General Your Tank is A Powerful Vehicle

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), a German poet, playwright, and theatre director, was an
influential literary figure of the twentieth century. He started writing newspaper articles,
including theatre reviews, at the age of eighteen. When he was nineteen, he won, for his first
three plays, the Kleist prize, Germany’s most prestigious literary award at the time. He is
associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement in German art, with the
collaborative approach to artistic production, and with the experimental genre ‘epic theatre’.
He has written hundreds of poems, and many plays such as Mother Courage and Her
Children (1938), and The Good Person of Szechwan (1939).

A committed Marxist all his life, he expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and
Fascist movements of Europe through his creative and theoretical writings. As a result, he
had to leave Germany in 1933, fearing persecution by Hitler’s regime, and ultimately went to
America after Hitler proceeded to invade most of Europe. Even in America, his extreme
communist political views resulted in his being targeted by the government.

His writings advocate independent thinking and anti-establishment political action. ‘General
Your Tank’ was probably written between the two world wars. Here, he underscores the
power of critical thought as the ultimate weapon against war and oppression.

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General, your tank is a powerful vehicle.

It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.

But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.

He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

Questions:

1. The text suggests that the tank and the bomber are not perfect. Usually, one would
assume drivers and mechanics to be helpful to machines. The poet suggests that this
may not be the case. Why does he think so?
2. In the third stanza, the human being flies and kills for the general. As such, the human
 is powerful. What is the single word that indicates that power?
3. Why does thinking make a human being defective? For whom is he thus defective?
For himself or for the general?
4. Why is a thinking human inconvenient for armies and wars? Why might wars require
humans who do not or cannot think?
5. Does Brecht highlight the power of all kinds of thinking, or only some kinds?
Consider concepts such as debating, criticizing, challenging, questioning, opposing,
rebelling, etc.
6. What is the purpose and effectiveness of repetition in this poem? How does the genre
of poetry help put forward the poet’s message? Note similar uses of repetition in other
texts in this course: ‘Why I Want a Wife,’ ‘My Young Men Shall Not Work,’ ‘Ain’t I
a Woman?’ and ‘Imagine.’