Playwrights From Germany

"For once you must try not to shirk the facts: Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts."

"You may proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy But till you feed us, right and wrong can wait!"

"My business is too difficult. My business is trying to arouse human pity. There are few things that'll move people to pity, a few, but the trouble is when they've been used several times, they no longer work. So it happens, for instance, that a man who sees another man on the street corner with only a stump for an arm will be so shocked the first time that he'll give him sixpence. But the second time it'll only be a threepenny bit. And if he sees him a third time, he'll hand him over cold-bloodedly to the police."

"And the shark he has his teeth and There they are for all to see And Macheath he has his knife but No one knows where it may be."

"First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics."

"Those who lead the country into the abyss Call ruling too difficult For ordinary men."

"Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of."

"Let nothing be called natural In an age of bloody confusion, Ordered disorder, planned caprice, And dehumanized humanity, lest all things Be held unalterable!"

"The theater-goer in conventional dramatic theater says: Yes, I've felt that way, too. That's the way I am. That's life. That's the way it will always be. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is no escape for him. That's great art — Everything is self-evident. I am made to cry with those who cry, and laugh with those who laugh. But the theater-goer in the epic theater says: I would never have thought that. You can't do that. That's very strange, practically unbelievable. That has to stop. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is an escape for him. That's great art — nothing is self-evident. I am made to laugh about those who cry, and cry about those who laugh."

"Do not treat me in this fashion. Don't leave me out. Have I not Always spoken the truth in my books? And now You treat me like a liar! I order you: Burn me!"

"The main objective is to learn to think crudely. Crude thinking is the great one's thinking."

"A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls."

"People will observe you to see How well you have observed. The man who only observes himself however never gains Knowledge of men. He is too anxious To hide himself from himself. And nobody is Cleverer than he himself is."

"With drooping shoulders The majority sit hunched, their foreheads furrowed like Stony ground that has been repeatedly ploughed-up to no purpose."

"Wie lange Dauern die Werke? So lange Als bis sie fertig sind."

"Of all the works of man I like best Those which have been used. The copper pots with their dents and flattened edges The knives and forks whose wooden handles Have been worn away by many hands: such forms Seemed to me the noblest."

"All the gang of those who rule us Hope our quarrels never stop Helping them to split and fool us So they can remain on top."

"On golden chairs Sitting at ease, you paid for the songs which we chanted To those less lucky. You paid us for drying their tears And for comforting all those whom you had wounded."

"Spring is noticed, if at all By people sitting in railway trains."

"The rain Never falls upwards. When the wound Stops hurting What hurts is The scar."

"Come in, dear wind, and be our guest You too have neither home nor rest."

"Here today we huddle tight As the darkest heathens might The snow falls chilly on our skin The snow is forcing its way in. Hush, snow, come in with us to dwell: We were thrown out by Heaven as well."

"Marie Farrar: month of birth, April Died in the Meissen penitentiary An unwed mother, judged by the law, she will Show you how all that lives, lives frailly. You who bear your sons in laundered linen sheets And call your pregnancies a "blessed" state Should never damn the outcast and the weak: Her sin was heavy, but her suffering great. Therefore, I beg, make not your anger manifest For all that lives needs help from all the rest."

"Oh the harsh snarl of guitar strings roaring! Heavenly distensions of our throats! Trousers stiff with dirt and love! Such whoring! Long green slimy nights: we were like stoats."

"Worship with fulness of heart the weak memory of heaven! It cannot trace Either your name or your face Nobody knows you're still living."

"And when she was finished they laid her in earth Flowers growing, butterflies juggling over her... She, so light, barely pressed the earth down How much pain it took to make her as light as that!"

"Oh why do we not say the important things, it would be so easy, and we are damned because we do not."

"Engel verführt man gar nicht oder schnell. Verzieh ihn einfach in den Hauseingang Steck ihm die Zunge in den Mund und lang Ihm untern Rock, bis er sich naß macht, stell Ihm das Gesicht zur Wand, heb ihm den Rock Und fick ihn. Stöhnt er irgendwie beklommen Dann halt ihn fest und laß ihn zweimal kommen Sonst hat er dir am Ende einen Schock. Ermahn ihn, dass er gut den Hintern schwenkt Heiß ihn dir ruhig an die Hoden fassen Sag ihm, er darf sich furchtlos fallen lassen Dieweil er zwischen Erd und Himmel hängt – Doch schau ihm nicht beim Ficken ins Gesicht Und seine Flügel, Mensch, zerdrück sie nicht."

"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. (Weil die Dinge sind, wie sie sind, werden die Dinge nicht so bleiben wie sie sind.)"

"Firebugs dragging their gasoline bottles Are approaching the Academy of Arts, with a grin. And so, instead of embracing them, Let us demand the freedom of the elbow To knock the bottles out of their filthy hands. Even the most blockheaded bureaucrat, Provided he loves peace, Is a greater lover of the arts Than any so-called art-lover Who loves the arts of war."

"But something's missing (Aber etwas fehlt)."

"People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart."

"What is the wisdom of a book compared with the wisdom of an angel?"

