Lateness and Late Style in Brecht’s Last Poetry

Summary

The Work Written by Brecht in the last decade of his life has often been classified in the secondary literature as “late” work or the work of the “late Brecht.” Walter Hinck’s volume of 1959 Die Dramaturgie des späten Brecht (The Dramaturgy of the Late Brecht) set the tone; many standard critical works then followed in pinpointing the end of the Second World War as the caesura marking the beginning of a discrete period in Brecht’s aesthetic thinking and practice, a period that they label “late.” This understanding has come to dominate the reception of Brecht’s work in the GDR — especially of the Buckower Elegien (Buckow Elegies, 1953) and the poems written in the last years before his death — for reasons that are partly to do with the prejudices surrounding the lyric genre as one of inwardness, but also hinge on the contested reception of the Buckower Elegien in particular. However, the question of what “late” work might be has scarcely been addressed. When does late work begin and how is it defined? And what does the label mean for understanding the work in question? Studies have varied in when they define the precise beginning of Brecht’s late phase: favoring the beginning of his period of exile in 1938, at one extreme, or Brecht’s move to the newly founded GDR in 1949 at the other. But the approach has been remarkably consistent. The notion of late work (Spätwerk) has been uncritically merged with the notion of the work of old age (Alterswerk). Any form of theoretical understanding of what these might entail is absent. Instead, both have been caught up within a longstanding critical debate about whether Brecht’s poetry of the GDR years became more inward-looking or remained politically oriented.

In 1966, Alexander Hildebrand confidently claimed Brecht’s post-1948 poetry as “Alterslyrik” and adumbrated what he called a “late style” focused on the compression of the poetry and what he saw as the classicism of the form. Twenty years later, Jan Knopf’s pioneering complete edition of the Buckower Elegien (1986) also took as its starting point “die Klassizität des Texts” (the classicicity of the text).