The accusative of violence, like that of love, destroys the in-between . . . By contrast there is the dative of saying and speaking, which reinforces the in-between, which moves within the in-between. But then there is also the accusative of the singing poem, which releases and saves what it sings from the in-between and its relations, without reinforcing anything. When poetry and not philosophy absolutizes, there's salvation.
Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1953Footnote 1
In the second half of the 1960s, the political theorist Hannah Arendt published an extended profile of the poet, playwright, and director Bertolt Brecht. It first appeared in the New Yorker in 1966; two years later, Arendt included a revised version in her book Men in Dark Times, whose title was inspired by one of Brecht's poems; finally, in 1969, Arendt's own German translation appeared in the influential literary journal Merkur.Footnote 2 It is one of the most passionate essays Arendt ever wrote, yet its intensity has made it difficult to interpret. Her admiration for Brecht's writing is palpable, as is her disdain for the “second-rate critics and third-rate writers” who had once been able to “denounce him with impunity.”Footnote 3 But Arendt insists that her essay is not a work of literary criticism: as the subtitle of the German version indicates, it is an investigation of “the poet Bertolt Brecht and his relation to politics,” and Arendt's treatment of this theme is so heavily saturated with the language of sin and punishment that her essay has struck many readers as a bitter attack on Brecht for his postwar accommodation with the Stalinist regime in East Germany. The essay's reputation as an “angry” and “confused piece of anti-Communist polemic”—to quote one early reviewer of Men in Dark Times—was solidified by the furious reaction of Brecht's editor and translator John Willett, whose dogged challenges to Arendt's evidence for the claim that Brecht had written “odes to Stalin” eventually made the pages of the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times.Footnote 4
It is easy to understand Willett's indignation, especially against the background of the long history of public vilification to which Brecht had been subject in Western Europe and the United States. Even before the end of World War II, the former German Communist leader Ruth Fischer, who in exile became a militantly anti-Communist activist and informant, had labeled Brecht the “minstrel of the GPU,” invoking his play The Measures Taken—the story of a young Communist's willing submission to death at the hands of his comrades—as evidence that Brecht “follows the myth of the total state, the total terror and the iron disciplined party.”Footnote 5 After Brecht's return to East Berlin, and only a month after the sudden North Korean attack across the 38th parallel, a West German newspaper denounced visiting productions by his fledgling Berliner Ensemble as “shock-troop operations of the eastern Communists.”Footnote 6 The Viennese writer Friedrich Torberg—who had furnished the FBI with information about Brecht in 1943, when both were in exile in California—called Brecht a “literary stooge of red fascism” and campaigned for years for a theatrical boycott of his works.Footnote 7 Upon his death in 1956, Brecht was memorialized in the New Leader as a “purveyor of ethical barbarism,” “as Stalinist as Stalin,” who died “with blood on his hands.”Footnote 8 And several months later, the West German foreign minister caused a stir by comparing Brecht's poetry, on the floor of the Bundestag, to the work of Nazi lyricist Horst Wessel.Footnote 9 By the time Arendt's essay appeared, Willett had been defending Brecht against this sort of “fashionable contempt” for a decade; faced with Arendt's references to Brecht's “odes to Stalin,” he can hardly be blamed for worrying that her readers would remember “nothing else about [Brecht's] work” but that one damning phrase.Footnote 10
Still, Willett's own narrow focus on those same three words came at a price. Lost in the controversy about how many such odes Brecht had written, or whether a few lines of praise in a long poem amounted to an ode to Stalin at all, was the larger question of Arendt's purpose in mentioning them. It might have seemed obvious that the phrase “ode to Stalin,” penned by an eminent analyst of totalitarianism, could only be an angry accusation. But Arendt, with characteristic idiosyncrasy, appeared to have invoked these “odes” as grounds for lenience, not severity, in Brecht's case. Far from presenting Brecht's “odes to Stalin” as his “central sin,” as Willett put it in a gloss of Arendt's position, Arendt proposed that these odes, by virtue of their sheer badness, offered evidence that Brecht had already been “punished for [his] sins by loss of talent”—punished, indeed, by the “gods of poetry,” whose assumption of jurisdiction over the poet's “real sins,” Arendt wagered, might make room for his fellow citizens to treat him with generosity.Footnote 11 This is a strange and difficult thought. What could Arendt have meant in asserting that “a poet's real sins are avenged by the gods of poetry”—an assertion that she called, with deceptive directness, her “thesis”?Footnote 12 What, if not his “odes to Stalin” and his postwar return to East Germany, did she understand Brecht's “real sins” to have been? And through what rhetorical alchemy did Arendt hope to transmute offense at Brecht's sins, whatever they were, into forbearance, even gratitude, among her readers? By answering these questions, this article recasts Arendt's essay as a peculiar, qualified, but powerful defense of Brecht and his poetry—one that is all the more interesting because it did not arise out of personal loyalty to Brecht, whom Arendt once admitted she “never liked.”Footnote 13
This reinterpretation of Arendt's essay on Brecht serves two larger purposes. Careful readers have begun to dismantle Arendt's reputation as a crusader for Cold War liberalism—a reputation that had more to do with the public reception of The Origins of Totalitarianism in the 1950s and 1960s than with Arendt's own intellectual and political orientation. Yet her apparent polemic against Brecht remains a hard case for the view of Arendt as an unorthodox antitotalitarian, who refused any easy mapping of her conception of political freedom onto contemporary geopolitical rivalries.Footnote 14 One purpose of this article is to strengthen this view by reconstructing the complex relationship between Arendt's writing on Brecht and its Cold War context. Arendt's defense of Brecht was both powerful and vulnerable to misunderstanding, I propose, because it operated within but also cut against the grain of the dominant problematics of its time, implying a critique of the forced choices and forms of thoughtlessness that Arendt found pervasive in Cold War political culture. Making this case will involve tracing the long, adventuresome transnational history of Arendt's writing, speaking, and publishing on Brecht, which so far has been only incompletely explored.Footnote 15 This history, which is the focus of the first half of the article, challenges the view of Arendt's 1960s essay as a polemic against the poet, in which she jumped on the bandwagon of earlier attacks, like Ruth Fischer's denunciation, or Herbert Lüthy's subtler 1952 essay “Of Poor Bert Brecht,” published in several languages in magazines associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom.Footnote 16 To the contrary, in the late 1940s Arendt was already working out a stance toward the poet that put her out of alignment with leading combatants in the emerging “cultural Cold War”; read against this background, Arendt's later essay on Brecht emerges as a rejoinder to the very polemics it is often but wrongly thought to exemplify.
