It was in 1939 that Bertolt Brecht – writing in Svendborg, exiled from a native Germany under the yoke of Nazism and observing a European continent over which the storm clouds of fascism gathered – wrote a famous collection of three poems in which his narrator reflects on what it is to live life in such “dark times.”1 Brecht, in his title, chooses to address these reflections to die Nachgeborenen2 – with geborenen being the plural form of geborenen, meaning “born,” and with Nach meaning “after.”3 As he thought of them, these poems were an address to posterity; to lives not yet lived. But as one of die Nachgeborenen, or as a life now being lived, I will offer a reading through a passage on the non-titular intergenerationality in this collection – that is, Brecht’s relationship with past generations, which takes the form of a rumination on the significance of ancient wisdom in the final stanza of poem I. This opens the door to a reading that is sensitive to the nature of the act of reading the past. Put another way, it is sensitive to the act of history-making: this is a formulation that implies a conception of history not as an objective index of events, but rather an active process by which people choose a certain sort of reading based on their moment, based on their beliefs, based on the sorts of narratives that they, for some reason or another, tend to pick out in the multitudes contained in past lives lived. Such a frame offers the insights of theoretical frameworks and literary formulations on the concept of history – in this case, provided by Walter Benjamin’s work of that very title: “History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time [Jetztzeit].”4 More fundamentally, though, it offers insight into how a life lived like Brecht’s (or Brecht’s narrator’s) in his now-time in 1939 prompts a certain reading of, in his case, “old books.”5,6 It offers a reading of his relationship with die Nachgeborenen through the lens of history-making: sensitivity to how Brecht reads the past prompts a sensitivity to how Brechtwishes to be read when he becomes the past.
It is a foregrounding of Brecht’s reading of past generations (going against the forward-looking grain that he established in his choice of title) that offers this frame of relationships between lives lived, life being lived, life not yet live, and the act of reading. And, because the paradigms of our actions are similar (though mine has the added meta-level of being a reading of a reading of the past and is, of course, in a very different format) it prompts me to reflect on how a life lived like mine in this now-time in 2024 prompts a certain reading of, in my case, old poems.
I. Reading a past reading of past life lived
In the first line of that aforementioned final stanza of poem I, Brecht’s narrator mentions that he would be gerne to be wise 7 – that is he would do so with pleasure, or, in Scott Horton’s translation, he “would happily be wise.” This attitude towards wisdom takes on a new significance when put into conversation with some of Walter Benjamin’s notions prompted by Lotze’s observation that "It is one of the most noteworthy peculiarities of the human heart that so much selfishness in individuals coexists with the general lack of envy which every present day feels toward its future.” In response, Benjamin writes “The happiness which could awaken envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed” – but this is not just the air of one’s own moment, for “Doesn’t a breath of air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well?.”8,9, Thus, the happiness which could awaken envy in us exists not only in one’s present moment, but also in all the moments of the past. The happiness – though hypothetical – implied in Brecht’s narrator’s gerne to be wise thus falls within this frame.
With that being said, Brecht’s narrator provides his reading of the teachings of past life lived. Of course, like any other reading (or any other history), this could go a multitude of different ways: “The old books” that “teach us what wisdom is”10 contain a breadth of different wisdoms. The Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, at once extols magnificence as a virtue and imagines desire as a product of an irrational, animalistic, appetitive part of the soul that human rationality ought to temper.11 The ancient conception of magnificence as a wisdom could have been a relevant concern for Brecht’s narrator: how could magnificence possibly be a virtue in a time when one questions “how I can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat / From the starving, and / My glass of water belongs to one dying of thirst?”12 If, in Brecht’s moment, one questions even one’s right to do these most basic acts of life – in this case, down to the level of sustenance – then how can it be that, as an old wisdom goes: “The magnificent man is like an artist; for he can see what is fitting and spend large sums tastefully?”13
But Brecht omits these indulgent elements of past life lived from his reading. Instead, his narrator picks the second of these two old wisdoms, a wisdom he says he cannot heed because of the dark times during which he lives: “The wise do not seek to satisfy their desires / but to forget them.”14 But it is not the aforementioned appetitive sort of desire in Aristotle that Brecht’s narrator cannot forget – Brecht’s narrator relates to all of the appetitive parts of life begrudgingly! The trivialities of life, life, is lived reluctantly for Brecht: “What kind of times are they, when / A conversation about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors?”15 If anything, Brecht’s narrator fulfills the Aristotleian ideal of one who separates oneself from the appetitive part of their livelihood – his concerns are in the realm of justice. But he does not understand himself this way; he does not read the wisdom of past life lived in this way. He reads his actions as satisfying his desires, even when his actions are just and political: he rises up with men in times of hunger, he acts in such a way that he can at least hope that “those in power / sat safer without me”16, he conceives of himself as a part of a “We / Who wished to lay the foundation for gentleness.”17 For many, an Aristotelian eudaimonic humanism may seem more indulgent, in its emphasis on the individual, than Brecht’s narrator’s class struggle.
