Paratextual Profusion:

Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer

J. J. Long
Durham, School of Modern European Languages and Cultures

Abstract  Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer, first published in 1955, is a collection of what
Brecht termed “photo-epigrams.” These consist of a photograph—usually one cut
from the illustrated press—mounted on a black background and accompanied by
a four-line poem by Brecht. The theme of the book is World War II. Critics have
tended to view the War Primer as a didactic piece that offers a Marxist corrective
to “Western” histories of the war. This article, however, argues against this view.
By contextualizing the work in terms of Brecht’s and Benjamin’s writings on pho-
tography in the 1920s and 1930s and taking into account not merely the relation-
ship between photograph and quatrain but all of the numerous paratexts (original
newspaper captions, titles, explanatory notes, foreword, jacket copy, title page, and
author’s signature), the article argues that the diverse modes of address constructed
by the text preclude communication of a unitary ideological message.

In the anglophone world, Bertolt Brecht’s name is most commonly asso-

ciated with the theater, a sphere in which he was active not just as a play-
wright and director but as one of the most important and influential dra-
matic theorists of the twentieth century. While in the German-speaking
world he is also celebrated for his contributions to poetry and to the
theory and practice of film, his comments on the still image are relatively
unknown. Yet throughout his career, Brecht returned repeatedly to the
question of photography. His voluminous Schriften (Miscellaneous Writings)
contain numerous passages examining the epistemological, aesthetic, and

Poetics Today 29:1 (Spring 2008)  DOI 10.1215/03335372-2007-023

© 2008 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
198 Poetics Today 29:1

political implications of photographic representation. This article takes

these writings as a starting point and proceeds to offer a reading of Brecht’s
little-known photographic book the Kriegsfibel or War Primer. Despite a
recent full-length study by Welf Kienast (2001), the War Primer is a text that
has remained a marginal item in the Brechtian canon, perhaps because of
its idiosyncratic form. It is composed of sixty-nine text-image composites,
which Brecht termed “photo-epigrams” ( journal entry for June 20, 1944,
in Brecht 1995: 196). Each photo-epigram consists of a newspaper photo-
graph mounted on a black background—sometimes with the original
caption still attached—and an accompanying four-line poem by Brecht.
This layout clearly demands an engagement with the relationship between
image and text. But Brecht’s quatrains are not the only verbal element of
the work. There is a plethora of paratextual supplements that complicate
the reading of the photo-epigrams, and in this article I seek not merely to
explore the relationship between the photographic image and its accom-
panying quatrain but to investigate the consequences of all of these verbal
elements of the work for a reading of the War Primer in its entirety.

1. Brecht (and Benjamin) on Photography

The War Primer appeared in book form in the GDR (German Democratic
Republic) in 1955, but it was the culmination of almost three decades of
intermittent activity. As early as the 1920s, Brecht began to collect news-
paper cuttings, often providing them with explanatory captions as a way of
commenting on contemporary events (Knopf 1988: 410). Throughout his
period of exile, which took him via Prague, Vienna, and Paris to Denmark
(1933–39), Sweden (1939–40), Finland (1940–41), and finally the United
States (1941–47), he continued collecting press cuttings, many of which he
pasted into his Arbeitsjournale (Work Diaries) (Brecht 1994a, 1995; see also
Brady 1978 for commentary). In 1939–40, during his brief stay in Swe-

.  Brecht’s Arbeitsjournale or work diaries (1994a, 1995) contain scores of photographs that
the author cut from news periodicals and pasted into his diaries. In response to the first pub-
lication of the journals in 1977, Philip Brady (1978) provided a useful genealogy of Brecht’s
writings on photography. Brady’s purpose was to show that photography was of greater
concern to Brecht than had hitherto been realized and to establish a continuity between the
Arbeitsjournale and Brecht’s other work. Lately, Tom Kuhn (2006) has undertaken a more
extensive attempt to contextualize the comments on photography in terms of Brecht’s wider
concerns and intellectual development.
.  For a detailed account of the genesis of the Kriegsfibel, see Knopf 1988: 410–14. The Kriegs-
fibel has been translated into English (Brecht 1998). Since I wish to draw attention to particu-
lar linguistic features of Brecht’s quatrains, I have provided my own prose translations. The
photo-epigrams are referred to by their numbers, however, facilitating easy comparison with
the published translation.
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 199

den, he began to mount news photographs and related four-line poems on

single sheets of paper and continued to produce such “photo-epigrams”
throughout the war. A selection of sixty-nine of them eventually appeared
in book form as the War Primer, after lengthy negotiations with various
GDR cultural institutions and publishers (Bohnert 1982: 235–48).
While studies of the War Primer differ in their methodology and interpre-
tative detail, almost all of them agree that the book offers a Marxist cor-
rective to a capitalist, “Western” history of World War II. Indeed, the only
critic not to rehearse this argument in one form or another is Stefan Soldo-
vieri (1997). But to produce a photographic book that provides a critique of
capitalism is a highly ambitious undertaking because from the very begin-
nings of its history photography has been inextricably bound up with the
capitalist state. Dominique François Arago’s (1980 [1839]: 17–18) report to
the French Chamber of Deputies in July 1839 recommended that Daguerre
and the son of Nicéphore Niépce be awarded lifetime pensions in return
for their making photographic processes freely available to artists, scien-
tists, archaeologists, and so on. In two telling paragraphs, photography is
presented as invaluable to the processes of imperial expansion and national
prestige and its capacity for economic exploitation clearly articulated. And
as numerous recent commentators have shown, it was not long before pho-
tography was being enlisted in the dual regime of surveillance and spec-
tacle, which in turn constituted a powerful disciplinary apparatus (in the
Foucauldean sense) for the production and regulation of social subjects
within the expanding capitalist state. Jonathan Crary (1989: 13) has linked
photography to commodity circulation within a money economy, arguing
that photography operated as a form of exchange analogous to money.
The two were “homologous forms of social power [and] equally totalizing
systems for binding and unifying all subjects within a single global net-
work of valuation and desire.” In his now-classic essay “The Body and the
Archive,” Allan Sekula (1992: 347) notes that nineteenth-century photog-
raphy established visual typologies of class, race, and criminality. As such,
it constituted what Sekula terms a “shadow archive” that encompassed
“an entire social terrain while positioning individuals within that terrain,”
thereby serving to reinforce class hierarchies. Furthermore, as Suren Lal-
vani (1996) has argued in a Foucauldean analysis of domestic portrait pho-
tography, the process of surveillance penetrated into the very heart of the
bourgeois family, where photography constituted a central means of regu-
lating conduct and reproducing ideologies of class, gender, and kinship.
The implication of photography in the political economy of capital-
ism—in terms of commodity exchange and all levels of social regulation—
accounts for the deep suspicion of the photographic image that surfaces in
200 Poetics Today 29:1

