05.11.2026

Bertolt Brecht and Holy Joy

Culture can bring together theatre, poetry, music, stand-up comedy, anthropology and communist politics. That, explains Tam Dean Burn, is the ambition of the Diderot Gesellschaft Movement

Two events happening in London this week bring the opportunity to take forward plans for our communist cultural front, the Diderot Gesellschaft Movement (DGM). Running from November 5-8 at SOAS and Birkbeck University, is Historical Materialism’s 2026 conference - ‘Planetary warscapes ablaze: imperialist mutations in infernal times’. It will feature a session on November 8 led by Esther Leslie and myself, under the heading, ‘Ideas for a manifesto for a renewed Diderot Gesellschaft’.

Readers may be aware of how we have developed this DGM project in both the 2025 and 2026 Communist Universities, followed by articles on both, published in the Weekly Worker.¹ On such foundation we wrote this introduction for our Historical Materialism session:

The Diderot Gesellschaft was a proposition by Bertolt Brecht in 1937. Drawing together materialist intellectuals and practitioners across Europe, its aim was to refashion cultural production as a critical tool on the basis of encyclopaedism, rather than specialisms; collaboration, not individual artists; experiment, not convention; and the insights of social inquiry and materialist stances. This panel argues that the moment has arrived to reanimate this aborted project.

The session will present the original idea, explain its contemporary relevance and potential and draw up elements of a manifesto together with participants. As a reference point there will be the recent work of Darko Suvin on Brecht, including his versification of the Communist manifesto, revolutionary song, ecology, Prometheus and speculative fiction. There will be presentations and discussion, as well as performance elements.

That Communist manifesto versification was another of Brecht’s projects which did not come to fruition, although he worked on it from 1945 until his death in 1956. Comrade Darko describes it thus in the introduction to the published text:

In early 1945, most probably already in January, Brecht started working on what he at some point called a “versification of the Communist manifesto”, but at other points also thought of it as part of a vaster project, a Lehrgedicht parallel to Lucretius’s ‘On the nature of things’. The title of that “didactic poem” or “poem for learning” was not yet fixed, but could have been something like ‘On the nature of people’ or, more precisely, ‘On the unnatural character of bourgeois relationships’.

The time slot for this venture of Brecht’s in Santa Monica was found by a hiatus in co-translating his play, Life of Galileo, with Charles Laughton: Laughton had to play in the pirate movie, Captain Kidd, in order to redeem time for that translation-cum-adaptation, which eventually resulted in his playing Galileo in Los Angeles. But the deeper impulse for Brecht was the overwhelming approach of an end to World War II that put on the agenda the future of Germany; for emigres of Brecht’s stripe this meant: will it be socialist or not?

During his intense concentration on what turned out to be not only a versification but also a reworking of Marx’s Manifesto … Brecht noted in his diary on March 10 1945: “Between the ‘didactic poem’ and the terrible newspaper reports from Germany - ruins and no sign of life from the workers.” Pondering on how to rediscover for German workers the obviously forgotten teachings of Marxism, Brecht concluded that “it seems to me possible to renew the propagandistic efficacy [of the Communist manifesto] today, one hundred years later, and to lend it new, fortified (bewaffnet) authority, by sublating its pamphlet character”.²

Brecht was keen to place the ideas of Marx and Engels in the context of world wars and the cyclical nature of spiralling capitalist crises:

The great truth of our epoch (which is not enough, but without which no other pertinent truth can be found) is that our continent is sinking into barbarism, because violence is used to cling to the existing relations of property over the means of production ... We cannot search out the truth about the barbaric conditions without thinking about those who suffer under them and, while we, continually sloughing off temptations of cowardice, search for the true relationships because of those who are ready to use such cognitions, we have at the same time to think about presenting the truth in such a way that it could be a weapon in their hands, and also so slyly that this presentation may not be found out and cut off by the enemy.

Whole poem

At each of those CU programmes, I performed sections of the poem before sessions each morning, starting with this first stanza invoking the epoch:

Wars are destroying the world,
and the ruins are visibly haunted
By an enormous spectre, not simply born of war.
In peace it could already be sighted, terror to the rulers
But friend to the children of slums. In scanty kitchens
Often it peeps, horrified, angry, into the half-empty pots.
Often it waits for the exhausted in front of shipyards and mines;
It visits friends in jails, passing without passport.
Even in offices it may be seen and in lecture-rooms
Heard. At times it dons a hat of steel, enters
Huge tanks & flies with deadly bombers. It speaks in many
Tongues, in all of them. And in many it holds its tongue.
It sits as a guest of honour in hovels, a headache of villas,
It has come to change all things and stay forever, its name is …
Communism.

Now for the first time ever there will be a performance of the whole poem (written in hexameters, as inspired by Lucretius) as translated and adapted by Darko Suvin. It will be hosted by another ongoing DGM partnership - the legendary music group spanning almost four decades, Band of Holy Joy. This will be performed on their Resonance radio show, ‘Bad Punk’,³ to a soundtrack created live in the studio, featuring Stuart Wilding of the Lo-Fi Improvised Music Workshop and Skye McDade-Burn on clarinet.

