A terrifying series of short poems by one of the world's leading playwrights, set to images of World War II
Bertold Brecht (1898-1956), the German poet and playwright, was forced into exile in 1933, returning from the USA to Switzerland in 1947, and to east Berlin in 1949. One of his country's greatest 20th century poets, among his most famous plays are The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage, Life of Galileo and The Caucasian Chalk-Circle.
An album of pity and anger which fixes the evil of war for all
time.
*Observer*
A handsome edition of War Primer, a series of short poems
illustrated and inspired by war photographs Brecht clipped from
newspapers.
*London Review of Books*
Tender, angry and incisive.
*Independent*
A modern equivalent of Goya.
*Guardian*
Brecht reprinted photographs from wartime mass-circulation
magazines, replacing the captions with short poems about the
essential truth of each image.
*Daily Telegraph*
Deserves a place of the shelves of every public and school
library.
*Times Literary Supplement*
By themselves the images are disturbing, often terrifying. The four
lines of poetry make them devastating. They achieve this through
what was Brecht's greatest strength as a writer: his ability to
coax out the twisted, icy rationale of a world whose overriding
logic is self-justification. The bitter chuckle brought on in the
reader by these words reveals unsettling machinations. War, capital
and fascism are made mundane before that very mundanity is turned
inside out by dint of its own force.
*Red Wedge Magazine*
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