Trechos de Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (2014), de Stephen Parker.
[the outbreak of war] Like his father, Eugen [Bertolt] Brecht joined in the general mood of patriotic fervour. [...] as Walter Brecht points out:
His patriotism went so far that, at the start of the year 1915, he still wrote a poem in homage to Kaiser Wilhelm II on his first birthday in the war.
- - -
Brecht and his contemporaries witnessed the destruction of the world of 1914.
- - -
These compositions, read alongside other sources, show the sensitive, psychologically brittle boy initially devoting himself to the patriotic cause in the name of national purification. He did so by treating suffering as sacrifice - and suffered the consequences in a truly harrowing lesson for life. The assured manner of Brecht's later demolition of discredited patriotic values belies his profound struggle in the years 1914-16, which saw the collapse of his belief in the cause of German Christian nationalism as the reality of suffering left him traumatised, his world shattered. The young Brecht followed a trajectory from idealism to profound disillusion similar to that of the English poet Wilfred Owen, who by 1917 was denouncing Horace's dictum dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as "the old lie". In Germany, which collapsed in the turmoil of defeat and national humiliation, the denunciation would be all the more bitter.
Before the outbreak of war the Brecht boys were out in uniform on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons in the Wehrkraftverein, Eugen making up for the earlier ignominy that Emil Enderlin had inflicted on him when he had not been allowed to participate. Later, Brecht would claim that he'd always managed to avoid this pre-military training by forging his father's signature. That may well be true of the later stages of the war. However, in the early stages no one wanted to miss out on the action, least of all Eugen Brecht. Teachers and pupils volunteered for the front and numbers in the Wehrkraft soared. The retired generals Rösch and von Hößlin provided leadership. Pupils helped with the harvest and with transportation, others watched out for enemy aircraft.
Johann Grandinger recalls that in August 1914 Eugen Brecht joined the war effort:
In the first days of the war Brecht had to conduct the nightly watch for aircraft with my father up the Perlach Tower. But in those days enemy aircraft only came as far as Freiburg. At first Eugen also served quite diligently in the Wehrkraftverein. Of course there, too, every free minute was taken up with debate, mostly about literature.
Eugen Brecht immediately wrote in the national cause. His reportage "Tower Watch" appeared in Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten on 8 August 1914, his first mass-circulation publication. He wrote that there were no enemy planes overhead but he could see troop trains leaving the station, carrying soldiers to their "uncertain fate". And he could hear the singing of "The Watch on the Rhine", the anti-French battle song from the Wars of Liberation. The young volunteer's account ends with a call for young people to support the war effort.
How did the sixteen-year-old schoolboy come to appear in the press as the advocate of war only days after its outbreak? Immediately before the war, Eugen Brecht saw his future as a theatre critic in the mould of the famous Berlin critic Alfred Kerr, later an arch-enemy. He introduced himself to Wilhelm Brüstle, the editor of the literary review of Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten. [...] the more pressing events of August delayed publication and Eugen made his debut instead as a war correspondent.
Brecht's sympathetic review of Karl Lieblich's poems in September captured the patriotic mood: Lieblich's was a "German book". The review contained quite conventional views on art: Brecht praised Lieblich's affinities with Dehmel and showed his antipathy towards "super-modernist" aesthetic fashion, particularly the "city demon" of Expressionism, an allusion to Georg Heym's verse.
- - -
In his own "official" war writing, Brecht followed the same precept of combining truth after nature with idealism - until the yawning gap between the two plunged him into a profound artistic and psychological crisis, from which he emerged as if re-born, as the Brecht we know. Well versed in capturing heroic death in the patriotic cause, in August 1914 Eugen Brecht showed Brüstle that he was equipped to support the war effort with his pen. Eugen's next piece appeared on 10 August, in response to the sinking of the German warship Viktoria Luise on 6 August. Eugen conveyed what he had learnt about composure in the face of sacrificial death for the patriotic cause, imputing such composure to the stricken sailors, who "forgot wife and child, father and mother and went to a certain death for the great cause". Eugen addressed his fellow citizens as if he were the Kaiser's spokesman: "Let's show them that we understand their sacrifice and thank them for it!".
Detzer's patriotic sermons glorifying the Kaiser provided the boy with theological justification of suffering. As a Protestant at war, Detzer evidently felt that he should represent the values of the predominantly Lutheran Reich within the predominantly Catholic South. His sermon at the Barefoot Church on 9 August 1914 made a deep impression on Brecht. The aggressive language fed into "Thanksgiving Service", a poem which captured the mood of popular euphoria on this first "Victory Sunday" of the war.
