Wednesday – May 1
Despite incessant GOP attacks on unions with their Orwellian-named “right to work laws,” increasing income inequality may push Democrats to aggressively push for more actual workers’ rights. I was struck that Joe Biden, in announcing his presidential bid, said he was “sick of this President badmouthing unions.” Later he tweeted, “Labor built the middle class in this country. Minimum wage, overtime pay, the 40-hour week: they exist for all of us because unions fought for those rights. We need a President who honors them and their work.”
Few poets have supported worker organizing more powerfully than Bertolt Brecht. In “Report from Germany,” he reminds us how the rich and powerful have always hated organized labor.
Having just fled Hitler’s Germany, Brecht describes Nazi stormtroopers (“the brown plague”) descending upon a worker community flying a red flag to commemorate the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s October 7 revolution.
The symbolic gesture costs many lives, and irony hangs heavy in the poem’s conclusion as we get a new explanation for the color of revolution’s flag. The poem, like much of Brecht’s writing, features a clear and compelling narrative line with an everyday item playing an important role:
Report from Germany
We learn that in Germany
In the days of the brown plague
On the roof of an engineer works suddenly
A red flag fluttered in the November wind
The outlawed flag of freedom!
In the grey mid-November from the sky
Fell rain mixed with snow
It was the 7th, though: day of the Revolution!
And look! the red flag!
The workers stand in the yards
Shield their eyes with their hands and stare
At the roof through the flurries of icy rain.
The lorries roll up filled with stormtroopers
And they drive to the wall any who wear work clothes
And with cords bind any fists that are calloused
And from the sheds after their interrogation
Stumble the beaten and bloody
Not one of whom has named the man
Who was on the roof.
So they drive away those who kept silent
And the rest have had enough.
But next day there waves again
The red flag of the proletariat
On the engineering works roof. Again
Thuds through the dead-still town
The stormtroopers’ tread. In the yards
There are no men to be seen now. Only women
Stand with stony faces; hands shielding their eyes, they gaze
At the roof through the flurries of icy rain.
And the beatings begin once more. Under interrogation
The women testify: that flag
Is a bedsheet in which
We bore away one who died yesterday.
You can’t blame us for the color it is.
It is red with the murdered man’s blood, you should know.
We are a long way from Nazi Germany and, for that matter, from the white terrorism that established and maintained Jim Crow following the Reconstruction. Never underestimate, however, what fear will cause even so-called civilized people to perpetrate or tolerate.
