foudebassan (foudebassan) wrote in gedichte, @ 2008-04-28 22:49:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | brecht |
Eugen Berthold Friedrich aka "Bertholt" Brecht
(1898-1956) was born in a very bourgeois family - his father was CEO of a paper factory. He studied medecine and was enlisted as a nurse during WW1. In the 20s he converted to Marxism, published a lot of things, and had a lot of affairs. He had a habit of always keeping two different mistresses at any given time, when they got to know about the other one and confronted him, asking to choose, he's dump both and start again. He was also extremely prolific, and wrote a lot with his mistresses. Several of them were accused of plagiarism and / or thought to have written very Brechtian pieces, only recent research tends to show that the plagiarised stuff or Brecht-inspired materials often happened to have been produced before their authors even met Brecht.
As a communist he was not welcome in Nazi Germany, so he fled to Scandinavia, then to the US, where McCarthyism made him almost as indesirable, so he settled down in East Germany instead - and make no mistake, he didn't do that strictly out of ideological grounds, he was treated like the priced apparatchik he was over there and not like the hoi polloi. That included giving him his very own theatre, run by his wife (Helene Weigel, a reknown actress and dramaturg in her own right) to showcase his plays. It still exists today.
He was indeed first and foremost a playwright - you must have heard of the Verfremdungseffekt ie the technique that consists in making the viewer very aware at all times that they are watching a man-made bit of industry and no Oh Good God No! certainly not something they might actually sit back for and enjoy (that's bourgeois and old-fashioned, you know). For some reason that remains very popular even in present times. His best-known piece is probably the Dreigroschenoper (Three penny opera? L'opéra de quat' sous). He applied the same principles to poetry, doing his very best (and for all his faults, his talent is undeniable, so his very best is something to be reckoned with) to rob the words of all the beauty they might have contained and systematically wreck all the magic of language.
Today's poem is short, which is good, we wouldn't want to suffer any more than strictly necessary. It was written in 1953, right after the popular uprisings in East Germany against the emerging communist governement that claimed it stood for the industrious masses. They featured demonstrations where blue-collar workers shouted "we are the people!", and the authorities shot into the crowd, eliminated the ringleaders, and generally made sure nothing would stand in the way of a brighter future under the kindly rule of marxist-leninist inspired enlightement. Brecht disapproved of the sanctions, and famously wrote to the president of the DDR's state council (who'd said he was disappointed with the demonstrants), saying that since the government didn't approve of the people, perhaps it should dissolve it and elect a new one? (I lack the time to research which one of his women was with him when he wrote that, so I'm sorry I can't tell you what the real author was that dictated it to him).
Der Radwechsel Ich sitze am Straßenrand Der Fahrer wechselt das Rad. Ich bin nicht gern, wo ich herkomme. Ich bin nicht gern, wo ich hinfahre. Warum sehe ich den Radwechsel Mit Ungeduld? |
The Changing Of The Wheel I am sitting at the turn of the road. The driver is changing the wheel. I don’t like it where I come from. I don’t like it where I’m going to. Why am I watching the changing of the wheel With impatience? |