Brecht's War Primer: the "photo-epigram" as poor monument.

Kriegsfibel (literally, War Primer) 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 II, 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. (1) This book merits attention for two reasons: first, it represents Brecht's most sustained, practical engagement with photography and second, it was notably absent in the discussions about Brecht and photography which reached their apogee in the 1970s, in Britain at least.

The title, War Primer, deliberately recalls the textbooks used to teach elementary school children how to read. Brecht's "primer" also has a didactic function, but aims to teach visual literacy to adults. In her introductory note, Berlau challenges the idea that the meaning of a press photograph is self-evident: "The great ignorance concerning social relations, an ignorance nursed carefully and brutally by capitalism, reduces thousands of photos in illustrated journals to hieroglyphs which are undecipherable for the unsuspecting reader (2). Like an ancient hieroglyph, the press photograph is "undecipherable" for anyone who lacks the appropriate training. Brecht's book is offered, therefore, as a practical manual, demonstrating how to "read" or "translate" press photographs. At the same time, it seeks to provide some basic lessons about the nature of modern warfar.

The place and date of publication (the GDR, 1955) is significant. Attempts to publish the book in the early 1950s had run into difficulties, ultimately related to global politics. The start of the Cold War had encouraged the Soviet Union to maintain a tight grip on its satellites in Central and Eastern Europe, including the GDR. Culturally, this meant the strict imposition of Socialist Realism, and it was now reduced to a crude checklist which allowed any cultural artifact to be categorized as progressive or reactionary. Initially, War Primer posed problems for cultural inspectors. Most obviously because it does not present World War II as a modern morality tale whose conclusion confirms the superiority of the Soviet system. Yet by the mid-1950s the situation was more favorable for Brecht's book. The Cold War was not over but a temporary lessening of international tensions was discernible, registered by the meeting of Soviet and Western leaders at the Geneva Summit Conference in July, 1955. Socialist Realism was not abandoned, but it was less rigidly defined. This was the moment when the project developed in World War II could finally be published as a book.

While working on War Primer in the early 1940s, Brecht kept workbooks that also contained press photographs, including early examples of the "photo-epigrams." This material became part of the Arbeitsjournal (3), published in English as Journals 1934-1955 (4). In a rare English-language review of the original German edition, John Brady notes that Brecht appears to be using the illustrated press as raw data for the ongoing training of an epic dramatist in exile, who was deprived of a regular theater audience (5). War Primer, too, can be approached as a continuation of epic theater by other means.

The Gest

For Brecht, the gest has a restrictive and an expansive meaning. Restrictively, it refers to an approach to acting which assumes that an understanding of the world comes from the observation of human behavior. The epic actor uses gestures, but not every gesture constitutes a gest. "Only when the strutting takes place over corpses do we get the social gest of Fascism" notes Brecht (6). In other words, the gest always aims to foreground the social significance of an action. Expansively, the gest refers to the complete scene within which every com ponent--costume, lighting, props, scenery--contribute to elicit the social theme. Epic theater proceeds through an accumulation of gests, resulting in a calculated jerkiness. Thus, for Walter Benjamin, Brecht's theater "proceeds by fits and starts, in a manner comparable to the images on a film strip (7).

There are affinities between epic theater and cinema, but Brecht is also drawing on older traditions, explored in Barthes' essay "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein" (8) For Barthes, the gest reworks the idea of the "pregnant moment" which is closely related. to an earlier formulation of the "perfect. instant".. Diderot draws attention to the similarities between theater and painting. The rectangular theater stage is compared to the picture frame, and the succession of theater scenes are related to a series of pictures. For Diderot, the ideal theater scene or painting is a tableau which conveys a clear didactic message. This is to be achieved through a composition which gives maximum emphasis to the "perfect instant"--a significant moment which condenses past, present and future. The ideal play or exhibition of paintings is an accumulation of tableaux. Within painting, Diderot's role model is Jean-Baptiste Greuze who specialized in scenes from middle class life like The Return of the Prodigal Son ("Morality in paint " according to Diderot.) Brecht abandons this Christian morality but retains a commitment to the tableau or gest as an appropriate means for teaching his audience about "the scientific age."

As a theatre director, Brecht was able to construct his gests. As a "photo-epigrammist," he had to make do with found imagery which had "gestic" potential.