This will broadcast live 10pm-11.30pm on Friday November 6 and will include excerpts of works by Brecht’s longtime musical partner and comrade, Hanns Eisler. This will reflect the poignancy that, as Darko points out, “Discouraged by his best friends, such as Eisler and Feuchtwanger, engaged in many other pressing writings, and above all unsure of who would be the poem’s readers, Brecht broke off its composition in the second half (probably in September) of 1945. He cherished the project until the end of his life.”

Eisler was later to deeply regret his actions, stating in an interview:

Well, and here comes a big slice of self-criticism, I took a far too practical view. I thought: ‘What baggage do we bring back with us when we return to our destroyed Germany? What can we rebuild it with? We won’t achieve a lot with the Manifesto in hexameters.’ Today, in 1961, I regret having discouraged a great master like Brecht from this project rather than having encouraged him. Don’t get me wrong: if Brecht wanted to do something, nobody could restrain him - nobody, regardless of who or what he was. So I wasn’t really the one who held him back. But if, in the isolation of the emigration, a man hears every day from his best friends, ‘What on earth are you doing? And anyway, the hexameters are wrong!’, after a few weeks, he’ll simply lose his enthusiasm.

Both Feuchtwanger and I discouraged him, and we were both completely in the wrong. We had completely forgotten that Marxism and the struggle of the working class take place to varying extents, and in many different ways and arenas, regardless of any considerations of practicability. Were we to have the Communist manifesto in epic form by Brecht, it would have gone down in history as a unique work of art - it would have been magnificent for the finest literary minds to have had access to it.⁴

This by his other culpable comrade, written after his death, has similar sentiments:

This most rich poet scattered into all he created seeds of thought, destined to spring into full life only later. He was persuaded that any living work grows and works on by immanent force, that it changes with each listener and reader reached. His poems are based on this presupposition, and only the future shall make visible the full width and plenitude of his work.⁵

But, of course, Brecht was not able to foresee the other great crisis facing humanity - the looming, temperature-rising climate catastrophe. Darko and I have discussed this and how it fits with Brecht’s inspiration for Lucretius’s extended poem, ‘On the nature of things’.

So, as a counterpoint to the Manifesto, Esther Leslie will present some of the ecological work of Rosa Luxemburg on our broadcast and outline how Brecht was inspired by the possibilities for the medium of radio. His call for it to be a two‑way means of communication has only really become possible with recent technology and is part of our plans for experimenting with the Substack platform.

At our Sunday Historical Materialism session we will highlight both aspects of Brecht’s work and go deeper into the ideas of the Manifesto with attendees.

Another wonderful element that has since come to the fore and now features strongly in the possibilities going forward is what was recently highlighted at an Online Communist Forum: the forthcoming launch of the path-breaking book by Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis, The revolutionary origins of language.⁶

The Radical Anthropology Group has organised a day school - both in‑person and on zoom - on Tuesday November 10 under the title, ‘What made us “hunter-gatherers of words”’ with several RAG and other speakers.⁷

The discoveries that express the revolutionary theory in the book are so rooted in the origins of human ritual and culture that the possibilities for performance are enormous and something that DGM will be focussing on in the coming months.

Language

For example, as the book states at the opening of chapter 3,

“All the acts of the drama of world history were performed before a chorus of the laughing people. Without hearing this chorus we cannot understand the drama as a whole” (Mikhail Bakhtin).

Few would deny that humans feel healthiest and happiest when relaxing among equals, taking orders from no-one, free to play, joke and laugh. Language flourishes best under conditions of this kind. For our conversations to come alive, we need freedom to express our thoughts in ways not literally true, to allow a gap between what we say and what we actually intend our words to mean. Wherever our evolutionary ancestors lacked such freedom, it is unlikely that language as we know it could have come into being.

When we look at what happens among egalitarian hunter-gatherers today, we find the most favourable conditions imaginable for language to flourish. Social scientists in the west often picture egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies as deficient - no property, no authority figures, no status differentials and, in short, no ‘social complexity’. Hunter-gatherer societies are said to be ‘simple’. So, to many, it comes as a surprise to discover the subtle and complex strategies used by hunter-gatherers to maintain what to them is the most precious thing - their right to personal autonomy, including the right to resist harassment or abuse. Key among these strategies is the use of humour to prevent people from throwing their weight around.

So a stand-up comedy show immediately appears to fit so well as a potential performance format and that is something we will be exploring. Such possibilities of working with social scientists like the RAG alongside a radical comedian like Mark Thomas is exactly the sort of thing the DGM is looking towards right now, whilst also developing our international connections with such eminent Marxist academics as Darko Suvin - and hopefully those of like mind at Historical Materialism 2026 and the RAG day school.

1. 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1548/learning-to-play-our-way; 2026: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1596/nothing-is-fixed-or-finished.↩︎

2. darkosuvin.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ds-manifesto-transl.-1-19.pdf.↩︎

3. resonancefm.com. It will be archived on mixcloud.com.↩︎

4. www.bloomsbury.com/uk/brecht-music-and-culture-9781472531599.↩︎

5. Lion Feuchtwanger’s poem, ‘Bertolt Brecht’ (1957).↩︎

6. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300289206/the-revolutionary-origins-of-language.↩︎

7. www.ucl.ac.uk/social-historical-sciences/events/2026/nov/what-made-us-hunter-gatherers-words.↩︎