On Arendt’s adages and Brecht’s poetic sins

by Karen Feldman

In a 1966 New Yorker essay on Bertolt Brecht, republished in her volume Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt announces that “poets are there to be quoted, not to be talked about.” Nonetheless, her essay proceeds to “talk about” Brecht over dozens of pages, depicting the trajectory of his career, lauding his poetic skill, and lamenting his political choices. Over the course of the essay, Arendt produces a slew of adages about poets, including “[T]hose whose business it is to soar must shun gravity.” Precisely owing to their epigrammatic flavor and quotability, Arendt’s invented adages evoke a certain moral authority cloaked in a mantle of quasi-literary wisdom. That is, Arendt produces formulations that feel like quotable proverbs, mottos, and lessons, lending them an authoritativeness greater than that of a mere philosophical claim, opinion, or speculation. Her casting about for portentous lessons from Brecht’s life and work reflects a concern unique to the Brecht essay—in contrast to her essays on Hermann Broch and Isak Dinesen, for example—because in his “committed” writing, Brecht is on territory that for Arendt is both more volatile and more universalizable than that of other literary figures—namely, the relationship between politics and literature. Arendt thus writes that Brecht’s “political biography [is] a kind of case history of the uncertain relationship between poetry and politics.”

In the course of the essay, however, Arendt turns from the clinical language of “case history” to the register of mythology or tragedy, producing the portentous dictum, “[A] poet’s real sins are avenged by the gods of poetry.” This adage supports Arendt’s withering assessment of Brecht’s later poetry, in particular what she calls Brecht’s “odes to Stalin,” which she describes as “sound[ing] as though they had been fabricated by the least gifted imitator Brecht ever had.” His “case” thus exemplifies how bad political judgment backfires upon the poet, who ends up producing inferior art. Nonetheless, Arendt’s adage, with its tragic and mythological registers of sin, gods, and vengeance, conveys the magisterial authority of literary tradition. She even purports to derive the adage’s literary bona fides—in a substantial stretch—from a line in Goethe’s “Venetian Epigrams,” whispered by a nymph to the poet, “Dichter sündgen nicht schwer [Poets do not sin gravely].” Arendt thereby borrows literary authority from Goethe, even while inventing an adage that bears little connection to Goethe’s line.

Goethe’s “Dichter sündgen nicht schwer” forms a shaky segue to a series of Arendtian adages about the relationship of poets to the world:

The poets’ relation to reality is indeed what Goethe said it was: they cannot bear the same burden of responsibility as ordinary mortals; they need a measure of remoteness, and yet would not be worth their salt if they were not forever tempted to exchange this remoteness for being just like everybody else.

None of these adages bears a close relationship to “Dichter sündgen nicht schwer,” but Arendt nonetheless appears to believe that they properly derive from Goethe, for later in the essay she recapitulates her interpretation of the quote as if it were Goethe’s own adage: “[I]n general Goethe was right and more is permitted to poets than to ordinary mortals.”

Arendt’s adages about the poet’s necessary distance from the world stand in uncomfortable proximity to her seeming apologia for Heidegger in an essay she wrote in honor of his eightieth birthday. In that much-discussed essay, Arendt appears to absolve Heidegger from personal and ethical responsibility for his involvement with National Socialism, and to trivialize or excuse his decision-making both prior to becoming rector of the University of Freiburg under National Socialism and after stepping down and withdrawing from public activity. Arendt’s assessment dovetails with her further exculpatory implication that Heidegger was, like Thales of Miletus, who was said to have fallen into a well while looking at the stars, too much a philosopher focused on unworldly concerns to navigate the worldly phenomenon of National Socialism. While the short Thales narrative serves as a specious philosophical exemplum in Arendt’s apologia for Heidegger, the Goethe line furnishes a literary authority for Arendt’s more equivocal apologia for Brecht. As we have seen, the line “Dichter sündgen nicht schwer” can be understood as saying that poets—similar to philosophers who even temporarily embrace National Socialism—are not like others and therefore not as guilty when they commit worldly errors.

