Adjudicating a poetry competition in 1926, Brecht refused to award the prize to any of the more than five hundred entries. In none, he said, was there any successful attempt to communicate anything of any value to anybody. None of the poems was of any use. And lyric poetry especially, he declared, is something of which we must be allowed to ask “what use is it?” His own answers to that fair and important question were, in the course of his life, various, subtle and profound; but here we need only note that in love poetry, too, in Brecht’s at least, usefulness (Gebrauchswert) is a constituent factor. In his sonnets, but not only there, Brecht as love-poet puts himself into the Renaissance and Baroque tradition of writing poems with a purpose, to persuade, to seduce. Or the poems give instructions—sardonic, brutal, or tender. Their Gestus is very often that of a person trying to make something happen. And in that stance, of course, they belong fully among the many poems Brecht wrote in the wish to induce people to think in a particular way, to arm themselves in the struggle against fascism.

More generally, Brecht’s love poems almost always are what, in his view, none of the poems he adjudicated were: they are a communicative act, they address a person or persons in ways that require attention. Readers will very often have to adjust their thinking, their expectations, to attend to the communication, and perhaps to answer back. Something is in play, at stake, between Brecht (his poem) and the addressee, a dialogue is being offered, never an easy one. With Margarete Steffin and, to a lesser extent, with Ruth Berlau, Brecht entered into real poetic exchanges. A poem was sent and responded to, answered, a conversation, most often very testing and unsettling, was carried on in verse.

Steffin was Brecht’s friend and lover for nearly ten years until she died of tuberculosis in Moscow in June 1941. She was also his closest collaborator in the literary work which he and she equally understood as an act of resistance to Hitler, in the cause of humanity. She was, as he himself said, his pupil, his teacher, his soldier, his general. Brecht has often been accused of using people, women especially; but his relationship with Steffin, his love for her and his work with her, should make us think more understandingly about what it meant, in those times, in that struggle, to use and to be used. Both equally desired, and thought it their responsibility, to be useful to the cause. Brecht’s poems to Steffin, several of them in this volume, the rest to follow, are poems of a love which is, in its mixed entirety, tender, sensual, solicitous, jealous, protective, unkind, and kind. But at the heart of it, unchanging, was a loving and fighting collaboration, a commitment to serve, to use and to be used, in a matter which, quite rightly, they understood to be one of life or death. Seen like that, Brecht and Steffin, in that dialectic, using and being used, have considerable poignancy and nobility. They were engaged in unselfish action, in times which threatened to deform and deprave even the most usual and decent human dealings. Brecht, the lover and love-poet, is in that context an emblem of, at the very least, the desperate struggle to keep faith, hope, and love alive, and as such he, and his lover and comrade Steffin, deserve sympathy and admiration.