Svendborger Gedichte ('Svendborg Poems') is a poetry collection by the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the last collection of new poems to be published while he lived. The collection is named after the town of Svendborg on the Danish island of Funen, where Brecht lived during his exile from Nazi Germany. During this period, Hanns Eisler stayed several times to set a large group of the poems to music in collaboration with Brecht.
The first major poetry collection that Brecht wrote in exile was Lieder Gedichte Chöre . This was followed by the Svendborger Gedichte in 1939. This compilation was preceded by earlier publications, and individual poems followed, such that one can assume a period of origin from 1926 to 1938. Brecht worked on compiling the collection primarily during the winter of 1937-38 while living at Skovsbostrand outside Svendborg, in collaboration with Margarete Steffin, almost entirely completing the work by 22 July 1938. The title was initially Gedichte im Exil ('Poems in Exile'). The intention was to include the work in volume 4 of the edition of Brecht's work to be published by Wieland Herzfelde's press Malik-Verlag, nominally in London but in practice from Prague. Brecht wrote in May 1938: "you can now give me the decisive position that I have not had in emigrant literature so far. And you can simultaneously put the publisher [Malik] at the forefront." [1] [2] [3]
By March 1939, galley proofs of the whole volume had been sent to Brecht from Prague, with the set type itself being in Prague. But in the wake of the events surrounding the Munich Agreement and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, Herzfelde had to flee from Prague; the finished set of Svendborg poems was lost. The galley proofs were then passed to Copenhagen, where in May 1939 the Danish printer Universal Trykkeriet printed the Gedichte im Exil section under the new title Svendborger Gedichte, with Herzfelde named as the publisher and London as the place of publication. The volume was billed as an 'advance printing from Brecht: Collected Works, volume 4'. The publication received significant support from Ruth Berlau, the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, and apparently the Diderot Society (the latter of which Brecht was working to found around 1936). [4] [5] [6]
There are only two copies of the so-called "Prague sequence" known, one of which is in the Brecht Archive, Berlin; the other copy was discovered in 2011 by the Rotes Antiquariat, Berlin, in New York. [7]
The poems that comprised section 3, Chroniken ('chronicles'), were based on stories which Brecht encountered in his reading. For example, "Abbau des Schiffes Oskawa durch die Mannschaft" ("How the Ship 'Oskawa' was Broken up by her own Crew") is a subversive rewriting of an account of life on the ship by Louis Adamic in his 1931 Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America , while "Kohlen für Mike" ("Coal for Mike") was based on an incident in Sherwood Anderson's novel Poor White . [8]
The collection is divided into six sections. It opens with the following 'Motto to the Svendborg Poems' and contains the following poems, arranged in six sections.
Geflüchtet unter das dänische Strohdach, Freunde | Refuged beneath this Danish thatched roof, friends |
Bei den Hochgestellten; Das Brot der Hungernden ist aufgegessen; Der Anstreicher spricht von kommenden großen Zeiten; Im Kalender ist der Tag noch nicht verzeichnet; Die Arbeiter schreien nach Brot; Die das Fleisch wegnehmen vom Tisch; Die Oberen sagen: Frieden und Krieg; Wenn der Anstreicher durch die Lautsprecher über den Frieden redet; Wenn die Oberen vom Frieden reden; Die Oberen; Mann mit der zerschlissenen Jacke; Auf der Mauer stand mit Kreide; Die Oberen sagen; Der Krieg, der kommen wird; Die Oberen sagen, im Heer; Wenn es zum Marschieren kommt, wissen viele nicht; General, dein Tank ist ein starker Wagen; Wenn der Krieg beginnt; Der Anstreicher wird sagen, daß irgendwo Länder erobert sind; Wenn der Trommler seinen Krieg beginnt.
This series of poems begins with the famous motto
In den finsteren Zeiten, | In the dark times |
It contains: Deutsches Lied; Ballade von der Judenhure Marie Sanders; Ballade von den Osseger Witwen; Lied der Starenschwärme; Ulm 1592; Vom Kind, das sich nicht waschen wollte; Kleines Bettellied; Der Pflaumenbaum; Mein Bruder war ein Flieger; Der Gottseibeiuns; Keiner oder alle; Lied gegen den Krieg; Einheitsfrontlied; Resolution der Kommunarden.
Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters; Legende von der Entstehung des Buches Taoteking auf dem Weg des Laotse in die Emigration; Besuch bei den verbannten Dichtern; Gleichnis des Budda vom brennenden Haus; Die Teppichweber von Kujan-Bulak ehren Lenin; Die unbesiegliche Inschrift; Kohlen für Mike; Abbau des Schiffes Oskawa durch die Mannschaft; Inbesitznahme der großen Metro durch die moskauer Arbeiterschaft am 27. April 1935; Schnelligkeit des sozialistischen Aufbaus; Der große Mai.
An den Schwankenden; An die Gleichgeschalteten; Auf den Tod eines Kämpfers für den Frieden; Rat an die bildenden Künstler..; Ansprache des Bauern an seinen Ochsen; Bei der Geburt eines Sohnes; Rede eines Arbeiters an einen Arzt; Appell; Verhöhnung des Soldaten der Revolution; Kantate zu Lenins Todestag; Lob des Revolutionärs; Grabschrift für Gorki.
Die Bücherverbrennung; Traum von einer großen Miesmacherin; Der Dienstzug; Schwierigkeit des Regierens; Notwendigkeit der Propaganda; Die Verbesserungen des Regimes; Die Ängste des Regimes; Kanonen nötiger als Butter; Die Jugend und das Dritte Reich; Der Krieg soll gut vorbereitet sein; Die Liebe zum Führer; Was der Führer nicht weiß; Wörter, die der Führer nicht hören kann; Die Sorgen des Kanzlers; Trost vom Kanzler; Der Jude, ein Unglück für das Volk; Die Regierung als Künstler; Dauer des Dritten Reiches; Verbot der Theaterkritik.
