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Tap-dancing to the Sounds of a Machine Room

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On Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Of Poor B.B.’

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On the 26 April 1922, Bertolt Brecht, aged twenty-four, took the night train from Berlin to Munich. He had, by this point, already written three plays – Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities – and many of the poems that would be eventually published in his first collection, Devotions for the Home. Yet the poem he composed on the journey, ‘Vom Armen B.B.’ (‘Of Poor B.B.’), is a precocious masterpiece even by Brecht’s formidable standards; not, as with those earlier plays, a portent of greater things to come (The Threepenny Opera, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), but an unparalleled achievement in its own right.

To lay meine Karten auf den Tisch from the outset, I think ‘Of Poor B.B.’ is a brilliant poem, possibly the best of the twentieth century, and despite Michael Hofmann’s excellent translation (from which I shall be quoting), woefully underread in the Anglosphere. Although the poem’s central themes – the desecration of Nature, the alienation of urban existence – are paradigmatically modernist ones, it feels much newer than Eliot’s, Yeats’s or Auden’s work from a similar time; fewer frills, less persiflage. By paring the idiom of early modernism down to its most basic elements, Brecht captures something unchanging about the texture of life in cities.

Reading ‘Of Poor B.B.’, one catches a glimpse of a road English-language poetry did not take – one which is terser, less consoling, more disagreeable and more honest.

Sonically, the original German is a virtuosic balancing act, at once formally stringent and utterly unpedantic, each completed rhyme somehow natural, almost inadvertent. Hofmann’s version conveys a similar sense of control (though without mirroring Brecht’s formal choices), along with the poem’s frankness and harshness. Those same qualities are what make ‘Of Poor B.B.’ such a welcome palate cleanser for anyone who tires of whatever is sentimental, pious or trite in contemporary poetry.

Reading ‘Of Poor B.B.’, one catches a glimpse of a road English-language poetry did not take – albeit with a few blazing exceptions; Les Murray, Frederick Seidel – one which is terser, less consoling, more disagreeable and more honest. In fact, one could do worse in summarising what Brecht does in this poem than by stealing David Orr’s description of Seidel as ‘a violinist who pauses from bowing expertly through Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 to smash his instrument against the wall.’

‘Of Poor B.B.’  is nothing if not Protean – confessional, satirical, elegiac and apocalyptic by turns – but it is, above all, a poem of placelessness, a poem of transit written in transit. It is, in other words, a poem for which the exact when and where of its making matters unduly; which is why, one hundred and four years to the day since Brecht set out for Munich, I boarded the southbound sleeper from Berlin Hauptbahnhof and tried to write about it.

That Brecht found train carriages conducive to writing poetry at all – he wrote another poem which wound up in Devotions for the Home, the uncharacteristically sweet and lovely ‘Memory of Marie A.’ while travelling the same route in the opposite direction two years prior – is surprising for several reasons. Trains are both noisy (noisier still a century ago) and places where reading poetry aloud is usually frowned upon.

Not all poets find it necessary to read aloud while they compose, but my assumption (though surely a commonsense one?) is that those who don’t are unlikely to write poems which depend on regular, insistent sound patterns – that they are, in some sense, writing for the page. Yet Brecht’s early poems demand to be performed – he himself said that the poems in Devotions are ‘nearly all supposed to be singable, and in the simplest possible way. I set them to music myself’, and the nine balladic quatrains of ‘Of Poor B.B.’, with their insistence on rhyme and recurrent four-stress rhythms, are eminently singable.

It’s tempting to imagine that the rhythm of the train itself, the knocking of the engine or the clacking of the wheels, would have compensated, provided a countervailing rhythm, a metronome. And perhaps it did, but it’s worth noting that Brecht certainly came to feel the opposite – that mechanical noises were in opposition to rhythmic regularity and may have actually helped to kill it off. A later essay attempts to justify his turn away from metrical verse by claiming that ‘our ear is certainly in the course of being physiologically transformed. Our acoustic environment has changed immensely. An episode in an American feature film, when the dancer Astaire tap-danced to the sounds of a machine-room, showed the astonishingly close relationship between the new noises and the percussive rhythms of jazz.’ These ‘new noises’, which Brecht set out to imitate in his poetry and deploy strategically in his plays, were not redolent of the old rhythms of regularly metred poetry.

