In our era of perception management, fake news, information wars, an alt-right, the so-called “dark enlightenment,” etc., well may we ask What is to be done? In her paper “Poetry, Transformation, and the Column of Tears” Jane Hirshfield designates the poetry of Bertolt Brecht as our antidote to any propagandistic “language that steers, hardens, and stupefies” (Hirshfield 243). To wit: Brecht’s poetic may well lead onto sharper-minded freedoms and, for those of us who labor creatively, texts such as “To Those Born Later” (An die Nachgeborenen) not only resonate but indeed may well retune. Not only does the German poet show how “silence is no option” (Maguire), Brecht enshrines a speaking position that utters beyond the interpellations of thunderously toxic political storms.
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The day after the Reichstag fire in late February 1933, Brecht fled Germany, perhaps foreseeing the foul terminus of those brute malevolences at work within a nascent NSDAP. Written in several locations over the next years, “To Those Born Later” declares from its first line those compunctions impelling the writer-in-asylum toward antilyrical modes: “Truly, I live in dark times!” the poem begins, at once recalibrating and recoiling, to exemplify an exilliteratur emerging through the fourteen years Brecht spent in political asylum (Thomson 96). In its address to an imagined future peoples, “To Those Born Later” seems indeed “an assertion of hope, a contradiction of the times, an act of opposition” (Constantine 40), the poem performing both self-reflexive admonishment and openly transgressive reportage:
What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
[ . . . ]
They say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat
From the starving, and
My glass of water belongs to one dying of thirst? (318)
In this first of the poem’s three sections: the luxury of ambivalence, replaced in Brecht’s second section with neither questions nor exclaimed responses but, instead, images of places where starvation—physical, moral, beyond—reigns amid the carnage. At war, the poet must learn to “lay down among murderers” (319), not only refusing to acquiesce to the logic of the mobilizing Wehrmacht, but fighting to maintain his humanity amid marauding columns of ideologically programmed proto-Übermensch. Writing from these all-too-human places, Brecht’s antilyrics are an ethical challenge, “forswear[ing] of beauty and the merely asesthetic” (Thomson 98). His transgressions are exemplary, an assault on apolitical styles.
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Written from places where all roads “led into the mire” (319), Brecht’s text is strikingly free of figuration, as if social norms in the imploding world are so radically defamiliarized that the image alone serves to perpetuate not only our “moral enlargement” (Hirshfield 249) but an expansion of symbolic orders into profound incredulity. No need here for aesthetically decorative evocations; if figuration is an ideal mode of transmutation, then Brecht’s images importantly refuse to allow us to avert our gaze or disengage our sensibilities from the catastrophe. These unfigured lines carefully scan across “cities in a time of disorder” (319), the image at once a preserving agent, a forewarning, and a compulsive moral screed.
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Indeed, Brecht’s text is our landmark, a recalibration (Hirshfield 252) delineating empathetic modes amid egregious ideologies; “To Those Born Later” refuses to let pass malfeasant political rationalizations that at first rhetorically and then militarily sectioned Europe into cataclysmically demarcated zones. In his interrogations of power, Foucault will ask “where does [the text] come from; how is it circulated; who controls it” (138). Brecht is an Ur-contrarian speaking against the twentieth century’s onset of totalitarianism, and we of the hypercapitalized early twenty-first century are those to whom Brecht addresses his poem. “To Those Born Later” parachutes through time toward our narcissified digital domains, the poem a warning to we who are positioned at the brink of a horizontal abyss.
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In her paper “‘Singing about Dark Times:’ Poetry and Conflict” Sarah Maguire asserts Brecht is “working through his dilemma as a radical lyric poet [sic] in front of us. He shows us the things that poets want to write about. And then he shows us how these human, natural, ordinary things are annihilated by Fascism” (Maguire). Brecht remains fundamentally—indeed metahistorically—aware that the moment he occupies is a moral space in a landscape computing to the (non)logic of epistemic violence, and it is in these contexts that the poem utters across the dehumanizing storms flooding through Europe. Perhaps we can read this text as specifying timeless creative labors: after Brecht, those of us with alarums sounding early in the twenty-first century must write from what we see and hear, toward those who can neither sense nor see reason to speak. There is darkness in the world (always), and perhaps in darker times our humanizations must not merely add to that black sum; somehow, our snapshots must shine pragmatically, hopefully, into ideologically irradiated zones.
