Poets From Germany

"When I take a long look at my life, as though from outside, it does not appear particularly happy. Yet I am even less justified in calling it unhappy, despite all its mistakes. After all, it is foolish to keep probing for happiness or unhappiness, for it seems to me it would be hard to exchange the unhappiest days of my life for all the happy ones. If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless. Even if, as it is decreed by the gods, fate has inexorably trod over my external existence as it does with everyone, my inner life has been of my own making . I deserve its sweetness and bitterness and accept full responsibility for it."

"Once my world was full of friends,"

"Sadness when there should be Joy, hatred when there should be love show compassion because we can be more because we both have scars and pain that no one will ever understand but us so be with me not against me and bring us where we were happy and free."

"That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!"

"Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure."

"In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day."

"I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, "It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." I cherish the mercy and the grace of women’s work. But I know there is new work that we must undertake as well: that new work will make defeat detestable to us. That new women’s work will mean we will not die trying to stand up: we will live that way: standing up. I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again."

"I turned to Brecht and asked him why, if he felt the way he did about Jerome and the other American Communists, he kept on collaborating with them, particularly in view of their apparent approval or indifference to what was happening in the Soviet Union. ... Brecht shrugged his shoulders and kept on making invidious remarks about the American Communist Party and asserted that only the Soviet Union and its Communist Party mattered. ... But I argued ... it was the Kremlin and above all Stalin himself who were responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of the opposition and their dependents. It was at this point that he said in words I have never forgotten, 'As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' I was so taken aback that I thought I had misheard him. 'What are you saying?' I asked. He calmly repeated himself, 'The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' ... I was stunned by his words. 'Why? Why?' I exclaimed. All he did was smile at me in a nervous sort of way. I waited, but he said nothing after I repeated my question. I got up, went into the next room, and fetched his hat and coat. When I returned, he was still sitting in his chair, holding a drink in his hand. When he saw me with his hat and coat, he looked surprised. He put his glass down, rose, and with a sickly smile took his hat and coat and left. Neither of us said a word. I never saw him again."

"I will quote Brecht: “I’m on the side of the people.”"

"Yesterday, a long conversation in Brecht’s sickroom about my essay "The Author as Producer." Brecht thought the theory I develop in the essay — that the attainment of technical progress in literature eventually changes the function of art forms (hence also of the intellectual means of production) and is therefore a criterion for judging the revolutionary function of literary works — applies to artists of only one type, the writers of the upper bourgeoisie, among whom he counts himself. "For such a writer," he said, "there really exists a point of solidarity with the interests of the proletariat: it is the point at which he can develop his own means of production. Because he identifies with the proletariat at this point, he is proletarianized — completely so — at this same point, i.e. as a producer. And his complete proletarianization at this one point establishes his solidarity with the proletariat all along the line.""

"There is a wonderful sentence, a statement, by one of Bertolt Brecht's characters, he says: "I am that man that goes around with a brick in his hand, to show the world how his house was." And that's the way I feel about my books in a way, that they are my bricks. I can show people what I believe my world was, so I've not lost it."

"What if they gave a war and no one came? Then the war will come to you."

"If you fight you might lose, if you don’t you have already lost."

"The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies."

"Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it."

"And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds. That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself Surely you see that."

"High above the lake a bomber flies. From the rowing boats Children look up, women, an old man. From a distance They appear like young starlings, their beaks Wide open for food."

"Every day, to earn my daily bread I go to the market where lies are bought Hopefully I take up my place among the sellers."

"This is the year which people will talk about This is the year which people will be silent about.The old see the young die. The foolish see the wise die.The earth no longer produces, it devours. The sky hurls down no rain, only iron."

"In den finsteren Zeiten Wird da auch gesungen werden? Da wird auch gesungen werden. Von den finsteren Zeiten."

"The man who laughs has simply not yet had the terrible news."

"General, man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect: He can think."

"General, your tank is a powerful vehicle it smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. but it has one defect: it needs a driver."

"Their peace and their war Are like wind and storm.War grows from their peace."

"Little changes are the enemies of great changes."

"The headlong stream is termed violent But the river bed hemming it in is Termed violent by no one."

"Who built Thebes of the 7 gates ? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ?And Babylon, many times demolished, Who raised it up so many times ?In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live ? Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?Great Rome is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them?Over whom did the Caesars triumph?Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ?Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it, The drowning still cried out for their slaves.The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone?Caesar beat the Gauls. Did he not even have a cook with him?Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down. Was he the only one to weep?Frederick the Second won the Seven Years' War. Who else won it?Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors?Every ten years a great man. Who paid the bill?So many reports.So many questions."

"When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!"When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer."

"The plum tree in the yard's so small It's hardly like a tree at all. Yet there it is, railed round To keep it safe and sound.The poor thing can't grow any more Though if it could it would for sure. There's nothing to be done It gets too little sun."

"Events cast long shadows before. One such event would be a war. But how are shadows to be seen When total darkness fills the screen?"

"Play your part creatively in all the struggles Of men of your time, thereby Helping, with the seriousness of study and the cheerfulness of knowledge To turn the struggle into common experience and Justice into a passion."

"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."

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

"I love Brecht and Fassbinder, of course."

"this sequence has that title coming from a poem by Bertolt Brecht, the great German playwright and poet, a revolutionary playwright and poet, I should add, who wrote a poem in which he said, “What kind of times are these, when it seems almost a crime to talk about trees, because it means keeping silent about so many evil deeds.” And so, I called the whole sequence “What Kind of Times Are These.” And in it, I was just playing with the sense of what it was like—what it is like to be alive in this country in the 1990s—the encroaching power of the capitalist economy, the denial of any kind of counterbalancing past, the wiping out of history, and also the need to find happiness and pleasure in the midst of such dark times, and how that can carry you through to be aware, as open-eyed as you can of what is going on in your time, and at the same time, as Rosa Luxemburg advised, to seize every beautiful cloud and every joyful moment. And so, this little sequence of poems came out of that kind of musing."

"As a youth I enjoyed — indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered — the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system — which is to say by the accrual of wealth — house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America."