capitalism
Bertoldt
Brecht was hated by fascists and the Nazis. He had none of the fake anti-racism
that we see with today's purveyors of the ‘equality agenda.’ An equality that is aimed at upholding the existing society, never changing it
fundamentally. We can see how this 'equality agenda' is used when Zionists come quoting the MacPherson Report (erroneously).
Brecht
summed up his philosophy in the following line from the Three Penny Opera
‘Who is the bigger criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one?’
Although a communist Brecht wasn’t a slavish
supporter of Stalinism and in the wake of the use of Soviet tanks to put down
the workers’ uprising in East Germany in 1953 he wrote
the immortal lines:
After the
uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary
of the Writers Union
Had leaflets
distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that
the people
Had forfeited
the confidence of the government
And could win
it back only
By redoubled
efforts.
Would it not
be easier
In that case
for the government
To dissolve
the people
And elect
another?
The poem was first printed in the West-German newspaper Die Welt
in 1959 and subsequently in the Buckow Elegies in the West 1964. It was
first published in Stalinist East Germany in 1969 after Helene Weigel had insisted on its
inclusion in a collected edition of Brecht's works.
Brecht
wrote in Is Communism Exclusive?, Ist der Kommunismus exklusiv? 1932:
Our opponents are
the opponents of mankind. Their point of view is not just: their point of view
is injustice. It is understandable that they defend themselves, but they defend
robbery and privileges, and to understand here does not mean to excuse as well.
He who is a wolf to man, is no man, but rather a wolf. Today goodness means
where the bare self-defense of the great masses becomes the final battle for
the position of command, the destruction of which makes goodness impossible.
 |
| Nick Cohen's anti-Communist tirade |
It is no surprise that Islamaphobes
and war mongers like Nick Cohen, a former socialist and now turncoat, who parades his reactionary
credentials to impress, should try and denigrate Brecht for the sins of Stalinism in Time for curtain to fall on Brecht. Cohen
is oblivious to the times that Brecht lived through or his courage in the face
of Nazism. As Mark Ravenhill’s Don't bash Brecht points out, the attacks on Brecht, whose
books were burnt, takes place in the context of the rehabilitation of those
artists such as Richard Strauss and even Hitler’s film maker Leni Riefenstahl
who played along with the Nazis.
One thing is for sure, there is nothing of Nick Cohen's worth burning.
However the new anti-communists,
who define themselves by their opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ which crystallizes around
support for the world’s only Apartheid state, are united in their support of
the capitalist economic system that gave birth to Hitler and the Holocaust.
Below is an introduction to Brecht in a BBC primer Epic
theatre and Brecht
Tony Greenstein
Bertolt Brecht –
a brief background
The playwright Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898 in the German town of
Augsburg. After serving as a medical orderly in the First World War and
appalled by the effects of the war, he went first to Munich and then to Berlin
in pursuit of a career in the theatre. That period of his life came to an end
in 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany. Brecht fled and during this
period the Nazis formally removed his citizenship, so he was a stateless
citizen.
 |
| Bertolt Brecht, 1948 Credit: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images |
In 1941 Brecht became resident in the USA but returned to Europe in 1947
after appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Ostensibly
against communism, this committee also targeted intellectuals. By the time of
his death in 1956, Brecht had established the Berliner Ensemble and was
regarded as one of the greatest theatrical practitioners.
As an artist, Brecht was influenced by a diverse range of writers and
practitioners including Chinese theatre and Karl Marx. The turmoil of the times
through which Brecht lived gave him a strong political voice. The opposition he
faced is testament to the fact that he had the courage to express his personal
voice in the world of the theatre. He also had an original and inspired talent
to bring out a dynamic theatrical style to express his views.
 |
| Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children at the Olivier Theatre, London Credit: Tristram Kenton |
His most acclaimed work is Mother Courage and Her Children.
Although it’s set in the 1600s, the play is relevant to contemporary society
and is often regarded as one of the finest anti-war plays. Fear and Misery
of the Third Reich is Brecht’s most overtly anti-fascist play. This work
analyses the insidious way the Nazis came to power.
credit Steve
Toner
Credit: Goskino/Ronald Grant
An extended ode to the revolutionary German
playwright-genius Bertolt Brecht, whose exhaustive new collected poems exalt
combating injustice while keeping faith in his fidelity to dissent.
Your
spectator is sitting not only
In
your theatre, but also
In the world.
‘I
live in dark times,’ Brecht said, but he
liked to believe the darkness would end. In the poem containing those words,
written in the 1930s, he apologises to ‘those
born after’, saying that
Hatred,
even of meanness
Makes
you ugly.