The second, more explicitly theoretical, purpose of this article takes its lead from Arendt's suggestion that “Brecht's political biography” represents “a kind of case history of the uncertain relationship between poetry and politics.”Footnote 17 In some of Arendt's writings, this uncertain relationship can seem like a stark opposition. The Human Condition, for example, is often read as an attempt to recover a distinctive idea of political action or praxis—“open-ended, non-violent performance in a context of plurality,” as Dana Villa glosses it—by separating it from form-giving work or poiêsis.Footnote 18 Indeed, on Villa's influential interpretation, Arendt holds to this distinction even more rigorously than did her teacher Martin Heidegger, who undertook a similar recovery of praxis in the 1920s, but later muddled things through his various appeals to the idea of poetry as a site of political redemption.Footnote 19 Yet Arendt does not locate Brecht's “sins” in his violation of some strict boundary between poetry and politics; nor does she defend Brecht even in light of his sins, as some Western liberals did, by bracketing politics and appealing to the sheer artistic greatness of his work: instead, she defends Brecht and praises his poetry on specifically political grounds. Through careful attention to the rhetorical workings and theoretical underpinnings of Arendt's 1960s essay on Brecht, and especially to her account of Brecht's “sins” and “punishment,” the second half of this article reconstructs Arendt's unusual conception of poetry's political vocation. Arendt associates poetry with truth-telling—not the mere recording of information, nor the disclosure of philosophical or (as in Heidegger) ontological truth, but a kind of disruptive faithfulness to factual reality, one that interrupts efforts to derive practical conclusions, as if automatically, from philosophically or theoretically simplified appeals to facts. This account complicates the familiar picture of Arendt's political thought as built around an impassable gulf between work and action, or poetry and politics:Footnote 20 it suggests instead that Arendt was able to explore the fraught but fruitful interdependence between these terms by holding poetry, like politics, at a distance from philosophy. This account will also indicate why the historical and theoretical sides of this article belong together: in presenting a narrative of Brecht's “sin” and “punishment” that could serve as a defense of the poet—thereby challenging the polarized terms of engagement with Brecht's legacy that prevailed in the first decades of the Cold War—Arendt's essay emulated, in its own way, the poetic practice she admired in Brecht's own writing.
ARENDT ON BRECHT IN THE COLD WAR
Hannah Arendt's first published treatment of Bertolt Brecht came relatively early in her American career, before the appearance of The Origins of Totalitarianism, when she was working for Schocken Books and writing for a variety of American and European periodicals.Footnote 21 In 1946, Brecht's friend and translator Eric Bentley, then on the editorial staff of the Kenyon Review, arranged for Arendt to review a new bilingual edition of Brecht's Selected Poems; her review appeared under the title “Beyond Personal Frustration: The Poetry of Bertolt Brecht” in early 1948.Footnote 22 “Beyond Personal Frustration” already sounded themes that would persist in all of Arendt's writings on Brecht. She emphasized Brecht's distinctive lack of self-pity, his attention to worldly events rather than to his own suffering, his consequent preference for the ballad and epic forms rather than the lyric and tragic, and his concern not only with the material deprivation of the poor but also with the public obscurity that poverty imposes. In all of this Arendt was unequivocally, often eloquently, admiring, as when she wrote that Brecht's poetry displays a “passionate anger at the course of the world, where it has always been only the victors who have chosen what is to be recorded and remembered by mankind.” His poems, she continued, are not simply “plaidoyers for the poor, but the expression of a passionate longing for a world in which all can be seen and heard, the passionate wrath against a history that remembered a few and forgot so many, a history that under the pretense of remembering caused us to forget.”Footnote 23
Bentley would later express dismay at Arendt's “second thoughts” about the “enthusiasm” she had shown for Brecht in this early review;Footnote 24 but the discontinuity is more apparent than real. To be sure, “Beyond Personal Frustration”—written shortly after Brecht's hasty departure from America in the wake of his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but before his return to GermanyFootnote 25 —said nothing about Brecht's involvement with Communist politics or even his Marxism, apart from a passing reference to his “dialectical-materialist approach to history.” But the review, for all its praise, was not uncritical. In a brief concluding section, Arendt took Brecht to task for failing to understand “fascist and totalitarian events, such as terror, concentration camps, anti-Semitism”—a failure she found evidenced by his ineffective poetic response to the rise of Nazism. And here, Arendt already seemed to anticipate the complicated rhetoric of her later essay, with its puzzling invocation of Brecht's sin and punishment as grounds for leniency. In introducing her criticism of Brecht's clumsy efforts to write against Hitler, she remarked in 1948 that “it is entirely to Brecht's credit that he writes badly when he does not see the truth—however distressing it may be to see how badly he can write. Here the conscious loss of sensibility has taken its revenge.” Arendt had already sketched a version of these sentences on the endpapers of her copy of Brecht's Selected Poems, where she appears to have begun to compose her review; as we will see, the thought would remain at the core of her stance toward Brecht for two decades.Footnote 26
Shortly after its publication, Arendt's review caught the eye of Melvin Lasky, a young American writer in Berlin who was preparing to launch a new German-language periodical, Der Monat, under the sponsorship of the American military government.Footnote 27 Lasky is remembered today as a vigorous partisan in the “cultural Cold War”—he was a driving force behind the establishment of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin in 1950, and would edit its British magazine, Encounter, from 1958 until the fall of the Berlin Wall—and as one of that subset of the “New York intellectuals” who moved from revolutionary Trotskyism in the 1930s toward liberal anti-Communism in the 1950s.Footnote 28 By early 1948, Lasky was already well along this path. After his army service, he had stayed on in Europe as a civilian journalist, writing dispatches for the New Leader and Partisan Review from the front lines of the intensifying conflict between the occupying powers over the future of Germany, and making a name for himself with a combative challenge to the Soviets at the Communist-sponsored German Writers’ Congress in 1947. Yet Lasky was more than just a budding Cold War polemicist.Footnote 29 He also had a deep understanding of German history and culture, as well as a journalist's talent for conversation and appetite for particulars, which he fed even while still in the army by seeking out opportunities to talk with Germans, eminent and ordinary, about their experiences of the war and occupation.Footnote 30 Among those he met this way were Karl and Gertrud Jaspers, whom he helped put back in touch with Arendt for the first time since the war beganFootnote 31 —a kindness that also occasioned the beginning of Arendt's and Lasky's own correspondence.Footnote 32 Lasky's observations left him distressed at how little Americans understood about the postwar situation in Germany, and informed his harsh critiques of American occupation policy, which in his assessment was driven by a catastrophic mix of a punitive “conqueror psychology,” well-intentioned bureaucratic incompetence, and a narrow-minded impulse to “make Europe safe for the American dollar.” What was missing, Lasky thought, was any serious attempt to renew Germany's “hopelessly atomized” cultural and intellectual life and to reintegrate it into a larger European and transatlantic conversation.Footnote 33
