WHAT if poetry were a kind of medicine, or a salve for the problems of daily life? The thought occurred to me in 2020, a few months after the outbreak of COVID-19, which I’d been covering for the Washington Post in Berlin. Like most reporters, I inhaled and exhaled news of the pandemic. I woke up scanning death tolls and infection rates, went to bed with images of body bags and ambulances queuing up outside overcrowded hospitals. After a few months I had developed obsessive fears that bordered on hypochondria and felt, like so many people, overwhelmed by anxiety and exhaustion.
It was a fluke, really, when one afternoon, tired and slouched over my couch, I scanned my bookshelf for a distraction and landed on Doctor Erich Kästner’s Lyrical Home Apothecary. Given to me by my German godfather when I was fourteen, the 1936 poetry collection was by Kästner, a German author and satirist who wrote in just about every genre, including fiction, drama, and journalism. In 1933 in Berlin, Kästner witnessed the Nazis burn his books along with those of nearly five hundred other writers. Banned from publishing in Germany, Kästner published the Lyrical Home Apothecary in Switzerland. He continued to write under pseudonyms in Germany to avoid being sent to a concentration camp, as many of his fellow writers and dissidents had been.
The was part of a genre called , or “practical poetry,” popularized by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Concerned with the daily lives of ordinary people, Gebrauchslyrik is characterized by simple,’s opening poem, “Railroad Allegory,” describes a train ride in which people are separated by class—an implicit critique of Germany’s vast social inequality. In a poem titled “Warning,” Kästner cautions readers against mass movements, perhaps an indictment of Nazism: “A person who has ideals, / must beware of attaining them!” he writes. “Otherwise, one day, they will resemble / other people instead of themselves.”