This series of poems begins with the motto
Du der du, sitzend im Buge des Bootes | Seated up in the boat's bows, as you |
It contains: Über die Bezeichnung Emigranten; Gedanken über die Dauer des Exils; Zufluchtstätte; Und in eurem Land?; Verjagt mit gutem Grund; An die Nachgeborenen.
One English translation of most of the Svendborger Gedichte is Bertold Brecht, Poems 1913-1956, ed. by John Willett, Ralph Manheim, and Erich Fried (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976). The poems are scattered through this anthology; there is a guide to their published order on pp. 506–9.
The poems are also translated in Bertold Brecht, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, trans. by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn (New York: Liveright, 2018).
German editions include:
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, subtitled "A parable play", is a 1941 play by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. It chronicles the rise of Arturo Ui, a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster, and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket by ruthlessly disposing of the opposition. The play is a satirical allegory of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany prior to World War II.
Hanns Eisler was a German-Austrian composer. He is best known for composing the national anthem of East Germany, for his long artistic association with Bertolt Brecht, and for the scores he wrote for films. The Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin is named after him.
Poor White is an American novel by Sherwood Anderson, published in 1920. An episode in the novel inspired Bertold Brecht's poem "Kohlen für Mike", published in his 1939 collected Svendborger Gedichte.
Baal was the first full-length play written by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. It concerns a wastrel youth who becomes involved in several sexual affairs and at least one murder. It was written in 1918, when Brecht was a 20-year-old student at Munich University, in response to the expressionist drama The Loner by the soon-to-become-Nazi dramatist Hanns Johst.
Drums in the Night is a play by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht wrote it between 1919 and 1920, and it received its first theatrical production in 1922. It is in the Expressionist style of Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser. The play—along with Baal and In the Jungle—won the Kleist Prize for 1922 ; the play was performed all over Germany as a result. Brecht later claimed that he had only written it as a source of income.
Arthur Kutscher was a German historian of literature and researcher in drama. Together with Max Herrmann he can be seen as a founding father of theatre studies in Germany. He was a professor at Munich University, where he taught a famous seminar in theatre history. Kutscher was a friend of the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret-star Frank Wedekind. His work influenced many playwrights, poets, and directors. His students included Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, Peter Hacks, Hanns Johst, Klabund, and Erich Mühsam. Brecht's first full-length play, Baal, was written in response to an argument in one of Kutscher's drama seminars. While Kutscher was responsible for inspiring an admiration for Wedekind in the young Brecht, he was "bitterly critical" of Brecht's own early dramatic writings.
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The Decision, frequently translated as The Measures Taken, is a Lehrstück and agitprop cantata by the twentieth-century German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Created in collaboration with composer Hanns Eisler and director Slatan Dudow, it consists of eight sections in prose and unrhymed, free verse, with six major songs. A note to the text by all three collaborators describes it as an "attempt to use a didactic piece to make familiar an attitude of positive intervention."
In the Jungle of Cities is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. Written between 1921 and 1924, it received its first theatrical production under the title Im Dickicht at the Residenztheater in Munich, opening on 9 May 1923. This production was directed by Erich Engel, with set design by Caspar Neher. The cast included Otto Wernicke as Shlink the lumber dealer, Erwin Faber as George Garga, and Maria Koppenhöfer as his sister Mary. Im Dickicht was produced at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where Brecht had been employed as a dramaturg. The production opened on 29 October 1924, with the same director and scenographer, but in a cut version with a new prologue and the title Dickicht: Untergang einer Familie. Fritz Kortner played Shlink and Walter Frank played George, with Franziska Kinz, Paul Bildt, Mathias Wieman, and Gerda Müller also in the cast. Willett and Manheim report that this production "was not a success".
Mahagonny, ein Songspiel, or Mahagonny, a song-play, was written by composer Kurt Weill and dramatist Bertolt Brecht and first performed with that title and description in 1927. Elisabeth Hauptmann contributed the words to two of its songs. Just under half an hour in length, the work can be thought of as a staged or scenic cantata. By the end of 1929, however, Mahagonny had grown into a two-hour opera with the title Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, or Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. This was premiered in March 1930. Today the cantata and the opera are considered separately, the latter holding a place in the repertory, the former being an occasional piece staged in small theaters or programmed as an outgrowth of a song recital when resources permit. For this reason the shorter work is informally referred to as Das kleine Mahagonny, or The Little Mahagonny, or as Mahagonny-Songspiel.
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Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt.
"What Keeps Mankind Alive?" is a song composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their music drama The Threepenny Opera which premiered in Berlin in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. The title refers to the central line from the finale of act 2, Denn wovon lebt der Mensch?. In the opera, the two stanzas of the strophic piece are sung by Macheath and Mrs Peachum and the final line is sung in fortissimo by the chorus.
Peter Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter.
The "Einheitsfrontlied" is one of the most famous songs of the German labour movement. It was written by Bertolt Brecht and composed by Hanns Eisler. The best-known rendition was sung by Ernst Busch.
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Gerhard Friedrich "Gerd" Semmer was a German poet, columnist, songwriter and translator. He is considered the "father of the German protest song".
Kantate (Cantata) for soli, choir, organ and orchestra is a work by German composer Jörg Widmann. It was composed in 2023, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach taking office as Thomaskantor in Leipzig. It was premiered on 8 June 2023 by Thomaskantor Andreas Reize conducting Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and Thomanerchor at Thomaskirche.
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