With the foundation of Der Monat, Lasky joined these two orientations into a single project. His new publication aimed simultaneously to contribute to the reconstruction of German culture, and to enlist an educated German readership, especially on the non-Communist left, in the American-led “political offensive” against totalitarianism—not by propagandizing directly for the United States or advancing a specific political line, but by presenting a “wide variety of political and cultural opinion” and by adopting an “unafraid self-critical tone,” which would make the magazine a “living demonstration of how the democratic mind works.”Footnote 34 The tensions inherent in this strategy—in which the very practice of free, wide-ranging conversation was deployed as a weapon in the Cold War—would eventually precipitate a crisis (less for Der Monat than for the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter) when the Central Intelligence Agency's covert funding of the Congress was publicly exposed in 1967, raising questions about whether the supposedly autonomous discourse being held out as a model to the world had been subject to political control by the institutions on which it depended.Footnote 35 But even insofar as they enjoyed substantial independence from their sponsors and funders, publications like Der Monat faced another challenge. Cultural and intellectual life, understood as a domain of flourishing diversity and freedom, could only be sharpened into a weapon suited to politics, understood as a matter of disciplined antitotalitarian struggle with a “united sense of mission,” by simultaneously displaying and limiting its capaciousness.Footnote 36 This problem would prove especially difficult to negotiate when it came to topics that straddled the boundary, and thus implicated the relationship, between culture and politics, as Lasky would discover during Der Monat’s first year with respect to the swiftly changing case of Bertolt Brecht.
In mid-June 1948—just before the beginning of the Berlin blockade, and while Brecht was still in Switzerland, unsure of his future—Lasky wrote to Arendt after a long hiatus to invite her to contribute to Der Monat, which was then still in the planning stages, and which he described in decidedly nonmilitant terms as “American-sponsored, in the German language, and political and cultural in character.” If Arendt would adapt her Kenyon Review piece on Brecht for a German readership, Lasky proposed, he would publish it in a regular section he envisioned for the magazine on “Poets and Poetry.” Arendt, preoccupied over the summer with politics and war in the Middle East and with the manuscript of Origins, didn't respond, so Lasky reiterated the invitation at the end of September.Footnote 37 Arendt finally sent a note of agreement to Lasky in the American sector of Berlin, where he had just put out the first issue of Der Monat with help from the airlift, on 17 October—the same day that Brecht left Zurich on a route that took him through Salzburg, Prague, and Dresden to the Soviet sector of Berlin.Footnote 38 There, Brecht began to work on a new production of Mother Courage for the Deutsches Theater, which would open in January to acclaim from audiences and critics across the city—a reaction that Brecht himself took as an encouraging sign that Berlin's cultural life had not yet been fragmented along sectoral lines.Footnote 39 Still, while movement among the zones of the city remained unrestricted even during the blockade, at least one important American-zone newspaper ignored Brecht's production as part of a “blackout” of coverage of theatre in the East, and urged its readers to deny their patronage to cultural institutions in the Soviet sector.Footnote 40 The newspaper of the Socialist Unity Party, in turn, called the boycotters a “barbaric faction of pogromists,” declared Mother Courage a triumph not only for Brecht but for the new social and political order being built in the East, and reminded its readers that Brecht's “dramas are weapons.”Footnote 41 A few months later, Lasky's German coeditor at Der Monat, Hellmut Jaesrich, would liken this fracturing of Berlin's cultural scene to a “fissure that runs in a zig-zag through the asphalt streets of this city.”Footnote 42
This was the tense setting into which, in early March 1949, Arendt delivered what amounted to a new German-language essay on “Der Dichter Bertolt Brecht” (“The Poet Bertolt Brecht”).Footnote 43 The essay—which Arendt had warned Lasky would be a “tightrope act”Footnote 44—began with an extended discussion of the “difficulties” that lie at the intersection between poetry and politics, in which Arendt invoked the then-current uproar over Ezra Pound's Bollingen Prize for the Pisan Cantos.Footnote 45 She also brought Brecht's own political orientation into the foreground, explaining in her cover note to Lasky that Brecht's return to Berlin had made it seem “nonsensical” for her to “beat around the bush” with regard to the “Communist question.”Footnote 46 But Arendt did not proceed within the prevailing terms of public dispute over poetry and politics, in which the issue was whether the aesthetic quality of a poet's work could outweigh, or indeed could be separated from, the political commitments it or its author expressed.Footnote 47 That way of framing the problem would have been consonant with Der Monat’s own project of relating culture, understood as a relatively autonomous space for the free play of ideas, to politics, understood as a domain of compulsory partisan struggle. Instead, Arendt pursued a complex strategy of deflection, prefigured by her quotation of one of Goethe's epigrams—“poets do not sin so grievously”—which introduced the language of “sin” into her writing about Brecht for the first time, even as it also minimized its force.Footnote 48 Strikingly, Arendt proposed that the very play that had become central to attacks on Brecht in the West, from Ruth Fischer's polemic to his HUAC hearing, should actually earn him praise: “In Brecht's case,” she wrote, “it is not so serious that he wrote The Measures Taken in order to glorify a totalitarian party,” for that play, whatever the commitments of its author, “told the truth,” and did so about something that the party in question “wanted to keep secret at any price.” The fact that Brecht “found what he told wonderful” was ultimately less important than the fact that he “did what all poets do when they are left alone: they tell tales out of school.” And while Arendt repeated and elaborated the critique of Brecht's anti-Nazi poetry that she had advanced in her Kenyon Review piece—this time ascribing its flatness and ineffectuality to Brecht's “experiment[ation]” with “socialist realism”—the point of this critique was not to denounce Brecht's political commitments, but to explain why, at one crucial moment, his poetry had lost touch with the political “reality” to which, at other times, it so powerfully “bore witness.”Footnote 49