For Walter Benjamin, for example, class struggle offers the possibility of Erlösung (redemption, deliverance, resurrection) to past lives18; It is a messianic promise to an oppressed past. The revolutionary “takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history; thus, he blasts a specific life out of the era, specific work out of the lifework.”19 The revolutionary is life-creating, the revolutionary, in first reading and then blasting life out of past life creates new life. “The nourishing fruit of what is historically understood contains time in its interior as a precious but tasteless seed.”20 Class struggle, then, is life-giving: in the sense of resurrecting past life lived, in the sense of generating new life, in the sense of providing nourishment. This further reinforces the intuition that an Aristotelian eudaimonic wisdom is comparatively indulgent in that it tends primarily to one’s own life, whereas class struggle, in this way of understanding it, tends to so many other lives.
But hold on – Brecht’s narrator’s experience is nothing like this! Brecht’s narrator is a revolutionary, but he does not find a nourishing fruit in the act of reading past life. He does not even want nourishing fruit. How could one eat nourishing fruit when others are starving? Brecht’s narrator does not at all have a messianic relationship with an oppressed past, he is not “nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors”21 – the only past he engages with is a past which he does not wish to avenge, a past which he would happily emulate the way of life of but cannot due to the darkness of his times. For Walter Benjamin, the revolutionary – in the act of reading past life – is both redeeming it and creating new life; for Brecht, the revolutionary’s reading of the past is simply a way to point out the darkness of his own times and the experience of his own life.
Thus, in his reading of past life lived, Brecht’s narrator chose a seemingly less indulgent insight offered by those past lives (moving past the appetitive as opposed to, say, the virtue of magnificence); after choosing this as the subject of his history, he defies the intuition that his way of life is less indulgent by positioning himself and his involvement in class struggle as a degeneration of an old ideal of enlightened and temperate life lived. Thus far I have taken for granted Brecht’s narrator’s choice to describe the precepts of past lives as wisdom. But Brecht’s narrator chooses to read the precepts of past life as wisdom he cannot heed. He places himself – including his political action – as a being driven by desire, a being who lives life on a level below that of wisdom.
II. Reading past life lived
This reading of his reading offers an explanation for the strange tensions in poem II. Seeing his politics as degraded as such, Brecht can hardly mention politics without, in the same breath, speaking of personal life, and then that which is most fundamentally appetitive: food. All of this is muddied, treated in the same way. A political action: “I came among men in a time of turmoil / And I rose up with them” is immediately followed by the (out of context) intimately personal and (in context) strangely glib statement: “And so passed / The time given to me on this earth.”22 To rise up in that stanza is to eat “my food between slaughters” and lay “down to sleep among murderers” in the next: political action is treated as life; life (in its most basic form – eating and sleeping) is made to sound wrong. Then, Brecht narrator moves on to another layer of life lived: love pflegte ich altos23 – pflegte is a conjugation of pflegten, a verb which means “to care,” “to look after,” or even “to nurse.” There is a tenderness to it, but here it is modified by the contradicting adverb achtlos, which means “thoughtlessly” or “carelessly.” Thus, all the levels of life lived feel wrong to some extent. The way the narrator eats – between killings – contradicts the nourishment of eating. The way the narrator sleeps – among murders – violates the vulnerability and contradicts the healing of sleep. The way the narrator tends to love – “carelessly” – contradicts the concepts of both tending and love themselves. And somehow all of this, along with politics (even in the final stanza of the poem, where it isn’t about his own life, but rather the place other lives might reach) is related to in the same sort of way, with that repeated statement that “And so passed / The time given to me on earth.” In Brecht’s now-time from which he constructed that history of past life that made clear this relationship, in dark times, all is on the level of appetitive life: food, love, political praxis, and political theory are all on the same plane. As his narrator put it: “All roads led into the sumpf in my time”, – all roads led into the marsh, the swamp, the mud.24,25 It was all life, yes, but life as a liquid, murky, dark mixture of things which no one takes the time to find beautiful.
