Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956)
Commonly known as Bertolt Brecht, was an influential German Marxist dramatist, stage director, and poet of the 20th century.
The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn
When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.
And when she was finished they laid her in earth
Flowers growing, butterflies juggling over her...
She, so light, barely pressed the earth down
How much pain it took to make her as light as that!
The rain
Never falls upwards.
When the wound
Stops hurting
What hurts is
The scar.
All the gang of those who rule us
Hope our quarrels never stop
Helping them to split and fool us
So they can remain on top.
As a youth I enjoyed — indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered — the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system — which is to say by the accrual of wealth — house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.
What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank?
Wie lange
Dauern die Werke? So lange
Als bis sie fertig sind.
Events cast long shadows before.
One such event would be a war.
But how are shadows to be seen
When total darkness fills the screen?
On golden chairs
Sitting at ease, you paid for the songs which we chanted
To those less lucky. You paid us for drying their tears
And for comforting all those whom you had wounded.
But something's missing (Aber etwas fehlt).
Come in, dear wind, and be our guest
You too have neither home nor rest.
Firebugs dragging their gasoline bottles
Are approaching the Academy of Arts, with a grin.
And so, instead of embracing them, Let us demand the freedom of the elbow
To knock the bottles out of their filthy hands.
Even the most blockheaded bureaucrat,
Provided he loves peace,
Is a greater lover of the arts
Than any so-called art-lover
Who loves the arts of war.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!"
Marie Farrar: month of birth, April
Died in the Meissen penitentiary
An unwed mother, judged by the law, she will
Show you how all that lives, lives frailly.
You who bear your sons in laundered linen sheets
And call your pregnancies a "blessed" state
Should never damn the outcast and the weak:
Her sin was heavy, but her suffering great.
Therefore, I beg, make not your anger manifest
For all that lives needs help from all the rest.
People will observe you to see
How well you have observed.
The man who only observes himself however never gains
Knowledge of men. He is too anxious
To hide himself from himself. And nobody is
Cleverer than he himself is.
Some party hack decreed that the people
had lost the government's confidence
and could only regain it with redoubled effort.
If that is the case, would it not be be simpler,
If the government simply dissolved the people
And elected another?
The law is simply and solely made for the exploitation of those who do not understand it or of those who, for naked need, cannot obey it.
Food first, then morality.
Their peace and their war
Are like wind and storm.