Indeed, in its final pages, Arendt's essay became lyrical in its praise of the “genuinely revolutionary temperament” that Brecht's work expressed—though without quite losing its sharp edge.Footnote 50 Reiterating her earlier portrait of a poet indignant at the exclusion of the “poor, the oppressed, and the exploited” from the annals of history, Arendt now quoted extensively from Brecht's “Ballad of the Waterwheel,” which contrasts the regular rising and falling of the “mankind's outstanding figures” with the unchanging subordination of “us who have to keep them going.”Footnote 51 This poem, she explained,
has nothing to do either with socialist realism or with proletarian poetry. It deals with something much more general, and at the same time much more precise, namely the construction of a world in which all men are equally visible, and with the planning of a history which does not remember few and forget many, which does not produce forgetfulness under the pretext of memory, which does not make some into participants and others into the instrument of events.Footnote 52
Because the ballad was the form in which “the people endeavored to create its own poetic immortality,” Arendt concluded, it was not when he engaged with Marxist philosophy but rather when “he began to use the ballad form and to achieve great things with it” that Brecht really “took the side of the oppressed. And no one can deprive him of this honor, ‘no God, no emperor or tribune’, not even his own blindness.”Footnote 53
Across the spring and summer of 1949—the period in which Lasky, in exchanges with Sidney Hook, Ruth Fischer, and others, was starting to envision what would become the founding event of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in BerlinFootnote 54 —Arendt's manuscript languished in Der Monat’s editorial office. In April, Lasky received a memo from the New York branch of the US Army bureaucracy that supported its roster of periodicals in occupied Germany, suggesting that he republish Arendt's original book review (its gloss: “though a favorable literary estimate, Arendt dissents from his politics”). Lasky replied that he already had a “complete rewrite of that old Kenyon essay, but the matter is a very delicate one, especially here in Berlin (where [Brecht] is cultural-collaborationist number one).”Footnote 55 A few days later, in response to a query from Arendt about the status of her manuscript, Hellmut Jaesrich replied that “the theme of ‘Brecht’ is particularly difficult here in Berlin, where he represents the most reliable trump-card in our political rival's hand,” and that they were therefore unsure whether to publish Arendt's essay alone, or to supplement it with something else.Footnote 56 This was the last Arendt seems to have heard about the matter directly from Der Monat. After inquiring with the magazine's representatives in New York several times about her fee—“Miss Arendt is indignant and impatient,” they wrote to LaskyFootnote 57 —she was told in August that Der Monat had decided not to use the piece “because it is too friendly to Brecht on political grounds.”Footnote 58 (Arendt did not expect Brecht himself to see it that way.Footnote 59) She immediately offered the essay instead to her friend Dolf Sternberger, a fellow student of Jaspers from their Heidelberg days, who had published several of Arendt's essays in Die Wandlung during its brief but distinguished existence, and who was now slated to become a coeditor of the revived Neue Rundschau. “Der Dichter Bertolt Brecht” finally appeared there early in 1950.Footnote 60
Arendt would go on to publish several other pieces in Der Monat, including excerpts from The Origins of Totalitarianism, and she and Lasky remained on friendly terms. Indeed, when Arendt and Lasky met during her first postwar visit to Berlin in February 1950, Lasky even accompanied her to East Berlin for a performance of Brecht's Mother Courage at the Deutsches Theater.Footnote 61 Still, a deep gulf remained between their ways of engaging the intersection of culture and politics, and between their stances toward Brecht. At that summer's meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin—held, as Lasky put it, at the very “border along which two different worlds confront each other” in a “supreme drama”—both Lasky and Arthur Koestler would issue public challenges and rebukes to Brecht and other East German literary figures; several years later, after Brecht's death, Lasky still saw himself and the Congress as embroiled in a struggle against the exploitation of “Brechtomania” by the Communists.Footnote 62 Of course, Lasky was hardly Brecht's staunchest antagonist among Congress intellectuals. He rejected Friedrich Torberg's call to boycott Brecht, as well as the Austrian's intemperate tone, preferring to deploy liberality as a weapon instead—for example by offering Brecht space in Der Monat to explain his views of “artistic freedom,” and then running a blank page under Brecht's name when the poet failed to deliver.Footnote 63 But Lasky's biggest contribution to the “Battle of Brecht” came two years after the appearance of Arendt's essay in Neue Rundschau, when he published Herbert Lüthy's “Of Poor Bert Brecht” as the lead article in the May 1952 issue of Der Monat.Footnote 64
Lüthy's long literary-political polemic, its title a pointed play on one of Brecht's early poems, combined a sensitive appreciation of Brecht's formal talents with a stinging critique of his politicization of his art. That summer, in a report on the Congress-sponsored arts festival in Paris, Lüthy would argue in Commentary that “there is no committed art, for commitment would make it cease to be art at all.” In Brecht's case, Lüthy saw evidence of this corruption in the convergence between Brecht's later poetry and “Stalinist prose,” a convergence he dramatized by presenting in verse form, as if it were a late work of Brecht's, a long passage from a fawning 1948 salute to Stalin by the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences. “Admittedly,” Lüthy conceded, “one will not find this poem in any Brecht anthology: he has not yet written it, although he has tried.”Footnote 65 For Lüthy, this dead end represented the culmination of Brecht's whole career, which had been suspended between two extremes. On the one hand, his early plays and poems, exemplified by Baal and the Hauspostille, expressed an utterly unpolitical fascination with the “basic theme of purely biological life, life sensed as a phase in the metabolism of nature, whose conscious individuality is only an accidental byproduct of organic chemistry.” On the other hand, in his equally though differently “inhuman” didactic plays, like The Measures Taken, Brecht left nature behind in order to campaign for the transformation of social reality, but without managing to give any content to his vision of political change beyond change for its own sake, and the murders that principle can justify.Footnote 66 At the unproductive intersection between these two tendencies, Lüthy placed the very poem Arendt had praised in 1949, the “Ballad of the Waterwheel,” but while Arendt had seen in that poem a “genuinely revolutionary” attack on systematic subordination, Lüthy saw it as a “revolt against all social order as such” in the name of letting natural life run its own course.Footnote 67 Brecht had left himself no way forward: as Lüthy commented when he revised the essay for republication in English in 1956, “since he settled in East Germany, Brecht has not published a single line that will take its place in his literary work.” Instead, Lüthy wrote, turning another of Brecht's own poems against him, “he sits, splendid and well organised, on the very outermost limb of the free world—busily sawing it through.”Footnote 68
