poor photographer - dead troops talk
bertolt brecht - war primer
Brecht’s War Primer - David Evans
War Primer - Kriegsfibel in German - is a collection of what Bertolt Brecht called “photo-epigrams”, four line verses captioning photographs clipped from newspapers and magazines. They were mainly composed during World War Two, while Brecht was living in Scandinavia and the United States as an exile from Nazi Germany. Edited by his Danish collaborator, Ruth Berlau, they were finally published as a book in 1955 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Brecht’s home base from 1949 until his death in 1956. Astonishingly, an English language edition only appeared in 1998. This edition was the work of Brecht scholar John Willett and Libris, an independent publisher in North London that specializes in German Studies. War Primer merits attention for two reasons: first, it represents Brecht’s most sustained, practical engagement with photography; second, it was notably absent in the discussions about Brecht and photography which reached their apogee in the 1970s, in Britain at least. War Primer can be viewed as the “functional transformation” of mainstream press photographs though the addition of alternative captions, informed by Brecht’s Communist politics. But it is more. If the choice of the epigram is meant to suggest ancient inscriptions, then the press photograph has plausibility as the equivalent to the ancient statue or building for which the epigram was originally intended. That is, War Primer is a series of portable monuments, flat memorials to World War Two. In addition, War Primer can be understood as a homage to Lenin, a leader who had little time for traditional monuments. In Brecht’s project there are no heroes, no statues, no stone, no bronze. Not even the impermanent plaster favoured by Lenin for an abandoned series of temporary monuments to teach revolutionary, proletarian civics. Instead, Brecht uses paper images cut out of newspapers and magazines. For Krakauer, such photographic ephemera are an aid to forgetting. For Brecht, however, they have a potential use value. Combined with his epigrams, the carefully selected images become poor monuments, an aid to critical remembering. The above is adapted from: David Evans,’Brecht’s War Primer : The “Photo-Epigram” As Poor Monument’, Afterimage 30.5 (March/April 2003). All “photo-epigrams” used by criticaldictionary are translated by John Willett and taken from War Primer (London: Libris, 1998). Thanks to Nicholas Jacobs (Libris) for permission to use this material.
Suffer the old woman to come unto me That they may glimpse, before their graves close o’er them The man their sons obeyed so faithfully As long as he had graves left open for them
But when we sighted the red walls of Moscow People appeared from farm and factory And they repelled us in the name of every people Even the people back in Germany
Look at the helmets of the vanquished! Yet Surely the moment when we came undone Was not when they were smitten from our heads But when we first agreed to put them on
A summer day was dawning near Cherbourg A man from Maine came crawling up the sand Supposedly against men from Ruhr In fact against the men of Stalingrad
Here are two brothers, brought in armoured trucks To quarrel over the one brother’s land! So cruelly the tamed elephant attacks His brother, the unbroken elephant.
heiner müller, sibylle bergemann - a spectre is leaving europe
Heiner Müller and The Spectre Leaving Europe A Spectre Leaves Europe was published in Cologne in 1990. (The title ironically alludes to the opening boast of The Communist Manifesto of 1848 about the new spectre haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.) Sibylle Bergemann’s photographs are an official record of the creation and installation of a statue of Marx and Engels, unveiled in East Berlin in 1986. Bergemann gave a set of prints to poet / playwright Heiner Müller who left them lying around in his East Berlin apartment for some time. Müller only thought of using the images when Communist monuments began to be dismantled, rather than erected, throughout Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. The photographs show Communist business as usual. Viewed retrospectively, however, they encourage reflections on the fragility and transience of all forms of political authority. A theme that interested Brecht, but not Müller. Unlike Brecht’s ‘photo-epigrams’, his poems offer no direct commentary on the photographs. Rather, they are ‘the explosion of a memory’, triggered by the events of 1989: On the tube I see my compatriots With hands and feet vote against the truth That forty years ago was my own What grave will protect me from my youth? (DE)
