Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956)
Commonly known as Bertolt Brecht, was an influential German Marxist dramatist, stage director, and poet of the 20th century.
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.
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.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!"
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.
Come in, dear wind, and be our guest
You too have neither home nor rest.
The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn
When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
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.
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?
Wie lange
Dauern die Werke? So lange
Als bis sie fertig sind.
What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank?
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.
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.
The rain
Never falls upwards.
When the wound
Stops hurting
What hurts is
The scar.
But something's missing (Aber etwas fehlt).
Every day, to earn my daily bread
I go to the market where lies are bought
Hopefully
I take up my place among the sellers.
Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women. The latter normally concerns itself with profit, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure.
Oh why do we not say the important things, it would be so easy, and we are damned because we do not.
Play your part creatively in all the struggles
Of men of your time, thereby
Helping, with the seriousness of study and the cheerfulness of knowledge
To turn the struggle into common experience and
Justice into a passion.
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set some limit on infinite error.
Sometimes I have visions of myself driving through hell, selling sulphur and brimstone, or through heaven peddling refreshments to the roaming souls. If me and the children I've got left could find a place where there's no shooting, I wouldn't mind a few years of peace and quiet.