WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE SPAIN - news journal UPDATE - (en) Spain, Regeneracion: Why should we read Bertolt Brecht? (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 «General, the man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill. But he has

one defect: He can think.» ---- Bertolt Brecht was unknown to me until I
began my process of politicization. I was able to finish my studies
without even knowing his name -some people say that you can't learn
everything, to which I reply that we could do without more than one
gentleman to make room for authors like Brecht-. In my process of
(re)learning, his quotes began to stand out, first timidly, then with
unbridled fury. Singers, authors or artists -some marginal, others of
the stature of Silvio Rodríguez- remembered this man buried for the vast
majority in the drawer of history. To a large extent because he put the
focus on the defeated in the longest and deadliest war of humanity.

«The names of the kings appear in the books.

Did the kings drag the great blocks of stone?

And Babylon, destroyed so many times,

Who rebuilt it so many times?

In what houses in golden Lima did the workers who built it live?

On the night the Chinese Wall was finished,

Where did the bricklayers go?».

Recently, while browsing through the shelves of La Magdalena in Madrid,
I came across Poems and Songs by Brecht. I did not hesitate to take it
out of the library. It is a collection of writings that summarize part
of his life, which was greatly agitated by the arrival of the Nazis to
power in his native land, which caused him to have to emigrate. Some
lines about exile in the gloomy year of 1941, the year in which the Nazi
victory in World War II seemed evident, are torn apart.

«Fleeing from my compatriots

I have arrived in Finland.

Friends I did not know yesterday

have arranged beds for me

in a clean room.

On the radio I hear the news

about the triumph of human scum.

With curiosity I consider the map of the Earth.

Up in Lapland,

towards the Arctic Sea,

I still see a small door.

Reading Brecht means disdaining part of the inculcated history, taught
by today's oppressors, heirs to yesterday's exploitation. It means
realizing the lack of memory to which so many people have been relegated
who deserve more pages than those we study ad nauseam. Brecht decided to
stain his hands with ink to honor the people who most deserved it.
Brecht should be required reading for every critical mind willing to
rethink history.

«We had many masters,

we had hyenas and tigers,

we had eagles and pigs.

and we fed them all.

Better or worse it was the same:

The boot that steps on us is always a boot.

You understand what I mean:

Not to change masters, but to have none at all.

https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2024/10/04/por-que-deberiamos-leer-a-bertolt-brecht/?
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