Anger,
even at injustice
Makes
your voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who
wanted to prepare the land for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly
‘Could
not be friendly’ is a discreet but painful
understatement, a too amiable hint at horrors. Dark times mean not only that
terrible things happen to the world and to us but also that we have had a hand
in the terrible things. In a remarkable late poem Brecht imagines a loved
landscape has changed, suddenly let him down. But it hasn’t changed. He has
remembered where he is in moral time.
The
white poplar, a famous local beauty
Today
an old hag. The lake
A bowl
of slops, don’t touch it!
The
fuchsias among the snapdragon cheap and showy.
Why?
Last
night in a dream I saw fingers pointing at me
As
though at a leper. They were worn by work and
They
were broken.
There
are things you don’t know! I cried.
Knowing I was guilty
Translated by Tom Kuhn and David
Constantine
W.W. Norton, December 2018; 1312 pages
We don’t have to apologise for our
times. We can gloat over their darkness, become the pointing fingers. This, I
take it, is the implication of a much earlier epigram:
In the
dark times
Will
there be singing?
There
will be singing.
Of the dark times.
Or there could be silence. Brecht
covers this ground too.
They
will not say: when the nut tree shook in the wind
But
rather: it was when the housepainter trampled the workers.
They
will not say: when the child skimmed the flat pebble over the rapids
But
rather: when the ground was being prepared for great wars.
They
will not say: when the woman walked into the room
But
rather: when the great powers united against the workers.
But
they will not say: the times were dark
But rather: why were their poets
silent?
There is something clunky and too
correct about the party line here – the house painter was far more ecumenical
in his trampling – but the prophecy of the final question is eloquent and looks
forward to the title of a Heinrich Böll novel: Where were you, Adam? Where
were we when the unfriendliness got out of control?
 |
| mother courage and her children |
‘Is
there no grace, no credit,’ Brecht writes in a
1921 diary entry, ‘is there no one who
does not believe in our
sins, who thinks better of us than we ourselves do?’ The answer is probably
no, but one implication of the cry is that we might try to be this person for
others. Brecht’s plays and poems perform this role with a kind of stealthy
splendour. Surely no other writer was ever so patient, funny and astute about
human frailty. There is a sort of puzzle here, though, that we need to dispose
of. Isn’t he just letting everyone else off the hook so he won’t have to hang
there himself? There are moments when this seems to be what is happening.
Brecht’s announcement that ‘in me you
have someone you cannot count on’ sounds like a blank ethical cheque, an
advance abolition of the need for forgiveness. But these moments are remarkably
rare. Hannah Arendt says one of Brecht’s ‘great
virtues’ was that he ‘never felt
sorry for himself – hardly ever was even interested in himself’. The person
he called ‘poor B.B.’ feels like a
character in one of his plays, and we hear the confessional note only in poems
like the one I quoted, about the altered white poplar, and the last but one
piece in the Collected Poems:
And I
always thought the very simplest words
Would
be enough. If I say what is
Every
heart will surely be lacerated.
That
you will go under if you don’t fight back
Surely
you must see that?
It is perhaps worth having Michael
Hamburger’s version here, just to hear a slightly different lilt:
And I
always thought: the very simplest words
Must
be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone’s
heart must be torn to shreds.
That
you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself
Surely
you see that.
Brecht is attentive to all kinds
of weakness and forms of helplessness that he doesn’t have, and the ones he
does have tend to make him an expert rather than a hypocrite, the man who will
never cast the first stone. We remember too that the cry in the diary was not
an address to an individual conscience but a dream of other, kinder minds.
‘The Infanticide Marie Farrar’
tells us that the sentenced woman shows ‘the
frailties of all creation’ and the poem’s refrain, repeated nine times with
very slight variations, runs: ‘But you, I
beg of you, contain your wrath for all/God’s creatures need the help of all.’
The chorale that ends The Threepenny Opera – the music is Kurt Weill’s
affectionate parody of Bach – makes the same recommendation: ‘Combat injustice but in moderation.’ In
these and many other lines we hear the voice of the Protestant who grew up in a
largely Catholic world, and who kept not the faith of his parents but his own
form of fidelity to dissent. Brecht always knew how to catch the fakery in
religious and social piety, but also knew what a genuine, secularised care for
others might look like. ‘Don’t give up on
your own kind’, he says; and praises doctors and nurses ‘who/Remember their obligation to those
who/Have a human face.’
