The solution

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The solution is a poem by the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht . It is part of the Buckower Elegies collection .

content

The poem refers to the uprising of June 17 in the GDR and reports on leaflets that were then distributed in Stalinallee in East Berlin . They demanded that the population should double their work in order to win back the government's trust. The poem then asks whether it would not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and choose a new one.

background

On June 17, 1953, workers' protests in the GDR, which had initially been directed against raising standards, were violently suppressed with the participation of Soviet troops. In a short three-sentence letter to Walter Ulbricht, Brecht stated his ties to the SED . When the letter was printed in Neues Deutschland on June 21, 1953, the following sentence was omitted:

"The great debate with the masses about the speed of socialist construction will lead to a review and to a safeguarding of the socialist achievements."

Emergence

With the poem The Solution , which he wrote in his summer house in Buckow in the summer of 1953 , Brecht used poetry to reflect on the events of June 17, 1953. The idea that “the government should choose a new people” had already been considered by Brecht in the 1930s Years ago in his fragment of the Tui novel . The direct cause for the poem was a contribution How I'm Ashamed! by Kurt Barthel , 1st Secretary of the GDR Writers' Association (until 1954, then member of the Presidium) and candidate of the Central Committee of the SED in New Germany on June 20, 1953, in which it says, addressed to the construction workers:

“You will have to wall a lot and very well and act very wisely in the future before you forget this disgrace. Repairing destroyed houses is easy. Rebuilding broken trust is very, very difficult ”.

publication

Brecht published only six of the Buckow elegies during his lifetime; The solution wasn't among them. The poem was first printed in the newspaper Die Welt (1959), then in the first book editions of the Buckower Elegien , which appeared in Frankfurt am Main in 1964. Helene Weigel pushed through its inclusion in the edition of poems by Aufbau-Verlag (1969).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bertolt Brecht: Large commented on Berlin and Frankfurt edition . Suhrkamp, ​​1988-1999, Vol. 30, p. 178
  2. Jan Knopf (Ed.): Brecht-Handbuch . JBMetzler, Stuttgart 2001, vol. 2 p. 416 f
  3. Who was who in the GDR. bundesstiftung-aufverarbeitung.de
  4. KuBa: How ashamed I am! In: Neues Deutschland , June 20, 1953, p. 3; Excerpts from the article in How I am ashamed , DER SPIEGEL 27/1953; Werner Mittenzwei: The life of Bertolt Brecht or dealing with the world riddles . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1989 II p. 533
  5. ^ First publications by Buckower Elegien :
    • Sinn und Form , Heft 6, 1953 (selection, without the solution )
    • Experiment 31, Book 13, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Width and Variety of Realistic Notation. The Buckower Elegies . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 1954 and construction, Berlin 1954 (without the solution )
    • The world printed the poem on December 9, 1959 “in a remote place”.
    • Poems in exile, Buckower elegies . Insel-Bücherei No. 810, Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1964
    • Poems , Volume VII, Buckower Elegien, Poems in Exile, Late Poems, 1947–1956 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1964
    • Poems , Vol. VII, 1948–1956, Buckower Elegien, Poems, poems and songs from pieces not included in collections . Structure, Berlin and Weimar 1969