The Journals contain early instances of Brecht working on press photographs that caught his eye. In 1940 Brecht saved an image from a National Socialist publication that shows Hitler's Foreign Minister, von Ribbentrop, taking leave of Mussolini. He commented sardonically, "What a wealth of material for the theatre there is in the fascist illustrated weeklies. These poseurs understand the art of epic theatre, giving banal events a touch of the historic. (9)

Another press cutting in the Journals features the British Viceroy and his entourage in New Delhi, capital of the British Raj. Taken in 1942, the image captures the pomp and ceremony of. imperial business as usual. Yet the Japanese had already invaded Burma, precipitating a train of events that rapidly led to the end of the British Empire. Laconically, Brecht observed that "war, the great dialectician, puts every organ to the test. (10)" His caption efficiently converts a routine image of empire and ornament into a confirmation of the fragility and transience of all forms of political domination. Imperial gestures become part of a gest.

A similar "gestic" approach to photography also informs the "photo-epigrams." One example included in the Journals shows a newspaper of Hitler amiably shaking hands photograph with an older woman. The accompanying poem reads:

Suffer the old women 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 still waiting for them (11).

The poem represents Hitler's private thoughts. His messianic pretensions are conveyed in the opening line which rephrase the words of Jesus in Mark 10:14, "Suffer the little children to come unto me." Unlike Jesus, Hitler can only greet mothers because their sons are elsewhere, fighting and dying to supposedly liberate Germany. Through the epigram, a routine publicity shot becomes a gest. Hitler is now the ersatz savior whose swastika armband is a perversion of the Christian cross, the older woman's black clothes become mourning shrouds and the touch of the leader's hand is paltry consolation for the loss of a son.

The Fable

Brecht's epic theater presents a "fable" or "story." The intention is to offer a version of familiar material that an audience could relate to, other versions allowing the audience to identify the particularity of an "epic" approach. Instead of the suspense associated with much conventional drama, Brecht's plays offer the pleasures of comparative assessment. War Primer is also a "fable," seeking a critical reader who can recognize that the meaning of the past, including the recent past, is fiercely contested. Brecht's book offers one perspective. It assumes the existence of others and invites critical comparison, most notably with the rival "fables" about World War II that came from two antagonistic Germanys (12).

In 1949, two German states were founded. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was oriented towards the U.S. and its allies in Western Europe. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was under Soviet influence. Containment of Germany had been a major concern of the allies meeting in Potsdam in 1945, however, the formal division of Germany into two states registered the ways in which attempts to create a postwar order merged into what became known as the Cold War. The term was first used in 1947 to describe the emerging tensions between the former allies of World War II. The Soviet Union confronted the U.S., and each power laid claim to a different part of the former German enemy.

The origins of the two Germanys ensured the interpretations of World War II became an important factor in their ideological rivalry from an early date. The inauguration of commemorative days was complemented by exhibitions, monuments and school curricula. Cumulatively, the two German states sought legitimation with rival histories and, ultimately, rival political theories. What was National Socialism? What was Communism? What was representative democracy? How were these different state forms related? The two Germanys asked the same questions but offered divergent answers. West Germany Stressed its democratic constitution and political institutions, bringing it in line with Western partners like the U.S. National Socialism was treated as a regrettable antidemocratic aberration that terminated in 1945 Defeated, it posed no threat to the revival and extension of the Weimar experiment. Rather, the danger came from Soviet Communism. Not only had this authoritarian infamy outlived National Socialism to which it was comparable, but it now menacingly occupied German territory via its equally authoritarian puoppet, the misnamed German Democratic Republic.

East Germany rejected this "fable." National Socialism was treated as a dictatorial response to capitalism in crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Capitalism still existed in West Germany in the 1950s, but, potentially, another economic crisis could cause West Germany to abandort its democratic facade and welcome a new Hitler. Such a seenario was only unimaginable in those states that had gone beyond capitalism: the Soviet Union and its allies. Under Communism, public planning and collectivization created an equitable economic infrastructure. For the first time in human history, popular sovereignty had a material basis. In this respect, the soviet system was an advance on those 50-called representative democracies (like West Germany or the U.S.) that in reality, merely represented the interests of the dominant economic groups. Communism, rather than bourgeots democarcy, represented the surest defense against its reawakening.

War primer was first submitted to an East German publisher in 1949, but various objections delayed its appearance until 1955. In the tense, early years of the Cold War, even orthodoxy caused problems. One disputed "photo"-epigram" deals that the National Socialism invasion of the Soviet Union. Brecht's starting point is an American press cutting in which a protographic portrait of a German soldier is placed next to another of his Soviet counterpart. The similarities of subject matter, size and composition create a mirror image, implying that the invading Wehrmacht and the defending Red Army are somehow compatible. Under the images, Brecht comments:

Here are two brothers, brought in armoured trucks

To quarrel over one brother's land!

So cruelly the tamed elephant attacks

His brother, the unbroken elephant (13).