"History has a way of reducing individuals to flat, two-dimensional portraits. it is the enemy of subjectivity, which is why Stephen Dedalus called it "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". If we think of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, we see them standing alone, outside of history. They are spotlighted by their intensity, and the background is all darkness. They intersect history, but are not a part of it. There is something anti-history about such men; they are not subject to time, accident and death, but their intensity is a protest against it. I have elsewhere called such men "Outsiders" because they attempt to stand outside history. which defines humanity on terms of limitation, not of possibility."

"The one poet who both grew out of but gave form to many of the thoughts and philosophies of these groups was Friedrich Hölderlin and though his disillusionment with the French revolution was great, the poems he wrote in response to it seek to bring a the sense of revolutionary elan and hope which it promised into his oeuvre. He did this by returning to the classical tradition and a reworking of ancient Greece which, instead of the usual promotion of a static understanding of the way history works, he emphasised the old Heraclitean adage that everything is in flux. Hope sprung eternal because hope emerged out of changed circumstances and out of the fundamental human desire to make things better, no matter how that desire may become diverted and deformed by the contingencies of the every day. His rediscovery of Dionysian desire is clear in his work."

"The fact remains that Hölderlin's creed was a kind of pantheism – though it has many varieties – and that his supreme value was beauty – though beauty is variously understood and experienced. Beauty for Hölderlin was not a thing in itself, but rather the grace attendant on a harmonious manifestation of the powers of Nature. Athenian civilization was the type of the beautiful, because Nature achieved in it her own perfect form."

"It was the function of poetry, not of himself as the poet, that he thought highly. That function was sacred, for the poet was the priest of the divine. Mr. Peacock – we think rightly – compares him with Blake both for his isolation among his contemporaries and for the purity of his utterance, which seems to carry with it so little base or neutral matter. He can be compared with Blake also for his sense of inspiration; but whereas the divine for Blake was gradually concentrated in a power which he identified with the god of Christianity, Hölderlin sought for it in the gods. These gods of his – of whose imaginative reality his poetry convinces us – appear to have been created by a singular combination of German philosophical pantheism and a profound insight into the religious sources of Greek poetry."

"Friedrich Hölderlin saw his times – like Wordsworth, Beethoven and Hegel, he was born in 1770 – as in fermentation, as a messy process that may lead to clarity. Most of his poems are concerned with the nature and possibility of transition. Through the complexity of their syntax, the intricate jointing of their rhythms, and their abrupt shifts between images, we are trained in the dynamics of moving through uncertainty, and given experiences of how it can resolve itself into coherence. But almost at once comes the correction, the recognition that reality does not yet match the hopes that it is nevertheless capable of nourishing. If we are taken back to ancient Greece, the chief sustainer of Hölderlin's belief that a better world was possible, to witness, as in his poem “The Archipelago”, a vision of the growth of Athens so powerful it seems to be happening before our eyes, it is only to have the illusion wrecked by the reminder that Athens now lies in ruins. “The Archipelago” ends with the sober desire to understand the “changing and becoming” (“das Wechseln / Und das Werden”) it has so successfully embodied in its lines, so at a kind of remove; and most of Hölderlin's completed poems end quietly."

"When you read Hölderlin, you see feints and variations that put him with Celan; it was reading Hölderlin that gave Rilke the impetus for his Duino Elegies (his "Gods" are like Rilke's "Angels", tutelary presences that don't quite convince us that they exist: "Celebrate – yes, but what?" Hölderlin writes somewhere, but it sounds eerily like Rilke). Sometimes reading him can feel as bitterly sacramental as Trakl, the great Austrian poet who took his life following the battle of Grodek in the first world war. All that doesn't really "translate". If you really want to read Hölderlin – or any one of the other great "national" poets – you should learn German (or Russian or French or Spanish)."

"Before either of us knew it, we belonged to each other."

"It was not delight, not wonder that arose among us, it was the peace of heaven. A thousand times have I said it to her and to myself: the most beautiful is also the most sacred. And such was everything in her. Like her singing, even so was her life."

"I call on Fate to give me back my soul."

"What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful! There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go."

"Now we were standing close to the summit's rim, gazing out into the endless East."

"Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste."

"The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling."

"You seek life, and a godly fire Gushes and gleams for you out of the earth, As, with shuddering long, you Hurl yourself down to the flames of the Etna. So by a queen's wanton whim Pearls were dissolved in wine- heed her not! What folly, poet, to cast your riches Into that bright and bubbling cup! Yet still are you holy to me, as the might of the earth That bore you away, audaciously perishing! And I would follow the hero into the depths Did love not hold me."

"Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth, and one way."

"Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst // das Rettende auch. - Patmos, 1803, Vers 3f. in: Gedichte von Friedrich Hölderlin, Druck und Verlag von Philipp Reclam jun., Leipzig 1873, S. 133"

"Wir sind nichts; was wir suchen, ist alles. - Fragment von Hyperion, aus: Neue Thalia, Vierter Band, Hrsg. Friedrich Schiller, Georg Joachim Göschen, Leipzig 1793, S. 220"