David Lau on Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer

At the Verso Books blog, David Lau writes about Bertolt Brecht's War Primer, which the publisher recently released into the wilds of bookstore shelves. "When War Primer (Kriegsfibel) first appeared in English nearly two decades ago," Lau explains, "its Second World War-era photo-epigrams (fotoepigramme, as Brecht dubbed them) would take readers into a core sample of the twentieth century’s unparalleled violence. A compelling use of the epigram alongside newspaper war photography, War Primer’s image-poems each dialectically exemplify a moment of conflict during the war." Let's pick up with his essay from there:

Chiseled rhyming quatrains, a form borrowed from Kipling and rendered expertly by translator and scholar John Willet, separate an epic of World War II into instances, some familiar. Others confound expected patterns. The book is a verbal-visual montage of irony, discord, and hope. Like a child’s primer on letters, animals, or, from our perspective, political dinosaurs, it presents a veritable alphabet of figures, from individuals like Hitler, Goebbels, and Churchill, to crowds of refugees, soldiers, and anonymous elements of the masses caught in the fighting. Estranging the interstate conflict, Brecht here depicts soldiers, peasants, families, workers, and others — the protagonists of his historical materialism — in an underlying class struggle made obscure by fascism, Stalinism, and the World War.

Brecht considered War Primer part of “a satisfactory literary report on my years in exile,” as he wrote in a 1944 journal entry. Since this first English language reception of War Primer on the centenary of Brecht’s birth in 1998, what are we now to make of his poignant modernist epic of four-liner lyrics and scrapbook photos? Today, in our post-crash era, with its renewal of Marxism, Brecht the formalist can be freed from a series of postmodern qualifications. War Primer’s historical intervention can be seen in a new way today. With the far right politically relevant again, Brecht’s image-by-image analysis of social democracy, America, and fascism, which is the veritable heart of War Primer, possesses fresh relevance.

Read on at Verso.