the theoretical approaches to photography developed by Brecht and other

Marxist intellectuals in the Weimar Republic. As W. J. T. Mitchell (1986:
160–78) has shown, iconophobia is deeply rooted in Marxism and finds its
earliest expression in the camera obscura metaphor of The German Ideology
and, supremely, in the concept of the commodity fetish in Capital. Guy
Debord’s (1995 [1967]) attack on the society of the spectacle and Fredric
Jameson’s (1991) critique of the depthlessness of postmodern visual culture
might be seen as later manifestations of this tradition in Marxist thought.
In Weimar Germany, though, it was specifically the medium of photog-
raphy around which iconophobic concerns tended to crystallize, largely
because of the dramatic and unprecedented increase in the use of photog-
raphy in advertising, the illustrated press, and party-political propaganda.
It is in this context that Brecht’s theoretical pronouncements on photogra-
phy have to be understood. While his writings on the medium are unsys-
tematic, insubstantial, and it has been argued, uninteresting (Koetzle 1998:
87–88; quoted in Kuhn 2006), they evince numerous points of intersec-
tion with the work of Walter Benjamin, with whom Brecht corresponded
regularly on the subject in the early 1930s (Giles 1997: 133–36). Indeed,
Benjamin’s work often seems to comment on and develop Brecht’s and
will help to determine with greater precision what is at stake in Brecht’s
engagement with the photographic medium.
Brecht’s best-known comments on photography emerge in the context of
a longer theoretical work, Der Dreigroschenprozess (The Threepenny Lawsuit) of
1931. The work owes its curious title to the fact that it was written in direct
response to a lawsuit that Brecht had brought against the Nero-Film AG, a
production company that had acquired the film rights to Brecht and Kurt
Weill’s Threepenny Opera. When author and film company failed to agree on
a script, Nero-Film excluded Brecht from all further collaboration. Since
the film company was contractually obliged to consult Brecht in the pro-
cess of developing a usable script, Brecht believed that he had grounds to
sue. He lost. In The Threepenny Lawsuit, Brecht (1992k [1931]: 463) claims
that the lawsuit itself had been a “sociological experiment” that would
effectively force the law to articulate some of its founding assumptions,
particularly those concerning the relationship between intellectual prop-
erty rights and capitalist production and those concerning the ideology of
art. It is the latter that is of interest in the present context. In a series of
short chapters, Brecht critiques the assumptions about art that emerged
from the judgment and explores the consequences that the technical media
(predominantly film but also photography) have for traditional concep-
tions of the work of art.
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 201

In a densely argued section, Brecht claims that the prevalent social atti-
tude toward film sees it as a Genußmittel (ibid.: 467), a word that denotes
something whose value lies in its ability to produce enjoyment while also
being a euphemism for stimulants (such as coffee) and narcotics. He takes
issue with the assumption that film can be ennobled by art, arguing that
what is understood by “art” in this context is itself nothing more than a
kind of elevated Genußmittel that can, furthermore, be easily disposed of
in the market place (“[ist] auf dem Markt . . . unterbringbar”). Brecht
refers to such art—a thoroughly commodified entity whose sole function
is to give pleasure—as “‘art’” (with scare quotes). He goes on to argue that
commercial filmmakers have failed to realize the potential of the cinematic
apparatus to represent reality, precisely because they have been excessively
concerned with the production of “art” and correspondingly unconcerned
with the nature of either reality or the apparatus (ibid.: 468).
The situation [in capitalist society as a whole] is now becoming so complex that a
simple “reproduction of reality” says less than ever about reality itself. A photo-
graph of a Krupp factory or the AEG says practically nothing about these insti-
tutions. Reality itself has shifted into the realm of the functional. The reification
of human relationships, such as the factory, no longer betrays anything about
these relationships. And so what we actually need is to “construct something,”
something “artificial,” “posed.” What we therefore equally need is art. But the
old concept of art based on experience is invalid. For whoever reproduces those
aspects of reality that can be experienced does not reproduce reality. For some
time reality has no longer been experienceable as a totality.  (Ibid.: 469)

The epistemological poverty of photography is here linked to both the cog-

nitive limits of human subjects and the inadequacy of a conception of the
artwork that assumes the individual’s ability to apprehend empirically—
and represent—reality in toto. Here, as elsewhere in Threepenny Lawsuit,
Brecht argues that reality cannot be reduced to the visible surface of things
but has to be understood as a set of functional and abstract social rela-
tionships that are inseparable from the workings of advanced capitalism.
Consequently, a putatively “realistic” aesthetics based on mimetic repro-
duction, of which the photograph (in Brecht’s view) is an incarnation, is no
longer adequate to the reality it claims to represent.
While the terms of the argument have shifted slightly in the above
passage—from the earlier critique of art as Genußmittel to a critique of
experienced-based art—the fundamental point is broadly the same: “art”
fails to represent reality and remains unaffected both by the emergence of
the technical media and by what Brecht (ibid.: 474) refers to elsewhere in
the Dreigroschenprozess as the “violence of that revolutionary process that
202 Poetics Today 29:1

pulls everything into commodity circulation.” Brecht’s plea for art that is
“constructed,” “artificial,” and “posed” seems to imply that foregrounded
artifice or self-reflexivity offers a formal solution to the problem of repre-
senting the abstract social relationships that constitute reality.
In a series of short commentaries on photography written around the
same time as Threepenny Lawsuit, Brecht articulated similar thoughts while
also sketching out in concrete terms some ways in which photography
might be made into a representational medium that is more adequate to
what Brecht sees as the nature of reality. In a fragment entitled “Über Foto-
grafie” (“On Photography”) of 1928, for example, Brecht (1992b [1928]:
264) attacks photography for being in thrall to painting:
Photography should by now have got over the stage in which artists repeatedly
want to demonstrate all the clever things you can do with a camera, especially
when all they want to prove is that you can do with a camera what you can also
do with a paintbrush.

The fragment continues:

A naïve question such as the following often emanates from the images of the
avantgarde: “Do you actually know what a woman’s behind looks like, no, I
mean what it really looks like?” This would not be so irritating if one did not
have the impression that these images were interested not so much in answering
this modest question, as in the creation of a work of art, for which the behind in
question is merely a pretext.  (Ibid.)

