Tristan Tzara (born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; April 16 [O.S. April 4] 1896 – December 25, 1963) was a Romanian and French avantgarde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, but later eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism. During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War. Tzara is burried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

Henri Guilbeaux (Verviers, 15 June 1938 - Paris 5 November 1884) is a writer and journalist. Politically, he first was a socialist militant, then an anarchist and finally a French Communist. He was a member of the ‘Club Anarchiste communiste” and was in charge of the arts’ section in their journal, Le Mouvement Anarchiste. But he is best known for his pacifist resistance during the First World War.

Agnita Henrica (Agnita) Feis (Rotterdam, February 10, 1881 - Amsterdam, November 9, 1944) was Dutch, an experimental poet, writer and visual artist. She was the wife of avantgarde (and former Dadaist) Theo van Doesburg. In 1915 she published ‘Oorlog’ (‘War’) in an edition of 200 copies. It was her only publication - after her death, her poem ‘Kermis’ (’Fair’) came out in a bibliophile edition. In 1917 she divorced Van Doesburg. The Internet is silent about the rest of her life.

Kurt Tucholsky (Berlin, January 9, 1890 – Göteborg, December 21, 1935) was a German-Jewish journalist, satirist and writer. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Kaspar Hauser, Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger and Ignaz Wrobel. Born in Berlin-Moabit, he moved to Paris in 1924 and then to Sweden in 1930. Tucholsky was one of the most important journalists of the Weimar Republic. As a politically engaged journalist and temporary coeditor of the weekly magazine Die Weltbühne he proved himself to be a social critic in the tradition of Heinrich Heine. He was simultaneously a satirist, an author of satirical political revues, a songwriter and a poet. He saw himself as a left-wing democrat and pacifist and warned against anti-democratic tendencies – above all in politics, the military and justice – and the threat of National Socialism. His fears were confirmed when the Nazis came to power in 1933: his books were listed on the Nazis' censorship as "Entartete Kunst" ("Degenerate Art") and burned, and he lost his German citizenship. In 1935 he died in Sweden after consuming a large quantity of sleeping pills. It is generally believed that he was in despair over what was happening in the world and took his life. The only known works from his Swedish years are some (heartbreaking) letters.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (Lisbon, June 13, 1888 – Lisbon, November 30, 1935), commonly known as Fernando Pessoa, was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French. Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he dreamed up approximately seventy-five others. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views. Pessoa never got married and only had a platonic relationship with his secretary. He wanted to remain ‘in the dark’ during his lifetime, and after his death fame might come. He was afraid of strangers and unfamiliar places and didn’t want to be photographed. About his loneliness, he stated the following : "The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible: nostalgia for what never was ; the desire for what could have been ; regret over not being someone else ; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence.” How could he escape this ? By sleeping, ending in alcohol and finally in the ‘big sleep’ (death). He died (not involuntarily) on November 30, 1935, from alcohol poisoning (colic). His legendary last line was : "Give me some more wine, because life is nothing."

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (Russian:Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Бло́к; St-Peterburg, 28 November 1880 – Petrograd, 7 August 1921) was a Russian lyrical poet. The idealized mystical images presented in his first book helped establish Blok as a major poet of the Russian Symbolism style. Blok's early verse is musical, but he later sought to introduce daring rhythmic patterns and uneven beats into his poetry. His mature poems are often based on the conflict between the Platonic theory of ideal beauty and the disappointing reality of foul industrialism. He was often compared with Alexander Pushkin, and is considered perhaps the most important poet of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry. During the 1910s, Blok was admired greatly by literary colleagues, and his influence on younger poets was virtually unsurpassed. Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Nabokov wrote important verse tributes to Blok. Blok expressed his opinions about the revolution by the enigmatic poem "The Twelve" (1918). The long poem exhibits "mood-creating sounds, polyphonic rhythms, and harsh, slangy language" (as the Encyclopædia Britannica termed it). It describes the march of twelve Bolshevik soldiers (likened to the Twelve Apostles of Christ) through the streets of revolutionary Petrograd, with a fierce winter blizzard raging around them. Blok considered this poem to be his best work. Shortly before he died, he wrote that “no star is yet illuminating our time” and that "world music fell silent to me”.

Nâzım Hikmet Ran (Thessaloniki, 15 January 1902 – Moscow, 3 June 1963), was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the "lyrical flow of his statements”. Described as a "romantic communist" and "romantic revolutionary”, he was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages. In 1938 he was sentenced to imprisonment for 28 years. His books are said to incite to disobedience and rebellion. In captivity, he will write his most important work, "Human Landscapes from My Country". In 1950 he finally is set free and flees to the Soviet Union. In 1963 he dies and is buried in Moscow. On June 25, 1951 his Turkish citizenship was taken by the Turkish state. Only 58 years later, on January 5, 2009, he was rehabilitated as a Turkish citizen.

Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi (Cape Town, 1 December 1875 – 29 July 1945) was a Xhosa poet, teacher and historian. Mqhayi was born in the Cape Province, South Africa to a Christian family. In addition to teaching and helping to edit journals in the Xhosa language, he was appointed to the Xhosa Bible Revision Board in 1905. Later he would help to standardize Xhosa grammar and writing, and then become a full-time author. Between 1896 and 1944 he was a journalist and wrote for Xhosa newspapers. In 1907 he wrote what is considered by some to be the first novel in the Xhosa language, U-Samson, which is now lost. In 1914 he published Ityala lamawele ('The Lawsuit of the Twins') an influential Xhosa novel and an early defence of customary law and Xhosa tradition. He is best known and most celebrated today for his authorship of much of the poem, "Nkosi Sikelel'i Afrika," which was to form part of a free South Africa's national anthem. Nelson Mandela recalls his first encounter with Mqhayi while at school as a truly inspirational moment : “... the sight of a black man in tribal dress coming through that door was electrifying. It is hard to explain the impact it had on us. It seemed to turn the universe upside down ... he raised his assegai into the air for emphasis, and accidentally hit the curtain above him ... he ... faced us, and newly energised, exclaimed that this incident – the assegai striking the wire – symbolised the clash between the culture of Africa and that of Europe.”

