Bertolt Brecht fled Nazi Germany in 1933, spending the rest of the decade mostly in Denmark and Sweden. In 1941, he managed to acquire a US visa and settled in Santa Monica, California. Much of Brecht’s most famous poetry and plays were written during this long period of exile from Germany, including his poem “An den kleinen Radioapparat” (To My Little Radio).

The poem addresses a portable radio that the speaker has painstakingly brought with him on his complex route of exile (“from house to train, from train to house to boat”). The importance of the radio, however, is not the sentimental value of the object itself, but its function: “So that my enemies might always speak.” Instead of seeing the radio as a form of entertainment to pass the time or forget his predicament, for Brecht it is a tool for his almost masochistic compulsion to keep up with the (always bad) news from home.

A common theme of Brecht’s exile poetry is a sense of guilt at having escaped when so many could not, and also of his powerlessness as a writer in a time of war. Listening to Nazi propaganda radio out of Germany could have fed this guilt, and yet given the technology of the time, perhaps these broadcasts were one of Brecht’s few means of connecting to his countrymen, experiencing some of what German anti-fascists were going through on the ground, and remembering their plight and struggle.

The plea in the final line – “Give me your word you won’t give up on me!” – suggests that for the exiled Brecht, the silence of the little radio would have marked the permanence of his exile. A break in this one-way communication threatened to destroy his spiritual and psychic connection with Germany, and may have prevented him from ever returning (as he eventually did in 1949 – to East Germany).

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In her poem, “كنتُ مسرعةً” (I Was in a Hurry), the Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail also starts off with an image of a hurried flight from one’s country, but from the first line she boldly voices what Brecht perhaps did not want to say outright: “Yesterday I lost a country.” Mikhail’s speaker does not pretend to have had the foresight to bring along some symbolic object connecting her to her country: with humble self-derision she concedes, “I was in a hurry / and didn’t notice when it fell from me / like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.”

For so many refugees, the goal of gaining physical safety comes before any thought of what they are losing; this is not “forgetfulness,” but an unconscious survival strategy, which of course has its own painful consequences.

Mikhail looks for her country in images – both concrete and abstract – that would be familiar to nearly any refugee: a suitcase, a lottery ticket, a policeman’s uniform, the questions of children. Each image is paired with a verbal participle, creating a clear symmetry in the Arabic, as each participle begins with the letter mīm (مـ‎). The conception of her country is alternately a grammatical object that has been altered by outside forces (“engraved on a rock,” “cancelled like a losing lottery ticket”), or a subject which is continuously changing (“rushing forward without a goal,” “rolling like a helmet on the sand”). In any case, her country is not how it was when she “lost” it just yesterday, and it is not easy to recognize or find without some imagination.

I think the most moving part of the poem is its turn: we lose things quietly everyday, but there is particular pathos in someone asking strangers for help to find and return something so abstract and impossible to regain as one’s country. “If anyone stumbles across it, / return it to me, please…/ It is my country…” The act of asking requires courage, and also a fierce hope that these strangers will understand what one means.