The first major poetry collection that Brecht wrote in exile was
Lieder Gedichte Chöre. This was followed by the
Svendborger Gedichte in 1939. This compilation was preceded by earlier publications, and individual poems followed, such that one can assume a period of origin from 1926 to 1938. Brecht worked on compiling the collection primarily during the winter of 1937-38 while living at Skovsbostrand outside Svendborg, in collaboration with
Margarete Steffin, almost entirely completing the work by 22 July 1938. The title was initially
Gedichte im Exil ('Poems in Exile'). The intention was to include the work in volume 4 of the edition of Brecht's work to be published by
Wieland Herzfelde's press Malik-Verlag, nominally in London but in practice from Prague. Brecht wrote in May 1938: "you can now give me the decisive position that I have not had in emigrant literature so far. And you can simultaneously put the publisher [Malik] at the forefront." By March 1939,
galley proofs of the whole volume had been sent to Brecht from Prague, with the set type itself being in Prague. But in the wake of the events surrounding the
Munich Agreement and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, Herzfelde had to flee from Prague; the finished set of Svendborg poems was lost. The galley proofs were then passed to Copenhagen, where in May 1939 the Danish printer Universal Trykkeriet printed the
Gedichte im Exil section under the new title
Svendborger Gedichte, with Herzfelde named as the publisher and London as the place of publication. The volume was billed as an 'advance printing from
Brecht: Collected Works, volume 4'. The publication received significant support from
Ruth Berlau, the
American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, and apparently the
Diderot Society (the latter of which Brecht was working to found around 1936). There are only two copies of the so-called "Prague sequence" known, one of which is in the
Brecht Archive, Berlin; the other copy was discovered in 2011 by the
Rotes Antiquariat, Berlin, in New York. The poems that comprised section 3,
Chroniken ('chronicles'), were based on stories which Brecht encountered in his reading. For example, "Abbau des Schiffes
Oskawa durch die Mannschaft" ("How the Ship 'Oskawa' was Broken up by her own Crew") is a subversive rewriting of an account of life on the ship by
Louis Adamic in his 1931
Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, while "Kohlen für Mike" ("Coal for Mike") was based on an incident in
Sherwood Anderson's novel
Poor White. ==Contents==