Five difficulties in writing the truth by Albrecht Mueller and Bertold Brecht, 6/1/2025

Five difficulties in writing the truth

by Albrecht Müller

[This article posted on 6/1/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=115958.]

Introduction: “This text was written by BERTOLT BRECHT for distribution in Hitler’s Germany. It is published as a special edition of the anti-fascist magazine Unsere Zeit, published by the ”Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller“ (Protective Association of German Writers).”

BERTOLT BRECHT

Five difficulties in writing the truth

“The writer should not bow to the powerful, nor should he deceive the weak. Of course, it is very difficult not to bow to the powerful and very advantageous to deceive the weak.”

Anyone who wants to fight lies and ignorance and write the truth today has at least five difficulties to overcome. They must have the courage to write the truth, even though it is suppressed everywhere; the wisdom to recognize it, even though it is concealed everywhere; the art of making it a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread it among them. These difficulties are great for those who write under fascism, but they also exist for those who have been driven out or have fled, and even for those who write in countries of bourgeois freedom.

1. The courage to write the truth It seems self-evident that the writer should write the truth in the sense that he should not suppress or conceal it and that he should not write anything untrue. He should not bow to the powerful, he should not deceive the weak. Of course, it is very difficult not to bow to the powerful and very advantageous to deceive the weak. To displease those who possess means to renounce possession. To renounce payment for work done means, under certain circumstances, to renounce work, and to reject the favor of the powerful often means to reject fame altogether. This requires courage. Times of extreme oppression are usually times when there is much talk of great and lofty things. It takes courage to speak of such low and small things as the food and housing of the working people at such times, in the midst of a tremendous clamor that sacrifice is the main thing. When farmers are showered with honors, it takes courage to talk about machines and cheap feed that would make their honored work easier. When all the broadcasters are shouting that the man without knowledge and education is better than the knowledgeable man, it takes courage to ask: better for whom? When people talk about perfect and imperfect races, it is courageous to ask whether hunger, ignorance, and war do not produce terrible deformities. Likewise, courage is needed to tell the truth about oneself, about oneself as the defeated. Many who are persecuted lose the ability to recognize their mistakes. Persecution seems to them the greatest injustice. The persecutors, since they persecute, are the wicked; they, the persecuted, are persecuted because of their goodness. But this goodness has been defeated, conquered, and prevented, and was therefore a weak goodness, a bad, untenable, unreliable goodness; for it is not possible to attribute weakness to goodness, as one attributes wetness to rain.To say that the good were not defeated because they were good, but because they were weak, requires courage. Of course, the truth must be written in the struggle with untruth, and it must not be something general, lofty, or ambiguous. Untruth is precisely of this general, lofty, ambiguous nature. When someone is said to have spoken the truth, it means that some or many or one have said something else, a lie or something general, but he has spoken the truth, something practical, factual, undeniable, that which was at stake.It takes little courage to complain about the wickedness of the world and the triumph of brutality in general and to threaten the triumph of the spirit in a part of the world where this is still permitted. Many appear as if cannons were pointed at them, when in fact only opera glasses are pointed at them. They shout their general demands into a world of friends and harmless people. They demand general justice, for which they have never done anything, and general freedom to get a share of the spoils that have long been shared with them. They consider only what sounds beautiful to be the truth. If truth is something numerical, dry, factual, something that is difficult to find and requires study, then it is not truth for them, nothing that intoxicates them. They only have the outward appearance of those who speak the truth. The misery with them is that they do not know the truth.

