Svendborg poems

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Title poem Svendborger Gedichte

Svendborger Gedichte is a collection of poems by the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht . The collection is named after the town of Svendborg on Fyn , where Brecht stayed during his exile in Denmark. During this time, Hanns Eisler stayed there several times in order to set a large part of the poems to music together with Brecht.

Emergence

The first large collection of poems that Brecht wrote in exile was songs, poems, choirs . The Svendborger Gedichte followed in 1939. This compilation is preceded by older editions and individual poems follow, so that one can assume a period between 1926 and 1938. The title was initially Poems in Exile , Brecht urged his publisher Wieland Herzfelde to publish both works together after the great attention that his Paris performance of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich had received in May 1938. He wrote in May 1938: “You can now give me the decisive position that I have not yet had in émigré literature. And you can make the publishing house [Malik] dominant at the same time. ” In the course of the events surrounding the Munich Agreement , Herzfelde had to flee Prague; the completed set of Svendborg poems was lost. The collection was published in mid-1939 using the Prague flags in Copenhagen and with significant support from Ruth Berlau .

Only two copies of the so-called “Prager Satz” are known, one of them is in the Brecht Archive, Berlin, the other copy was discovered in 2011 by the Rote Antiquariat , Berlin, in New York and given to an important private collection.

content

The collection is divided into six sections (fictitious section headings in brackets) and contains the following poems:

I German War Primer
Among the Supreme; The bread of the hungry is eaten; The house painter speaks of the great times ahead; The day has not yet been recorded in the calendar; The workers cry out for bread; Who take the meat off the table; The superiors say: peace and war; When the house painter talks about peace through the loudspeakers; When the superiors speak of peace; The upper ones; Man with the tattered jacket; It was written in chalk on the wall; The upper ones say; The war that will come; The superiors say in the army; When it comes to marching, many do not know; General, your tank is a strong car; When the war begins; The house painter will say that countries have been conquered somewhere; When the drummer starts his war.

II [Motto: "In the dark times ..."]
German song; Ballad by the Jewish whore Marie Sanders; Ballad by the Widows of Osseg; Song of the swarms of starlings; Ulm 1592; About the child who did not want to wash; Little beggar song; The plum tree; My brother was an aviator ; The gods of us; None or all; Song against war; United front song; resolution

III Chronicles
Questions from a reading worker ; Legend of the origin of the book Taoteking on the path of Laotse into emigration ; Visiting the exiled poets; Budda's parable of the burning house; The Kujan-Bulak carpet weavers honor Lenin; The invincible inscription; Coals for Mike; Dismantling of the Oskawa ship ..; Taking possession of the great metro ..; Speed ​​of socialist construction; The great May

IV
To the wavering; To those in line; To the death of a fighter for peace; Advice to visual artists ..; Address of the farmer to his ox; At the birth of a son; Speech of a worker to a doctor; Appeal; Mockery of the soldier of the revolution; Cantata on the anniversary of Lenin's death; Praise of the revolutionary; Gravestone for Gorky

V Deutsche Satiren
Die bookburning; Dream of a great bully; The service train; Difficulty of governing; Need for propaganda; The improvements in the regime; The regime's fears; Cannons more necessary than butter; The youth and the Third Reich; The war should be well prepared; Love for the leader; What the Führer does not know; Words the guide cannot hear; The concerns of the chancellor; Consolation from the Chancellor; The Jew, a misfortune for the people; The government as an artist; Duration of the Third Reich; Ban on theater criticism

VI [Motto: "You who sit in the bow of the boat ..."]
About the term emigrants; Thoughts about duration of exile; Refuge; And in your country ?; Chased away with good reason; To those born later

Individual evidence

  1. Jan Knopf (Ed.): Brecht Handbook . JB Metzler Stuttgart 2001, vol. 2, p. 327
  2. ^ BB: Selected works in 6 volumes . Suhrkamp 1997, Vol. 3, S273 ff, 465 ff.
  3. New youth. Brochure for the small Grosz folder (PDF). Red second-hand bookshop. Catalog autumn 2011.