The Buckow Elegies are 22 poems that Bertolt Brecht wrote during the summer of 1953, when he was staying at a country house that he had bought early the previous year. The poems were published gradually over the next two decades. The sequence includes the most significant late poems of Brecht, renowned for being controlled, short, and formally tight.
Elegies are, by definition, backward-looking. Many of the Buckow Elegies, then, look back to the past, with Brecht indulging in unusually lyrical, personal remembrances. In Firs, for example, the speaker (who can be equated unproblematically with Brecht in all of the Elegies) sees the trees as stable, constant presences during a century of unparalleled turbulence: the trees are unchanged, but the speaker is marked by age and by the constant memories of “two world wars.”
The title Eight Years Ago looks back to 1945, to the end of the war that destroyed Nazi Germany; the poem is concerned with the current whereabouts of the Nazis who caused Germany’s downfall. The speaker suspects the “gait” (“erect”) of a postman and wonders about what “the electrician” did during the war. In other words, the past affects the present: the legacy of Hitler is alive and dangerous because men who served his destructive ideology are still at liberty in Germany.
Another poem, The One-Armed Man, actually imagines a Nazi Gestapo officer (“The dreaded S.S. man”) being exposed in the present. Despite the poems’ inclination to retrospection, as is apparent in these reflections, there is also a strong engagement with issues pertinent to 1953.
A number of the poems deliver a lacerating critique of what Brecht saw as the state-led malaise on his side of partitioned Germany, Communist East Germany. Many of these poems could not be published in East Germany during Brecht’s lifetime because they were so critical of the one-party state. The Solution, for example, is renowned for its bitterness and withering sarcasm about what Brecht viewed as the malign state apparatus that misruled East Germany.
On June 17, 1953, the East German authorities had used Soviet tanks to crush a rebellion staged by workers who protested against increased productivity quotas. Brecht supported the workers (with some reservations) and wrote in his journal in August of that year that the workers were “exposed to the class enemy again, to the capitalism of the fascist era in renewed strength.” For Brecht, the East German communist government acted as selfishly and brutally as any Western capitalist or even fascist government.
Brecht attacks this betrayal in The Solution: he sarcastically imagines a state that would rather solve all of its problems by destroying the people rather than face censure or challenge—“dissolve the people” rather than improve the nation. For such courage Brecht was regarded by many East Germans as a poet of the state. The poet’s anger over being associated by the East German government with the betrayal of the workers fully invests another poem, Nasty Morning, where the first-person speaker describes an anxiety dream in which some people point at him as if he were “a leper.”
Ultimately, Brecht was very conscious that he was not a major political player, but merely a poet writing verses in a rural retreat. Changing the Wheel best encapsulates Brecht’s sense of marginality. The speaker is an impotent passenger who must watch a driver “changing the wheel”: he can only watch “with impatience” as society struggles against the botched application of socialism by the East German government.
A low-budget German film released in 2000, The Farewell: Brecht’s Last Summer, dramatizes a sensitive fictional account of Brecht’s writing of the Buckow Elegies. In this dramatization, Brecht’s disillusionment and fatigue reflect eloquently the poems’ resigned disappointment at the apparent failure of Brecht’s art to contribute to a dynamic, just Germany.
Works Cited
Brecht, Bertolt. Journals, 1934–1955. Edited by John Willett, Routledge, 1996, pp. 454–55.
———. Letters. Edited by John Willett, Routledge, 1990, p. 674.
———. Poems, 1913–56. Edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, Eyre Methuen, 1976, pp. 439–46, 514–15, 600–03.
The Farewell: Brecht’s Last Summer. Artificial Eye, 2001.
Thomson, Philip. “Brecht’s Poetry.” The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, edited by Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks, Cambridge UP, 1994, pp. 201–17, especially 215–16.
Völker, Klaus. Brecht: A Biography. Marion Boyars, 1979, pp. 371–72.
Categories: British Literature, German Literature, Literature, War Literature
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