Promotional Information

A terrifying series of short poems by one of the world's leading playwrights, set to images of World War II

About the Author

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.

Reviews

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*