Introduction

German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) composed From a German War Primer during the uneasy decade before World War II. The work gathers 22 brief poetic reflections on the immorality of war and the inequities it exposes between the rich and the poor. 

The collection reflects Brecht’s outrage as Germany embraced Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist agenda and its hawkish call to restore Germany’s pre-World War I prestige, which could only be done by provoking another land war.

By the time of the poem’s 1937 composition, Brecht, uneasy over the appointment of Hitler to the powerful position of Chancellor in 1933, had left Germany and was living in Svendborg, Denmark. For Brecht, it was the working class that most endured the suffering and the indignities of war. The wealthy profited from war, the very wars they promoted through their manipulation of propaganda, packaging their greed in the empty rhetoric of patriotism. 

With the cool detachment and understated irony that marked his groundbreaking theater works, Brecht exposes the plight of the working class during wartime. But the poem refuses to surrender to despair. Brecht celebrates the resilience and humanity of the poor as a reason to hope that wars someday might be stopped altogether.    

Plot Summary

The poem begins by pointing out the reality of hunger among the working class. Among the wealthy, talking about food is considered to be in poor taste. But that is only because, as the poet ironically notes, the rich have eaten and have a meal to critique, unlike their poorer contemporaries.

The poor, the poem notes, live and die without ever tasting “good meat.” Rather, they subsist on a grim diet of scrap vegetables, gristle meat, and hard bread. They work long days and come home exhausted. They lack respite from their labors. They never vacation to the “mountains and the great sea.” They spend their entire lives at backbreaking work.

Importantly, because the poor never experience finer things, such as seasoned meat or trips to seaside resorts, they may never “rise” because they have never known a better life to demand. But there looms a bigger problem. Even as the poor sweat out their lives, the beautiful laurel trees all around them have been chopped down to make room for new “arms factories,” their furious chimney smoke signaling a nation preparing for war.

Stanza 7 focuses on the coming war, which the poet ironically describes as the “great times to come.” Everything appears quiet. The forests still grow. The cities are at peace. But there is a foreboding, a feeling that a day is coming that will be marked with a “cross,” indicating its dramatic, historic importance.

Meanwhile even as factories begin stockpiling shells, the workers who man those factories still “cry out for bread.” The poor, who now work long hours in miserable conditions to build the national arsenal, still live on a pittance and still go hungry.

Stanza 10 confronts this hypocrisy. The wealthy, who control the weapons production and are already profiting from the war build-up, encourage the poor to cooperate. They teach “contentment.” They preach sacrifice, extolling the common good and the need for patriotic commitment:

Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry 
Of wonderful times to come.

This propaganda pushes the poor to devote themselves to war preparations, even as the wealthy lead “the country into the abyss.” The poor know the reality. When the powerful and wealthy, “those at the top,” assure the poor they are doing everything they can to maintain peace, “the common folk know / That war is coming” and that...