“Des Toten Dichters Gedenkend”: Remembering Brecht in Contemporary German Poetry

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Karen Leeder

“Des toten Dichters gedenkend”: Remembering Brecht in Contemporary German Poetry

Fifty years after the poet’s death, this essay addresses German poetry written “after Brecht”. After examining the different forms of reception in general terms, it focuses on three categories of poems: poems about Brecht himself, those that take on the legacy and those that are inspired by the Brechtian gesture. Surprisingly perhaps, since the demise of the state which Brecht had been seen to legitimize, very many poems have focused on the biographical premise. Poems published since 1989/90 are then analyzed which present the fascinating or vilified person Brecht in context and in conversation with other contemporaries, especially the women around him. I shall also be looking at the many letters or telegrams addressed directly to Brecht from posterity, and finally at the poems which deal with his death – and the ways in which he might be remembered.

It is odd to think that half a century has passed since the death of Bertolt Brecht: partly because he is in so many ways the epitome of the “modern” poet; and partly because his voice is so much a part of the grammar of our times, that it seems he cannot have been gone so long. It is not just that Brecht’s poems are still read, nor that they are influential – though they are certainly both of these – but that his poetry has found a further afterlife in the work of the poets who have come after him. The poems I am going to discuss here give just a taste of a vast reception, which is perhaps unparalleled in any age or language. That Brecht should have acted as a focus for so many poems suggests though that something more has been going on than a simple reading of his work. It has to do with Brecht as a figure as well. His personal charisma, his radical politics, his wayward behav- iour, his desire to rip up any rule books and change art and the world, all have contributed to a kind of mythical aura which has engendered reworkings of his life in novels, films and plays. Whether “loving Brecht” (the title of Elaine Feinstein’s 1992 novel), or hating him – as in that deeply flawed “Brecht- buster”, John Fuegi’s Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht of 1994 – the magnetism of the figure still fascinates.1 As always, it is the details which catch the eye: the haircut, the cigar, the “klug und kahl” demeanour (Thomas Brasch).2 But the contradictions too, both real and of biographical anecdote, have since become

1 Elaine Feinstein: Loving Brecht. London: Hutchinson 1992; John Fuegi: The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht. London: Harper Collins 1992. See also Jacques-Pierre Amette: La Maîtresse de Brecht. Paris: Albin Michel 2003. 2 Thomas Brasch: Im Garten Eden, Hollywood genannt. In: Der schöne 27. September. Gedichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1980. P. 17. CH018.qxd 4/16/08 10:14 AM Page 278

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also part of the legend: the young man who could publish a pornographic son- net under the name of the venerable (and despised) antagonist Thomas Mann, the silk shirts under the worker’s jacket, the comradeship and faithlessness in the same breath. This extraordinary reception, though, also has to do with Brecht’s unique diction. Brecht was a superb lyric poet who profoundly distrusted the lyric mode. Nature and love are at the centre of his work and yet he wrote with a con- viction that it was largely illegitimate in times like his to derive poetry from such experiences. That he managed to articulate this contradiction has much to do with “List” – Brecht’s word – a project which also became a philosophy of survival for him in the Third Reich.3 He created an immediately recognizable voice: low-key, simple, but without being arch or sentimental. And it is striking how persuasively that diction infects many of those who come after. Moreover, he is also a poet’s poet – in the best sense of the phrase. Although he was a writer urgently concerned with the dark times he lived in, very many of his poems are also themselves about poetry. For that reason those who have come after have felt themselves called on to respond both to their own times and to the demands of poetry. And finally: the longevity and variety of Brecht’s afterlife make sense because Brecht’s own poetry is so centrally concerned with the issue of reception. Very many of his poems are explicitly concerned with the way posterity will read and judge the poet and his times – most notably of course the celebrated poem, “An die Nachgeborenen” (BFA 12. Pp. 85–87). Indeed, a whole matrix of symbols of survival and forgetting, memorialization and inscription runs through his work, as Siegrid Thielking has persuasively teased out in her article “L’homme statue? Brechts Inschriften im Kontext von Denkmalsdiskurs und Erinnerungspolitik”.4 This was a very real issue for Brecht, who fled the book- burnings of Nazi Germany on the day after Hitler’s accession to power. He sim- ply did not know whether he or his work would survive. His friend and lover Ruth Berlau recalls him asking her to learn his poems off by heart, so that they at least would last.5 But from an early age Brecht famously also liked to situate himself in a long line of famous poets. Hans Otto Münsterer, for example, tells an anecdote about him standing as a self-styled Friedrich von Schiller in the

3 See Bertolt Brecht: Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit. BFA 22. Pp. 74–89. 4 Siegrid Thielking: L’homme statue? Brechts Inschriften im Kontext von Denkmalsdiskurs und Erinnerungspolitik. In: Brecht 100ϽϭϾ2000. Ed. by John Rouse, Marc Silberman and Florian Vaßen. Madison (WI): University of Wisconsin Press 1999. Pp. 54–67 (The Brecht Yearbook 24). 5 Ruth Berlau: Brechts Lai-Tu. Erinnerungen und Notate. Ed. by Hans Bunge. Darmstadt – Neuwied: Luchterhand 1987.