What do you think?
Rate this book
War primer
Book by Brecht, Bertolt
190 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1955
21 people are currently reading
444 people want to read
About the author
Bertolt Brecht
1,604 books1,923 followersEugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. A seminal theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble—the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife and long-time collaborator, the actress Helene Weigel—with its internationally acclaimed productions.
From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the 'epic form' of the drama (which constitutes that medium's rendering of 'autonomization' or the 'non-organic work of art'—related in kind to the strategy of divergent chapters in Joyce's novel Ulysses, to Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and to Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts). In contrast to many other avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution; rather, he hoped to 're-function' the apparatus of theatrical production to a new social use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era—particularly over the 'high art/popular culture' dichotomy—vying with the likes of Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and developing a close friendship with Benjamin. Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger insists that he is "the most important materialist writer of our time."
As Jameson among others has stressed, "Brecht is also ‘Brecht’"—collective and collaborative working methods were inherent to his approach. This 'Brecht' was a collective subject that "certainly seemed to have a distinctive style (the one we now call 'Brechtian') but was no longer personal in the bourgeois or individualistic sense." During the course of his career, Brecht sustained many long-lasting creative relationships with other writers, composers, scenographers, directors, dramaturgs and actors; the list includes: Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau, Slatan Dudow, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Caspar Neher, Teo Otto, Karl von Appen, Ernst Busch, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Therese Giehse, Angelika Hurwicz, and Helene Weigel herself. This is "theatre as collective experiment [...] as something radically different from theatre as expression or as experience."
There are few areas of modern theatrical culture that have not felt the impact or influence of Brecht's ideas and practices; dramatists and directors in whom one may trace a clear Brechtian legacy include: Dario Fo, Augusto Boal, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller, Pina Bausch, Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill. In addition to the theatre, Brechtian theories and techniques have exerted considerable sway over certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice; Brecht's influence may be detected in the films of Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Lindsay Anderson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima, Ritwik Ghatak, Lars von Trier, Jan Bucquoy and Hal Hartley.
During the war years, Brecht became a prominent writer of the Exilliteratur. He expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most famous plays.
From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the 'epic form' of the drama (which constitutes that medium's rendering of 'autonomization' or the 'non-organic work of art'—related in kind to the strategy of divergent chapters in Joyce's novel Ulysses, to Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and to Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts). In contrast to many other avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution; rather, he hoped to 're-function' the apparatus of theatrical production to a new social use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era—particularly over the 'high art/popular culture' dichotomy—vying with the likes of Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and developing a close friendship with Benjamin. Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger insists that he is "the most important materialist writer of our time."
As Jameson among others has stressed, "Brecht is also ‘Brecht’"—collective and collaborative working methods were inherent to his approach. This 'Brecht' was a collective subject that "certainly seemed to have a distinctive style (the one we now call 'Brechtian') but was no longer personal in the bourgeois or individualistic sense." During the course of his career, Brecht sustained many long-lasting creative relationships with other writers, composers, scenographers, directors, dramaturgs and actors; the list includes: Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau, Slatan Dudow, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Caspar Neher, Teo Otto, Karl von Appen, Ernst Busch, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Therese Giehse, Angelika Hurwicz, and Helene Weigel herself. This is "theatre as collective experiment [...] as something radically different from theatre as expression or as experience."
There are few areas of modern theatrical culture that have not felt the impact or influence of Brecht's ideas and practices; dramatists and directors in whom one may trace a clear Brechtian legacy include: Dario Fo, Augusto Boal, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller, Pina Bausch, Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill. In addition to the theatre, Brechtian theories and techniques have exerted considerable sway over certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice; Brecht's influence may be detected in the films of Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Lindsay Anderson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima, Ritwik Ghatak, Lars von Trier, Jan Bucquoy and Hal Hartley.
During the war years, Brecht became a prominent writer of the Exilliteratur. He expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most famous plays.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
December 30, 2019
I vowed to cease rating and writing reviews on here, but after reading this magnificent work I felt compelled to so once more.
