Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of poems and songs that lamented the disastrous state of Nazi Germany. Germany, dating from 1933, is the most famous. Hitler’s Nazis began their totalitarian control of Germany during February 1933. Like many other communists, Brecht responded by fleeing the country.

One of Brecht’s long-term artistic and political collaborators, the musician and composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), also fled from certain arrest in Berlin. Brecht responded to their exile by writing lyrics and poems that denounce Nazism, and Eisler wrote music for many of these works. Their collaborative works of this period of crisis were published as a small volume in early 1934 by a press set up in Paris by German exiles to produce anti-Nazi propaganda. There was, of course, no possibility of the work being published in Nazi Germany.

In the book Lieder, Gedichte, Chöre (Songs, Poems, Choruses), Germany is a key poem from this collection and an important example of the sort of direct attack on Hitler that Brecht produced in response to the Nazis’ increasingly violent subjugation of German society.

The poem is an urgent lamentation on the disastrous direction in which Germany was headed. The speaker addresses Germany directly—the country is personified as a “pale mother.” The first of seven stanzas accuses Germany of being “soiled” and willfully shamed and stained within the milieu of disapproving European peoples.

The second and third stanzas condemn the effects of the German rulers’ oppression of Germany’s most vulnerable “sons.” Censorship within Hitler’s Germany is attacked in the fourth stanza: “Lies are roared aloud” in the “house” of Germany, but “the truth”—as spoken by Brecht and other vituperative opponents of fascism—is repressed, concealed.

The fifth, sixth, and final stanzas lament the combined fear and mockery that this personified Germany faces from all surrounding states: People laugh at the dilapidated, diminished condition of Germany, but they also reach for weapons when this aggressive entity approaches. Germany, then, is both laughable and dangerous, foolish and lethal.

There are two important English translations of the poem. Students of Brecht should engage with the versions in Selected Poems and in Poems, 1913–56. In the former, other countries, personified as nervous people, will reach for their knives, “As at the approach of a robber.” In the latter, however, the personified country approached by Germany “grips his knife / As on seeing a murderess.” This second version makes the state of affairs appear even more dramatic and urgent and closer to the original, in which the fear caused by Germany’s descent into fascist virulence causes others to be already holding their weapons and prepared to respond to Germany as a “murderess”—not just a “robber.”

Bibliography

Betz, Albrecht. Hanns Eisler: Political Musician. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 121–123, 314.

Brecht, Bertolt. Poems, 1913–56. Edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Eyre Methuen, 1976, 218–220.

———. Selected Poems: Translation and Introduction by H. R. Hays. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947, 112–115.

Cook, Bruce. Brecht in Exile. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1982, 21.

Esslin, Martin. Brecht: A Choice of Evils. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980, 52.

Kowalke, Kim H. “Brecht and Music: Theory and Practice.” In The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, edited by Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks, 218–234, especially 222–224. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

McCullough, Derek. “Hanns Eisler.” In Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture, edited by John Sandford, 179–180. London: Routledge, 1999.