If Arendt ever read Lüthy's essay, no direct evidence of her reaction has survived.Footnote 69 In fact, Arendt's Neue Rundschau piece was to be her last word on the subject for nearly a decade. But she wasn't done with Brecht, or with his critics. Attending a conference in Munich in the summer of 1958, when the West German foreign minister's “Horst Wessel” comparison was still fresh in public memory, she intervened in a controversy that broke out after one participant charged Brecht with “spiritual self-sacrifice” for “surrender[ing] his art to party doctrine.” In her apparently improvised response, Arendt exhorted the audience to show the “forbearance” that Brecht himself had asked of those “born later,” since “nothing and no one in the world could have punished [Brecht] as terribly as he punished himself.”Footnote 70 A few years later, while teaching for a quarter at Northwestern University, she was provoked to “anger with a friend of mine, [a] Professor of German Literature who thought he could throw Brecht out of the window,” but the friend, Erich Heller, “was generous enough to let me address his students,” so she composed and presented a new, full-blown lecture on Brecht, which she would deliver over the next few years at Emory University—where she paired it with “Truth and Politics”—and at Cornell. It was this lecture that she would expand for publication in the New Yorker, Men in Dark Times, and Merkur.Footnote 71
There are, to be sure, certain points of similarity between Arendt's later reflections on Brecht and Lüthy's polemic. These include Arendt's attention to Brecht's “odes to Stalin,” which she mentioned for the first time in 1958, as well as her claim that after Brecht returned to Berlin “his poetic faculty dried up from one day to the next,” such that “not a single play and not a single great poem was produced” during the last seven years of his life.Footnote 72 Yet when Arendt's and Lüthy's perspectives come into contact, the result is less a convergence than a collision. Strikingly, while Arendt had written briefly about Brecht's early poetry in her pieces for Kenyon and Der Monat, her later essay devoted a whole section to this period, including, for the first time, an extended reading of the text that Lüthy had taken to be emblematic of Brecht's early work: the choral hymn that opened his first great play, Baal. Arendt herself rendered the hymn's first and last stanzas this way:
When Baal grew up inside the white maternal womb there was the sky, great and still and pale, young and naked and immensely wondersome, as Baal then loved it when Baal came . . . When Baal was left to rot inside the earth's dark womb, there still was the sky, great and still and pale, young and naked and immensely wonderful, as Baal had loved it when Baal was.Footnote 73
Both Arendt and Lüthy saw this hymn as a song of gratitude; but they differed sharply about the object of this gratitude and its significance. For Lüthy, its object was the “natural world,” understood not as a “human habitation” but as a “boundless, all-embracing element”; what this poem and others of the same period celebrate is the “submergence of the individual in the purely material processes of the natural world.”Footnote 74 This reading helped anchor Lüthy's interpretation of Brecht's late poetic impotence as the outgrowth of the irresolvable contradiction that had structured his career as a whole, between antipolitical naturalism and a dangerous commitment to change for its own sake.
For Arendt, by contrast, the gratitude expressed in Baal and in Brecht's other early poetry cannot be parsed this way: while it is indeed gratitude for “earth and sky, for the mere fact of being born and alive,” it is also and indistinguishably “love of the world.”Footnote 75 It is surprising to find Arendt treating these two things as proximate, or even synonymous, given her emphasis elsewhere on the difference between natural “life” and the artificial “world.”Footnote 76 Yet on her reading, the experience of natural simplicity expressed in Brecht's early work is not pre-political or unworldly. Situating this poetry against the background of the “breakdown of tradition” exposed by World War I, Arendt wrote that for Brecht, “four years of destruction had wiped the world clean, the storms having swept along with them all human traces, everything one could hold on to, including cultural objects and moral values . . . it was as though, fleetingly, the world had become as innocent and fresh as it was on the day of creation.” For Arendt, in other words, even the “great and still and pale” sky can be worldly, if what resonates in its stillness is the “accomplished fact,” the “political reality” that has given it its “terrible freshness.”Footnote 77 And in reading even Brecht's early hymns to natural life in this way as forms of poetic responsiveness to worldly reality, Arendt was able to cast the trajectory of Brecht's career, from his early “life-praising” poetry to his later politically engaged writing, not as a hopelessly unproductive bouncing between extremes, but as a continuous, often powerfully successful, negotiation of the poet's vocation of truthfulness. Recounting these successes, Arendt counseled her listeners and readers not to judge Brecht harshly—indeed, she advised them not to try to “draw up a code of behavior for poets,” since there is “no surer way to make a fool of oneself.”Footnote 78 In one draft of her lecture, she even presented herself as the “attorney for the defense” before urging her audience, as they “consider what [Brecht] did,” not to “forget who he was—and the debt of gratitude we owe him.”Footnote 79 Perhaps it was this debt that Arendt meant to acknowledge when, in 1960, she gave her revised German version of The Human Condition a new opening epigraph: the first and last stanzas of the “Hymn of Baal the Great,” with its praise of earth and sky.Footnote 80
POETRY, TRUTH, AND FORBEARANCE: THE ZINC COFFIN
The “Cold War,” as Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell have recently written, “was an actors’ category, and is thereby entangled in the very history that the label is designed to identify.”Footnote 81 As a consequence of this entanglement, a briefer attempt to place Arendt's writing on Brecht in its Cold War context would have risked reproducing the powerful impulse toward polarization that circulated in the intellectual life of the era—as though there were basically only two positions she could have taken; as if her politics could be inferred straightforwardly from the density of her connections to militantly anti-Stalinist intellectuals; or as if the points of connection between her writing and Lüthy's amounted to a fundamental similarity in perspective. By attending more closely to such matters as the timing and fraught publication history of her writing on Brecht, the multiple axes of affinity and conflict that structured her relationship with figures like Lasky, and the divergences between Arendt's and Lüthy's readings of some of the same poetic material, the first part of this article has shown how Arendt, working in one sense within the context of the cultural Cold War, was also working against its grain. What remains to be seen, though, is exactly how Arendt performed this torquing maneuver in her writing. If the “thesis” of Arendt's later 1960s essay on Brecht is that “a poet's real sins are avenged by the gods of poetry,” this part of the article will show how Arendt's unconventional account both of the nature of poetic sin in general, and of the content of Brecht's sins in particular, allowed her to use the seemingly moralizing language of sin and punishment to leverage forbearance among her readers.
