| German infantry emerge from underneath railroad cars to storm the Albert Canal between the Netherlands and Belgium. It was the main line of Belgian defense, anchored by Fort Ében-Émael. German expatriate playwright Bertolt Brecht (February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956) left Germany in 1933. In his Danish exile in 1940, Brecht collected photos taken from LIFE Magazine and Swedish and American newspapers and wrote short poems to comment on them. In a journal entry of June 20, 1944, he called these works “photo-epigrams.” His way of interpreting them was to include a description of the photo on the left-hand page and a poem beneath. For the storming of the Albert Canal, he wrote: [LIFE Magazine caption, December 30, 1940:] “German assault troops, here emerging from beneath railroad cars to attack the Albert Canal line, were young, tough and disciplined. In all, there were two hundred and forty divisions of them. But despite the world’s idea that the conquest was merely by planes and tanks, it actually depended on the old-fashioned tactic of a superior mass of firepower at the decisive point.” “Before you join the great assault I see You peer around to spot the enemy. Was that the French? Or your own sergeant who Was lurking there to keep his eye on you?” In December 1944, Brecht and his collaborator, director, photographer and writer Ruth Berlau (August 24, 1906 – January 15, 1974), assembled the photo-epigrams into a small-format collection of prints he called “Kriegsfibel” (“War Primer.”) The collection contained 71 photos mounted on hand-cut sheets of black construction paper, with page numbers written by Brecht on the verso of each sheet. Also included is a title page and dedication sheet on onionskin paper. The pencil lines for marking the paper and the ragged hand-cut edges of the photographs are still visible. It is quite likely that Berlau herself reproduced the photographs from images that Brecht found in various publications. In 1944 Brecht presented a miniature copy of the Kriegsfibel to novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger (July 7, 1884 – December 21, 1958), his longtime friend, mentor, and collaborator and a fellow German exile living in Southern California. Brecht sent another copy to his friend Marxist theoretician and political philosopher Karl Korsch (August 15, 1886 – October 21, 1961) in February 1945; whether additional copies were created or still exist is unknown. In 1949, after Brecht returned to Germany, he and Berlau assembled the Kriegsfibel for publication; it did not appear, however, until the fall of 1955. In her preface to the 1st edition of Kriegsfibel: War Primer in 1955, Ruth Berlau described the book as a practical manual demonstrating how to read press photographs. The published work does not duplicate Brecht’s smaller format but instead re-creates the manuscript now located at the Brecht Archive in Berlin. Both the 1955 and 1994 reprint versions were enlarged to 2 1/2 times the size of the Feuchtwanger version. | |
| Image Filename | wwii2103.jpg |
| Image Size | 433.64 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2046 x 1410 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | Kriegsberichter |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | May 11, 1940 |
| Location | |
| City | Liège |
| State or Province | Wallonia |
| Country | Belgium |
| Archive | Bertolt Brecht |
| Record Number | Kriegsfibel |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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