In a sentence: if you have time only to read a single text on the second world war, Nazism and global totalitarianism, this is it.
That is all.
In a sentence: if you have time only to read a single text on the second world war, Nazism and global totalitarianism, this is it.
That is all.
March 5, 2021
This is one of those hard to classify books. There is no denying its poetry and poetic form in its 85 item pairing of one image of the Second World War and with a four line verse, amounting to a wholesale excoriation of mid-20th century war. But it also more than that; it’s a commentary on histories and the persistence of fascism, observations on suffering, exposure of political hypocrisy and opportunism and the presentation of all in popular media.
Brecht, as always, is not averse to highlighting the paradoxes of his contemporary world and note the less than pure pasts of allies. In item #14, he delves into the class contradictions of nationalisms and accompanies an image of Pétain and Laval with:
The people hate them more than a foreign foe.
Shitting themselves, they balance on the fence
And fear Germany less than they fear the French.
Be ruled by Germans? Yes. Ruled by the people? No.
While the paradoxes of leaders are shown in its facing pairing, where #15 shows us the well-known image of a cigar chewing besuited Churchill with Tommy gun:
Gang law is something I understand.
With man-eaters I’ve excellent relations.
I’ve had the killers feeding from my hand.
I am the man to save civilization
Yet much more of the album deals with the lives and deaths of more ordinary people, as well as wider questions of geopolitics and political economy. The images are drawn from newspapers and magazines, largely derived from where Brecht was at the time. When taken alongside the text, we can see a powerfully pacifist aspect as well as potent anti-fascist and more subtle anti-imperialist components. These design aspects suggest a second classification, as a piece of leftist (Marxist, not anarchist) cultural theorising of the phenomenology and political economy of war.
When the essay concluding the collection is considered, with its discussion of the difficulties of having the book published in Cold War East Germany is considered we can see that there is also an aspect that deals with the politics of publication.
All in all, these combine to make this a superb collection, both as artefact and current critique. Put it on the shelf next to Sven Lindqvist's Brief History of Bombing.
Brecht, as always, is not averse to highlighting the paradoxes of his contemporary world and note the less than pure pasts of allies. In item #14, he delves into the class contradictions of nationalisms and accompanies an image of Pétain and Laval with:
The people hate them more than a foreign foe.
Shitting themselves, they balance on the fence
And fear Germany less than they fear the French.
Be ruled by Germans? Yes. Ruled by the people? No.
While the paradoxes of leaders are shown in its facing pairing, where #15 shows us the well-known image of a cigar chewing besuited Churchill with Tommy gun:
Gang law is something I understand.
With man-eaters I’ve excellent relations.
I’ve had the killers feeding from my hand.
I am the man to save civilization
Yet much more of the album deals with the lives and deaths of more ordinary people, as well as wider questions of geopolitics and political economy. The images are drawn from newspapers and magazines, largely derived from where Brecht was at the time. When taken alongside the text, we can see a powerfully pacifist aspect as well as potent anti-fascist and more subtle anti-imperialist components. These design aspects suggest a second classification, as a piece of leftist (Marxist, not anarchist) cultural theorising of the phenomenology and political economy of war.
When the essay concluding the collection is considered, with its discussion of the difficulties of having the book published in Cold War East Germany is considered we can see that there is also an aspect that deals with the politics of publication.
All in all, these combine to make this a superb collection, both as artefact and current critique. Put it on the shelf next to Sven Lindqvist's Brief History of Bombing.
July 28, 2021
My enjoyment of poetry is amateur, the only real metric I can judge it on is how an author can make me pause on a single word and pore over it, as if it echoes meaning; I guess the poet is an architect that creates the acoustics for words to really resonate. I paused and paused and paused on Brecht's quatrains. It's funny that 'profound' is no longer profound enough to express the profound - so whatever feeling we know to be true profoundness, that the word no longer expresses, is what I felt reading this. True heartaches and true depths.
