Brecht ‘To Those Who Follow in Our Wake’

By Scott Horton

I

Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten!

Das arglose Wort ist töricht. Eine glatte Stirn

Deutet auf Unempfindlichkeit hin. Der Lachende

Hat die furchtbare Nachricht

Nur noch nicht empfangen.

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo

Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist

Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!

Der dort ruhig über die Straße geht

Ist wohl nicht mehr erreichbar für seine Freunde

Die in Not sind?

Es ist wahr: Ich verdiene nur noch meinen Unterhalt

Aber glaubt mir: das ist nur ein Zufall. Nichts

Von dem, was ich tue, berechtigt mich dazu, mich sattzuessen.

Zufällig bin ich verschont. (Wenn mein Glück aussetzt, bin ich verloren.)

Man sagt mir: Iß und trink du! Sei froh, daß du hast!

Aber wie kann ich essen und trinken, wenn

Ich dem Hungernden entreiße, was ich esse, und

Mein Glas Wasser einem Verdursteten fehlt?

Und doch esse und trinke ich.

Ich wäre gerne auch weise.

In den alten Büchern steht, was weise ist:

Sich aus dem Streit der Welt halten und die kurze Zeit

Ohne Furcht verbringen

Auch ohne Gewalt auskommen

Böses mit Gutem vergelten

Seine Wünsche nicht erfüllen, sondern vergessen

Gilt für weise.

Alles das kann ich nicht:

Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten!

II

In die Städte kam ich zur Zeit der Unordnung

Als da Hunger herrschte.

Unter die Menschen kam ich zu der Zeit des Aufruhrs

Und ich empörte mich mit ihnen.

So verging meine Zeit

Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

Mein Essen aß ich zwischen den Schlachten

Schlafen legte ich mich unter die Mörder

Der Liebe pflegte ich achtlos

Und die Natur sah ich ohne Geduld.

So verging meine Zeit

Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

Die Straßen führten in den Sumpf zu meiner Zeit.

Die Sprache verriet mich dem Schlächter.

Ich vermochte nur wenig. Aber die Herrschenden

Saßen ohne mich sicherer, das hoffte ich.

So verging meine Zeit

Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

Die Kräfte waren gering. Das Ziel

Lag in großer Ferne

Es war deutlich sichtbar, wenn auch für mich

Kaum zu erreichen.

So verging meine Zeit

Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

III

Ihr, die ihr auftauchen werdet aus der Flut

In der wir untergegangen sind

Gedenkt

Wenn ihr von unseren Schwächen sprecht

Auch der finsteren Zeit

Der ihr entronnen seid.

Gingen wir doch, öfter als die Schuhe die Länder wechselnd

Durch die Kriege der Klassen, verzweifelt

Wenn da nur Unrecht war und keine Empörung.

Dabei wissen wir doch:

Auch der Hass gegen die Niedrigkeit

Verzerrt die Züge.

Auch der Zorn über das Unrecht

Macht die Stimme heiser. Ach, wir

Die wir den Boden bereiten wollten für Freundlichkeit

Konnten selber nicht freundlich sein.

Ihr aber, wenn es soweit sein wird

Dass der Mensch dem Menschen ein Helfer ist

Gedenkt unsrer

Mit Nachsicht.

I

Truly, I live in dark times!

An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead

Points to insensitivity. He who laughs

Has not yet received

The terrible news.

What times are these, in which

A conversation about trees is almost a crime

For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!

And he who walks quietly across the street,

Passes out of the reach of his friends

Who are in danger?

It is true: I work for a living

But, believe me, that is a coincidence. Nothing

That I do gives me the right to eat my fill.

By chance I have been spared. (If my luck does not hold, I am lost.)

They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad to be among the haves!

But how can I eat and drink

When I take what I eat from the starving

And those who thirst do not have my glass of water?

And yet I eat and drink.

I would happily be wise.

The old books teach us what wisdom is:

To retreat from the strife of the world

To live out the brief time that is your lot

Without fear

To make your way without violence

To repay evil with good –

The wise do not seek to satisfy their desires,

But to forget them.

But I cannot heed this:

Truly I live in dark times!

II

I came into the cities in a time of disorder

As hunger reigned.

I came among men in a time of turmoil

And I rose up with them.

And so passed

The time given to me on earth.

I ate my food between slaughters.

I laid down to sleep among murderers.

I tended to love with abandon.

I looked upon nature with impatience.

And so passed

The time given to me on earth.

In my time streets led into a swamp.

My language betrayed me to the slaughterer.

There was little I could do. But without me

The rulers sat more securely, or so I hoped.

And so passed

The time given to me on earth.

The powers were so limited. The goal

Lay far in the distance

It could clearly be seen although even I

Could hardly hope to reach it.

And so passed

The time given to me on earth.

III

You, who shall resurface following the flood

In which we have perished,

Contemplate –

When you speak of our weaknesses,

Also the dark time

That you have escaped.

For we went forth, changing our country more frequently than our shoes

Through the class warfare, despairing

That there was only injustice and no outrage.