2. The wisdom of recognizing the truth Since it is difficult to write the truth because it is suppressed everywhere, it seems to most people to be a question of attitude whether the truth is written or not. They believe that all that is needed is courage. They forget the second difficulty, that of finding the truth. There can be no question that it is easy to find the truth. First of all, it is not easy to determine which truth is worth telling. For example, one of the great civilized states after another is now sinking into extreme barbarism, visible to the whole world. Moreover, everyone knows that the internal war, which is being waged with the most terrible means, can turn into an external war every day, which will perhaps leave our part of the world in ruins. That is undoubtedly a truth, but there are, of course, other truths. For example, it is not untrue that chairs have seats and that rain falls from above. Many poets write truths of this kind. They are like painters who cover the walls of sinking ships with still lifes. Our first difficulty does not apply to them, and yet they have a clear conscience. Unshaken by the powerful, but also unperturbed by the cries of the violated, they paint their pictures. The absurdity of their actions creates in them a “deep” pessimism, which they sell at good prices and which, in view of these masters and these sales, would actually be more justified for others. It is not even easy to recognize that their truths are truths about chairs or rain; they usually sound quite different, like truths about important things. For artistic creation consists precisely in giving importance to something. Only on closer inspection does one realize that they are merely saying: a chair is a chair and no one can “do” anything about the rain falling down. These people do not find the truth that is worth writing about. Others, on the other hand, are genuinely concerned with the most pressing issues, fear neither those in power nor poverty, but are nevertheless unable to find the truth. They lack knowledge. They are full of old superstitions, of famous prejudices that were often beautifully formulated in ancient times. The world is too complicated for them; they do not know the facts and do not see the connections. In addition to the right attitude, knowledge that can be acquired and methods that can be learned are necessary. In this time of confusion and great change, all writers need a knowledge of materialist dialectics, economics, and history. This can be acquired from books and through practical instruction, provided the necessary diligence is present.Many truths can be uncovered in simpler ways, parts of the truth or facts that lead to finding the truth. If you want to search, a method is good, but you can also find without a method, even without searching. But in such a random way, you can hardly achieve a representation of the truth that enables people to know how they should act on the basis of this representation. People who only write down small facts are incapable of making the things of this world manageable. But truth has only this purpose, no other. These people are not up to the task of writing the truth. If someone is willing to write the truth and is capable of recognizing it, three difficulties remain.

3. The art of making truth manageable as a weapon Truth must be told because of the conclusions that follow from it for behavior. As an example of a truth from which no conclusions or false conclusions can be drawn, let us take the widespread view that terrible conditions prevail in some countries, conditions that stem from barbarism. According to this view, fascism is a wave of barbarism that has swept over some countries with the force of nature.According to this view, fascism is a new third power alongside (and above) capitalism and socialism; not only the socialist movement, but also capitalism could have continued to exist without fascism, etc. This is, of course, a fascist assertion, a capitulation to fascism. Fascism is a historical phase into which capitalism has entered, insofar as it is something new and at the same time old. Capitalism exists in fascist countries only as fascism, and fascism can only be fought as capitalism, as the most naked, brazen, oppressive, and deceitful form of capitalism. How can anyone speak the truth about fascism, which they oppose, if they have nothing to say against capitalism, which gives rise to it? How can their truth be practical? Those who are against fascism without being against capitalism, who complain about the barbarism that comes from barbarism, are like people who want their share of the calf but don’t want the calf to be slaughtered. They want to eat the calf but not see the blood. They are satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before serving the meat. They are not against the property relations that produce barbarism, only against barbarism itself. They raise their voices against barbarism, and they do so in countries where the same property relations prevail, but where the butchers still wash their hands before serving the meat.Loud accusations against barbaric measures may have an effect for a short time, as long as the listeners believe that such measures are out of the question in their countries. Certain countries are able to maintain their property relations with less violent means than others. Democracy still provides them with the services for which others must resort to violence, namely the guarantee of ownership of the means of production. The monopoly on factories, mines, and land creates barbaric conditions everywhere; however, these are less visible. Barbarism becomes visible as soon as the monopoly can only be protected by open violence.Some countries that do not yet find it necessary to renounce the formal guarantees of the constitutional state, as well as such amenities as art, philosophy, and literature, for the sake of barbaric monopolies, are particularly fond of listening to visitors who accuse their homeland of renouncing such amenities, since they benefit from this in the wars that are expected. Should we say that those who, for example, demand relentless struggle against Germany “because it is the true home of evil in this age, the branch of hell, the abode of the Antichrist” have recognized the truth? It would be better to say that they are foolish, helpless, and harmful people. For the conclusion to be drawn from this chatter is that this country should be exterminated. The whole country with all its people, because poison gas does not seek out the guilty when it kills. The frivolous person who does not know the truth expresses himself in general, lofty, and vague terms. They babble about “the” Germans, they complain about “the” evil, and the listener, in the best case, does not know what to do. Should he decide not to be German? Will hell disappear if he is good? The talk of barbarism coming from barbarism is also of this kind. According to this view, barbarism comes from barbarism and ceases through civility, which comes from education. This is all expressed in very general terms, not as conclusions for action, and basically not said to anyone. Such representations show only a few links in the chain of causes and present certain driving forces as uncontrollable forces. Such representations contain much darkness that hides the forces that cause the catastrophes. A little light, and people appear as the cause of the catastrophes. For we live in a time when man’s destiny is man himself. Fascism is not a natural disaster that can be understood from the “nature” of man. But even in natural disasters, there are ways of presenting them that are worthy of man because they appeal to all his fighting spirit.In many American magazines after a major earthquake destroyed Yokohama, photographs showed a field of rubble. Underneath was written “steel stood,” and indeed, those who at first glance had seen only ruins now noticed, drawn by the caption, that some tall buildings had remained standing. Among the representations that can be given of an earthquake, those of civil engineers are of incomparable importance, as they take into account the shifts in the ground, the force of the shocks, the heat that develops, etc., and lead to constructions that can withstand the quake. Anyone who wants to describe fascism and war, the great catastrophes that are not natural disasters, must establish a practical truth. They must show that these are catastrophes brought about by the owners of the means of production on the huge masses of workers who have no means of production of their own. If one wants to write successfully about terrible conditions, one must write in such a way that their avoidable causes can be recognized. Once the avoidable causes are recognized, the terrible conditions can be combated.