My train carriage, of course, offered no sounds of the machine-room, just the oceanic hum of the electric engine rising and falling, which perhaps possessed an astonishingly close relationship to the hyperpop blaring from the Airpods of the teenager beside me. Almost everyone else in my carriage was, likewise, wearing headphones, which meant the only human noises came from an inconsolable child. This brings us to the poem’s title, its ‘BB’ toying with the saccharine coddling of ‘poor baby’ (a German pun reinscribed in English only belatedly, through textspeak). It is, as Hofmann observes, a somewhat ‘strange’ title for ‘such a pitiless poem’. I find it stranger still to think of Brecht – caustic, promiscuous, thin-skinned, overbearing, swaggering Brecht – as an infant at all. Yet ‘Of Poor B.B.’ begins by inviting us to do just that:

I, Bertolt Brecht, come from the black forests.
My mother carried me into the cities
When I was in her belly. And the chill of the forests
Will be in me until my dying day.

This first stanza is both a microcosm and logarithm for the eight that follow it, which will take us into and through the cities in three rather Prufrock-ish stanzas of urban ennui, followed by an altogether more baroque, thunderous fantasy of their future destruction, before returning to the womb in the last two lines (‘I, Bertolt Brecht, removed to the asphalt cities / From the black forests in my mother in the early times.’). Many, if not all, of Brecht’s fixations from this time are present here: forests, cities and the migration between them; pregnancy, birth, the choices inflicted on the young or not-yet-born; a simultaneous desire for origins and a repulsion from them; the omnipresent immediacy of death and the moment of dying.

Cities, as Brecht depicts them, live double lives.

Brecht’s early work is densely forested – a cursory flick through the first few volumes of his Ausgabe yields dozens of different species – yet what interested Brecht about trees most of all was the human tendency to project our fears and fantasies onto them. Here, for instance, Johannes in Baal, nervous about losing his lover’s exclusive affections, describes the following, baffling dream:

She’s the most innocent creature alive, but I saw her once in a dream being made love to by a juniper tree. That is to say, her white body lay stretched out on the juniper tree and the gnarled branches twisted about her. I haven’t been able to sleep since.

Yet whenever trees are absent, that absence tends to be felt as a terrible loss. As Shlink from In the Jungle of Cities laments:

The forest! That’s where mankind comes from. Hairy, with apes’ jaws, good animals who knew how to live. Everything was so easy…

Migration, and particularly rural-to-urban migration, was the defining experience for Brecht’s parents (both of whom grew up in rural Bavaria – ‘the black forests’ – before moving to the city of Augsburg), as it was for many Germans of their generation. By the late 1920s, Brecht had ascribed it seismic social importance, crediting it with the seething political and cultural atmosphere in German cities, Berlin above all.

But though ‘Of Poor B.B.’ is indeed a kind of polemic against modernity, Brecht was too sly and too sceptical to write a neat and tidy retelling of the Fall. The coldness imparted by the forests – forests that Brecht was, as he wrote this poem, hurtling towards – takes various forms. There’s an ‘insouciance’ towards women in particular (‘I say to them: / In me you have someone on whom there’s no relying’), and a kind of callous objectivity towards those around him in general. But this coldness has a double life – it is a kind of flattening neutrality, but it is also what allows the poet to see and speak clearly.

At Leipzig a ten minute stop was scheduled, which meant all the smokers went down onto the platform and I, in need of air and anecdotal titbits for this essay, went to join them. The smokers – Gesetzesbrecher, the lot of them, by the way, platforms being one of few places in Germany one is forbidden to smoke freely, and a particularly grievous sin in Leipzig, the largest covered station in Europe – were of no use to me (the headphones again). I did see, however, a rather striking train, which a guard informed me was one of several historical vehicles in the station, maintained and kept in running order by a dedicated team of volunteers.

I loved the idea that there was a chance, however infinitesimally slight, that I was looking at the same train Brecht travelled on, and was just slightly crushed to learn subsequently that the oldest train currently housed in Leipzig started running exactly a decade after Brecht made his journey south. A great deal changed in those ten years – by 1932, Brecht had become a committed Marxist, achieved definitive success in Berlin with the Threepenny Opera and developed an extensive body of aesthetic theory, which many of his later poems and plays attempt to put into practice.

The aesthetic world ‘Of Poor B.B.’  does not quite survive these transformations. Indeed, ‘Of Poor B.B.’ may be the purest instance of what Fredric Jameson describes as ‘the pallor and the sparsity of [Brecht’s] earliest work: the insistence on the washed-out quality of the world’s colours, the sky as “fahl” [pale or wan]: a characteristic private word and a stylistically preeminent Brechtian tactic for insisting on poetic perception at the same time as you deny the presence of anything vivid to perceive’. Yet, if it is a private world we find here, it is one scouring the public realm for its constituent elements (there really is no independent subject inhabiting this poem, the autobiographical framing preserves an icy objectivity throughout).