What kind of transgression does Arendt have in mind when she refers to a poet's “real sins”? The question is surprisingly difficult to answer. Arendt writes that “Brecht's troubles had started when he became engagé,” and she casts Brecht's “sin” in terms of the crossing of a boundary, though admittedly a “faint” one,Footnote 82 so perhaps Brecht's sin involves a transgression of the line between the distinct activities of poetry and politics. Such an interpretation of Brecht's “sin” could and frequently did underwrite a certain kind of defense of the poet, one that was readily adaptable to a Cold War geopolitical framework: by distinguishing aesthetics from politics, liberal Western readers could disapprove of Brecht's engagement but still find that the sheer quality of his poetry outweighed his political misjudgments—indeed, they could hold out their own willingness to separate “artistic quality” from “political attitude” as evidence of the openness of “Western democracy.” (As the critic Siegfried Melchinger put it in a two-sentence response to Torberg's call for a boycott: “why should Brecht be performed in the West? Because the West isn't the East.”Footnote 83) Yet Arendt's defense of Brecht does not follow this template. She doesn't explicitly locate the “boundaries” she associates with Brecht's sin with a frontier between poetry and politics.Footnote 84 Indeed, as we have seen, what she admires in Brecht includes a certain kind of political engagement, and she has harsh words elsewhere for the pursuit of aesthetic purity or “art for art's sake,” which she presents as a strategy employed by the “educated philistine” to assert his own social status and to evade the unpleasantness of the “reality” to which it is the poet's vocation to give voice.Footnote 85
Nor is it easy to determine what Brecht actually did that counts as a sin for Arendt. She rules out several possible answers: his sin wasn't that he became a Communist, because “to be a Communist in Europe in the twenties and even the early thirties . . . was no sin but merely an error.” It wasn't his “doctrinaire and often ludicrous adherence to the Communist ideology as such”; this, she says, “need hardly cause serious concern.” And it wasn't that he wrote The Measures Taken—which, Arendt observes, “outraged” both anti-Stalinists, because he had “written a play defending Moscow,” and Stalinists, because he had let the cat out of the bag.Footnote 86 Arendt does appear to suggest at one point that Brecht's “sin” was returning to the East and, perhaps, writing that ode to Stalin (“it came, finally, after he had settled down in East Berlin”), and this is indeed how she is typically understood—yet this passage refers to onset of Brecht's punishment for his sin, the “sudden loss” of his poetic powers, not to the sin itself.Footnote 87
Arendt comes closest to identifying the sin in the last section of her essay: it was a few years after The Measures Taken, she writes, “after the Nazis had seized power,” that “Brecht's sins were revealed for the first time.” Here, Arendt returns to the oldest layer of her criticism of Brecht: in a revised account of the flatness of his prewar anti-Nazi poems, she traces the failure of that poetry to Brecht's inability, at the time, to “recognize what Hitler actually did.”Footnote 88 Arendt initially explains this point by saying that Brecht failed to acknowledge “that those really persecuted were not workers but Jews, that it was race, and not class, that counted.” Yet that way of putting it does not really clarify her problem with the poetry of the period; moreover, it is an objection that, as Arendt herself tacitly acknowledges, would only have had force beginning in “1935 or 1936,” after the Nazis’ successful repression of serious opposition to fascism from the left, and after the intensification of anti-Semitic violence and the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws.Footnote 89 When Brecht fled Berlin at the end of February 1933, in the midst of the Nazis’ debilitating attacks on Communists and Social Democrats in the wake of the Reichstag fire, “race” and “class” remained inseparably salient; and Arendt—whose first husband, Günther Stern, left Germany shortly after, fearing that the Nazis would find his name in Brecht's confiscated address book—knew this all too well.Footnote 90
Without clearly signaling the transition, however, Arendt elaborates her critique slightly differently through a reading of Brecht's “Burial of the Agitator in the Zinc Coffin,” which she treats as exemplary of his anti-Nazi poetry, and which had also been the target of her criticism as far back as 1947–8.Footnote 91 This poem was written in 1933 and published the following year in Paris in a small volume of Brecht's political poetry put out by the exiled Communist publisher and anti-fascist activist Willi Münzenberg.Footnote 92 It deals, as Arendt says, “with the Nazi custom of shipping home in sealed coffins the remains of people beaten to death in concentration camps”—not the extermination camps, but the earliest camps established by the SA, whose brutal violence in 1933–4 was directed at the Nazis’ political opposition on the left, Jewish and non-Jewish.Footnote 93 Neither Arendt nor Brecht indicates where they learned of the Nazis’ use of sealed coffins, but it is likely to have been through coverage of cases like that of Fritz Gumpert, a worker, Communist, and antifascist activist from Heidenau in Saxony, arrested in March 1933 for distributing anti-Hitler leaflets during the election campaign and beaten to death in the Königstein concentration camp the following month. Gumpert's body was released for burial on the condition that his coffin not be opened, but his family and coworkers disobeyed the order, and an account of the mutilated condition of the corpse was widely publicized, first by Münzenberg's Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, which had been exiled to Prague, and then in the Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, a polemical dossier assembled in Paris by associates of Münzenberg to deflect blame for the Reichstag fire onto Hitler and to document Nazi atrocities.Footnote 94
For Arendt, the trouble with “Burial of the Agitator in the Zinc Coffin” was that it evaded rather than captured the terrifying specificity of the practice named in its title. In Brecht's poem, on Arendt's reading, what matters about the “trouble-maker” in the coffin, who had preached “eating your fill, a roof over your head, feeding your children,” is simply that he's dead, while the manner of his death—through a beating so vicious and with such gruesome results as to warrant a sealed coffin, itself a lingering threat and an instrument of terror among the dead man's family and friends—does not register.Footnote 95 In this way, Arendt complains, Brecht presents an agitator whose “fate was hardly any worse than the fate that an opponent of any kind of capitalist government was likely to suffer.” Arendt's claim here is not that Brecht's figure implies an equivalence between the oppressions suffered by Jews and by non-Jewish Communists under the nascent Hitler regime, but rather that it implies an equivalence between that regime and, say, the various Weimar governments that had preceded it. “And this,” she concludes, “was a lie”—an “outrageous lie,” as she put it in her lecture at Emory in 1964, where the phrase would have recalled for its audience the themes of “Truth and Politics,” which she had delivered a week earlier.Footnote 96
