Brecht’s love poems, often intimately personal, are also rich in impersonal exemplars; that is, characters who in certain situations, employing certain kinds of discourse and strategies, illustrate possible human dealings in a variety of social contexts. Altogether Brecht led an “exemplary” life. The course and shape of it were to a great extent determined by events in his nation and in the world. For all his often vehemently asserted individuality, he led a life which was in large measure typical, and as a writer he drew attention to that typicalness. Born 1898, having served as a medical orderly in the First World War, he was a close witness of much of its aftermath: the November Revolution, Kapp Putsch, Hitler Putsch, hyperinflation, the increasingly violent polarization of politics during the later years of the Weimar Republic, the collapse of the markets in 1929. And in 1933, on the day after the Reichstag Fire, he went into exile, first in Scandinavia then in the United States. Postwar then, he was uneasily at home in the new GDR. During the uprising of June 1953 there was fighting on the Chausseestrasse, almost under his window. Some in the West (unfairly) thought him the exemplar of compromise. He died in 1956, a couple of months before the failed revolution in Hungary. Millions of people lived through or died in the events of that half century. Every one of those lives has its exemplary or figurative sense. Brecht had eyes to see that sense and in his writings he made it clear. He appears, very often in the third person, as an emblematic figure: the playwright, the teacher, the exile; or as a named personage: poor B.B., Me-Ti, Herr Keuner. And we can add “the lover” to those figures, the lover in times and circumstances and under a social order often very inimical to love and its free enjoyment and fulfilment. In the savagely disillusioned Reader for City-Dwellers love suffers as friendship and comradeship do; the times, the ideology of commodification and mercantile transaction, make it hard for lovers to prosper or even survive. See here the two poems from that collection (in a woman’s voice): “He was easy to get . . .” and “Again and again . . .” And consider also, in the plays, Shen Te’s love for the out-of-work pilot Sun, and the wistful erotic interest the Meat King and Philanthropist Mauler takes in Johanna, the young woman in whom he detects feelings he will not allow himself in the life he has chosen to lead.

The love poems are not a category apart. As already indicated, love, like all other human dealings, is affected by social circumstances. In the Augsburg Sonnets, for example, as in the City-Dwellers poems, Brecht acts out some of the worst possibilities. He presents himself, as the male protagonist, quite often in a singularly unattractive light. In part this is a young man’s posturing; but posturing itself, understood as acting out, was an important poetic strategy throughout his career. So in poems of the early 1920s, acting cynically, he demonstrates a way of being human that is characteristic not just of a young man but of a young man in the big city between two wars. This important matter of the exemplary, of behavior which is figurative of the times and circumstances, will become clearer in our large edition of Brecht’s poetry when we set the poems out abundantly through their successive phases, the successive social, political, and personal contexts in which they were produced.