Bertolt Brecht Holocaust Poem: the Burning of the Books

Die Bücherverbrennung ("The Burning of the Books") by Bertolt Brecht loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch When the Regime commanded the unlawful books to be burned, teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires. Then a banished writer, one of the best, scanning the list of excommunicated texts, became enraged: he’d been excluded! He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath, to write fiery letters to the incompetents in power ? Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen ? Haven’t I always reported the truth? Now here you are, treating me like a liar! Burn me! Published by Poetry Super Highway, The Tory, The Hindu, Poetry on Demand, Poemist and Convivium Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956] was a major German playwright, poet, novelist, humorist, essayist, theater director and songwriter. He was also a highly influential pioneer of modern epic theater, or dialectical theater, with its "alienation effect" (also known as the "distancing effect" or "estrangement effect"). Brecht is highly regarded today for his poetry and for plays such as Antigone, Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Threepenny Opera and Drums in the Night. He also wrote the lyrics to the song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" ("Mack the Knife"), which became a number one hit for Bobby Darin. Brecht fled Germany in 1933, when Hitler assumed power. A number of Brecht's poems were written from the perspective of a man who sees his country becoming increasingly fascist, xenophobic and militaristic. For instance, “Die Bücherverbrennung” (“The Burning of the Books”) was written by Brecht about the Nazi book burnings orchestrated by Hitler's propaganda-meister Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis burned the books of writers they considered to be "decadent," including those of Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway and even Helen Keller. Also among the books burned were those of the great German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who in his 1820-1821 play Almansor accurately predicted, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." ("Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.") Keywords/Tags: Bertolt Brecht, Germany, German, translation, Holocaust poem, burning, books, banned, harmful, unlawful, illegal, censored, Nazi, regime, bureaucracy, fires, bonfires, oxen, carts, cartloads, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, World War II, write, writer, writers, writing, writings, excommunicated, exiled, burn, true, truth, pen, blazing, fiery, liar, voice