Translated and edited with an afterword and notes by John Willett

During his exile from his native Germany in the Second World War, in Sweden, Finland and in the USA, Brecht cut out striking war photographs from newspapers and magazines, kept them in a portfolio and, either immediately or later, wrote acerbic, satirical, angry and often poignant four-line poems to accompany them. The result is an outstanding literary memorial to the Second World War, and also one of the most spontaneous, revealing and moving of Brecht’s works.

In 1949 Brecht made his home in the new German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The Cold War had begun. At a time of renewed military build-up and heavy-handed ideological control, efforts to publish the War primer, with its relentless and subversive focus on the scandal and horror of war, were unsuccessful. It was considered too pacifist by the East German authorities. Even when it was eventually published in East Berlin in 1955, a year before Brecht died, it bore the marks of censorship; nor did its insistently radical and anti-capitalist view of the war period make it any more palatable in the West.

Not until 1994 did a full German edition of the War primer appear. In his afterword, John Willett tells the story of the work’s conception, composition, censorship and eventual proper publication. Now, some fifty years after it was completed, it appears for the first time in English translation – a commentary on a war which, for a time, was a victim of that war’s own bitter aftermath.

Published by Libris in 1998