4. The decision to choose those in whose hands the truth will be effective Through centuries of custom in trading written works on the market of opinions and descriptions, and because writers were relieved of concern for what they wrote, writers gained the impression that their customers or clients, the middlemen, would pass on what they wrote to everyone. He thought: I speak, and those who want to hear me hear me. In reality, he spoke, and those who could pay heard him. Not everyone heard him speak, and those who heard him did not want to hear everything. Much has been said about this, though still too little; I want to emphasize here only that “writing to someone” has become “writing.” But the truth cannot simply be written; it must be written to someone who can do something with it. The recognition of truth is a process shared by writers and readers. To say good things, one must be able to hear well and hear good things. The truth must be spoken with calculation and heard with calculation. And it is important for us writers to whom we say it and who says it to us.We must tell the truth about the terrible conditions to those for whom the conditions are worst, and we must learn it from them. It is not only people of a certain persuasion who must be addressed, but those to whom this persuasion and the reason for their situation are appropriate. And your listeners are constantly changing! Even executioners are amenable when the payment for hanging no longer comes in or the danger becomes too great. The Bavarian peasants were against any revolution, but when the war had lasted long enough and their sons came home and could no longer find a place on the farms, they were won over to the revolution. It is important for writers to strike the right tone of truth. Usually, one hears a very gentle, plaintive tone, that of people who would not hurt a fly. Anyone who hears this tone and is in misery becomes even more miserable. This is how people speak who may not be enemies, but are certainly not fellow combatants. The truth is something warlike; it fights not only untruth, but also certain people who spread it.