Brecht was born in Augsburg in
1898 and grew up there. He moved to Berlin in 1924, already something of a
celebrity. The huge success of The Threepenny Opera in 1928 was not
anticipated by anyone, but was unmistakable. Lotte Lenya, writing later about
those days, said ‘Berlin was swept by a Dreigroschenoper fever. In the streets no other tunes were
whistled.’ There were other fevers around, though, and in 1933, the day
after the Reichstag fire, as Kuhn and Constantine tell us, Brecht and his
Jewish wife, Helene Weigel, left Germany. Several years of exile followed,
principally in Denmark and the United States, and it is possible that exile
didn’t really end when both of them returned to Berlin. Brecht was a devout
communist but not much of a party man, and famously mocked the East German
government’s response to a 1953 revolt in these terms:
would
it not
Be
simpler if the government
Dissolved
the people and
Elected
another one?
And although he regularly defended
the workers against all their enemies, his deep sympathy was with a certain
kind of heroic disorder, as evoked in the wonderful poem ‘The breaking up of
the ship, the Oskawa, by her crew’. The ostensible argument concerns
the poor wages of the sailors, but what is shown is their recklessly
reprehensible behaviour, the glorious slack they allow themselves. ‘Since the wages were bad’, we read,
We
felt the need to drown
Our
troubles in alcohol, so
Several
cases of champagne found
Their
way into the crew’s quarters.
The ship gets lost a few times but
finally makes it from Hamburg to Rio. It sets off again with a new cargo (of
meat) and the old crew. Negligence causes a fire, the dynamos won’t work, the
meat goes bad, the engines are ruined by an inept use of salt water, various
attempts at repair fail and the ship limps back to Hamburg – it has to be towed
from Holland – and is scrapped. The last words of the poem are
Any
child, we thought
Could
see that our wages had
Really
been too niggardly.
Kuhn and Constantine tell us that
‘less than half of [Brecht’s] output of
poems was published by the time of his death in 1956,’ and every
description of the opus sounds dizzying. The 1976 selection of translations
edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim contains ‘roughly five hundred poems’, while a German collected edition of
1967 has ‘approximately one thousand
items’. The new book tells us that the latest complete works includes ‘more than two thousand poems’, of which ‘over twelve hundred’ are translated
here.
I don’t know whether these numbers
in themselves suggest variety or the possibility of a lot of repetition.
Brecht’s style and diction are pretty consistent, witty, idiomatic, often close
to ordinary speech, never far from the song or the ballad. The literary forms
he uses are very diverse, though, and I’m not sure I can name them all. Among
them are narrative poems, lyrical meditations, fables, aphorisms, maxims,
instructions, polemics, parodies, satires, handbooks, elegies, songs from
plays, sonnet sequences, prose reflections and an imitation of a book of
devotions. I was delighted to see in this book a connection I didn’t know
Brecht had made: one of the lines from the song celebrating the dark skills of
Mack the Knife (‘Is not asked and does not know’, in Eric Bentley’s version) is
attached to Göring.
In the
house …
Lived
a certain Mr Göring
Who
knew nothing, or wasn’t asked.
There is a lot of formal travel
between a cryptic, slightly self-mocking portrait like this one:
Wandering
this way and that
Kept
no note of my hither and thither
Don’t
know where I left my hat
Nor the
previous seven either
and the unprotected sweep of
Everything
was beautiful on that sole evening, ma soeur
After
it never again and never before –
True:
all I was left with then were the great birds
That in the dark sky when evening comes
are hungry.
Similarly, it’s good stretch from
the quiet anger of this image of support for the Nazis:
Knowledge
is cultivated too. Out from the libraries
Step
the slaughtermen.
to this intimate evocation of the
grief of mothers for their soldier sons:
And
the years go by. He is not dead.
He
will never die. It is only that he’ll never come back.
A
coffee pot stays full and empty a chair.
And
they save him a bed and they save him bread
And
they pray for him and when they lack
Always
they entreat him to come home here.
Haunting narratives include that
of the dead soldier who is dug up and sent back to war on the grounds that when
recruits are needed death is only a form of malingering, and that of the
children’s march in Poland which ends in their disappearance, their only legacy
a message tied around a dog’s neck:
Please
help us, we are lost.
We
can’t find the way anymore.
We are
fifty-five, the dog will lead
You to
where we are …
The
writing was a child’s.
Peasants
read it aloud.
That
was a year and a half ago.
The dog
hungered and died.
Brecht was a great believer in
doubt; it was a form of faith for him. But he could be harsh on easy doubters:
Their
only action is vacillation.
Their
favourite phrase: it’s not yet certain.
So
granted, when you praise doubt
Do not
praise
The
doubt that is despair!
What
use is doubting to him
Who
cannot make up his mind!