- - -
In time-honoured fashion, religious and secular images of suffering and death as transfiguration merge in the young Brecht's war poetry. As in his pre-war poetry, he is a fervent proponent of the German cause in God's name, which, he believes, can bring national purification for the civilian population as well as the military.
- - -
Eugen Brecht regularly took part in victory celebrations at the Stadtgarten and at school. He celebrated the capture of Liège in an "Augsburg War Letter" [...] Together with Gehweyer, he produced postcards to support the Red Cross War Aid.
- - -
Berthold Eugen became a regular freelancer for the two papers and earned recognition - as well as fees - in the first two years of the war. Improbable as it now sounds, Brecht's rise to fame began as a patriotic war correspondent. He met his deadlines for stories, reportage and poems from the Augsburg home front, showing his capacity to intervene rapidly in the affairs of the moment. He would in time develop out of that capacity an instrument for strategic intervention through art. For a while, his ambition to achieve fame through his writing came together with his patriotic fervour in his journalistic adventure. The Brecht family was proud that he was seizing the moment, as he had advocated in "Storm". [...] While Eugen was busy with his vital war work, school classes shrank as pupils volunteered or were conscripted. Many died at the front, others returned mutilated.
- - -
Boys disappeared from class from one day to the next. Eugen Brecht, the war's vociferous advocate in August 1914, could not volunteer. He gave his reason why in the poem "Springtime".
- - -
"The Officer Cadet" of April 1915 and "Dance Ballad" of January 1916 articulate shock and horror at the carnage in moving ballads which tell of deeply disturbed individual lives, ruined by war. Any notion of sacrifice for a just and noble cause is abandoned.
- - -
When Werner Frisch and K. W. Obermeier collected Brecht's wartime writings from the two Augsburg newspapers, they observed that they displayed the "most profoundly disturbed mental attitude" of their author. It is surprising that critics - and above all Brecht's biographers in thrall to images of Brecht as the ice-cold cynic and political master strategist - have not properly considered Frisch and Obermeier's view. The poems of wartime madness testify to the boy's extreme mental torment, bordering on disintegration.
- - -
In 1914-16, Eugen Brecht came to realise that the German people had a price to pay for the soldier emperor Wilhelm II's pursuit of his grand design to overtake the United Kingdom as the world's leading imperial power. Eugen Brecht had a price to pay, too. He had made a name in Augsburg with his glowing support for the patriotic cause, yet the source of his renown was now a source of torment. His struggle to free himself from the torment induced by his naive belief assumed, as always, a literary form. He began to take his leave of "official" German literature and to immerse himself once again in the poètes maudits and subversives of all hues. As his political awareness grew, he had nothing but scorn and contempt for the catastrophic folly of the German imperial project.
The First World War had a seminal impact upon the writer that Brecht became. Understanding its origins would remain a major pre-occupation. Looking back in exile to the confusions of those wartime days, Brecht produced a magnificent montage of contrasting images and literary allusions, drawn from the official canon and subversive writing. Full of scathing irony, the montage conveys a distance from events and ideas which was not remotely available to the adolescent, caught as he was between his fast-unravelling Christian belief in the national mission and his resurgent admiration for his free-thinking literary heroes.
- - -
The reputation he had acquired in that place had become an embarrassment. He was done with the popular mood.
- - -
"A schoolboy's mind disturbed by the war."
By 1915 Brecht himself had published poems in which he had exposed the suffering and madness of war.
- - -
In early 1916 Brecht's anguished tone in poems like "Dance Ballad" gave way in "Soldier's Grave" - his final war poem published during the First World War and the final piece that he signed Berthold Eugen.
- - -
The war had converted the young Brecht from an ardent supporter of the Kaiser to an increasingly considered and radical opponent of his foreign policy in war.
[...] In January 1916 the school authorities reprimanded him for his behaviour.
- - -
It was not just Brecht's contempt for the patriotic cause which outraged Friedrich Gebhard. [...] Gebhard reprimanded Brecht in front of the class, thundering away and threatening expulsion, just as the school had expelled that other poet, Ludwig Ganghofer.
