"Rot" by Johannes Becher

This poem first appeared in Kurt Pinthus’ influential 1920 anthology titled Menschheits Dämmerung (The Twilight of Humanity) with a subtitle “Symphonie jüngster Dichtung” (a “symphony of the youngest poets”). The collection opens with Jakob Van Hoddis’ “Weltende” (“The End of the World”) and includes work by Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, Iwan Goll, Franz Werfel, Gottfried Benn, and others.

The career of Johannes R. Becher traces many of the most significant artistic and political developments of the first half of the twentieth century. At the age of nineteen he participated in a last gasp of German Romanticism by entering a suicide pact (he did admire Kleist) with his lover whom he killed with a bullet though he only wounded himself. His first book Die Gnade eines Frühlings (“The Grace of Springtime”; 1912) contains thoroughly Romantic poems. While coping with morphine addiction he associated with Futurist and Expressionist groupings in the art world and with revolutionary organizations such as the Spartacist League and then the Communist Party in politics. His pacifist novel, (CHCI=CH)3As (Levisite) oder Der einzig gerechte Krieg was banned in 1925 and he was indicted for "literarischer Hochverrat" or "literary high treason.” And that was under Weimar. When the Nazi regime took over, he escaped arrest by going into hiding, then making his way to the Soviet Union where he likely found he had little choice and eventually declared his adherence to the socialist realism of Zhdanov. Implicated in the purges of suspected Trotskyites, he informed on others, then suffered depression and attempted suicide again. After the war he returned to the eastern zone of Germany to accolades as the great poet of the new era. He was made Minister of Culture in 1954. His business had become the suppression of young dissidents such as he himself had once been. He wrote the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic. In his memoirs, unpublished until thirty years after his death, he renounced not just his service to the East German Stalinist government but to socialism itself as the great mistake of his life.

In “Verfall” (“Rot”) Becher expresses a real punk sensibility, insisting that the most appropriate images for the age are ugly, even disgusting. For all Becher’s leftist activism, his taste resembles that of the fascist anti-Semite Céline.


Our bodies already rotten,
let us dig while singing
these intoxicated evenings,
awash in night storms and the sea,
our hot blood dried up,
an abscess of pus trickles away
mouth ear eye in disguise
sleep dream earth the wind.

Yellowish carrier worms
on a narrow-wounded passage,
throbbing rolling storms,
our eyelashes, blood red and long.
“Am I a crumbling wall,
a silent pillar by the roadside?
or a tree in mourning
that leans over the abyss?”
Ah, the sweet smell of decadence
filling the room, the house, the head!
In the flowers, the waving grasses,
in the birds, in their songs!

”Yes, the trunk is rotten.”
Mold. Groans. Moans.
Flight under a teeming sky!
A frightful clamor ensues.
Kettle-drums! Tuba grunts.
Thunder and wild flames of light!
Cymbals. A sound of percussion.
A drum-roll. It’s breaking up!

I gave myself to you,
wide world, ah! too easily trusting,
see how the poor flesh fails
yet my mind looks still homeward.
Oh, night, your sleep’s a solace
The mouth rests deep and poor.
Bright day, you dissolve me
in total and harmless unease.

There’s no way out,
Oh, I’m torn in two!
Blinkered, soon, soon blind and bandaged.
No kiss can heal me!
That I find no way out,
I'm the only one to blame:
A wild current, wind of blood and fire.
Shame, impatience.

The day brings sharp bitterness!
May night bring dreams and wisdom!
Shit, contortion, cut and tear!
A cool resting place –
everything must be far off –
far, oh so far from me –
blooming aloft in the shine of the stars –
my home, there! above!

One day I will stand by the road,
pensive, gazing at a metropolis.
Light falls through the dull clouds’ course.
Enchanted forms, wrapped in white,
My hands make the move
toward heaven, filled with gold,
instantly opening doors of wonder!

The fields and the forests rise,
Waters roll on. Bridges.
A roof. Endless streams are running.
Grey mountain ridge.
Red and dreadful thunder rises.
A dragon. Earth spews.
Torn throat. The sun roars.
Disgust. Laughing. Cries.


Fade to black. The taste of dirt and blood.
A ball. A huge bloodbath . . .
. . . “oh, timeless day, when will you dawn?
Is there still time?
When will you blow, oh sounding horn,
are you screaming the tide’s time?
Out of the underbrush, the moorlands, tomb and thorns,
Calling the sleepers here”