As in Threepenny Lawsuit, Brecht berates photography for failing to realize

its cognitive potential and being obsessed instead with producing artifacts
of superficial beauty. The primary aim of such a photographic practice,
Brecht (ibid.) argues, is to show that “‘life is, after all, beautiful’” (“‘das
Leben doch schön ist’”).
This final sentence is almost certainly an allusion to a book called Die
Welt ist schön (The World Is Beautiful ) by Albert Renger-Patzsch (1928), prob-
ably the best-known example of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) pho-
tography. The fact that Brecht made these comments in 1928 and placed
the words “die Welt doch schön ist” in quotation marks suggests that he
might well have written the piece in response to Renger-Patzsch’s book.
Brecht (1992e [1929]: 356) rejects the photography of New Objectivity—a
movement he dismissed as “reactionary”—because it encourages a purely
aesthetic response to phenomena. In a short piece that foreshadows the
comments on photography in The Threepenny Lawsuit, Brecht (1992j [1930]:
443) goes so far as to denounce photography per se on similar grounds,
arguing that the photograph cosmetically removes all traces of its own
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 203

context (“den Zusammenhang wegschminkt”). In other words, social con-

ditions and relationships cannot be read into or out of the beautiful surface
of the photographic image.
Benjamin (1982 [1934]: 24), writing in 1934, uses conspicuously similar
terms in a specific attack on Renger-Patzsch:
[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and
the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-
heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable
factory: in front of these, photography can only say “How beautiful.” The World
is Beautiful—that is the title of the well-known picture book by Renger-Patzsch
in which we see New Objectivity photography at its peak. It has succeeded in
turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way,
into an object of enjoyment.

Benjamin’s is a considerably more developed critique and makes explicit

the political implications of New Objectivity. He goes on to comment that
the economic function of this kind of photography is to supply the masses
“with matter which previously eluded mass consumption—Spring, famous
people, foreign countries,” thereby highlighting photography’s status as an
object of exchange and a vehicle of spectacle. Benjamin (ibid.) ultimately
sees New Objectivity as “an extreme example of what it means to supply a
production apparatus without changing it.”
Thus, at the heart of both theorists’ writings on photography lies a pro-
found unease about the affirmative role played by the medium within the
political economy of capitalism. In the above passage, Benjamin draws
attention to photography’s capacity for limitless reproduction (a prerequi-
site of mass consumption), and in his other writings on photography, he
notes that this results in a reduction of all things to a series of equivalences
that can be exchanged and substituted for each other within an expanded
field of commodity circulation (Benjamin 1980 [1930]: 200, 209). Further-
more, photography is implicated in the reproduction of the relations of
production, for by transfiguring even the most miserable sight into a thing
of beauty, it affirms the status quo. And this affirmation was of course all
the more pernicious because the myth of photographic realism and trans-
parency made it seem that the world truly was beautiful.
And yet Brecht and Benjamin alike were also alert to the revolutionary
potential of the technical media. In Brecht’s brief congratulatory note
on the tenth anniversary of the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (A-I-Z) (Worker’s
Illustrated News), founded in 1921 and published from 1924 by the commu-
nist politician and entrepreneur Willi Münzenberg (see Willmann 1975),
Brecht (1992l [1931]: 515) argues that, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, pho-
204 Poetics Today 29:1

tography has become a “weapon against truth” (“Waffe gegen die Wahr-
heit”): “The immense quantity of images that is spewed out daily from
the printing presses and appears to bear the stamp of truth in fact serves
merely to obfuscate the way things are.” Brecht goes on to praise the A-
I-Z for serving the interests of truth and restoring “the way things really
are” (ibid.). He does not spell out precisely how the obfuscation of the
bourgeois press or the revelations of the A-I-Z actually come about, but
there is a tacit assumption that photography can be enlisted in the radical
cause.
In the short piece entitled simply “Fotografie,” Brecht sketches out
some ways in which photography might be used to record not only the
appearance of things but their functioning or behavior (“Verhalten”). The
examples he gives include taking photographs of the same person’s head
on different days or over a period of years and then analyzing the differ-
ences; studying images of married couples and trying to match husband
and wife; or photographing the hands of manual and white-collar workers
holding the tools of both their own trades and those of the others’ (1992c
[1928]). These ideas tie in with the discussion of portrait sculpture in the
later essay “Betrachtung der Kunst und Kunst der Betrachtung” (“Viewing
Art and the Art of Viewing”)(1993b [1939]), where Brecht expresses a pref-
erence for works that do not try to distill the “essence” of the personality
but allow the contradictions within the personality and, indeed, within the
creative process to become visible. None of these suggestions is immedi-
ately revolutionary in its implications, but the principles of juxtaposition
that Brecht discusses here are designed to allow a sense of function, pro-
cess, and even contradiction to be integrated into photographic practice in
a way that seeks to rescue the individual image from its status as a purely
decorative Genußmittel.
In “Über Fotografie” (discussed above), Brecht (1992b [1928]: 265) some-
what cryptically suggests that the individual image might also be redeemed
not by combining it with another image but by providing it with a caption.
Again it is to Benjamin that we turn for a more developed account of this
.  Unlike other illustrated newspapers, such as the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, the A‑I‑Z
obtained its photographs not solely from the picture agencies that flourished in Weimar Ger-
many, but also from organized groups of worker-photographers, whose activities it coordi-
nated. The political value of the A-I-Z thus lay not only in the content of the images it pub-
lished, but also in its placing the means of representation in the hands of the proletariat.
.  Although he is nowhere mentioned in Brecht’s work, this essay bears a striking similarity
to Aleksandr Rodchenko’s article “Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot” (1976
[1928]): there, the numberless photographs of Lenin depicting him at different moments and
in different situations are deemed infinitely preferable to the monumentality of official easel
portraiture. By the late 1920s, Weimar Germany was saturated with the ideas of the Russian
constructivists and productivists.
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 205

solution to the problem of photography. As we have seen, Benjamin saw

New Objectivity photography as an example of supplying a production
apparatus without changing it. That passage continues:
Changing [the production apparatus] would mean bringing down one of the
barriers, surmounting one of the contradictions which inhibit the productive
capacity of the intelligentsia. What we must demand from the photographer
is the ability to put such a caption beneath the picture as will rescue it from
the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value. And
we shall lend greater emphasis to this demand if we, as writers, start taking
photographs. . . . Intellectual production cannot become politically useful until
the separate spheres of competence to which, according to the bourgeois view,
the process of intellectual production owes its order, have been surmounted;
more precisely, the barriers of competence must be broken down by each of the
productive forces they were created to separate, acting in concert.  (Benjamin
1982 [1934]: 24)

Benjamin stressed the importance of the caption in both the “Short His-
tory of Photography” (1980 [1930]: 215) and “The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction” (1999 [1936]: 220). What is particular about
“The Author as Producer” is that captions here are advocated as a means
of restoring political instrumentality to the photograph. Furthermore,
Benjamin sees this not merely as a formal procedure that affects noth-
ing but the image but as a social process that abolishes divisions of labor
within the field of “intellectual production.”
This is congruent with Brecht’s advocacy of the dismantling of related
binary oppositions in his theory of the Lehrstück (didactic play), such as that
between actor and spectator or that between politically active and philo-
sophically contemplative types (Tätigen versus Betrachtenden) (1992f [1930]
and 1992g [1930]). What emerges here and elsewhere in Benjamin’s and
Brecht’s writings is an expanded understanding of cultural production. It
is no longer a question of supplying the market with attractive artifacts or
Genußmittel. It is, rather, a question of developing new cultural forms that
encourage active involvement in the production of political consciousness
rather than passive consumption of artistic commodities. David Bathrick
(1995: 98) argues that Brechtian aesthetics, which makes both author and
audience into a producer, “shifts the whole emphasis of literary epistemology
from a reflected ‘content of knowledge’ to an active, ‘critical’ reorganization
of experience.” One potential problem with conflating the use of captions
and the production of consciousness within the same political project, how-
ever, is that captioning seeks to limit meaning, whereas the “production
aesthetics” outlined by Brecht and Benjamin in the essays discussed above
involves a cognitive reorganization that ultimately affects the production of
206 Poetics Today 29:1

subjectivity. These two tasks are not necessarily commensurable, and the
War Primer provides a fascinating illustration of precisely this dilemma.