Brecht's text is not a frontal attack on the disingenuousness of an anonymous picture editor. Rather, the mirror image becomes a starting point for a fable concerning two elephant brothers with radically different characters. Instead of "the reductive weapons of demystification," the poem deploys "caresses" and "amplifications", Barthes's terms to characterize what he considers an admirable and distinctive feature of Brecht's Marxist criticism (14). The end result is an oblique, but unambiguous, "photo-epigram" about Wehrmacht aggression and Red Army resistance. However, the qualities admired by Barthes were lost on East German officialdom. In this case, there was objection to the two photographs that "sweep under the mat the significance of the Soviet Union's Great Patriotic War (15)."

Soviet triumphalism is absent in Brecht's book. There are no winners and many losers in a "fable" which resists easy appropriation by any actually existing state, including the Soviet Union. Ultimately, the "fable" of War Primer poses two difficult questions. First, what are the social forces that unleash two world wars in which over half of the roughly fifty million fatalities in the second are civilians? Second, what form of social cooperation is required to prevent a third? Brecht's political sympathies are evident, but there are no glib answers.

Functional Transformation

For Brecht, the tale told cannot be divorced from the means of telling. Hence his preoccupation with the Umfunktionierung or "functional transformation" of artistic methods of production, distribution and consumption. Within theater, his achievement is to overhaul an invention of the Ancient Greeks to create a relevant forum to "expose the present (16). A comparable achievement in War Primer is to "re-function" the epigram, also invented by the Ancient Greeks, and the modern press photograph.

Today an epigram is generally defined as any short poem with a witty ending. However, its meaning was more specialized for the Ancient Greeks who viewed it as the appropriate form of poetry to be inscribed on stone monuments, especially for funerary purposes. To be successful, it had to be concise, dignified and durable; in short, lapidary (from the Latin lapis, stone). This is the adjective acutely chosen by Walter Benjamin to characterize the style of an earlier series of Brecht poems (without photographs) called German War Primer. Benjamin compares the poems to ancient inscriptions, brief and intended for the instruction of future generations (17). He died in 1940, before Brecht resumed work on a revised War Primer. Nevertheless, he had correctly identified Brecht's interest in commemorating modern warfare with a form of public verse that drew on ancient precedents.

The most obvious difference between German War Primer and War Primer is the coupling of epigrams with press photographs in the latter. A starting point for assessing Brecht's views on the illustrated press is a congratulatory message which was published in the Communist Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung in 1931, to celebrate its ten years of existence. According to Brecht.

The tremendous development of photojournalism has cotributed practically nothing to the revelation of the truth about the conditions of this world. On the contrary, photography, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, has become a terrible weapon against truth. The vast amount of picture materialthat is being disgorged daily by the press and that seems to have the character of truth serves in reality only to obscure the facts. The camera is just as capable of lying as is the typewriter. The task of the A.I.Z., which is to restore the truth, is of paramount importance under these circumstances and it seems to me that it fulfills this purpose extremely well (18).

A.I.Z. sought to encourage contributions from worker photographers. In practice, their efforts were insufficient, and the magazine had to rely on the same picture agencies as the establishment press. Brecht was faced with a comparable challenge. He, too, sought to elicit meanings from material appropriated from publications that rarely shared his political perspective.

War Primer can be understood as the "functional transformation" of mainstream press photographs though the addition of alternative captions, informed by Brecht's revolutionary politics. But it is more. If the choice of the epigram is meant to suggest ancient inscriptions, then the press photograph can be understood as 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 II. They register Brecht's response to two recent phenomena: the proliferation of monuments to commemorate an earlier world war and the rapid development of mass media, both occurring in the 1920s.

World War I had inspired more monuments than any other event in human history. In Britain alone over 36,000 monuments were built and the number was even greater in France and Germany. Quantity was not the sole distinguishing feature. Only a minority of the monuments were devoted to the military leaders. The vast majority, to be found in prominent positions in towns and hamlets across Europe, commemorated the ordinary soldier who had lost his life. The latter were generally the result of small-scale initiatives. Local veterans, the bereaved and dignitaries like priests and politicians took collective responsibility for the whole project, from fund raising to construction, unveiling and maintenance. Such details are of profound significance, revealing elements of democratic participation that mark a decisive break in the history of monuments. State-sponsored, national monuments also registered the originality of World War I as a war of the masses. Even though monuments devoted to war leaders were not entirely i gnored, they were overshadowed by attempts to commemorate the "unknown soldier," as in Lutyen's Cenotaph (literally empty tomb") in Whitehall, London (19).