III. Reading past life lived on life not yet lived (die Nachgeborenen)
The angel of history, Walter Benjamin suggests, has his face turned toward the past with wide eyes. He “sees only one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage… The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.”26 There is a messianic, resurrecting promise in one generation looking at (or reading) the lives of generations past. Given the dark times during which Brecht’s narrator lives, one might expect him to hold hopes of such a redemption. Walter Benjamin’s imagery of piling wreckage upon wreckage is not far from Brecht’s narrator’s, who imagines a flood in which those of his generation have untergegangen – gone under (gegangen meaning to go, unter meaning under), they have (as the word connotes) sunken, gone extinct, they are (as a civilization would be) lost. Yet while Walter Benjamin hopes for life to be brought back to those buried, Brecht’s narrator does not. If it was implicit in the previous two poems of the collection that the narrator conceives of his own life as a fallen one – expressed in the first by positioning himself as a desiring being compared to the wisdom of past life lived; expressed in the second by bringing all action, from the basic to the most principled down to the level of mud – in the third, that fallen nature becomes explicit:
Even the hatred of squalor
Distorts one’s features
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow hoarse
We who wished to lay the foundation for gentleness
Could not ourselves be gentle.
But you, when at last the time comes
That man can aid his fellow man,
Should think upon us
With leniency.27
Brecht’s narrator transitions from all of these more subtle ways of expressing this self-reading of his own life as degraded in a moment when, for the first time, he engages with life not yet lived. All those qualities that one might put in a level of life above the mud – one’s features (as the medium through which so much care and tenderness is expressed), one’s voice, one’s gentleness – he positions as explicitly diminished. The narrator can only imagine aid in life not yet lived; He makes it explicit that he cannot read his actions, even in class struggle, as aiding his fellow man. It is the concern of how his life will be read, or the history that will be made of his life that brings about this transition to the explicit. Concerns about reading are a powerful, frame-shifting thing.
Yet for all of his words on how begrudgingly all aspects of his life are lived, he does not wish for readings of his life to make him whole; he does not wish for readings of his life to have that messianic quality; he does not wish for readings of life to create new life – life he could never allow himself to live. All he assumes of a reading of his life is that it will be damning; all he pleads for in a reading of his life is that it would be with nachsicht – leniency, or even (implying restraint) forbearance. To live in the now-time that Brecht’s narrator lived is not just to go through all of life begrudgingly. It is to deny oneself the possibility of imagining that the act of reading, of history-making, could create life.
Epilogue. The act of reading, now
It would feel wrong to pass through all of these meta-layers of life and the act of reading – the past on the deeper past, the past on its own moment, the past on the future – without considering the present on all of these things. To do so, of course, is to put myself into this frame I have set.
As I do this reading, Israel escalates its genocide in Gaza by extending its path of destruction through Rafah. A portion of my tuition dollars have been directed into capital that is manufacturing weapons used to commit this violence; my government works closely with military-capitalist interests that profit from the market created by this violence. In the time I spend doing this reading, the political meetings I have and will attend are in the back of my mind. A conversation about trees – which Brecht imagined as a conversation about the wonderful everyday part of life – could, in my now-time, be a conversation about an extractivist global order that commits violence against life on the ecosystemic scale.
I almost think: What times are these, in which a conversation about Brecht is almost a crime, for in doing so we maintain our silence about so many horrors?28,29
Yet, I feel that saying so puts me, too, in a place where I deny myself the possibility of imagining that the act of reading could create life. Can’t the act of reading frame life in a way that combats injustice? And, perhaps more indulgently, does it not land as an injustice to deny oneself the creative possibilities offered by the act of reading? And, most indulgently, do I not commit an injustice against my own life in not allowing myself to enjoy a conversation about… whatever it is that, is my now-time, can be said to mean what a tree meant to Brecht in his?
Maybe I should write some poems to die Nachgeborenen to find out. In the meantime, I think it’s worth noting that it’s a beautiful thing that the act of reading brought me here.
