ABSTRACT
In war poetry, imagination, direct experience and moral indignation come uniquely together. It is this combination of qualities which underlies one of the last and most remarkable poems of the whole war: the young Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Legende vom toten Soldaten’. Brecht was studying medicine at Munich University in the spring of 1918 when the 17-year-olds and the over-age were called up. He was called up himself and placed in a hospital in Augsburg as a medical orderly; he later commented, ‘I saw how they patched people up in order to ship them back to the Front as soon as possible.’ When the over-age were called up, it was popularly said that they were digging up the dead (‘Man gräbt die Toten aus’). The starting-point for Brecht’s poem, which takes the form of a wicked parody of an heroic ballad, was partly this saying and partly George Grosz’s drawing ‘KV of 1916-17.
