Steffin's collection

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The Steffin Collection is a collection of poems by the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht .

Emergence

Margarete Steffin was Brecht's colleague and lover. She put together various poems by Brecht, which Brecht marked with the note Steffin's collection in 1941 after Steffin's death . From a further note by Brecht it emerges that the poems were written in Denmark, Sweden and Finland from 1937 onwards. In the USA, new versions of the collection were created in 1942, some poems were revised here together with Hanns Eisler and most of them were set to music by him. In 1948 Brecht planned to publish his exile poems at the Aufbau-Verlag , which did not materialize. To this end, he put the Steffin collection back together again.

content

The collection carries the motto: Now this is everything and is not enough ... .
It contains the following poems:

  • Spring 1938 (1-3), Der Kirschdieb, 1940 (1-8), To the Danish Refuge, Finnish Gutsspeisekammer 1940, memorial plaques for those killed in Hitler's war against France (1-2), memorial plaque for 4,000 who died in the war of Hitler were sunk against Norway
  • From the chronicles The horse of Ruuskanen
  • From the visions parade of the old new, the birth of the great Babel, the stone fisherman, the god of war, appeal of vices and virtues
  • Appendix [poems removed by the author during the revision in 1948] 5. (In the bath)
    • Finnish epigrams On the little radio, The pipes, I read about the tank battle
    • Sonnet Finnish landscape
    • From the visions The dispute anno Domini 1938

background

The poems in the collection follow on from the Svendborg poems , they are about a third of their size. Direct "Germany poems" are missing here, and the motto with "you" remains undefined when addressing. The subject of war, on the other hand, is present everywhere in the poems, "I am still there" is Brecht's message and the little that is there ("... and is not enough") he passes on.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bertolt Brecht: Selected works in 6 volumes . Suhrkamp 1997, vol. 3, p. 253 ff, p. 494 ff.