This example leads us to what is
perhaps a good place to end these illustrations. Brecht loved the idea of
reversible logic, because it leaves the reader or spectator with no option
except thinking. In one poem he mentions a shelter for the homeless in New
York:
The
world is not changed by this …
But a
few men have a bed for the night
The next stanza says
A few
men have a bed for the night …
But
the world is not changed by this
A later poem, this time quoted in
full, repeats the move:
Everything
changes. You can
Begin
anew with your very last breath.
But
what has been, has been. And the water
You
once poured into the wine, you can
Never
drain off again.
What
has been, has been. The water
That
you poured into the wine, you can
Never
drain off again. But
Everything
changes. You can
Begin
anew with your very last breath.
*
Kuhn and Constantine rather
sniffily say they are not ‘fond of
translation theory and leave it to others to describe our practice, as they
wish’. Of course any established academic pursuit is fair game for
scepticism, but it seems a little defensive to suggest you don’t care how your
work is described or couldn’t find any such description interesting. In fact
these new versions hold up very well to close study, especially in matters of
rhyming, usually the downfall of translators. Where there are questions they
concern not correctness or fidelity but intriguing matters of interpretation.
One of the tasks of the translator, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin,
apart from helping us to read texts we couldn’t otherwise approach, is to show
what different languages allow their speakers to do with words – and also what
those languages do not allow.
A good case arises with Brecht’s
short poem ‘The mask of the angry one’, or is it ‘The mask of evil’?
On my
wall hangs a Japanese carving
Mask
of an angry demon, lacquered in gold.
Feelingly
I observe
The
swollen veins at his temples, hinting
What a
great strain it is to be angry.
Here is what H.R. Hays (1947) has:
On my
wall hangs a Japanese carving,
The
mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically
I observe
The
swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a
strain it is to be evil.
The German text is:
An
meiner Wand hängt ein japanisches Holzwerk,
Maske
eines bösen Dämons, bemalt mit Goldlack.
Mitfühlend
sehe ich
Die
geschwollenen Stirnadern, andeutend
Wie
anstrengend es ist, böse zu sein.
We might say, if we are being
theoretical, that ‘feelingly’ is a
bit too literal for mitfühlend, which is just the Germanic form of ‘sympathetically’; but that ‘hinting’ gets us closer than ‘indicating’ does to the indirection of
the idea. Still, the real point of division (and of this comparison) obviously
lies in the word böse, which also appears in the poem’s title. It
signifies ‘mean’ or ‘naughty’ or ‘cross’ or ‘evil’,
depending on context and intention. When Kafka uses it in his aphorisms (‘Evil is what distracts’; ‘Evil knows about good, but good knows
nothing of evil’) ‘evil’ clearly
works best, and we can back up this sense with the memory that ‘Der Böse’ is also a name for Satan, the
Evil One. The proximity of the word in the poem to ‘demon’ might lead us to prefer Hays’s version. But then with Brecht
we may not want the theological dimension of Kafka’s claim, and if we’re in an
atheistic mood, we can think he just means ‘very
very bad’. In any case, the word certainly also means ‘angry’.
 |
| The fourth wall |
The situation becomes more
delicate when Rilke, in the ‘Fourth Duino Elegy’, uses the word to say what he
doesn’t understand about the mild manners of children who die young.
Murderers
are easy
to
understand. But this: that one can contain
death,
the whole of death, even before
life
has begun, can hold it to one’s heart
gently,
and not refuse to go on living,
is
inexpressible.
Mörder
sind
leicht
einzusehen. Aber dies: den Tod,
den
ganzen Tod, noch vor dem Leben so
sanft
zu enthalten und nicht bös zu sein,
ist
unbeschreiblich.
For the phrase ‘nicht bös zu sein’ we need something
that catches the sulkiness the children don’t have, and the literal ‘not to be angry’ used by C.F. MacIntyre,
for example, won’t do the trick. I think Stephen Mitchell’s ‘not refuse to go on living’ is too
metaphysical for these youngsters, but it does give a measure of what Rilke is
getting ordinary language (and behind it the image of the behaviour of ordinary
children) to do.
So with Brecht, angry or evil? We
can guess at what Brecht meant, and if he was around, we could ask him. His
response might settle things for some of us. But there is no way of making the
word on the page not have, for a given reader, any or all of its
meanings in current (or even ancient) usage. Kuhn and Constantine speak
eloquently of the ways in which Brecht’s poems ‘are never just the servants of his politics … they exceed his
engagement in the particular and necessary cause.’ And they are not
entirely the servants of Brecht himself. As the above examples show,
translators have to make choices on the behalf of writers, and even in the
original language the reader may have a long sliding scale of options.
[Essayist Michael Wood is a editorial board
member of, and a regular contributor to, the London Review of Books, He says he
lives in dark times, but tries to shine a little light here and there.]
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