May 27, 2025
People are right to compare this to Goya's "Disasters of War." A short collection of newspaper photos accompanied by poems that are easy to read but hit you hard in their matter-of-fact devastation. The poems’ function as captions ensure that the book perfectly embodies the period in which it was written.
On the other hand, I think that this book really shows me where anti-war art misses its goal, because it makes you (or me, at least) feel that retaliation is necessary and satisfying. The poem about the Soviet resistance in Moscow gave me a feeling of hope that pacifism can't deliver in the short-term.
On the other hand, I think that this book really shows me where anti-war art misses its goal, because it makes you (or me, at least) feel that retaliation is necessary and satisfying. The poem about the Soviet resistance in Moscow gave me a feeling of hope that pacifism can't deliver in the short-term.
December 19, 2017
"I am a city still, but soon I shan’t be –
Where generations used to live and die
Before those deadly birds flew in to haunt me:
One thousand years to build.
A fortnight to destroy."
----
"O thrill of marching bands and banners flying!
Teutonic myth of swastika-crusaders dying!
Till all objectives were reduced to one:
To find yourself some cover.
There was none."
Where generations used to live and die
Before those deadly birds flew in to haunt me:
One thousand years to build.
A fortnight to destroy."
----
"O thrill of marching bands and banners flying!
Teutonic myth of swastika-crusaders dying!
Till all objectives were reduced to one:
To find yourself some cover.
There was none."
May 13, 2021
I fotoepigrammi che compongono questo volume, tutti incentrati sul tema della guerra e l'oppressione dei popoli, lasciano trasparire una visione critica e allo stesso tempo ironica delle azioni umane dell'epoca. Un focus particolare lo si ha sulla questione di classe, mostrata non solo nelle brevi poesie, ma anche nelle didascalie, in maniera particolarmente presente. Una raccolta di scritti esemplificativa della storia del Novecento europeo, da affiancare ad una manuale di storia per completarlo.
Read
March 26, 2021powerful photos of WWII. The quatrains themselves are alright
February 4, 2022
Never forget that men like you got hurt
So you might sit here, not the other lot.
And now don't hide your head, and don't desert
But learn to learn, and try to learn for what.
(Brecht was right)
So you might sit here, not the other lot.
And now don't hide your head, and don't desert
But learn to learn, and try to learn for what.
(Brecht was right)
December 23, 2017
Never knowingly subtle. Does feature a poem inspired by a sexy carrot. This is not a joke.
July 3, 2018
War primer is simple and direct. Results of war are on display none of which should fill us with pride. The subject is WW2 and the calamity of that war now 70+ yrs on has not much slowed our appetite for starving disease oppression prideful viciousness mutilation or monstrous death on untold scales. Can art save us? Can anything?
Want to read
June 4, 2017The Shipwreck of History: Bertolt Brecht’s “War Primer”
By Roy Scranton
in: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
By Roy Scranton
in: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
February 27, 2020
Entertaining as well as thought provoking written by a world class author of his time Bertolt Brecht.
Read
June 3, 2025As good an introduction to poetry books as Where the Sidewalk Ends was to little boy me.
War Primer being a picture-book added a bubble gum flavor that helped me swallow reading poetry. Brecht personally collecting these photo clippings from newspapers adds a palpability to this piece. I imagine the utter frustration and fear he must have felt seeing these reports come in with no foreseeable end in sight. Perhaps this War Primer will never end as the Fascists of the last century are still paper-clipped to this one.
“Here are six murderers. Now don’t turn away
And don’t just nod and murmur “That’s the truth.”
Showing them up has cost us to this day
Fifty great cities and most of our youth.”
- page 40
The accompanying clipped publication picture to this prose of course promotes Rommel (one of the six murderers mentioned) as a “slashing, hard-hitting commander.” I like that Brecht later penned the following to accompany a photo describing Rommels shortcomings in the African Theater…
“O thrill of marching bands and banners flying!
Teutonic myth of swastika-crusaders dying!
Till all objectives were reduced to one:
To find yourself some cover. There was none.”