A lack of sleep is, surely, less well represented in literature than any other basic human condition, yet Brecht made it one of his specialities.

Cities, as Brecht depicts them, live double lives. Their inhabitants live cheek to jowl and are given to exchanging pleasantries and meaningless conversation ad nauseam:

I am friendly to people. I put on
A top hat because that’s what they do.
I tell myself: They are animals with a particular smell.
And I tell myself: What of it, so am I

(Never mind that Brecht was not, by most accounts, ‘friendly’ to the people around him.) Cities are full of people devoid of personality, more machinic than the machines with which they are surrounded. In fact, whatever is manufactured or built seems to be more fragile, less implacable and therefore, weirdly, more organic than the people who use or inhabit them:

In dwellings it pleased us to think of as indestructible
(In the same spirit we built the tall constructions on the island of Manhattan
And the thin antennae which underwire the Atlantic Ocean).
Of these cities there will remain only what passed through them, the wind

One pictures Brecht’s unfortunate interlocutors (literal windbags) will go on chattering even amid the ruins. This apocalyptic vision may have been wishful thinking on Brecht’s part; things had not been going well for him in Berlin. He had been trying, and thus far failing, to establish himself as the preeminent dramatist of his generation. A cocktail of formal difficulty, explicit content and Brecht’s own intransigence was proving fatal to his hopes of publishing, let alone staging, any of his plays. The one Brecht was rehearsing at the time had ended catastrophically and his health, usually poor, had been especially dismal; a representative account of one evening from around the time reads:

I traipsed home exhausted. Ate and drank and went to bed at 7.30. But they woke me up at 10, and I felt such a pain in me, like a watery jellyfish between the ribs, that I got up. There’s no air in this city, you can’t live in this place. It had tied a knot in my throat, I got up, fled to a restaurant, fled from the restaurant, tramped around in the icy moonlit night, crawled back here, don’t feel like writing, must get back to bed, can’t sleep.

That an earlier draft of the poem mentions further health complaints (specifically of kidney stones, which were, like his heart problems, an interminable difficulty) might tell us something about the state of mind he was in at the time, and why he felt compelled to write a poem that is at once a curse on city life and a premonition of its destruction.

By the time it grew light, I was passing through the dark forests of Brecht’s childhood, the same dark forests I had been reading about incessantly for the past eight hours. The train stopped at Augsburg where he was born and where he may well have stopped off on his own journey. The trees, more or less unremarkable when viewed in clear weather, were dripping with rain or dew. They were objectively beautiful and so I began to take notes, sensing a convenient ending for this essay. Yet I found I had nothing to say about them, no desire to enumerate the vernal bloom, the luscious woodbine and so on, either because Brecht had primed me to think of them as thingly and, hence, resistant to interpretation, or because sleeplessness had made me mildly catatonic. So, in an act of wanton unprofessionalism, though one I suspect Brecht would have approved of, I closed my eyes instead.

A lack of sleep is, surely, less well represented in literature than any other basic human condition (hunger, lust, loneliness), yet Brecht made it one of his specialities. Fatigue of almost every kind – hale and hearty sleepiness, the weariness of a long voyage, insomniac daydreams – found its way into his work and, as we’ve seen, he himself slept poorly or not at all during this period. Sleep is attainable in ‘Of Poor B.B.’, but is not a suspension of everyday anxieties (largely unspecified in the poem); it comes only with a mouthful of whiskey and stale tobacco smoke:

I empty my glass in the city and throw away
My cigar end and worriedly go to sleep

That this is the moment ‘Of Poor B.B.’ enters an apocalyptic register makes it possible to read the poem as a whole as a ‘day in the life’, of which the final portion is not a fantasy or a premonition but dream. An idle dream, one might say, that expresses Brecht’s perfect ambivalence both towards his own society and whatever might succeed it:

We know we are provisional
And that after us will come: really nothing worth mentioning

Whatever antipathy Brecht felt towards life in Berlin would not, as he surely knew, prevent him from returning there and making it his home until the Nazis came to power. Then began a far more convoluted pattern of migration than the one ‘Of Poor B.B.’ describes – Finland, the USSR, Los Angeles – until he returned for a last decade as the unofficial state poet of the GDR and director of his own theatre, the Berliner Ensemble, before dying of the heart condition (that ‘watery jellyfish’) aged fifty-eight.

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Luke Dunne is a poet and critic. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, The Stinging Fly, Boston Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Berlin.

Image details: Trimmed version of photograph released from the German Federal Archive of the German theatre director, dramatist, poet and theorist Bertolt Brecht in 1954. Kolbe, Jörg.

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