“Living Drafts”: Brecht’s Poetics of Exile in “Garden in progress”

Summary

The word “history” stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. (Auf dem Antlitz der Natur steht “Geschichte” in der Zeichenschrift der Vergängnis.)

—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928)

On July 21, 1941, Brecht arrived at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro via passenger ship from Vladivostok. For the next six years, he, like many other German and German-speaking exiles, made Los Angeles his new, albeit unwilling, home. Just a week after his arrival, he observed in his journal, “almost nowhere has my life ever been harder than here in this mausoleum of easy going. the house is too pretty, and here my profession is gold-digging” (“fast an keinem ort war mir das leben schwerer als hier in diesem schauhaus des easy going. das haus ist zu hübsch, mein beruf ist hier goldgräbertum”). Another entry on August 9, 1941 attests to his profound sense of dislocation, both geographic and temporal: “i feel as if I had been exiled from our era, this is tahiti in the form of a big city” (“ich komme mir vor wie aus dem zeitalter herausgenommen, das ist ein tahiti in großstadtform”). Later that year, he went on to compose a poem titled “Thinking about Hell …” (“Nachdenkend über die Hölle,” 1941) in which he alludes to Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem “Peter Bell the Third” (1839) in order to compare Los Angeles no longer to a fool's paradise but instead to hell itself. Similarly, in his other poems about Los Angeles he would go on to decry the “planned village” of Hollywood, with its massive disparities of wealth, and compare writers who go to work for the film industry to prostitutes.

Brecht's antipathy towards the superficiality of Los Angeles and the Hollywood “dream factory” with which he largely identified the city has led numerous critics to read his California poetry primarily as realistic representations of particular localities and as expressions of his own personal opinions. Yet this selective way of reading his poems overlooks both their nuance as well as their distinct literariness.