1. Bertolt Brecht, "To Those Who Follow in Our Wake," translated by Scott Horton, Harper's Magazine, January 2008, https://harpers.org/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake/.
2. Bertolt Brecht, "An die Nachgeborenen," in Svendborger Gedichte (1939), in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (1967), 722-25.
3. Bertolt Brecht, "To Those Born Later," translated by John Willet, Ralph Manheim, and Erich Fried, https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/brecht/ToThoseBorn.html. Willet et al. stuck to the literal meaning of each morpheme in their translation of the title, which was “To Those Born Later;” Scott Horton takes a more interpretive approach, bestowing upon the original title an emotional color not inherent in the original German and translates it as “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake”
4. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, edited and translated by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (First Harvard University Press, 2006), 395.
5. Brecht, “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake,” trans. Scott Horton, I.
6. Brecht, “To Those Born Later,” John Willet, Ralph Manheim, and Eric Fried, I. Both translations are the same here.
7. Brecht, “An die Nachgeborenen,” I
8. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” translated by Dennis Redmond, (Marxist’s Internet Archive, 2005), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. Redmond’s translation of this particular moment implies an intimacy with the past life lived compared to Howard Eiland and Michael Jenning’s translation, “Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before?” The passive voice in the Eiland translation, in which “we are touched,” puts a further distance between past life lived and life being lived; whereas in Redmond’s transition, it is the air that actively caresses. The level of intimacy suggested by Redmond’s translation is deepened by Emanuele Coccia’s later ontology of life: the air that caresses us is not just a “purely geological or mineral reality – it is not just out there, it is not as such, an effect of the earth” that just so happened to pass through past lives lived – “it is the breath of other living beings. It is a byproduct of ‘the lives of others.’” The fact that the air we breathe is created by the acts of past lives means that, in a sense, it is those past lives that caress us when the air does, for the “atmosphere is…the sphere of breath.”9 This is why I chose Redmond’s translation here: to underscore that sense of intimacy between past and present lives implied by Benjamin’s choice to focus on the breath.
9. Emanuele Coccia, “In Open Air: Ontology of the Atmosphere” in The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2019), 33-35.
10. Brecht, “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake,” trans. Scott Horton, I.
11. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by David Ross (Oxford University Press, 2009), 1102b, 1122b19.
12. Brecht, “To Those Born Later,” John Willet, Ralph Manheim, and Eric Fried, I.
13. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1122a35.
14. Brecht, “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake,” trans. Scott Horton, I.
15. Brecht, “To Those Born Later,” John Willet, Ralph Manheim, and Eric Fried, I.
16. Brecht, “To Those Born Later,” trans. Willet, Manheim & Freid, II
17. Brecht, “To Those Who Follow In Our Wake,” trans. Scott Horton, III
18. Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (Suhrkamp, 2010), 4.
19. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” trans. Howard Eiland and Michael Jenning, 396.
20. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” trans. Howard Eiland and Michael Jenning, 396.
21. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” trans. Howard Eiland and Michael Jenning, 394.
22. Brecht, “To Those Who Follow In Our Wake,” trans. Scott Horton, II
23. Brecht, “An die Nachgeborenen,” II
24. Brecht, “To Those Born Later,” trans. Willet, Manheim & Freid, II
25. Brecht, “An die Nachgeborenen,” II
26. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Howard Eiland and Michael Jenning, 392
27. Brecht, “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake,” trans. Scott Horton, III
28. Brecht, “To Those Born Later,” trans. Willet, Manheim & Freid, I
29. Brecht, “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake,” trans. Scott Horton, I – I took the creative liberty of mixing both translations here.
Bibliography
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by David Ross. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History,” translated by Dennis Redmond, Marxist’s Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. 2005.
Benjamin, Walter. Über den Begriff der Geschichte. Suhrkamp, 2010.
Brecht, Bertolt. "An die Nachgeborenen." In Svendborger Gedichte, 1939. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 722-25. 1967.
Brecht, Bertolt. "To Those Who Follow in Our Wake." Translated by Scott Horton. Harper's Magazine, January 2008. https://harpers.org/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake/.
Brecht, Bertolt. "To Those Born Later." Translated by John Willet, Ralph Manheim, and Erich Fried. https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/brecht/ToThoseBorn.html.
Emanuele Coccia,“In Open Air: Ontology of the Atmosphere” in The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, 32-53. Polity Press, 2019.