This sharp critique is made all the more pointed by its resonance with Brecht's own manifesto of his early exile, “Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth,” in which the poet summoned his fellow writers to “tell the truth about terrible conditions.”Footnote 97 Yet it is also a very narrowly focused account of the nature of Brecht's “sin,” which redirects attention away from the common focus on Brecht's postwar decision to return to East Germany, and also refuses the sort of blanket condemnation of Brecht's Communism that had become easy and attractive in the Cold War. Instead, Arendt seems to find in Brecht's “Burial of the Agitator” something like a trace of the Comintern's and the German Communist Party's disastrous underestimation of Nazism as a secondary symptom of a broader crisis of the capitalist state, in which the real struggle was between revolutionary Communism and the so-called “social fascism” of the Social Democratic Party.Footnote 98 And while Brecht himself seems not to have “swallowed whole the Comintern thesis of Social Fascism,” despite having been drawn to revolutionary Communism in part as a result of witnessing the May Day massacre of Communists in Berlin by police under Social Democratic leadership in 1929,Footnote 99 Arendt's objection to Brecht's reductive understanding of Nazism in this period is not wholly misplaced. One of the central “truths” that Brecht discusses in “Five Difficulties” consists in an orthodox characterization of fascism as a “historical phase which capitalism has entered into,” characterized by the use of “open violence” to protect private ownership of the means of production, which “can only be resisted as capitalism.”Footnote 100 For Arendt, recourse to such formulae in the face of the terrible novelty of National Socialism momentarily led Brecht away from his poetic task: to be “a voice . . . not of himself, to be sure, but of the world and of everything that was real.”Footnote 101
But what could it mean to say that Brecht's sin involved a “lie,” or that the poet's task is to be faithful to reality? The idea of faithfulness to reality seems to trade on a notion of brute facticity, of reality as composed at bottom of states of affairs about which there is no room for argument, no need for judgments other than the most mechanical. In “Truth and Politics,” for instance, Arendt presents the fact that “on the night of August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the frontier of Belgium” as one of those “brutally elementary data” that cannot be gotten around by appealing to the irreducibly interpretive character of the “historical sciences.”Footnote 102 Such an idea is puzzling in this context both because it fits awkwardly with the phenomenon of poetry, which Arendt herself says never merely reports, but condenses and transfigures, and because Arendt is known for her suspicion of appeals to truth in politics, which threaten to bypass, by virtue of their compelling force, the many-sidedness that is an irreducible aspect of plural political life.Footnote 103 Of course, Arendt would later excoriate the disregard for and manipulation of facts that was woven into “the infrastructure of nearly a decade of United States foreign and domestic policy,” but Brecht's “Burial of the Agitator” is a fundamentally different kind of utterance from the “deliberate falsehood and the outright lie” employed by politicians and bureaucrats. What bothers Arendt about it is not some lack of correspondence with a state of affairs, but the judgment the poem expresses about the relevance of various dimensions of similarity and difference between two social situations.Footnote 104 Why would the theorist par excellence of the dignity of opinion and judgment call this or any poem a “lie”?
Notice, however, that these questions presuppose a certain understanding of what the bruteness of factual truth entails. If Arendt's appeal to “brutally elementary data” is surprising, it is because we assume that any such appeal will function as a way to anchor political judgments in something undeniable, and that is exactly what Arendt criticizes in the case of appeals to rational or philosophical truth, which are supposed to have enough “compelling force” to cut through the tangle of competing and conflicting opinions.Footnote 105 Arendt's aim in “Truth and Politics,” however, is precisely to complicate this view of the force of facts, and thereby to draw a sharp category distinction between the political significance of philosophical and of factual truth.Footnote 106 To be sure, Arendt allows that claims to factual truth, like all truth-claims, assert a kind of peremptoriness, and therefore strike political actors as “despotic” in their “infuriating stubbornness.” Yet she also insists on the weakness and fragility of factual truth, both in the sense that facts are vulnerable to manipulation at the hands of political actors, and in the sense that the “mere telling of facts,” on its own, “leads to no action whatever.”Footnote 107 The bruteness of facts, in other words, is extraordinarily limited in its reach: that it was the German Army that crossed the frontier in 1914 may be one of those givens that people cannot change, but nothing further follows from the fact itself. Telling the truth as such only becomes political against the background of a practice of “organized lying,” where facts have already been made significant by being enlisted—even if only negatively, in their denial or distortion—into the service of action, and what makes truth-telling political in that context is not that it makes some decision incontestable, but that it disrupts the efforts of political actors to make the facts appear to fit cleanly with whatever stances they happen to take.Footnote 108
This reading of “Truth and Politics” explains how Arendt could have ascribed the obligation of truth-telling to the poet, for she suggests that appeals to factual truth need not obscure plurality or bypass the need for judgment. On the contrary, they can disclose that need, showing an audience their situation in sufficient factual richness that nothing will seem to follow from that situation automatically. It also clarifies what Arendt meant in claiming that Brecht's “Burial of the Agitator” involved a lie, even though what she found there was not a flatly false factual statement but a problematic analogy; for on her account, lying consists not only in the deliberate denial of this or that particular fact, but also in the attempt to represent “the facts” as a whole as if they constituted a tightly ordered totality—one that, by virtue of its internal consistency, takes on the compulsive rhetorical power that reality itself lacks.Footnote 109 One of the means through which this has been accomplished, Arendt explains in her study of the Pentagon Papers, has been the subordination of facts to “theories,” which in this context refers to expressions of “laws by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be.”Footnote 110 One symptom of this subordination is the facile deployment of historical analogies—such as invocation of the phrase “second Munich” to describe “every gesture of reconciliation” in the Cold War—which have the effect, Arendt proposes, of “shielding men from the impact of reality.”Footnote 111 Arendt's objection to “Burial of the Agitator,” seen in this light, was not that it contained propositions contrary to reality, but that its implied analogy between the early Nazi regime and other capitalist governments reflected the poem's dependence on a “theory” in this pejorative sense, and thus participated in what she would later call the “defactualization” of the modern world.Footnote 112 In the space of this poem, facts and stances fit together all too seamlessly.