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The author function? Jane Hirshfield says of Brecht (and later Miłosz) that theirs are poems to “unclench the mind and heart” (254), and perhaps this might be our ambit: in an age of screen-blinded, willfully ignorant, atomized Homo digitalis lurching hell-bent toward destabilization, is poetry yet a means by which to unroll our fists into outstretched hands that can beckon, wave, reach out?
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In his paper “The Usefulness of Poetry” David Constantine asserts how “[t]he mind, reading Brecht’s poetry, is tested, teased into agility” (36), and one cannot help but equally regard “To Those Born Later” as stretching open the ear, which is thrummed on like a drum or door. The text’s second section echoes the poet’s refrain, “[s]o passed my time,” and the repetitions are tonal, solemnly testimonial, as if through reiteration Brecht would signal his time as monumentally historical and his creative labors an opportunity amid chaos to parlay the sounds of a morally engaged inscription. He writes in 1951 of how “the moral content of a literary work is superior to its artistic quality” (Brecht 1951, qtd. in Macioszko), and so often Brecht’s onomatopoeic cris-de-coeur rupture into pseudo-sublime affect:
Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly (320)
he reveals, implying the force any gesture toward humanizing hopefulness sometimes will employ. Brecht’s text asks us to engage and to shift out from our comfortable passivities; “To Those Born Later” is an epigraph to future moral imperatives, an instruction for we who must also learn to speak a shuddering alternative resonance to the discordant performances of power.
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In his reimagining of authors as intertextualizers, Barthes suggests in “The Death of the Author” that texts operate as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,” and that “the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original” (522). Perhaps we encounter literature as a deep archive never able to be completely read and therein, in dark times, this repository must be approached selectively, scoured for political wisdoms. Brecht’s crystalline images are avatars of Barthesian anteriority, canonically positioned in front of us in the manner of a canary in a coal mine: a wild song, shining inside a sunless place. The author function? Surely Barthes’s death of the author is necessarily a death (again) to the disengaged lyric, and Brecht teaches the means by which we might connect:
I would also like to be wise.
In the old books it says what wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and to live out
Your brief time without fear. (318)
Brecht’s wisdom is of a wholly different order, and his image-mirrors refract through time into our own present realities, requiring that we regard ourselves and our others again amid terrains swarming (once again) with proto-monstrosities. As Hirshfield understands, “the business of writers is not answers, it is finding right questions” (25), and with the death of the author and birth of the reader-scriptor, one of our duties remains to those born earlier. Brecht’s text catalyzes the possibility of our engagements and asserts this wisdom: to be great writers, first we must become selective readers (no mean feat in our post-textual neon domains of always-flashing screens); thereafter, we stride together into a dialectic of intelligent, courageous, unflappable hope.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Continental Aesthetics Reader, 2nd ed. Ed. Clive Cazeaux. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2011. 520-23.
Brecht, Bertholt. “To Those Born Later.” Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913-1956. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen, 1987. 318-20.
Constantine, David. “The Usefulness of Poetry.” Brecht’s Poetry of Political Exile. Ed. Ronald Spiers, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 29-46.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977. 113-38.
Hirshfield, Jane. “Poetry, Transformation, and the Column of Tears.” Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. New York: Knopf, 2015. 243-71.
Macioszko, Jerzy J. “The Moral Aspect of Czesław Miłosz’s Creativity.” World Literature Today, vol. 73, no. 4, 1999. 675-76.
Maguire, Sarah. “‘Singing About Dark Times:’ Poetry and Conflict.” Poetry Translation Centre, 13 Mar. 2008. www.poetrytranslation.org/articles/singing-about-the-dark-times-poetry-and-conflict.
Thomson, Philip. “The Poet in Dark Times: Messages from Exile.” The Poetry of Brecht. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989. 96-119.