(Email, Cornell University)
Citing Silence: Ruhe und Schweigen in Brecht’s Poetry
This paper explores how Brecht uses the trope of silence in his poetry to challenge conceptions of nature, innocence, and the artistic object. Although such prominent critics as Theodor Adorno and Martin Walser have found the judgment articulated in, among other writings, three poems – “Liturgie vom Hauch,” “An die Nachgeborenen,” and “Schlechte Zeit für Lyrik” – to be pedantic, tendentious, and even threatening, I will argue that Brecht’s trope of silence in these three poems opens a space for a productive dialog concerning the role of art and the conditions of artistic expression.
Peter Bürger has theorized avant-garde practice as an assault on a traditional, contemplative, auratic understanding of art by way of an attack on artistic institutions. Yet the avant-garde doesn’t renounce artistic practice altogether, but rather radically refigures it by politicizing it. Brecht, by bringing traditional poetic categories into conflict with political repression, is a central part of this reconceptualization. Brecht’s figure of silence in the above-mentioned poems paradigmatically enacts the paradox of an attack on traditional art within the medium of art. By introducing silence into ‘Liturgie vom Hauch’ as quoted through a Goethe poem, Brecht posits it simultaneously as a traditional poetic category closely identified with nature, and as a marker of repression. By bringing it into ‘An die Nachgeborenen’ as the bad news that one has not yet heard, by differentiating between irrelevant pleasantries and necessary unpleasantness in ‘Schlechte Zeit für Lyrik,’ and by figuring any discussion of natural beauty as complicit silence in all three poems, Brecht effectively inverts the poetic categories of nature, innocence, and silence into murder, guilt, and a static noise that drowns out what needs to be heard.
RATHER THAN BEING CRASSLY DIDACTIC AND DOCTRINAIRE, BRECHT’S POEMS THUS APPEAR TO ENGAGE WITH THE CHALLENGE PRESENTED BY MODERNITY TO ART’S RELATION TO POLITICS, NATURE, AND THE TRADITION. THE REACTION THIS ENGAGEMENT CONTINUES TO PROVOKE DEMONSTRATES THE CENTRALITY OF BRECHT’S QUESTION TO THE QUESTION OF THE POSSIBILITY OF ART IN GENERAL.