Indeed, the understanding of poetry's relation to truth that Arendt invokes here in criticism of Brecht is surprisingly proximate to at least some of Brecht's own ideas. Arendt's emphasis on the need to interrupt the all-too-smooth integration of truth-claims and action, for example, resonates with Brecht's own efforts, in the Epic Theatre, to generate the “alienation that is necessary to all understanding.”Footnote 113 Walter Benjamin had also admired this practice, regarding it as a realization of the radical potential of the “method of montage,” in which a “superimposed element disrupts the context in which it is inserted,” thereby “counteract[ing] illusion on the part of the audience.”Footnote 114 Of course, in the domain of photography, Benjamin had also complained that the revolutionary power of montage had been displaced by a fashionable realism that “can no longer record a tenement block or a refuse heap without transfiguring it” into an object of enjoyment—a transfiguration that photography accomplishes, Benjamin wrote, borrowing a phrase from Brecht, when it presents itself as “the mere reflection of reality.”Footnote 115 Here, Arendt's appeals to facts and her alignment of poetry with reality may seem to put her sharply at odds with Benjamin and Brecht, especially given her approving citation of Auden's line—“poetry makes nothing happen”—in counterpoint to Brecht's impulse to “change the world.”Footnote 116 Yet Arendt's claim that the “mere telling of facts leads to no action whatever” is actually meant to support her claim that the “truth-teller,” when he pitches himself against “organized lying,” has at least “made a start toward changing the world” by shattering the impression of inevitability surrounding things as they are.Footnote 117 Arendt does not object per se to the construction and artifice that Brecht and Benjamin thought necessary to show reality in a politically meaningful way—for example by giving a photograph a caption that “wrenches it from modish commerce.”Footnote 118 Instead, she highlights the risk that these constructions will lose contact with reality if they are too strongly directed by doctrines that promise, in the words of Brecht's manifesto, to “achieve a representation of truth such that, on the basis of that representation, people will know how they should act.”Footnote 119 What is at stake between Arendt and Brecht here, one might say, is not so much the political orientation of his poetry as its relation to a certain conception of the epistemological authority of philosophy.
This implied difference between the specific vocation of poetry and the claims of (some) philosophy is central both to Arendt's critique of Brecht and to her defense of him, which turns, in the end, on her assertion that Brecht had been punished for his sins by the “gods of poetry” with the loss of his poetic faculties, and on her expectation that this assertion will generate forbearance among her readers. But how? On Arendt's understanding, Brecht's sin and his punishment both have something to do with his navigation of the dual, sometimes conflicting, imperatives of remoteness and engagement that structure the poet's vocation of truth-telling.Footnote 120 Arendt makes these connections explicit in a dense passage near the end of her essay, which comes just after she has praised Brecht for having tried to be a “voice” of “the world and of everything that was real”:
Yet that was not enough. To be a voice of what he thought was reality had carried him away from the real; wasn't he on the way to becoming what he liked least, one more solitary great poet in the German tradition, instead of what he wanted most to be, a bard of the people? And yet, when he went into the thick of things, his remoteness as a poet was what he carried, willy-nilly, into the newfound reality, his sharp and tricky intelligence notwithstanding. It was not so much lack of courage as this remoteness from the real that caused him not to break with a party that had killed his friends and allied itself with his worst enemy, and to refuse to see, for the sake of the “classics,” what was actually happening in his homeland—something that in his more prosaic moments he understood only too well . . . But, finally, when he went back to East Germany . . . his punishment caught up with him. Now reality overwhelmed him to the point where he could no longer be its voice.Footnote 121
Brecht's “remoteness,” as Arendt says earlier in her essay, “was a gift”—she says this of the poet's creative powers, too—“and was, like all such gifts, part blessing and part curse.”Footnote 122 It had this equivocal character because it was one pole of a field of tension that the poet must navigate. Brecht's remoteness allowed him to keep his eye fixed on “the catastrophes of the time in the world” and not on “anything that concerned him,” ensuring that he had the distance from reality necessary to capture and present the larger meanings of particular events—to practice the “precise generality of the literary art,” as Arendt had put it in 1949.Footnote 123 At the same time, this remoteness made him “curious and in desperate need of every bit of reality he can catch,” hungry for involvement in the world, anxious that he might lose touch with reality by making himself into a “solitary.” The problem, Arendt concludes, is that poets “need a measure of remoteness, and yet would not be worth their salt if they were not forever tempted to exchange this remoteness for being just like everybody else.”Footnote 124 And while these opposing forces, held in the right kind of restrained tension, enable and energize the best poetry, they can also fall out of balance in multiple ways. On the one hand, an excess of distance can issue in culpably stubborn blindness, as in the case of Brecht's anti-Nazi poetry, where the poet's “remoteness” becomes comparable to the “remoteness from reality” that Arendt would later find in the pages of the Pentagon Papers. On the other hand, the poet can also be overwhelmed and rendered mute by his proximity to the “reality” of everyday life under Stalinism, as Arendt suggests happened after his return to East Germany.Footnote 125 Arendt's language of sin and punishment expresses the mirror-image relationship between these two ways of missing the mark, as though the poet, falling out of balance in one direction, were caught in a fateful overcorrection.
At the same time, this language invites forbearance by relating Brecht's transgression to the delicate balance between forces whose tension is itself constitutive of the poet's vocation. In sharp contrast to Lüthy's narrative, in which Brecht's failure unspools with apparently iron necessity, Arendt claims that the risk of “sins” like Brecht's comes with the territory—without courting that risk, poets “would not be worth their salt.” Importantly, the same cannot obviously be said of philosophy, at least as Arendt understands it.Footnote 126 While great thinkers like Plato and Heidegger have made the remoteness from the world characteristic of thinking into their “residence” or “abode”—and while this may explain why, when they “succumbed to the temptation to change [their] ‘residence’ and get involved in the world of human affairs,” they “turned to tyrants and Führers”—this does not mean that they would have been poorer philosophers, not worth their salt, if they had not yielded to temptation but held steadfastly to their “essential seclusion from the world.”Footnote 127 This is why Arendt's defense of Brecht turns out to be stronger and more intense than the offering of forgiveness represented by her eightieth-birthday tribute to her teacher, with its uneasy combination of deep praise for Heidegger's practice of thinking, and gently mocking laughter at his political naïveté. She does not just groundlessly release Brecht from his “bad deed,” but claims that “as a poet he is entitled to such privileges as I here claim for him.”Footnote 128 It is also why Arendt's account of poetry's political significance, with its emphasis on poetry's disclosure of the disruptive and theoretically ill-fitting fact, is so different from Heidegger's resolutely ontological turn to poetry as philosophy's partner in a dialogue “engaged with the history of being.”Footnote 129 Indeed, in making her case, Arendt emulates aspects of the poetic practice she admired in Brecht's best work, driving an estranging wedge between a certain understanding of the facts of Brecht's case, such as the notion that he wrote “odes to Stalin,” or that his years in East Berlin were unproductive, and the stance of condemnation that seemed to many of her Cold War contemporaries to follow inexorably from those facts. If her strategy has often been misunderstood, this testifies both to the ongoing power of the assumptions and habits of inference she defies, and to the validity of the lesson she derives from the case of “poor B. B.”—not that poetry and politics cannot mix after all, but “how difficult it is to be a poet in this century or at any other time.”Footnote 130