- - -
Brecht's expulsion was firmly on the agenda. Biographers have interpreted this whole episode as if the ice-cold, cynical Brecht had emerged fully formed from his mother's womb. Such an interpretation, as we have already suggested, has no thought for this hyper-sensitive teenager's very brittleness and vulnerability.
- - -
Conscription would take care of a very necessary lesson in life.
Yet he was saved from this fate by the intervention of an auxiliary teacher, Romuald Sauer.
- - -
[...] those poems of wartime madness, born of the extreme conflict between his ardent belief in soldierly sacrifice for the German imperial mission and the awful reality of the mass butchery of his generation.
- - -
[...] what we already know: that Brecht experienced a severe mental conflict. An outright collapse is readily conceivable. His naïve enthusiasm for patriotic sacrifice had crumbled in the face of suffering which, as Knoblach says, he experienced with vicarious intensity. A little later, in December 1917 Brecht himself adumbrated his collapse and recovery in a letter to Caspar Neher. In a manner well-nigh unique in the fiercely self-reliant Brecht's writings, he recorded a profound debt of gratitude to Neher for his role in his "renaissance".
- - -
The wartime experience of suffering with such a "thin skin" made the growth of a "thick" skin to protect his extreme sensitivity an existential necessity. This was an essential lesson of the war. Brecht's recovery from his mental torment was necessarily defined through literature.
- - -
Sexual activity became a vital part of his construction and assertion of "selfhood", its importance matched only by writing.
- - -
Donning his uniform, Brecht took up his duties as a medical orderly in Augsburg. At this late stage in the war, the square bashing of basic training was dispensed with. He reported to the field hospital at the Schiller School in Oberhausen, today's Löweneck School. It was a gruesome place. Directly behind the school was a railway track, on which trainloads of badly-wounded soldiers were brought directly from the Alsatian Front for operations and amputations. He later told Sergei Tretiakov that he treated wounds with iodine and bandaged them, giving patients enemas and blood transfusions. The scenes which Brecht witnessed would come back to haunt him.
- - -
On 11 November the fighting in the First World War ended on all fronts when the western powers and Germany signed the armistice.
Brecht was busy assembling seven of his favourite compositions in his Songs for the Guitar by Bert Brecht and his Friends. The small collection remained unpublished during his lifetime.
- - -
Brecht would return again and again to the grim significance of Rosa Luxemburg's murder in the chaotic events surrounding the foundation of the Weimar Republic.
His patriotism went so far that, at the start of the year 1915, he still wrote a poem in homage to Kaiser Wilhelm II on his first birthday in the war.
- - -
Brecht and his contemporaries witnessed the destruction of the world of 1914.
- - -
These compositions, read alongside other sources, show the sensitive, psychologically brittle boy initially devoting himself to the patriotic cause in the name of national purification. He did so by treating suffering as sacrifice - and suffered the consequences in a truly harrowing lesson for life. The assured manner of Brecht's later demolition of discredited patriotic values belies his profound struggle in the years 1914-16, which saw the collapse of his belief in the cause of German Christian nationalism as the reality of suffering left him traumatised, his world shattered. The young Brecht followed a trajectory from idealism to profound disillusion similar to that of the English poet Wilfred Owen, who by 1917 was denouncing Horace's dictum dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as "the old lie". In Germany, which collapsed in the turmoil of defeat and national humiliation, the denunciation would be all the more bitter.
Before the outbreak of war the Brecht boys were out in uniform on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons in the Wehrkraftverein, Eugen making up for the earlier ignominy that Emil Enderlin had inflicted on him when he had not been allowed to participate. Later, Brecht would claim that he'd always managed to avoid this pre-military training by forging his father's signature. That may well be true of the later stages of the war. However, in the early stages no one wanted to miss out on the action, least of all Eugen Brecht. Teachers and pupils volunteered for the front and numbers in the Wehrkraft soared. The retired generals Rösch and von Hößlin provided leadership. Pupils helped with the harvest and with transportation, others watched out for enemy aircraft.
Johann Grandinger recalls that in August 1914 Eugen Brecht joined the war effort:
In the first days of the war Brecht had to conduct the nightly watch for aircraft with my father up the Perlach Tower. But in those days enemy aircraft only came as far as Freiburg. At first Eugen also served quite diligently in the Wehrkraftverein. Of course there, too, every free minute was taken up with debate, mostly about literature.
