Svendborger Gedichte
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Svendborger Gedichte ('Svendborg Poems') is a poetry collection by the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the last collection of new poems to be published while he lived. The collection is named after the town of Svendborg on the Danish island of Funen, where Brecht lived during his exile from Nazi Germany. During this period, Hanns Eisler stayed several times to set a large group of the poems to music in collaboration with Brecht.
The first major poetry collection that Brecht wrote in exile was Lieder Gedichte Chöre. This was followed by the Svendborger Gedichte in 1939. This compilation was preceded by earlier publications, and individual poems followed, such that one can assume a period of origin from 1926 to 1938. Brecht worked on compiling the collection primarily during the winter of 1937-38 while living at Skovsbostrand outside Svendborg, in collaboration with Margarete Steffin, almost entirely completing the work by 22 July 1938. The title was initially Gedichte im Exil ('Poems in Exile'). The intention was to include the work in volume 4 of the edition of Brecht's work to be published by Wieland Herzfelde's press Malik-Verlag, nominally in London but in practice from Prague. Brecht wrote in May 1938: "you can now give me the decisive position that I have not had in emigrant literature so far. And you can simultaneously put the publisher [Malik] at the forefront."[1][2][3]
By March 1939, galley proofs of the whole volume had been sent to Brecht from Prague, with the set type itself being in Prague. But in the wake of the events surrounding the Munich Agreement and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, Herzfelde had to flee from Prague; the finished set of Svendborg poems was lost. The galley proofs were then passed to Copenhagen, where in May 1939 the Danish printer Universal Trykkeriet printed the Gedichte im Exil section under the new title Svendborger Gedichte, with Herzfelde named as the publisher and London as the place of publication. The volume was billed as an 'advance printing from Brecht: Collected Works, volume 4'. The publication received significant support from Ruth Berlau, the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, and apparently the Diderot Society (the latter of which Brecht was working to found around 1936).[4][5][6]
There are only two copies of the so-called "Prague sequence" known, one of which is in the Brecht Archive, Berlin; the other copy was discovered in 2011 by the Rotes Antiquariat, Berlin, in New York.[7]
The poems that comprised section 3, Chroniken ('chronicles'), were based on stories which Brecht encountered in his reading. For example, "Abbau des Schiffes Oskawa durch die Mannschaft" ("How the Ship 'Oskawa' was Broken up by her own Crew") is a subversive rewriting of an account of life on the ship by Louis Adamic in his 1931 Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, while "Kohlen für Mike" ("Coal for Mike") was based on an incident in Sherwood Anderson's novel Poor White.[8]