5. The art of spreading the truth among many Many people, proud of their courage to speak the truth, happy to have found it, perhaps tired from the work it takes to put it into a manageable form, impatiently waiting for those whose interests they defend to take action, do not consider it necessary to use special cunning in spreading the truth. In this way, they often lose the full effect of their work. At all times, cunning has been used to spread the truth when it has been suppressed and concealed. CONFUCIUS falsified an old patriotic historical calendar. He changed only certain words. Where it said, “The ruler of Kun had the philosopher Wan killed because he had said this and that,” CONFUCIUS replaced ‘killed’ with “murdered.” If it said that the tyrant so-and-so had been killed in an assassination, he wrote “executed.” In this way, CONFUCIUS paved the way for a new assessment of history. Anyone in our time who says “population” instead of ‘people’ and “land ownership” instead of “land” is already refuting many lies. They are stripping words of their rotten mysticism. The word “people” implies a certain uniformity and suggests common interests, so it should only be used when referring to several peoples, since only then can a commonality of interests be imagined. The population of a region has different, even opposing interests, and this is a truth that is suppressed. In the same way, the soil speaks and the fields describe what the nose and eyes perceive by talking about their earthy smell and color, thereby supporting the lies of those in power; for it is not the fertility of the soil that matters, nor the love of the people for it, nor their diligence, but mainly the price of grain and the price of labor.Those who reap the profits from the soil are not those who reap the grain from it, and the smell of the soil is unknown to the stock exchanges. They smell of something else. Land ownership, on the other hand, is the correct term; it is less open to abuse. Where oppression reigns, the word obedience should be used instead of discipline, because discipline is possible even without rulers and is therefore something nobler than obedience. And better than the word honor is the word human dignity. This does not allow the individual to disappear so easily from view. We know what kind of rabble rushes forward to defend the honor of a people! And how wastefully the well-fed distribute honor to those who feed them, while they themselves go hungry. The cunning of CONFUCIUS is still applicable today. CONFUCIUS replaced unjustified judgments of national events with justified ones. The Englishman THOMAS MORUS described in a utopia a country in which just conditions prevailed – it was a very different country from the one in which he lived, but it resembled it very much, except for the conditions! LENIN, threatened by the Tsar’s police, wanted to describe the exploitation and oppression of the island of Sakhalin by the Russian bourgeoisie. He substituted Japan for Russia and Korea for Sakhalin. The methods of the Japanese bourgeoisie reminded all readers of those of the Russian bourgeoisie in Sakhalin, but the book was not banned because Japan was an enemy of Russia. Much that cannot be said about Germany can be said about Austria.There are many ways to deceive a suspicious state.VOLTAIRE fought the Church’s belief in miracles by writing a gallant poem about the Virgin of Orleans. He described the miracles that undoubtedly had to happen for JOAN to remain a virgin in an army, at court, and among monks.Through the elegance of his style and by describing erotic adventures drawn from the lavish life of the ruling class, he tempted them to abandon a religion that provided them with the means for this dissolute life. Yes, he thus made it possible for his works to reach their intended audience through illegal channels. The powerful among his readers promoted or tolerated its distribution. In doing so, they betrayed the police who defended their pleasures. And the great Lucretius expressly emphasizes that he expects much from the beauty of his verses for the spread of Epicurean atheism. Indeed, a high literary standard can serve as protection for a statement. Often, however, it also arouses suspicion. Then it may be a case of deliberately toning it down. This happens, for example, when descriptions of evil conditions are smuggled into inconspicuous places in the despised form of the crime novel. Such descriptions would certainly justify a crime novel. The great SHAKESPEARE lowered the level for much less significant reasons when he deliberately made the speech of Coriolanus’ mother, with which she confronts her son as he is leaving his native city, so weak. He wanted Coriolanus to be deterred from his plan not by real reasons or by deep emotion, but by a certain inertia with which he indulged an old habit.In SHAKESPEARE, we also find a pattern of cunningly disseminated truth in ANTONY’s speech over CAESAR’s corpse. He incessantly emphasizes that CAESAR’s murderer BRUTUS is an honorable man, but he also describes his deed, and the description of this deed is more impressive than that of its perpetrator; the speaker thus allows himself to be defeated by the facts themselves; he himself gives them greater eloquence. JONATHAN SWIFT suggested in a pamphlet that, in order for the country to prosper, the children of the poor should be pickled and sold as meat. He made precise calculations that proved that much could be saved if one did not shy away from anything. SWIFT played the fool. He defended a certain way of thinking that he hated with great fervor and thoroughness in a matter where its entire baseness was obvious to everyone. Everyone could be smarter than SWIFT, or at least more humane, especially those who had not yet examined certain views for the conclusions that could be drawn from them. Propaganda for thinking, in whatever field it occurs, is useful to the oppressed. Such propaganda is very necessary. Thinking is considered low among governments that serve exploitation.What is useful to the oppressed is considered base. Base is the constant concern for filling one’s stomach; the spurning of the honors offered to the defenders of the country in which they are starving; doubt in the leader when he leads to disaster; aversion to work that does not feed one’s family; rebellion against the compulsion to behave senselessly; indifference toward the family, whose interests are no longer of any use. The starving are reviled as gluttons who have nothing to defend, as cowards who doubt their oppressors, as those who doubt their own strength, who want wages for their work, as lazybones, etc. Under such governments, thinking in general is considered low and falls into disrepute. It is no longer taught anywhere, and where it does occur, it is persecuted.