Eugen Brecht immediately wrote in the national cause. His reportage "Tower Watch" appeared in Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten on 8 August 1914, his first mass-circulation publication. He wrote that there were no enemy planes overhead but he could see troop trains leaving the station, carrying soldiers to their "uncertain fate". And he could hear the singing of "The Watch on the Rhine", the anti-French battle song from the Wars of Liberation. The young volunteer's account ends with a call for young people to support the war effort.
How did the sixteen-year-old schoolboy come to appear in the press as the advocate of war only days after its outbreak? Immediately before the war, Eugen Brecht saw his future as a theatre critic in the mould of the famous Berlin critic Alfred Kerr, later an arch-enemy. He introduced himself to Wilhelm Brüstle, the editor of the literary review of Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten. [...] the more pressing events of August delayed publication and Eugen made his debut instead as a war correspondent.
Brecht's sympathetic review of Karl Lieblich's poems in September captured the patriotic mood: Lieblich's was a "German book". The review contained quite conventional views on art: Brecht praised Lieblich's affinities with Dehmel and showed his antipathy towards "super-modernist" aesthetic fashion, particularly the "city demon" of Expressionism, an allusion to Georg Heym's verse.
- - -
In his own "official" war writing, Brecht followed the same precept of combining truth after nature with idealism - until the yawning gap between the two plunged him into a profound artistic and psychological crisis, from which he emerged as if re-born, as the Brecht we know. Well versed in capturing heroic death in the patriotic cause, in August 1914 Eugen Brecht showed Brüstle that he was equipped to support the war effort with his pen. Eugen's next piece appeared on 10 August, in response to the sinking of the German warship Viktoria Luise on 6 August. Eugen conveyed what he had learnt about composure in the face of sacrificial death for the patriotic cause, imputing such composure to the stricken sailors, who "forgot wife and child, father and mother and went to a certain death for the great cause". Eugen addressed his fellow citizens as if he were the Kaiser's spokesman: "Let's show them that we understand their sacrifice and thank them for it!".
Detzer's patriotic sermons glorifying the Kaiser provided the boy with theological justification of suffering. As a Protestant at war, Detzer evidently felt that he should represent the values of the predominantly Lutheran Reich within the predominantly Catholic South. His sermon at the Barefoot Church on 9 August 1914 made a deep impression on Brecht. The aggressive language fed into "Thanksgiving Service", a poem which captured the mood of popular euphoria on this first "Victory Sunday" of the war.
- - -
In time-honoured fashion, religious and secular images of suffering and death as transfiguration merge in the young Brecht's war poetry. As in his pre-war poetry, he is a fervent proponent of the German cause in God's name, which, he believes, can bring national purification for the civilian population as well as the military.
- - -
Eugen Brecht regularly took part in victory celebrations at the Stadtgarten and at school. He celebrated the capture of Liège in an "Augsburg War Letter" [...] Together with Gehweyer, he produced postcards to support the Red Cross War Aid.
- - -
Berthold Eugen became a regular freelancer for the two papers and earned recognition - as well as fees - in the first two years of the war. Improbable as it now sounds, Brecht's rise to fame began as a patriotic war correspondent. He met his deadlines for stories, reportage and poems from the Augsburg home front, showing his capacity to intervene rapidly in the affairs of the moment. He would in time develop out of that capacity an instrument for strategic intervention through art. For a while, his ambition to achieve fame through his writing came together with his patriotic fervour in his journalistic adventure. The Brecht family was proud that he was seizing the moment, as he had advocated in "Storm". [...] While Eugen was busy with his vital war work, school classes shrank as pupils volunteered or were conscripted. Many died at the front, others returned mutilated.
- - -
Boys disappeared from class from one day to the next. Eugen Brecht, the war's vociferous advocate in August 1914, could not volunteer. He gave his reason why in the poem "Springtime".
- - -
"The Officer Cadet" of April 1915 and "Dance Ballad" of January 1916 articulate shock and horror at the carnage in moving ballads which tell of deeply disturbed individual lives, ruined by war. Any notion of sacrifice for a just and noble cause is abandoned.
- - -
When Werner Frisch and K. W. Obermeier collected Brecht's wartime writings from the two Augsburg newspapers, they observed that they displayed the "most profoundly disturbed mental attitude" of their author. It is surprising that critics - and above all Brecht's biographers in thrall to images of Brecht as the ice-cold cynic and political master strategist - have not properly considered Frisch and Obermeier's view. The poems of wartime madness testify to the boy's extreme mental torment, bordering on disintegration.