The proliferation of war memorials in the 19205 coincided with an unprecedented expansion of modern, mass communications. Cinemas, the illustrated press, advertising hoardings, electronic signs and elaborate shop window displays were to become common features of everyday life across Europe. How could the monument, a form adapted from the age of absolutism, and ultimately antiquity, compete with these novelties? For the Austrian novelist Robert Musil, monuments are "conspicuously inconspicuous" and would only cease to be "invisible" once their creators adapt the attention-grabbing techniques of modern advertising (20). The redundancy of existing monuments is also implied in the works of German critic Siegfried Krakauer. Writing about the illustrated press in the 1920s, Krakauer notes its stress on topicality. He concludes that "the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory" and that ultimately the appetite for this type of publication is related to the fear of death.

What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image. In the illustrated magazines the world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has become entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it (21).

That is, the illustrated press encourages the very amnesia which war memorials are intended to combat. Unhappy the land that needs monuments and Brecht's dissatisfaction with them is conveyed in the poem The Carpet-Weavers of Kuyan-Bulak Honor Lenin. The poor artisans from a small town in Turkestan wished to honor the deceased Soviet leader. Initially they planned to erect a plaster bust, but eventually, they decided to use the money to buy petroleum to treat a local mosquito-infected swamp:

So they helped themselves by honoring Lenin, and

Honored him by helping themselves, and thus

Had understood him well (22).

War Primer can be understood as an homage to a leader who had little time for traditional monuments. In Brecht's project there are no heroes, no statues, no stone, no bronze, nor even the impermanent plaster favored by Lenin for an abandoned series of temporary monuments to teach revolutionary, proletarian civics. Instead, he 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.

DAVID EVANS teaches the history and theory of photography at The Arts Institute at Bournemouth and The Surrey Institute of Art and Design, His publications include John Heartfield: AIZ/VI 1930-38 (New York: Kent Fine Art, 1992).

NOTES

(1.) Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel (Berlin: Eulenspiegel Verlag, 1955); Brecht, War Primer (London: Libris, 1998).

(2.) Ruth Berlau, "Preface" In: Kriegsfibel op cit, no page number. (This text is omitted in the English-language version.)

(3.) Bertolt Brecht, Arbeitsjournal (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp verlag. 1973).

(4.) Brecht, Journals 1934-1955 (London: Methuen, 1993)

(5.) P.V. Brady, "From cave-Painting to 'Fotogramm': Brecht, Photography and the Arbeitsjournal", Forum for Modern Language Studies, 14:3, July 1978, pages 270-282.

(6.) Bertolt Brecht, "On Gestic Music in: John Willett, ed; Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1964), page 105.

(7.) Walter Benjamin, "What is Epic Theatre? [Second Version]" in Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London NLB, 1973), page 21.

(8.) Roland Barthes, "Diderot, Brecht, Elsenstein" in: Barthes, Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana, 1977), pages 69-78. It is worth noting that Barthes' concluding remarks on a new type of are beyond the tableau are interesting, but not relevant to the discussion here.

(9.) Journals, op cit, pages 103-4.

(10.) Journals, op cit, page 206.

(11.) Journals, op cit, page 106; War Primer, op cit, photo-epigram 27. (the translation in War Primer is marginally different.)

(12.) For further discussion on the two Germanys and their rival histories see Gerd Knlschewski and Ulla Spittler, "Memories of the Second World War and National Identity in Germany", in: Martin Evans and Ken Lunn, eds, War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997), pages 239-254.

(13.) War Primer. op cit, photo-epigram 65.

(14.) Roland Barthes, "Brecht and Discourse: A Contribution to the Study of Discursivity" in: Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: university of California Press, 1989), page 216.

(15.) Cited in John Willett's "Afterword" to War Primer, op cit, page 13. Willett's "Afterword" and "Notes" on individual photo-epigrams are rich sources of information.

(16.) Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer" in: Benjamin, understanding Brecht, op cit, page 100.

(17.) Walter Benjamin, "Commentaries on Poems by Brecht" in: Benjamin understanding Brechi, op cit, pages 64-66.

(18.) Cited in: Heinz Willmann, Geschlchte der Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung 1921-1938 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975), page 125.

(19.) For further information, see: Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870-1997 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). especially pages 77-92.

(20.) Robert Musil, "Monuments" in: Musil, Posthumous, Papers of a Living Author (London: Penguin Books, 1995), pages 61-64.

(21.) Siegfried Krakauer, "Photography" in: Krakauer, The Mass Ornament: Welmar Essays (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), page 58.

(22.) Bertolt Brecht, "The Carpet Weavers of Kuyan-Bulak Honor Lenin" in: Brecht, Poems 1913-1956 (London: Methuen, 1976), page 175.

(1.) Arbeitsjournal (Frankfurt am Main, 1973).

(2.) Journals 1934-1955 (London, 1993).