2. The War Primer: Image, Text, Paratexts

The unease surrounding photography that emerges in the foregoing dis-

cussion resurfaces in the preface to the War Primer:
This book seeks to teach the art of reading images. For it is just as difficult for
the untrained viewer to read images as it is for him to read hieroglyphs. The
widespread ignorance of social relations that is carefully and brutally main-
tained by capitalism turns the thousands of photographs in illustrated maga-
zines into true hieroglyphs that are indecipherable to the gullible [nichtsahnend ]
reader.  (My translation)

Appeal is made here to the mystifying quality of photographs, and the

comparison with hieroglyphs feels as though it has been lifted straight
out of the discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital: “[Value] converts
every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the
hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products, for to
stamp an object of utility as a value is just as much a social product as lan-
guage” (Marx 1954 [1867]: 74).
Under capitalism, then, the ubiquitous forms of the commodity and the
photograph are highly complex because they conceal the true nature of
social relations beneath an almost indecipherable surface. Brecht’s War
Primer sets itself the explicit task of undoing this obfuscation by providing
the reader with a method for deciphering the meaning of photographs.
And in line with the theoretical reflections on the medium that we find
in the writings of Brecht and Benjamin, the technique it employs is the
caption: the mystifying power of the image, which easily deceives the clue-
less (nichtsahnend) viewer, can be countered only by a recourse to language.
Indeed, a persistent faith in language as the rational other of irrational images
emerges not only in Brecht’s theoretical writings and aesthetic practice
but in the writings of his later critics. When Stefan Soldovieri (1997: 154)
writes, “Brecht’s war and media critique make [sic] a final appeal to an
operative reading praxis under the sign of writing,” he is expressing a view
that recurs in almost all the critical literature on the War Primer.
However—and this is where the problems begin—the question of lan-
guage in the War Primer is not as simple as it has appeared to many of
Brecht’s critics. The War Primer explicitly presents itself as an instrument
for training us to read photographs, and Brecht meets this challenging task
by producing a book that is so idiosyncratic in its formal layout that I know
of no other quite like it.
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 207

The righthand page usually consists of a black background, upon which

is mounted a news photograph, often with its original caption in English,
German, or Swedish. Below the photograph appears Brecht’s quatrain
in white. This word-and-image composite constitutes the actual photo-
epigram itself. Theo Stammen’s (1999: 116) comment that “the actual ‘mes-
sage’ that the poet wishes to communicate to the reader is situated on the
right-hand page that contains the image and text” (my translation) articu-
lates an assumption shared by many critics of the War Primer, namely, that
the recto page is the only valid object of investigation (see, e.g., Didam
1977, Heukenkamp 1985, Lang 1986, Hunter 1987, Wöhrle 1988, Jost 1991).
But beyond this, there is a plethora of linguistic supplements. The left-
hand page, for example, though sometimes totally blank beyond an epi-
gram number in the bottom left corner, occasionally contains an addi-
tional caption and often a translation of the original newspaper caption,
if the extract is from a non-German source. In addition, there is a section
entitled “Notes on the Pictures” at the back of the book. These were com-
piled not by Brecht but by his editors, Günter Kunert and Heinz Seydel,
under Brecht’s supervision (Knopf 1988: 413). And the complexity of the
War Primer’s paratexts does not stop there: Ruth Berlau, Brecht’s associate
and sometime lover, contributed a short preface as well as a longer text
that was intended as an afterword but eventually formed the dust-jacket
blurb. The title page bears the word “KRIEGSFIBEL” in block letters and
a facsimile of Brecht’s signature. On the back of the dust jacket, there is a
further photo-epigram, whose source is given as the (as yet unpublished)
Friedensfibel (Peace Primer), while the title in block letters and Brecht’s sur-
name—again in facsimile—adorn the front of the jacket, superimposed on
a photograph of captured German soldiers that is an enlarged detail from
photo-epigram no. 61.
To recap, then, and moving from the text outward through the various
paratexts, we have, on the recto page, a caption attached to the original
newspaper image and Brecht’s four-line poem; on the verso page, a title
and a translation of the original caption; at the back of the book, four
pages of notes; at the front of the book, a preface; on the title page, the title
and facsimile signature; on the inside flaps of the dust jacket, a long text by
Berlau; on the back of the dust jacket, a photo-epigram from an allegedly
forthcoming work; and on the front of the dust jacket, the title and Brecht’s
surname.
So what are we to make of this paratextual profusion? The plethora of
linguistic supplements in the War Primer is impossible to overlook, and yet
critics have hitherto failed to account adequately for its consequences for a
reading of the book as a whole, perhaps because the conventions of critical
practice have not regarded paratexts as a legitimate object of investigation.
208 Poetics Today 29:1

It is surely not coincidental that some of the critics who totally ignore the
paratextual aspects of the War Primer look to the past and seek the key to
Brecht’s book in the classical Greek epigram (Wagenknecht 1978, Laus-
berg 1999) or in the Baroque emblem (Grimm 1969, Stammen 1999). The
emblem consists of an image, the pictura, which was usually a woodcut and
was accompanied by a title above (inscriptio) and a short text below (sub-
scriptio). Typically (though not necessarily), the subscriptio provided a moral
or doctrinal interpretation of the pictura. In purely formal terms, there are
certainly similarities between the emblem and the photo-epigram, but any
attempt to reduce the latter to the former fails entirely to engage with the
specifically modern medium of photography while also underestimating
the complexity of text-image relations in Brecht’s text.
Christiane Bohnert (1982: 245, 250) does mention the endnotes, arguing
that they seek to convince the skeptical reader of a materialist version of
the history of World War II and provide contextual information without
which the poems would be incomprehensible. Soldovieri (1997: 152) sees
the proliferation of paratexts as part of Brecht’s critique of the media and
the attendant logic of consumption, with the endnotes adding a “moment
of delay or complexity that requires the reader to maintain a mobile read-
ing practice.” This is certainly the case, for by encouraging the reader to
leaf backward and forward between photo-epigram and notes, the book
as object also encourages the abandonment of normal protocols of linear
reading. But this still does not fully account for the conspicuously large
quantity of textual and paratextual elements and their combined effects.
Slightly more attention is devoted to the paratexts by Welf Kienast
(2001), whose lengthy monograph promises an account of “Authorship and
the Collective Creative Process in Brecht’s War Primer.” But even Kienast
turns out to have remarkably little to say about either authorship or the
collective creative process. In a short section in the middle of the book,
he argues that the dust-jacket blurb reduces ambiguities by establishing a
univocal communicative situation: the exiled Brecht speaks to his compa-
triots in Nazi Germany (ibid.: 183). He also notes that both the back cover
and the preface emphasise the didactic claims of the book and its relevance
to the present-day GDR (ibid.: 184–85). In making this claim, however,
Kienast assumes that language functions in the way the War Primer says
that it does, namely, as a counterforce of the image. In both his account
of Berlau’s preface and his own critical practice, he reproduces the con-
ventional view that the poems of the War Primer do indeed demystify the
images. Kienast seldom considers the possibility that the viewing of the
photographs might be dependent on the paratextual elements as well as on
the epigrams themselves.
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 209

