The Collected Poems Of Bertolt Brecht, translated and edited by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine

After reading this book but before writing this review I read another book that drastically changed my thoughts on this collection as a whole.  I was going to write a much harsher review on the politics and hypocrisy of the author, and then in reading the author’s journals I realized that he was not a hypocrite at all, however much I disagree with his political perspective, but that he was a clear-eyed writer who despite being a prominent leftist nonetheless also was able to see the evils and horrors of Soviet Russia for what they were, and that sense of balance is entirely missing from this book, which has a lot of criticism to make of Hitler’s Germany but which appears, at least through omission, to ignore the horrors of the Soviet Union and the violence of that evil regime.  The fault of that, I believe, belongs to the translators and editors of this collection, who clearly do not wish to point out Brecht’s hostility towards Soviet violence in their one-sided attempt to paint Brecht as a loyal leftist who turned his rhetorical guns only towards capitalism and the evils of Fascist Germany, which is simply not true.

This particular book is a sprawling collection of more than 1000 pages of poetry written by Brecht over the course of his life ranging from his youthful songs to his elderly reflections on his own blame and responsibility for the sad state of the world that he found it in postwar Communist East Germany.  The editors of this collection, when faced with the massive collection of poetry to choose from given Brecht’s immense fecundity as a writer, divide the collection into five parts.  The first part consists of the domestic breviary as well as other poems written by Brecht between 1913 and 1924, many of them uncollected, which takes up 250 pages of the book.  After that the authors look at Brecht’s poetry in Berlin between 1925 and 1933, which makes up a lengthy collection of uncollected poems, Augsburg Sonnets, The Reader For City Dwellers, and songs from some of the author’s plays from that time.  After that the editors consider Brecht’s poetry from exile in Denmark from 1933-1938, including more uncollected poems, poems for Margarete Steffin, the German War Primer complex, as well as the Svendborg Poems.  After that the editors collect Brecht’s WWII poems in Europe and America from 1938-1945, including some studies, more uncollected poems, selections from his plays written during this period, the Steffin collection, more poems for Margarete Steffin, as well as Chinese Poems and some Hollywood Elegies.  Finally, the book closes with poems written after the war, including two sets of uncollected late poems and the Buckow Elegies, along with notes and indices of the German and English titles and first lines of the poems in this collection.

Even knowing that a great many of the problems of this book are the responsibility of the editors and translators, there is still a great gulf between the poet and I in terms of our worldviews.  Brecht was a passionately immoral person whose personal life was deeply disordered, whose religious worldview was heathen in nature, and whose political worldview was decidedly leftist.  Many of the poems here reflect the author’s limited insights on the West and his inveterate hostility to Hitler, who is often viewed as a “housepainter” in these works and seldom called by name.  The poems show the author’s seeming obsession with women as whores and his inability to come to grips with Christian morality and faith.  Yet towards the end of his life, the author came to realize that the way he had lived his life had some definite negative effects and he did come to at least some sort of self-criticism that, nonetheless, did not lead him into full repentance.  One wonders if the editors, who are so keen to view Brecht as some immensely insightful visionary, are as reflective as the man whose poems they have collected and translated.