Hundert Gedichte

The poet avoids radiant chords. He thrusts through tubes, whips the drum shrill. He tears the people apart with chopped sentences. From the poem "Entrance" in the collection "To Europe" (1916) Johannes R. Becher (1891-1958) was a prolific writer who sought to intervene in his time like few others. Most of his poems have passed with the very time from which they emerged, having been thoroughly contentious and controversial, washed away by the river of time. It would be easy to select from this rubble of the completed those verses that would expose him as an arch-Stalinist or illustrate his decline from a "flame of expressionism" to the "stable lantern of the party," as is often said in today's literary sections. But what would we gain from that? Another confirmation of our self-righteous superiority, which makes us feel so much better than the past.