- - -
In 1914-16, Eugen Brecht came to realise that the German people had a price to pay for the soldier emperor Wilhelm II's pursuit of his grand design to overtake the United Kingdom as the world's leading imperial power. Eugen Brecht had a price to pay, too. He had made a name in Augsburg with his glowing support for the patriotic cause, yet the source of his renown was now a source of torment. His struggle to free himself from the torment induced by his naive belief assumed, as always, a literary form. He began to take his leave of "official" German literature and to immerse himself once again in the poètes maudits and subversives of all hues. As his political awareness grew, he had nothing but scorn and contempt for the catastrophic folly of the German imperial project.
The First World War had a seminal impact upon the writer that Brecht became. Understanding its origins would remain a major pre-occupation. Looking back in exile to the confusions of those wartime days, Brecht produced a magnificent montage of contrasting images and literary allusions, drawn from the official canon and subversive writing. Full of scathing irony, the montage conveys a distance from events and ideas which was not remotely available to the adolescent, caught as he was between his fast-unravelling Christian belief in the national mission and his resurgent admiration for his free-thinking literary heroes.
- - -
The reputation he had acquired in that place had become an embarrassment. He was done with the popular mood.
- - -
"A schoolboy's mind disturbed by the war."
By 1915 Brecht himself had published poems in which he had exposed the suffering and madness of war.
- - -
In early 1916 Brecht's anguished tone in poems like "Dance Ballad" gave way in "Soldier's Grave" - his final war poem published during the First World War and the final piece that he signed Berthold Eugen.
- - -
The war had converted the young Brecht from an ardent supporter of the Kaiser to an increasingly considered and radical opponent of his foreign policy in war.
[...] In January 1916 the school authorities reprimanded him for his behaviour.
- - -
It was not just Brecht's contempt for the patriotic cause which outraged Friedrich Gebhard. [...] Gebhard reprimanded Brecht in front of the class, thundering away and threatening expulsion, just as the school had expelled that other poet, Ludwig Ganghofer.
- - -
Brecht's expulsion was firmly on the agenda. Biographers have interpreted this whole episode as if the ice-cold, cynical Brecht had emerged fully formed from his mother's womb. Such an interpretation, as we have already suggested, has no thought for this hyper-sensitive teenager's very brittleness and vulnerability.
- - -
Conscription would take care of a very necessary lesson in life.
Yet he was saved from this fate by the intervention of an auxiliary teacher, Romuald Sauer.
- - -
[...] those poems of wartime madness, born of the extreme conflict between his ardent belief in soldierly sacrifice for the German imperial mission and the awful reality of the mass butchery of his generation.
- - -
[...] what we already know: that Brecht experienced a severe mental conflict. An outright collapse is readily conceivable. His naïve enthusiasm for patriotic sacrifice had crumbled in the face of suffering which, as Knoblach says, he experienced with vicarious intensity. A little later, in December 1917 Brecht himself adumbrated his collapse and recovery in a letter to Caspar Neher. In a manner well-nigh unique in the fiercely self-reliant Brecht's writings, he recorded a profound debt of gratitude to Neher for his role in his "renaissance".
- - -
The wartime experience of suffering with such a "thin skin" made the growth of a "thick" skin to protect his extreme sensitivity an existential necessity. This was an essential lesson of the war. Brecht's recovery from his mental torment was necessarily defined through literature.
- - -
Sexual activity became a vital part of his construction and assertion of "selfhood", its importance matched only by writing.
- - -
Donning his uniform, Brecht took up his duties as a medical orderly in Augsburg. At this late stage in the war, the square bashing of basic training was dispensed with. He reported to the field hospital at the Schiller School in Oberhausen, today's Löweneck School. It was a gruesome place. Directly behind the school was a railway track, on which trainloads of badly-wounded soldiers were brought directly from the Alsatian Front for operations and amputations. He later told Sergei Tretiakov that he treated wounds with iodine and bandaged them, giving patients enemas and blood transfusions. The scenes which Brecht witnessed would come back to haunt him.
- - -
On 11 November the fighting in the First World War ended on all fronts when the western powers and Germany signed the armistice.
Brecht was busy assembling seven of his favourite compositions in his Songs for the Guitar by Bert Brecht and his Friends. The small collection remained unpublished during his lifetime.
- - -
Brecht would return again and again to the grim significance of Rosa Luxemburg's murder in the chaotic events surrounding the foundation of the Weimar Republic.
