'An Artifact Rich & Strange': Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer

It's an "acid take on the so-called 'Good War,'" Roy Scranton writes of Bertolt Brecht's War Primer, a diary that fuses photographs Brecht collected between 1939 and 1945 with poetic epigrams. At Los Angeles Review of Books, Scranton writes, "Brecht's War Primer comes to us from that lost world, its pages less a lesson than the partial remains of a witness." We'll pick up with Scranton's review from there:

The photos in War Primer, which Brecht clipped out of newspapers and magazines, are accompanied by poetic epigrams in what is more or less ballad form, tart quatrains in sing-song pentameter rhyming ABAB, sometimes AABB, rendered here in the late John Willett’s finely crafted translations from the German. Their tone is pungently “Brechtian,” the voice that of a moralizing Mackie Messer, cynical, scornful, witty, and sly. Picture-epigram #57 gives something of the taste: the photo shows an American soldier standing on the beach looking down at a dead Japanese counterpart he’s just shot. We see the American from the rear; he clutches in his hand a pistol. The Japanese soldier lies twisted at the American’s feet, holding his stomach. Beyond them we see more bodies, the corner of a barge or landing craft, and the wide Pacific. Brecht’s quatrain reads:

And with their blood they were to colour red
A shore that neither owned. I hear it said
That they were forced to kill each other. True.
My only question is: who forced them to?

Brecht’s hatred for Nazi leadership, and especially his contempt for Hitler, shines clear in many of the epigrams, but War Primer is no work of Allied propaganda. As the text of #57 suggests, Brecht understood World War II largely in terms of masses duped, betrayed, hijacked, and murdered by corrupt rulers. Behind the nationalist fervor roused by the war, Brecht saw gangsters waging a turf battle. In this way, War Primer offers a perspective not often considered by contemporary American readers, an acid take on the so-called “Good War” which sees the conflict not as a necessary struggle of good against evil but a worldwide eruption of violence, cruelty, profiteering, suffering, and lies. It was, for Brecht, like all wars, a global bloodbath in which the vampiric rich fed on the machine-gunned and fire-bombed poor.

Read more at Los Angeles Review of Books.