It seems to me, however, that the very excess of writing that we find in
the War Primer precludes this kind of reduction. Indeed, rather than being
the solution to the word-image problem, this excess is actually a symptom
of an abiding mistrust of photographic images, a sense that their power
to deceive the untrained viewer is so great that one caption alone is insuf-
ficient to control the image’s potential for ideological mystification and
unregulated polysemy.
This in turn has far-reaching consequences for a reading of the War
Primer. In particular, the dominant trend to view it as an unambiguous
piece of Marxist didacticism becomes highly problematic because the text
thwarts the easy formation of a coherent ideological subject. The War
Primer’s mode of address shifts radically not only from one poem to the
next, but often also between poem and paratext and even within indi-
vidual poems—thereby constructing a highly unstable reader position,
which undermines the notion that the subject of the text is subject to a uni-
vocal didactic intention. The relationship between the mode of address,
the production of ideology, and the constitution of the subject in the War
Primer is best approached via a consideration of Louis Althusser’s essay
“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971). According to Althus-
ser, ideology acts to “recruit” subjects from among individuals and trans-
form them into subjects through the operation of what Althusser terms
“interpellation,” imagined along the lines of a commonplace hailing: “hey,
you there!” (ibid.: 162). As soon as an individual recognizes himself or her-
self to be thus addressed or interpellated, he or she becomes a subject who
is subjected to the Subject (ibid.: 167). The paradigmatic example given
by Althusser is Christianity, according to which God occupies the position
of Subject who interpellates the faithful as subjects (ibid.: 166–68); but
it could equally well be Marxism, with the revolutionary party or state
occupying the role of the Absolute Subject that “interpellates around it the
infinity of individuals in a mirror-connexion such that it subjects the sub-
jects to the Subject, while giving them in the Subject in which each subject
can contemplate its own image (present and future) the guarantee that it
really concerns them and Him” (ibid.: 168).
What Mitchell (1994: 75) terms “effects of interpellation” can be seen
at work in the reading and viewing process as well, “in the sense that the
image greets or hails us, that it takes the beholder into the game, enfolds
the observer as object for the ‘gaze’ of the picture.” Viewers and readers
are to a large extent constructed by the rhetoric and mode of address of
.  I therefore cannot agree with Kienast (2001: 39) when he writes that the War Primer both
presupposes a reader schooled in the fundamentals of Marxist dialectics and produces such
a reader.
210 Poetics Today 29:1

the text they happen to peruse or of the image they happen to look at.
Any text or image will interpellate the reader by implying a position for
the reading or observing subject, thereby subjecting him or her to its own
structural demands and ideological presuppositions. In the light of such
considerations, an immediately striking aspect of the War Primer is that the
mode of address is not constant either throughout the volume or, in many
cases, within individual poems. Consider the first poem in the book:
Wie einer, der ihn schon im Schlafe ritt
Weiß ich den Weg vom Schicksal auserkürt
Den schmalen Weg, der in den Abgrund führt:
Ich finde ihn im Schlafe. Kommt ihr mit?
.  It is, of course, not unusual for collections of poetry to change their mode of address fre-
quently. It is less common for individual poems to imply a split reader position themselves,
though many modernist poems exploit this device. My point is not that the War Primer is
strikingly original in its poetics or that it is an especially demanding text to read. Indeed, as
befits a primer—which is, after all, a fundamentally didactic genre—Brecht’s versification is
simple. My point is, rather, that shifting structures of interpellation within and between the
quatrains work against the univocal ideological message that many of Brecht’s critics claim
to have identified in the War Primer.
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 211

[As one who has often ridden it in his sleep

I, chosen by destiny, know the path,
That narrow path that leads to the abyss:
I could find it in my sleep. Coming?]

This quatrain accompanies an image of Hitler standing at a lectern and

speaking, with his head raised and his right arm outstretched in an expan-
sive gesture, to four microphones. A faint swastika can be seen against an
otherwise dark background, and Hitler himself is wearing a Nazi uniform,
suggesting that the image was taken at a Nazi Party rally. The image-text
combination clearly establishes him as the speaking subject of the quatrain
addressing an audience outside the frame. The use of “ihr”—the infor-
mal plural form of “you”—appears to situate Brecht’s collective readership
in the uncomfortable position of being the direct addressees of Hitler’s
speech. But the image, which is taken from the side, also allows for the
possibility that the reader position constructed by the text is that of an
excluded third party. Even this single, and simple, photo-epigram, then,
offers the reader a fundamentally ambiguous subject position, and this is
complicated further by the content of the words spoken by “Hitler.” On the
one hand, there is a clear appropriation of Nazi rhetoric: the notion that
through Nazism the German people would fulfill their historical destiny
under the prophetic leadership of the führer. On the other hand, there is
an imputation of blindness and irrationalism (sleepwalking) and an explicit
declaration that Hitler is going to lead Germany not to some apotheosis
but to an abysmal end (cf. Kienast 2001: 41). Accepting one strand of this
rhetoric entails rejecting the other. This incompatibility can of course be
recuperated by reading the poem ironically, but irony is nothing less than
the adoption of a dual subject position vis-à-vis a given text, one that reads
literally and tropically at the same time. In this sense, irony is the enemy
of ideology.
As the reading of the War Primer progresses, moreover, the subject posi-
tion offered continues to change from one epigram to the next:
“Was macht ihr, Brüder?”—“Einen Eisenwagen.”
“Und was aus diesen Platten dicht daneben?”
“Geschosse, die durch Eisenwände schlagen.”
“Und warum all das, Brüder?”—“Um zu leben.”
[“What are you making, brothers?”—“An iron cart.” [i.e., a tank]
“And what are you making out of those sheets just there?”
“Shells that can penetrate iron walls.”
“And why are you doing all this, brother?”—“In order to live.”]
212 Poetics Today 29:1

Die Frauen finden an den spanischen Küsten

Wenn sie dem Bad entsteigen in den Kliffen
Oft schwarzes Öl an Armen und an Brüsten:
Die letzten Spuren von versenkten Schiffen.
[Women on the Spanish coast often find,
When they emerge from the sea and climb the cliffs
Black oil on their arms and breasts:
The last traces of sunken ships.]