- page 43
I wish he would have addressed the Hugo Boss uniforms because I hate how often I have to hear about how well dressed Nazis were; as if it’s a required addendum to German war crimes. These myths, even if rooted a kernel of truth, have been so repeated that you could imagine SS officers walking out of an upper middle class mall dressing room before you remember any of the terrors they committed. Nazi propaganda of Rommel’s tactical genius was repeated by the Allies to explain away their failures. So why are we employing the well-dressed Nazi narrative? Are we explaining away our broke fashion shortcomings so we can still enjoy the rich psychopaths who shine at the Met Gala? The Germans lost two world wars and are still considered great tacticians, so perhaps we should rethink that AND stop giving that sympathizing spy-whore Coco Chanel so much grace when all we are doing is see her little black dress vacuum seal a BBL.
Brecht’s writing is concise and I found myself reinterpreting each line over and over. While the warnings in War Primer are fastened to a Cold War context like an umbilical cord. The 20th Century exclusivity was cut for me with the timelessness of “sex sells.” An image of a woman selling Defense Stamps stuck to here bikini-clad body accompanied the following…
“If we can have the right to touch her up
She’ll find that we are quite prepared to spend
From our own pocket or some other chap’s.
That’s how it started. How’s it going to end?”
- page 83
And thus I found phrases like “semen for blood” and “sexy carrot” to be more jarring in this book than seeing a Southeast-Asian woman crying over her dead child. I’ve seen images like the latter aplenty. TikTok E-girls engaging the youth to sign up for the Army are probably running laps around the enlistment numbers of the crew cut recruiters from when I was in highschool. Still, I’d go to war for the sexy green M&M if the flagship store in Times Square was attacked. A corporate sponsored casus belli would be a poetic primer to World War III.
War Primer being a picture-book added a bubble gum flavor that helped me swallow reading poetry. Brecht personally collecting these photo clippings from newspapers adds a palpability to this piece. I imagine the utter frustration and fear he must have felt seeing these reports come in with no foreseeable end in sight. Perhaps this War Primer will never end as the Fascists of the last century are still paper-clipped to this one.
“Here are six murderers. Now don’t turn away
And don’t just nod and murmur “That’s the truth.”
Showing them up has cost us to this day
Fifty great cities and most of our youth.”
- page 40
The accompanying clipped publication picture to this prose of course promotes Rommel (one of the six murderers mentioned) as a “slashing, hard-hitting commander.” I like that Brecht later penned the following to accompany a photo describing Rommels shortcomings in the African Theater…
“O thrill of marching bands and banners flying!
Teutonic myth of swastika-crusaders dying!
Till all objectives were reduced to one:
To find yourself some cover. There was none.”
- page 43
I wish he would have addressed the Hugo Boss uniforms because I hate how often I have to hear about how well dressed Nazis were; as if it’s a required addendum to German war crimes. These myths, even if rooted a kernel of truth, have been so repeated that you could imagine SS officers walking out of an upper middle class mall dressing room before you remember any of the terrors they committed. Nazi propaganda of Rommel’s tactical genius was repeated by the Allies to explain away their failures. So why are we employing the well-dressed Nazi narrative? Are we explaining away our broke fashion shortcomings so we can still enjoy the rich psychopaths who shine at the Met Gala? The Germans lost two world wars and are still considered great tacticians, so perhaps we should rethink that AND stop giving that sympathizing spy-whore Coco Chanel so much grace when all we are doing is see her little black dress vacuum seal a BBL.
Brecht’s writing is concise and I found myself reinterpreting each line over and over. While the warnings in War Primer are fastened to a Cold War context like an umbilical cord. The 20th Century exclusivity was cut for me with the timelessness of “sex sells.” An image of a woman selling Defense Stamps stuck to here bikini-clad body accompanied the following…
“If we can have the right to touch her up
She’ll find that we are quite prepared to spend
From our own pocket or some other chap’s.
That’s how it started. How’s it going to end?”
