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In 'Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao-te-ching', the aged Lao-tzu is leaving his country on an ox when a poor customs man stops him and asks what he taught; told that 'soft water wears down the mighty stone', the official insists the wisdom be written down before he goes. The poem credits the book's existence to the customs man who extracted it: 'wisdom has to be wrested from the wise.'
'Questions from a Worker Who Reads' asks who actually built seven-gated Thebes, who cooked Caesar's victory feast, who wept when Philip of Spain's armada sank. Recorded history credits kings and generals with deeds that took thousands of anonymous workers, so each 'great man' should be read as a stand-in for the unnamed people whose labor made the event possible.
The German War Primer argues that rulers and ruled use the same words to mean opposite things: 'those at the top say peace and war are of different substance', yet their peace is what breeds the war. The epigrams show how official vocabulary disguises the fact that the costs of war fall on those below while its decisions and gains stay above.
In 'To Those Born Later', Brecht admits that 'hatred of baseness distorts the features' and anger at injustice 'makes the voice hoarse'. People who worked to prepare the ground for kindness could not themselves be kind, so he asks later generations to judge his generation with forbearance, not by the standards of a gentler time.
'To Those Born Later' opens with 'What times are these, when a conversation about trees is almost a crime, because it implies silence about so many horrors.' Under atrocity, aesthetic or private speech is no longer neutral: by omission it becomes complicity. The exiled writer's task is therefore to sing about the dark times themselves.