These are the second and third quatrains of the War Primer, and it can
already be seen that the mode of address shifts radically from poem to
poem. In photo-epigram no. 2, the reader is an eavesdropper on a con-
versation being held by figures within the photographic frame itself: the
image is an overhead shot of four workers dwarfed by vast stacks of armor
plating. In the third, on the other hand, the mode of address is that of
an implied lyric “I” to an implied “you,” allowing the reader to take up
temporary residence in the absent second-person pronoun. This third
photo-epigram complicates the picture yet further. The verso page con-
tains the words “Spain 1936,” providing a referential anchor for the poem
in Franco’s invasion and the start of the Spanish Civil War. Reference is
made in the poem to the oil that women find on their arms and breasts,
and yet the image shows a grinning woman with oil only on the palms of
her hands and the soles of her feet, which are turned deliberately toward
the camera. There is thus a discrepancy between the image evoked by the
ekphrastic moment of the poem and the photographic image to which the
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 213

poem ostensibly refers, constructing an irreducible tension between image

and text. The quatrain cannot be said to caption or comment on the image,
nor does the image illustrate the poem, with the result that the sense of the
text-image combination can be recuperated only by stressing precisely the
disorientating function of the composite.
The poems in the War Primer change their mode of interpellation every
time a page is turned, placing the reader-viewer in a shifting and often
ambiguous relationship to the image and preventing him or her from
adopting a consistent subject position relative to the text as a whole. If
interpellation is the means by which ideology functions, then, it is clear
that the mutable modes of address in the War Primer preclude the commu-
nication of a coherent and univocal ideological meaning because they can
construct neither a unitary Subject nor a unitary subject of ideology.
This becomes even more apparent as the complexity of the text-image
relationship increases. In photo-epigram no. 13, for example, a large-
format image shows the German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger behind
the barbed-wire fence of a French internment camp. Like many Germans
resident in France, he was interned by the French shortly after the outbreak
of the Second World War, first in Les Milles and later near Nîmes. The
original caption from Life magazine, in which the image was published
on August 1, 1941, states: “Lion Feuchtwanger (facing camera) behind the
barbed wire in the brickyard concentration camp. This hitherto unpub-
lished picture was smuggled out of France by Mr Feuchtwanger.” The
accompanying poem reads:
Er war zwar ihres Feindes Feind, jedoch
War etwas an ihm, was man nicht verzeiht.
Denn seht: ihr Feind war seine Obrigkeit
So warfen sie ihn als Rebell ins Loch.
[Although he was the enemy of their enemy,
There was yet something about him that cannot be forgiven.
For behold: their enemy was his ruler [i.e., the state of
which he was a citizen]
So they threw him as a rebel into jail.]

Brecht’s verse addresses an anonymous, plural “you” (implied by the

second-person plural imperative “seht”—“behold”), who is capable of
decrypting the deictic reference of the possessive adjective “their” (ihr),
meaning the French who had interned him. The poem thus draws atten-
tion to the absurd Allied policy of interning so-called enemy aliens with
scant regard for anything beyond nationality, a practice which resulted
in Germans of all hues, including Nazis, Jews, and communists, living
214 Poetics Today 29:1

in the same camps. But the newspaper caption frames the image rather
differently, stressing the moment of adventure and escape of which the
photograph is evidence. The endnote for this image offers an expanded
version of this dichotomy. It provides basic contextual information
about the French internment of German nationals that would allow the
less informed reader to supply the referents of the poem’s deictics and
to understand the flawed nature of Allied internment policy. But it also
stresses Feuchtwanger’s heroic creativity (he completed five novels during
his exile period in Sanary-sur-Mer) and his daring escape from impris-
onment: he was abducted (entführt) by friends and brought to safety in
America.
The analysis of systemic political naïveté and absurdity and the narra-
tive of individual survival, then, interpellate the reader-viewer in two dif-
ferent ways, each implying a somewhat different conception of the photo-
graph. In terms of Brecht’s quatrain, it is the content of the image that is
privileged as evidence of Feuchtwanger’s internment. In terms of the news-
paper caption and the endnote, on the other hand, what the photograph
depicts is less important than its status as a material object, as a token of
survival that has accompanied Feuchtwanger during his escapades.
In the Feuchtwanger photo-epigram, caption, quatrain, and endnote
interact in a way that increases the semantic density of the image. In
photo-epigram no. 47, on the other hand, the textual and paratextual ele-
ments surrounding the photograph become the site of an explicit ideologi-
cal struggle over the meaning of the image and thereby dramatize most
clearly Brecht’s and Benjamin’s claim that captions have the ability to
change the function and value of the photograph. Here, we are once again
confronted with the original caption from the so-called “bourgeois press”
as well as with Brecht’s response to this combination of word and picture in
the form of the quatrain. Brecht’s quatrain is the privileged text, not only
in terms of the layout but also in the sense that Brecht was able to respond
thereby to the image and to the text appended to it. Indeed, this particular
photo-epigram actually comments on the rhetoric of the original caption
as well as on the photograph—or even instead of it. The original magazine
caption reads: “An American soldier stands over a dying Jap whom he has
just been forced to shoot. The Jap had been hiding in the landing barge,
shooting at US troops.” Brecht’s quatrain reads:
Es hatte sich ein Strand von Blut zu röten
Der ihnen nicht gehörte, dem noch dem.
Sie waren, heißt’s, gezwungen, sich zu töten.
Ich glaubs, ich glaubs. Und frag nur noch: von wem?
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 215

[A beach was obliged to dye itself red with blood.

It belonged to neither of them.
They were, so it is said, forced to kill each other.
I believe it, I believe it. I just want to ask: by whom?]