Precisely owing to their epigrammatic flavor and quotability, Arendt’s invented adages evoke a certain moral authority cloaked in a mantle of quasi-literary wisdom.

Arendt’s adages declaring that poets must remain at a distance from reality are seemingly recapitulated in Arendt’s account of Brecht’s commitments to the Communist Party, which, she claims, brought him into error by removing him from reality and the world. She writes that “Brecht’s troubles had started when he became engagé . . . when he tried to do more than be a voice [. . .] of the world and of everything that was real.” Although the word “engagé” connotes worldliness, in Arendt’s telling his engagement was instead caught up in a false reality. For instance, Arendt recounts how Brecht joined the Communist Party and “began to speak of Marx, Engels, and Lenin as ‘the classics.’” Similarly, his embrace of the quasi-reality of the Communists had the effect of distancing Brecht from “the real,” exchanging the world for a false reality. Arendt writes,

[It was] this remoteness from the real that caused him not to break with a party that killed his friends and allied itself with his worst enemy.

In lending his literary skill to depicting reality as understood through the Communist lens, Arendt suggests, Brecht became distant from worldly reality but without knowing it. We might imagine Adorno agreeing with Arendt on this point, declaring that Brecht, even with his devotion to “alienation effects,” was not dialectical enough in dedicating his art to the cause of communism, with the result that his literary work did not truly resist reality, which for Adorno is the task of art amid the catastrophe of the Enlightenment.

Cornell University political theorist Patchen Markell argues that Arendt’s quarrel is not with Brecht’s communism, but rather with his sacrifice of truth. Markell argues that Cold War readers of Arendt established an interpretation that chalks her objections to Brecht up to anti-communism, whereas, Brecht’s “sin” in Arendt’s eyes instead consists in his infidelity to reality. It is inviting reading, but Arendt’s essay provides ample evidence that Arendt does see Brecht’s sins as his sometime-support for Stalin and the DDR (whether or to what degree Brecht lent his support is disputed), and not a few of the adages that Arendt generates pertain directly to Brecht’s engagement with Soviet Communism. This engagement, I would argue, is, in Arendt’s view, what caused Brecht to depart from truth and reality. For instance, she suggests that when Brecht took his orientation from Marxism, it prevented him from seeing the racism of National Socialism: “[H]e simply refused to recognize what was patent to everybody—that those persecuted were not workers but Jews, that it was race, and not class, that counted.”

In the final section of the New Yorker essay, Arendt turns to the special status of the poet. Echoing elements from her conclusion to Eichmann in Jerusalem, she first declares that “the majesty of the law demands that we be equal—that only our acts count, and not the person who committed them.” The poet, however, has an “unequal” status; his sins do not warrant the same treatment as the sins of others. This is highlighted in the last and most adage-like of all the adages in the Brecht essay: “Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi (what is permitted to Jove is not permitted to an ox).” A truncated translation of this quoted

“It is the poet’s task to coin the words we live by.”

adage even became the title of the version of the Brecht essay in the New Yorker, “What is Permitted to Jove.”

For Arendt, this adage encapsulates the “privileges” of the poet, including his requisite distance from reality and the forgiveness we accord him. It is intriguing that Arendt incorrectly attributes the line to ancient Rome—an attribution that lends it an air of poetic wisdom—while its quasi-poetic and even folksy quality is reinforced by the rhyme Jovi/bovi. Cicero wrote a similar adage in De Finibus bonorum et malorum, although he compared what is accorded to cows vs. humans rather than cows vs. gods: aliud bovi, aliud homini. The Roman playwright Terence had earlier written a line that resembles Arendt’s adage metrically, namely, Aliis si licet, tibi non licet (to others it is permitted, but not to you), which in its refusal of permission to the “you” might in turn remind us of Kafka’s grim line, “Unendlich viel Hoffnung—nur nicht für uns (There is plenty of hope—just not for us).”