Nevertheless, there are always areas where one can point to the successes of thinking with impunity; these are the areas where dictatorships need thinking. For example, the successes of thinking can be demonstrated in the fields of military science and technology. Stretching wool supplies through organization and inventions of substitutes also requires thinking. The deterioration of food, the training of young people for war, all of this requires thinking: it can be described. The praise of war, of the ill-considered purpose of this thinking, can be cleverly avoided; thus, thinking that arises from the question of how best to wage war can lead to the question of whether this war makes sense and can be used to ask how best to avoid a senseless war. Of course, this question can hardly be asked publicly. So can the thinking that has been propagated be put to use, that is, shaped in a decisive way? It can. In order for oppression, which serves the exploitation of one (larger) part of the population by the (smaller) other part, to remain possible in a time like ours, a very specific basic attitude is required on the part of the population, which must extend to all areas. A discovery in the field of zoology, such as that made by the Englishman DARWIN, could suddenly become dangerous to exploitation; nevertheless, for a time, only the Church took any notice of it, while the police were still unaware. In recent years, the research of physicists has led to conclusions in the field of logic that could, after all, endanger a number of dogmas that serve oppression.The Prussian state philosopher HEGEL, engaged in difficult investigations in the field of logic, provided MARX and LENIN, the classics of the proletarian revolution, with methods of inestimable value. However, the development of the sciences takes place in a connected but uneven manner, and the state is unable to keep an eye on everything. The champions of truth can choose battlefields that are relatively unobserved. Everything depends on teaching correct thinking, a way of thinking that questions all things and processes in terms of their transitory and changeable nature. Those in power have a great aversion to radical change. They want everything to stay the same, preferably for a thousand years.It would be best if the moon stood still and the sun did not move! Then no one would ever be hungry or want to eat dinner. Once they have fired, the enemy should not be allowed to fire again; their shot should be the last. A way of looking at things that emphasizes transience is a good way to encourage the oppressed…

The fact that in every thing and in every state a contradiction arises and grows is something that must be held up against the victors. Such a way of looking at things (like dialectics, the doctrine of the flow of things) can be practiced in the study of objects that escape the rulers for a time. It can be applied in biology or chemistry. But it can also be practiced in the description of the fate of a family without causing too much of a stir. The dependence of every thing on many others; constant change is a dangerous idea for dictatorships, and it can occur in many ways without giving the police any leverage.A complete description of all the circumstances and processes affecting a man who opens a tobacco shop can be a heavy blow to dictatorship. Anyone who thinks about it a little will see why. Governments that lead the masses into misery must avoid the government being thought of in misery. They talk a lot about fate. It is fate, not they, that is to blame for the shortages. Anyone who searches for the cause of the deprivation is arrested before they come across the government. But it is possible to counter the talk of fate in general; it can be shown that man’s fate is prepared by other men. This can be done in many ways. For example, the story of a farm, such as an Icelandic farm, can be told. The whole village talks about a curse on this farm. A farmer’s wife threw herself into the well, a farmer hanged himself. One day, a wedding takes place: the farmer’s son marries a girl who brings some fields into the marriage. The curse is lifted from the farm. The village is divided in its assessment of this happy turn of events. Some attribute it to the sunny disposition of the young farmer, others to the fields that the young farmer’s wife brought with her, which make the farm viable. But even in a poem that describes a landscape, something can be achieved, namely when things created by humans are incorporated into nature. Cunning is necessary for the truth to be spread.

Summary

The great truth of our age (the recognition of which has not yet been served, but without which no other truth of importance can be found) is that our continent is sinking into barbarism because the ownership of the means of production is being maintained by force. What good is it to write something courageous that shows that the state into which we are sinking is a barbaric one (which is true) if it is not clear why we are sinking into this state? We must say that torture is used because the ownership structure is to remain in place. Of course, when we say this, we lose many friends who are against torture because they believe that the property relations can be maintained without torture (which is untrue).

We must tell the truth about the barbaric conditions in our country, that what can be done to make them disappear is to change the property relations.