The response to the original text here is multilayered. First of all, the rhe-
toric of the opening line mimics that of the original caption in its sup-
pression of agency. The passive voice in “a dying Jap whom he has just
been forced to kill” leaves unmentioned the agent doing the forcing, just
as Brecht’s first line, “Es hatte sich ein Strand von Blut zu röten,” does. In
Brecht’s poem, however, the idea of a beach being obliged to turn itself red
216 Poetics Today 29:1

is a strange concept, and so the sentence also serves to make explicit the
rhetorical means by which agency can be suppressed in discourse. Lines 3
and 4 then take up the terms of the original caption explicitly and ask the
very question that is precluded by the passive construction in the original.
Brecht’s quatrain, however, does not have the power entirely to displace
the original caption. The photograph was cut out of the New York edition
of Life magazine for February 15, 1943. Life depended for its commercial
success on selling advertising space, the cost of advertisements being pro-
portional to the circulation of the magazine. So its selection of images and
its captions clearly had to be designed to be palatable to a broad cross sec-
tion of the American wartime public. This accounts for the composition
of the image, in which the massive figure of the GI looms over the prone
and slight figure of the Japanese, whose body leads the eye toward further
corpses lying in the sand and, finally, to the open door of the landing craft
from which the Japanese had allegedly been firing. It is also notable that
there is no visible triumphalism in the American’s stance. On the con-
trary, his bowed head and massive size in comparison with his Japanese
adversary lend a singular pathos to the representation of death in battle.
This is accompanied by the ethical dimension implied by the passive voice:
the soldier was “forced to shoot” the Japanese, the implication being that
he had not wished to. The overall logic of the caption thus appeals to
the pragmatic imperatives of the battlefield (if you don’t shoot, you get
shot) as a means of justifying violence and assuaging any guilt that might
have been felt by the consumers of the image on the home front. The
viewer-reader thus interpellated is one for whom the immediate context of
battle provides a sufficient rationale for killing, even though killing is itself
regrettable.
The Life caption thus presupposes an acceptance of the ideology of war,
whereas Brecht sets out to call that ideology into question. He does so by
defamiliarizing the newspaper caption in two ways, producing thereby a
kind of Verfremdungseffekt. Firstly, as we have seen, the notion of a beach
having to dye itself red exposes the means by which agency can be sup-
pressed in discourse. Secondly, the last line of the quatrain makes clear
all that the original Life caption had sought to conceal: an awareness of
agencies—be they economic forces or individual politicians—that “force”

.  Defamiliarization is a term most commonly associated with Russian Formalism and in
particular the work of Viktor Shklovsky (1965 [1917]). As Fredric Jameson points out in his
book on Brecht (1998: 85–86), defamiliarization is both the precursor of the Brechtian “Ver-
fremdungseffekt” and a more accurate translation than “alienation,” the term used by John
Willett in his translations of Brecht’s theoretical writings. ( Jameson nevertheless opts for the
word “estrangement” to translate “Verfremdung.”)
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 217

people to kill each other (cf. Feddersen 1995). However, Brecht’s epigram
cannot fully displace the original caption because they belong to totally
different discourses. Whereas the original caption deals with the pragmatic
decisions within the sphere of combat itself and inserts the image into a
microhistory of one particular beach skirmish, Brecht’s quatrain implies
a totally different narrative that addresses the ultimate causes of the war
itself. These two discourses exist in a mode of unresolved competition,
and the ideological struggle for the meaning of the photograph is dra-
matized on the page. Turning then to the back of the book, we find, among
the “Notes on the Pictures,” the following commentary on photo-epigrams
nos. 39–47, all of which deal with the war in the Pacific:
The Japanese Emperor Hirohito, an ally of the German Führer and the Italian
Duce, sent his bombers to attack the American naval base in the Pacific on 8
December 1941. Heavily armed, Japan set out to overthrow the white colonial
rulers in Asia and the Pacific and to exploit the natural resources itself. The war
was now being fought right across the Pacific. After initial victories, the Japa-
nese troops had to surrender one island after another. The fighting was cruel.
The American soldiers, encumbered with racial prejudice, regarded the Japa-
nese as inferior beings and behaved accordingly.  (My translation)

This once again reframes the image, inserting it into yet another narra-
tive that explains the war in terms of colonial competition, with the Euro-
pean colonial powers being ousted from the Pacific by a different colonial
power in the form of Japan. The endnote also seeks to account for the
brutality of the combat in terms of purely American racism. The endnote
thus involves a different mode of interpellation from either the caption or
Brecht’s quatrain.
There is, then, an excess of verbal discourse, and the image becomes
overdetermined, acquiring ever more meanings as one reads outward from
the textual to the paratextual apparatus. As noted earlier, Ruth Berlau’s
preface to the War Primer compares photographs to hieroglyphs and claims
that Brecht’s book seeks to teach the art of reading images that would
otherwise be “indecipherable” (unentzifferbar). Entziffern in German carries
a connotation of discovering the true meaning behind a mysterious sur-
face message. But what emerges from the War Primer is that decipher-
ing the image entails a recognition of the various modes of reading and
interpretation to which it can be subjected. Christiane Bohnert (1982:
253; cf. Stammen 1999: 118) seeks to square the circle by claiming that the
reader first occupies the standpoint of the image, then that of the text (or
vice versa). Out of the shift from the one to the other, a third standpoint
emerges: the reader’s own. The above examples, however, demonstrate
218 Poetics Today 29:1

that such a reading is applicable neither to the individual photo-epigrams

nor to the War Primer in its entirety. For if we actually pay attention to all
the verbal texts that contextualize and recontextualize the act of viewing,
it becomes clear that what we have is not contradiction or even duality but
multiplicity, which in turn precludes the kind of dialectical resolution of
which Bohnert writes.

3. Proliferating Paratexts

In this light, the War Primer can be understood as a response not only to the
Second World War, but also to the cultural politics of the GDR in the first
half of the 1950s. It was published at a time when the pressure on East Ger-
man writers to conform to the aesthetic prescriptions of Socialist Realism
was already well established ( Jäger 1982: 33, 69). The pronouncements
on aesthetics made by GDR cultural functionaries in the 1950s, particu-
larly those that drew on Stalin’s prescription that writers should be engi-
neers of human souls, lend themselves to rereading in the light of Western
theory. In particular, the much-vaunted need for artists to contribute to
the molding of the new socialist state and the “new socialist person” is
ultimately an exhortation to produce docile ideological subjects that would
unquestioningly carry out the will of the party. Central to this Marxist-
Leninist agenda was an aesthetics of reflection, which was essential not
only because it provides a more immediately accessible and popular mode
of literary communication but because the representation itself becomes,
as David Bathrick (1995: 97) puts it,
a replica of pre-established modes of being and knowing. In interrelated ways
works of art in accordance with socialist realism are the result of prefabrication:
as works reflecting “reality,” they present a cognitive organization after the fact,
that is, one that conforms and is subordinate to a set of “objective,” “natural”
processes. Second, the view of these processes is itself to be informed by an
objective science that already “knows” certain outcomes by virtue of the cate-
gories it employs (the inevitable arrival of socialism after the inevitable collapse
of capitalism, etc.). Once given these two interfacing premises (the inevitability
of “socialist history” and the infallibility of a science that will know it), it follows
that the Party can install itself as the omniscient mediator of the whole process.