The adage Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi, however, derives not from a Roman source but from Joseph von Eichendorff’s 1826 novella, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing). The adage appears in a comic moment of the novella, in which the protagonist is impressed by the Latin phrases spouted by a band of pompous students. Arendt’s confusion of the Roman adage and the nineteenth-century Austrian aphorism is intriguing because Eichendorff presumably modified Terence’s line for his novel in order to fashion a parody of wisdom; Arendt applies Eichendorff’s parodic adage to Brecht in order to argue that as a great writer Brecht indeed merits a certain forgiveness not accorded to ordinary people. The poet Brecht is compared to Jove as having divine gifts, but he is also an ox when he writes, per Arendt, “unspeakably bad verse, worse by far than any fifthrate scribbling versifier.”

Arendt thus grasps for a quotable adage when discussing Brecht, perhaps more than in her other discussions of poets, because her conflicted views of his poetry and his politics seem to demand an exalted arbiter, an authoritative judgment.

Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi, even in its scrambled provenance, provides a key to Arendt’s deployment of Goethe’s “Dichter sündgen nicht schwer” and her own adage about the revenge of the gods of poetry and the poet’s real sins. Misattribution aside, for Arendt, the point is that the poet, like divine Jove, has the privilege of remaining distant from the world. For Arendt, however, this privilege comes with a responsibility that is unique to the poet and not shared with others. That responsibility is expressed in yet another key adage invented by Arendt, namely, “It is the poet’s task to coin the words we live by.” Her loosely deduced interpretations of the Goethe line call attention to the source of the “words we live by” for which Arendt holds the poet responsible. In fact, Arendt herself is the one writing, selecting, and interpreting the words that she instructs us to live by; she is the one producing adages and lessons throughout. Her essay demonstrates that any particular line from a play, poem, or novel is only words to live by when taken out of the literary sphere and into the ethical one.

But Arendt wants to retain a place for literature somehow as the source of our ethics, even where she allows the author a distance from the world, and where she herself crafts authoritative adages that have the feel of literary insight. She thereby covers over the philosopher’s or critic’s agency in drawing out of the poet’s words, or even inventing, her adages to live by. It is the quoting, interpreting, and inventing, with a literary flair, that make her phrasing into adages and thereby makes them authoritative. To be sure, this happens “in-the-world,” from which Arendt requires the poet maintain a distance. The excerpting, quoting, and inventing are not the work of the poet, but the work of the judge, critic, or philosopher, and yet the literariness of her adages carries with it the authority of literature.

Arendt thus grasps for a quotable adage when discussing Brecht, perhaps more than in her other discussions of poets, because her conflicted views of his poetry and his politics seem to demand an exalted arbiter, an authoritative judgment. In that grasping for an authoritative judgment, she takes the line from Goethe that suits her purpose, although it does so only barely. After all, “Dichter sündgen nicht schwer” does not patently state any of what Arendt draws out of it—that poets cannot be held responsible in the way others are; that they require a distance from the world; and that they would prefer to be like everyone else. Arendt extracts from Goethe’s line her own words by which she implies we all should live, including according poets their Jove-like distance. Her adage about the poets giving us words to live by reveals at least as much about Arendt as about poets. Her grasping for words to live by imputes the adage’s authority to the poetic authors, when in fact she produces it herself.

This article appears in the 2025-26 Berlin Journal (39). The full-length version of this article appears in Colloquia Germanica 58.1 (2025). This abbreviated version is published with the permission of Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, Tübingen.

Photos: Hannah Arendt, June 1966. Courtesy bpk-Fotoarchiv / Fred Stein / Fred Stein Archive; Bertolt Brecht, July 1954. Courtesy bpk-Fotoarchiv / Herbert Hensky