Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht enters the discussion as the author of “The Solution,” a poem about the East German workers’ uprising of June 17. The book reads the poem in two sharply opposed ways: it recognizes its satire of Communist officials’ arrogance, yet condemns Brecht’s political positioning as opportunistic and rejects the poem’s implied objection to revolutionary transformation. The dispute turns on whether a people is a settled political identity or something that can be remade through collective action.

The Poet and “The Solution”

The book identifies Brecht through a specific political poem rather than offering a broader account of his life or literary career. “The Solution,” dated 1953 and published in 1956, responds to the uprising by presenting the Secretary of the Writers’ Union of the German Democratic Republic as asking whether the government should dissolve the people and elect another. The poem’s compressed irony makes the leadership’s contempt for the workers legible: instead of recognizing the revolt as a judgment on those in power, officials appear to treat the people themselves as the problem.

The target of the satire is the Communist nomenklatura confronted by workers in revolt. Brecht’s formulation exposes the authoritarian absurdity of a government imagining that it can replace a disobedient population, as though popular legitimacy were an administrative inconvenience. The poem’s force, in this reading, comes from the discrepancy between the official claim to represent the people and the officials’ readiness to dismiss the people when they resist.

The Political Ambivalence of the Poem

The book does not treat the poem’s satirical insight as a sufficient political position. It calls the poem politically opportunistic and sets it beside Brecht’s letter of solidarity with the East German Communist regime, published in Neues Deutschland. The criticism is pointed: Brecht is said to have supported the regime while also signaling solidarity with the workers, thereby attempting to protect himself whichever side prevailed. The two gestures do not resolve into a stable position; their coexistence is the evidence for the book’s charge.

That judgment shifts the emphasis from the poem’s attack on the leadership to the political uses of its irony. Satire can expose the gap between a regime and the people it claims to embody, but, in the book’s account, Brecht’s simultaneous gestures leave the political consequences of that exposure unsettled. The poem can register the workers’ grievance while its author’s public positioning, as described here, avoids committing fully to either side of the conflict.

The People as a Revolutionary Task

The book nevertheless takes the phrase about dissolving and electing another seriously, against the poem’s apparent satirical direction. It argues that a revolutionary party may have a duty to dissolve the old, opportunistic people and elect another: not to discard a population at will, but to transform an inert empirical crowd into a revolutionary body conscious of its historical task. This transformation is described as the conversion of the empirical people into a body of truth, and as the most difficult political task rather than an easy exercise of authority.

This reversal does not simply excuse the officials whom the poem mocks. It changes the question from whether a government may substitute one population for another to how a collective subject capable of revolutionary action can come into being. Brecht’s phrase becomes politically double-edged: it names the leadership’s contempt when used to dismiss the workers, but it can also describe a demanding process of collective transformation when directed against the passivity and opportunism of the old political body.

The Body of Truth and the Subject

The book places this argument within a wider account of the subject as a bearer of impersonal truth. Its discussion compares the hysterical body, made into a surface on which unconscious truth is inscribed, with the political body imagined by Stalin’s claim that communists are made of “a special stuff.” In both cases, the body is treated not merely as an individual organism but as a medium through which a truth is borne. Brecht’s poem enters this discussion because its political question concerns whether an empirical population can be transformed into such a collective body.

The contrast is not simply between an individual and a group. The book distinguishes the ego, understood as a person’s organizing agency, from a subject that functions as the bearer of an impersonal truth. Applied to revolutionary politics, this account makes the people neither a fixed mass nor a neutral container for competing interests: the collective has to become a subject through the difficult work of assuming a historical task. Brecht’s satirical image of officials proposing to replace the people thus meets a more demanding question about what it would mean for a people to be made anew.

Exception and Universality

Elsewhere, the book describes universality not as a neutral framework shared by particular groups, but as a tension that becomes visible through what does not fit the prevailing order. Its account of concrete universality gives political importance to the excluded or supernumerary element: the exception can disclose a universal dimension precisely because it has no proper place in the established structure. Read alongside the discussion of Brecht, this helps clarify why the workers’ revolt cannot be reduced to an administrative dispute between a government and a population. The excluded or misrepresented people may expose the limits of the order that claims to speak for them.

The connection is analytical rather than a claim that Brecht’s poem itself develops the theory of concrete universality. Together, these arguments sharpen the book’s central distinction: a people may be invoked as a ready-made whole, or it may emerge through conflict and transformation. “The Solution” makes that distinction vivid by turning the question of who counts as the people into a test of political authority—and, in the book’s reversal, into a question about the arduous creation of a revolutionary subject.