.  See, for example, the article by Alexander Abusch on “Die Diskussion in der Sowjet-
literatur und bei uns” in the GDR newspaper Neues Deutschland, July 4, 1950 (cited in Jäger
1982: 27).
.  What Socialist Realist literature was deemed to “reflect,” however, was also subject to
ideological prescription. It was not, nor did it claim to be, an aesthetics of pure and osten-
sibly value-free mimesis.
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 219

Rephrased in Althusserian terms, this implies that the effect of Social-

ist Realism is to interpellate subjects as “spoken by” the mimetic text,
thereby subjecting them to the Subject, which is in this case the revolu-
tionary state itself. And as we have seen, the War Primer embodies a chal-
lenge to Socialist Realism precisely because of the multiplicity of subject
positions it constructs for the reader-viewer. The pictorial, textual, and
paratextual strategies analyzed above—including a constantly changing
layout, shifting relationships between the images and the various texts
that surround them, an ideological struggle between the texts themselves,
and the perpetual destabilization of the subject position implied by the
text’s mode of address—appear to produce the very “critical reorgani-
zation of experience” of which Bathrick writes. And yet this reorganiza-
tion is not necessarily concordant with the kind of cognitive realism for
which Brecht pleaded in a series of polemical attacks on Georg Lukács and
Socialist Realism (see the essays collected in Brecht 1971). Brecht’s (1971:
70) famous “counter-definition” of realism involves “revealing the societal
causal complex,” “unmasking the ruling points of view as the points of
view of the ruling,” and “writing from the point of view of the class that
offers the broadest solutions to the most urgent difficulties in which human
society finds itself ” (“den gesellschaftlichen Kausalkomplex aufdeckend /
die herrschenden Gesichtspunkte als die Gesichtspunkte der Herrschen-
den entlarvend / vom Standpunkt der Klasse aus schreibend, welche für
die dringendsten Schwierigkeiten, in denen die menschliche Gesellschaft
steckt, die breitesten Lösungen bereit hält”). Insight into social relations is
here explicitly linked to an ideological program. The structures of inter-
pellation in the War Primer, however, elude any such ideological fixity.
It is at this point that we can finally turn our attention to those paratexts
that have hitherto been ignored: the preface, jacket text, and cover. The
preface, as we have seen, states the aim of the War Primer: “This book seeks
to teach the art of reading pictures”—in particular the photographs con-
tained in the capitalist illustrated press. The preface also states, “Nobody
escapes the past by forgetting it.” This establishes a contract with the
reader—again a mode of interpellation—that seeks to determine how the
book is read and used. It emphasizes the need to confront the Nazi past and
directs the reader’s attention to the text’s anticapitalist agenda by noting
that the mystifying quality of photographs is a function of the widespread
ignorance of social relations that is maintained by capitalism. To demystify
is thus an anticapitalist project.
The inside flaps of the dust jacket fulfill a different purpose. They give
an account of Brecht’s work during his Swedish exile and represent him
as a heroic refugee, blessed with the gift of prophecy, desperate to help
220 Poetics Today 29:1

spread revolutionary consciousness among his disciples, and bound in

love and solidarity to the German and Soviet Volk. Significantly, Ruth
Berlau, author of this text, writes that she frequently saw Brecht himself
with scissors and glue in his hands, putting the photo-epigrams together.
The import of all this is to establish Brecht’s authorship: he is not only
the mediator of ideas but the person whose artisanal craftsmanship has
produced the book as object. This represents another attempt to fix the
meaning of the War Primer by insisting on the integrity and unity of the
consciousness and indeed the body that produced it. However, Berlau’s
preface and dust-jacket text constitute what Genette (1997: 263) terms
“allographic prefaces,” namely, prefaces written by someone other than
the named author. “Allography,” as Genette (ibid.) goes on to say, “is in
its own way a separation: a separation between the sender of the text (the
author) and the sender of the preface (the preface-writer).” So in the very
act of claiming a unity of intention behind the War Primer, the preface and
jacket copy introduce a further split in the book’s mode of address.
In line with the attempt in the dust-jacket text to install Brecht him-
self as the controlling intelligence that guarantees the meaning of the War
Primer as a whole is the inclusion of a facsimile of Brecht’s signature on the
front cover and the title page. As Derrida (1982) has shown, the signature
derives its authority not from uniqueness but from reproducibility, with
reproducibility becoming the very condition of possibility of the unique-
ness it appears to oppose. But even in its reproduced condition, it func-
tions as a graphic mark of the author’s hand. It thereby signals a degree of
ownership and authorship that is performatively more powerful than the
author’s name in normal type because it implies an indexical link between
the speech act and the body of the writer rather than the purely conven-
tional link between the person and the proper name.
In no sense can the signature be seen as a kind of product endorsement,
as Kienast (2001: 179–80) claims, nor can it be seen as part of Brecht’s
wider critique of intellectual property, authorship, and copyright, as Soldo-
vieri (1997: 153) argues. Indeed, although Brecht repeatedly defended pla-
giarism as a legitimate artistic practice (1992d [1929], 1992h [1930], 1992i
[1930]), Threepenny Lawsuit was itself the product of an attempt on Brecht’s
part to assert intellectual property rights; and if John Fuegi (1994) is to be
believed, Brecht’s free appropriation of other people’s intellectual prop-
erty went hand in hand with a fierce protection of his own, especially when
his financial interests were at stake. The War Primer involves the reproduc-
tion of large quantities of copyright matter without acknowledgment. As a
speech act, the facsimile signature imprints authorship and ownership on
this heterogeneous compilation of pictorial and textual material in such a
 Long • Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer 221

way as to establish Brecht firmly as the authority that will ultimately guar-
antee the unity and meaning of the work.
Both the signature and Berlau’s prefatory material thus constitute
attempts, in extremis, to reassert the didactic value of the War Primer by
countering the dissemination of meaning and the multiple effects of inter-
pellation produced within its pages. Yet as the above analysis has shown,
these additional textual supplements cannot reverse the implications of
those they physically surround.
I wrote at the beginning of this article about the unease that dominates
discussions of the technical image in much Marxist criticism. This unease
is enacted within the pages of the War Primer, as the concentric circles of
textual material that strive to fix the meaning of the images and of the
work ultimately foreground the instability of photographic meaning and
the limitations of the linguistic caption. What emerges from a study of all
the War Primer’s verbal adjuncts is a view of Brecht’s book that is far more
interesting than the assertion that it counters Western historiography with
a materialist representation of World War II. What it reveals in particular is
that an active engagement with the book as a whole and its multiple modes
of address creates a fluid subjectivity that resists rather than acquiesces in
the kind of univocal ideological message that Socialist Realism sought to
impose and that most of Brecht’s critics claim to discern in the War Primer.
This reading of the War Primer ultimately suggests that conferring revolu-
tionary use value on the photograph is not something that can be achieved
by means of captioning; the photographic image cannot be reduced to a
function of its linguistic supplements. The War Primer thus offers a belated
critique of the notion, propounded by Brecht and Benjamin in the interwar
years, that language can harness the power of photography in the service
of radical politics.

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