And yet we knew:

Even the hatred of squalor

Distorts one’s features.

Even anger against injustice

Makes the voice grow hoarse. We

Who wished to lay the foundation for gentleness

Could not ourselves be gentle.

But you, when at last the time comes

That man can aid his fellow man,

Should think upon us

With leniency.

–Bertolt Brecht, An die Nachgeborenen first published in Svendborger Gedichte (1939) in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, pp. 722-25 (1967)(S.H. transl.)

I have just posted an original translation of Bertolt Brecht’s poem An die Nachgeborenen. This poem probably dates from 1939 and in any event from the period of Brecht’s Danish exile. Like most of those from the period, this poem has strong political undercurrents and is filled with brooding. Considering the gathering of storm clouds across Europe at the time of its composition, this is easily understood. There are several exceptional works in this collection, the Svendborg poems, but this one is the stand out.

The poem uses a first person narration and is divided into three segments. The first points to his frustration over the evil descending upon his homeland. He is writing about the Nazi regime which has tightened its control over his homeland, ruling with acts of unprecedented thuggery and brutishness. Brecht realized that he had to flee because his life was at risk. The earnestness of the situation is troubling. How, he asks, can one in such circumstances talk about trivialities (he alludes to “conversations about trees”). To do so is to avoid speaking about the unpleasant circumstances that govern their lives. This is followed by an allusion to his decision to go into exile, to Denmark, a short distance from the German border (“he quietly crosses the street,” but is now out of reach for his friends in need, that is, those who remain in Hitler’s Germany.)

In the next stanza he develops this theme a little further. How can he find internal peace with his comfortable conditions in exile when his friends and colleagues live in hunger and cower in fear for their lives, he asks. But these lines contain a second meaning–they refer to the totalitarian state and its ability to reduce the quality of human life to its essentials, to the need for food and drink, for instance. The pact offered by the totalitarian state is simple: we will furnish you those essentials, that food and drink. In exchange we command your unquestioning loyalty. (Hence the sudden change in voice to the command imperative: Man sagt mir: iß und trink du!).

The fourth stanza marks a point of departure from the predecessors, which can be called a catalogue of the indignities of the Nazi regime. Here Brecht turns to the collected wisdom of humanity, to book learning. He points to the received wisdom of prior generations, which admonishes to retreat from the conflicts of the world, to counter evil with good, to avoid seeking to satisfy one’s desires. These values appear buried in a number of texts that Brecht was developing at the time this poem was composed, for instance in the final chapters of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus cycle (1669), in which the protagonist lauds the virtue of retreat from the pointless violence and terror of life in Middle Europe during the Thirty-Years War. Much of this was developed in Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1939). But even more to the point is the Confucian and Buddhist world view which is the object of Brecht’s highly partisan political criticism in Der gute Mensch von Sezchuan (1939).

The fifth stanza jumps back further in time. Brecht alludes to the terror-filled months that followed the collapse of the Kaiserreich at the end of World War I—this is the time of disorder in the cities to which the first lines refer. The Kaiser was forced to abdicate, the nation descended into chaos. Starvation was widespread and competing political groups turned to terror as a weapon for the consolidation of power. This was the inauspicious soil in which the Weimar Republic was launched, soon to be destroyed by an enemy which “revealed itself with its language.” This is one of several passages which is best understood in terms of traditional Marxist dialectic; Brecht is referring to a governing class which employs its own peculiar language. Of course, for Brecht and many of his fellow Marxists, fascism was explained as a manifestation of an ailing or collapsing capitalism.

The final stanzas are filled with anxiety and regret. What will posterity think of the fact of my flight, Brecht asks, of the fact that he “changed his country as often as his shoes.” But for all of this, Brecht is confident in a final victory over fascism and the dawn of a new era in which “men can help one another,” which for Brecht assuredly means the triumph of Marxism. His close is very troubling. He appeals to posterity to consider, before condemning his generation, the terrible circumstances in which they lived. Is he justifying the reach to brutal methods against the enemy? Is he saying that the “ends justify the means?” That is a persistent theme in Brecht’s writings at this time. But the close remains poetic and ambiguous. It was an ambiguity that he only overcame following the uprising in Germany in 1953, I think. That was the point at which he recognized clearly the fundamental evil of an ideology that instrumentalizes humanity.

Still, Bertolt Brecht is one of the consummate writers of exile literature in the twentieth century. His writings maintain an intriguing balance between the sentimentality and longing that mark the genre from the time of Chateaubriand, mixed with ideological backbone and resolve, a determination to engage and fight, a will to vanquish the oppression that drives him from his homeland. And this poem, addressed to posterity, may be the consummate work of exile poetry.

Listen to Bertolt Brecht read An die Nachgeborenen on a SONY BARBArossa Musikverlag (Sony) 2002 recording.

Listen to Gottfried von Einem’s Cantata An die Nachgeborenen, op. 42, composed to mark the 30th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, and premiered in New York on October 24, 1975.