- page 83
And thus I found phrases like “semen for blood” and “sexy carrot” to be more jarring in this book than seeing a Southeast-Asian woman crying over her dead child. I’ve seen images like the latter aplenty. TikTok E-girls engaging the youth to sign up for the Army are probably running laps around the enlistment numbers of the crew cut recruiters from when I was in highschool. Still, I’d go to war for the sexy green M&M if the flagship store in Times Square was attacked. A corporate sponsored casus belli would be a poetic primer to World War III.
January 27, 2020
Bertolt Brecht, during and after World War II, collected war photographs, and captioned them with quatrains. For example, beneath a photo of Goebbels came the following:
An afterword gives a history of the book's making, and the bumpy road to its publication in East Germany, where Brecht had moved after the war.
I am 'the doctor', I doctor what gets printed,
It may be your world, but I have my say.
So what? Its history gets reinvented.
Even my club foot seems a fake today.
An afterword gives a history of the book's making, and the bumpy road to its publication in East Germany, where Brecht had moved after the war.
December 18, 2017
A scrapbook of images of war and epigrams penned by Brecht, who at the time was a German refugee, undermines any sense of nobility in war. Although it is pointedly damning of Hitler, it also attacks all sides as gangsters and profiteers. It is a unique book, not offering any solutions but rather demanding that history never ignore the consequence of human destruction.
July 16, 2019
Short book of Brecht poems that accompany photos of World War II. Brecht's politics - and the politics of the GDR (as the afterword notes) - shine through, but what struck me is just how grim the wartime world was, even in a veritable safe haven like the United States. The world trembled on the precipice of barbarism, and it was clearly everywhere one looked.
June 11, 2024
"Reading" this "book" is like sitting out on a cold beach somewhere in Europe and everything is grey and you can hear the water and feel the terrible weight of our shared history of violence. First time hanging with Brecht! What a rare approach to the witnessing of fascism
August 10, 2025
I suppose I’m just not postwar-leftist-theory-oriented mentally to enjoy this. I understand the value in the commentary, but to me there are far more powerful ways of conveying the message of World War Two that require much less mental gymnastics and contextual information to attain meaning from.
May 14, 2017
WW2 photography + poetry. I devoured this in one sitting as it did double duty for the war buff in me and the fan of verse.
April 12, 2020
Potente. Brecht è sempre potente. Da leggere. Da far leggere.
June 1, 2020
Bertolt Brecht
War Primer
Verso
112 pages
7.8
War Primer
Verso
112 pages
7.8
November 3, 2020
one of my favourite books of all time
February 2, 2021
i think the form is really effective and whilst not all of the poetry itself is my favourite i think it works nicely for the purpose of the collection
March 10, 2021
Haunting.
July 1, 2021
یک اثر مینیمالیستی و مصور بسیار زیبا و غمانگیز در مذمت جنگ. گردآوری اتفاقات و پدیدهها و اشخاصِ جالب، یا قربانی، یا بینهایت تراژدیک و ضد و نقیض همراه با سرودهای برایشان.
July 21, 2021
A good collection of poems connected to photos that were written throughout the war. 14,15 and 26 were some of my favourites.
Read
June 7, 2024”Lär dig det enklaste! För dem
Vars tid har kommit
Är det aldrig för sent!
Lär dig ABC, det räcker inte, men
Lär dig det! Låt dig inte avskräckas!
Börja! Du måste veta allt!
Du måste ta över makten!”
Vars tid har kommit
Är det aldrig för sent!
Lär dig ABC, det räcker inte, men
Lär dig det! Låt dig inte avskräckas!
Börja! Du måste veta allt!
Du måste ta över makten!”
February 7, 2020
On historical specificity we thrive.
May 13, 2022
Good read
August 14, 2017
Strange how much can be said in a few lines and how hard it seems to add anything useful.
The concept of a montage of pictures each supported by a four line poem is great and would work even better if the editors of the digital book took the pretty damned limited effort required to place relevant poems and pictures on the same page together. Just needs a page break. Bah!
The concept of a montage of pictures each supported by a four line poem is great and would work even better if the editors of the digital book took the pretty damned limited effort required to place relevant poems and pictures on the same page together. Just needs a page break. Bah!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews