Bertolt Brecht’s notebooks: a encouragement for reading

Brecht did not catch the eye of the publication of these poems, often fragments, and he has even forgotten them aside. They were only written off with the machine in a few cases, usually a first step from the notebook to print.

Archive of Brecht’s poetry also means: archive of his literary material – motifs, ideas, stories, stories, word fields, word lists, rhyme lists, line beginnings, lines, verses (no “line scrap” to take up a term from the history of reception). The notebooks contain a lexicon of Brecht’s writing.

When Brecht led the first notebooks, he has not yet written a typewriter himself. He wrote and dictated by hand. From the beginning of the use of typewriters, handwriting (in notebooks or on single sheets), machine script and dictation compete.

The typeface is variable, as is the writing programs on the computer that enable flexibility that lack the relatively rigid machine script. Notebooks offered the author the opportunity to use different types of types and techniques (ink, lead, copy pen, color pin -differences in colors, the line, the font design, the possibilities to extinguish), various writings (Kurrentschrift, Latin script, stenography, large -scale /Small writing, different font sizes), to tear out pages, add insoles.

A prominent example is the poem “Memory of Marie A.” with the lines about the cloud: “It was very white and monster at the top / and when I was looking at it was never there.” Half libraries were written. But is really what can be seen on the original, taken into account in the numerous essays? The editors Martin Kölbel and Peter Villwock points out that Brecht has subsequently set the title of the first draft “Sentimental Lied No 1004” over the text.

And not only that: At first it was called “sentimental song”, and then the author went one step -it -off with the “No 1004”, which was reminiscent of Don Giovanni’s register. And at the end we read the dating with the time of pedantry with time with time at the end of the poem: “21. II. 20, in the evening 7h on the train to Berlin ”and the puzzling, probably invented bon mot of a certain“ go. R. Kraus “:” In the state of the filled seed bubble, the man sees Aphrodite in every woman. “

Read Brecht’s notebooks, the poems, the meal lines in it, but also everything else. You will be surprised and delighted what you encounter there: the unfinished, open, fleeting, the fleeting intuitions that the author wants to hold on, the will to work (only rarely the work itself), the broken, rejected, the stranger. And overall a firework of ideas, something unpleasant, just (yet) not controlled.

Gérard Genette speaks of the “sacred character” of the final – yes, there is sometimes something tired, clarified work. On the other hand, we see the freshness, which sometimes is unscathed by the first note.

The notebooks stimulate a brecht reading that corresponds to the primeval reason of the poetry of the poet: the “experimenter”, as Walter Benjamin said, the searcher, the player-against the cliché of the base, ideologist, everything. This edition promises a joy of discovering. As Max Frisch said elsewhere, she is “gorgeous to gather of sobriety”.