The Editorial Board of The Masses is republishing a selection of poems by revolutionary poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Bertolt Brecht was a German communist writer whose poetry and theater confronted imperialism, fascism, war and the exploitation of the masses, while insisting that art should help the masses understand and transform the conditions of their lives. Forced into exile after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Brecht continued to write against fascism and imperialism before returning to Germany to live in the German Democratic Republic after the end of the Second World War.
In Praise of the Revolutionary
The Praise of the Revolutionary was first written by Brecht for the 1933 version of the play, based on Gorky’s Mother.
When exploitation is on the rise
Many get discouraged
But his courage grows.
He organises his struggle
For wage-pennies, for tea-water
And for taking over power.
He asks property:
What is your origin ?
He asks the viewpoints:
Whom do you serve ?
Wherever there is a hush
He will speak out
Wherever there is oppression, and the talk is of fate
He will call things by their right names.
Where he sits down on the table
There sits also dissatisfaction
The food is perceived to be awful
And the room too narrow.
Wherever they chase him away
Turmoil follows, and at the hunting place
Unrest remains.
-1933
Truth Unites
Friends, I would wish you should know the truth and say it!
Not like the tired fleeing Caesars ‘Tomorrow we get the rations!’
But like Lenin: Tomorrow evening
We are done for, UNLESS…
As the little nursery rhyme has it:
Brother, to the solution
Of this problem now I turn
No way out of our precarious position
No way we can cut and run’.
Friends, a robust confession
And a robust UNLESS !
-1953
Song of the Rivers
This song was written at the request of Joris Ivens, eventual co-director of How Yukong Moved the Mountains, in whose film, Das Lied der Ströme, or The Song of the Rivers, it was reproduced in the voice of the prolific orator, musician, and revolutionary Paul Robeson.
Old Man Mississippi wreaks havoc
Our cattle it drags away, even our lands disappear.
Send to the devil the riffraff its masters
Who unleash it on us year after year
We, whose fields are gone
Nothing will be forgiven –
When its masters are undone
We will tame it then.
Our Ganges flows in India
And when it flows, everything can grow
And where it flows, there is hunger.
But it will not always be so.
We who built the fields
And watered the valley
Know that the day is near, when
There will be food in our belly.
Our Nile flows in Egypt
Temples and palace look on
And slavery is six thousand years old
Still its time is finally done.
We, who built the houses
And piled stone upon stone
Know that the day is near, when
All this we’ll own.
Our China! Our Chang Jiang(1)
Where it flows, we own the land till the sea
Merrily we work where it flows
And it also does its work merrily.
And it always was not ours
A bitter struggle had to be waged
The banner fluttered in front of the shovel
And its colour is red.
Dear Volga, our mother!
Lenin was your son, hesitation was not his style
The slave song of the barge haulers is now over
There now soars the song of the turbine all the while.
Stalingrad was the name our city
World’s enemy was there laid low.
You, wherever you find him
Like us, give him a blow.
Our Amazon no doubt flows in
Brazil, but the American flag there flies
Huge and powerful it is, and works for
The master, whom it never saw with its eyes.
Still one day, which is approaching fast
We have this solemnly sworn
It will work full blast
For us, who in this land are born.
-1954
[Image Source Above: Bert Heller, portrait of Bertolt Brecht, 1955-56]