Hafez Ibrahim (Arabic: حافظ†إبراهيم†) (Dairout, 1871– Kairo, 1932) was known as the Poet of the Nile, and sometimes the Poet of the People, as his writings were widely revered by ordinary Egyptians. His poetry was often about subjects with which the majority of Egyptians were familiar, such as poverty and the politics of foreign occupation. He was one of several Egyptian poets that revived Arabic poetry during the latter half of the 19th century. While still using the classical Arabic system of meter and rhyme, these poets wrote to express new ideas and feelings unknown to the classical poets. Hafez is noted for writing poems on political and social commentary. Hafez Ibrahim is quoted of saying: “When you educate a woman, you create a nation.”

Miroslav Krleža (Zagreb, 7 July 1893 – Zagreb, 29 December 1981) was a leading Croatian writer and a prominent figure in cultural life of both Yugoslav states, the Kingdom (1918–1941) and the Socialist Republic (1945 until his death in 1981). A one time Vice President and General Secretary of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (JAZU), he has often been proclaimed the greatest Croatian writer of the 20th century and beyond. He enrolled in a preparatory military school in Pécs, modern-day Hungary. At that time, Pécs and Zagreb were within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Subsequently, he attended the Ludoviceum military academy at Budapest. As a poet, novelist, playwright and essayist he created a monumental body of work comprising more than sixty titles. A recurring theme in his work is the confrontation of the individual with his social environment. His work has been translated into many languages and he was more than once a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

Giuseppe Ungaretti (Alexandria, February 10, 1888 - Milan, June 2, 1970) was an Italian poet. His father was an immigrant from Tuscany who had participated in the Suez Canal Project. He visited in Alexandria the Ecole Suisse Jacob and then moved to France in 1912 to contunue his studies. Here he met several poets and artists such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Georges Braque and Amedeo Modigliani. In 1921 he moved with his family to Rome and in 1924 he joined the fascist movement. His poems against the war and his poetic humanism are in stark contrast with his political choices. Until World War II, he remained loyal to fascism and to Mussolini who gave him in return a professorship in Rome. In 1944, he wrote against the war : "No more crying”. And it still is a mystery to literary critics how Ungaretti reconciled all these contradictions in his life. In 1969 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature..

Klabund (* 4. November 1890 in Crossen an der Oder; † 14. August 1928 in Davos; pseudonym for Alfred Georg Hermann Henschke) was a German writer. In 1912 he quit his studies and took on the pseudonym Klabund, styling himself after Peter Hille as a vagabond poet. The name Klabund goes back to a north and northeast German name and was devised by him and others as a combination of Klabautermann (a devious hobgoblin of German folklore) and Vagabund (vagabond). He is best known as a poet of cabaret texts. In 1925 his play Der Kreidekreis inspired by a Chinese story premiered. Later Bertolt Brecht edited this piece to become his The Caucasian Chalk Circle. His personal life was marked by a lot of sorrow and adversity. His first wife died when she was 22 years old and their baby died a bit later. Klabund suffered almost his whole life of tuberculosis.

About the origin of these poems is not much known. They were noted by private Fernand Epron who survived the trenches of World War One (internet photo without reference). In a little booklet, he noted 28 songs he sang with his fellow soldiers. Epron left the booklet to his granddaughter Mme Danielle Pascual who made it public. The notebook can be consulted entirely on the internet. In it are typical bluettes and romantic love songs. But it is striking that it contains several lyrics on insubordination, desertion and disobedience.

Ber Horowitz (Majdan, July 17, 1895 – Stanislavov, October 2, 1942) was aYiddish poet, short story writer, and essayist, associated with the Young Galicia school of Yiddish poetry. Born in Majdan in the Carpathian mountains and educated in nearby Stanislav. He studied medicine in Vienna, published in many Yiddish newspapers and wrote poems in Yiddish. He spoke twelve languages and translated from Polish and Ukrainian to Yiddish. He traveled extensively and was among others active in the oil production in Romania. His lyrics about robust, rural Jews living close to the soil found their finest expression in a collection of lyrics, Reyakh fun Erd (Smell of Earth, 1930). At the outbreak of World War ii, Horowitz was living in Stanislav, where he continued his literary activities. He was killed either by the Nazis or by the Ukrainian villagers among whom he lived when the Germans invaded his district in October, 1942.

Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht (Augsburg, 10 February 1898 – Berlin, 14 August 1956) was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director of the 20th century. He made contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, and is considered to be the founder of the epic theater. He worked together with the composers Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill and Paul Dessau. In 1933 Brecht left Germany and arrived in 1941 in the United States. He wanted to work there as a scriptwriter, but in Brecht's eyes the Americans are just looking for banal entertainment. In his own words : he is a teacher without students. After the Second World War, Brecht got persecuted as a Communist. In October 1947, he had to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The day after the interview - the day of the premiere of "The Life of Galileo 'in New York - Brecht left the United States and settled in Zurich, Switzerland. Actually, he wanted to go to Germany, but he was denied access to the US occupation zone. He stayed one year in Zurich a year. Early 1949 Brecht left with a Czechoslovakian passport via Prague to East Berlin. He founded together with his wife Helene Weigel, the Berliner Ensemble. Bertolt Brecht died in 1956 at the age 58 of a heart attack.

Sarojini Naidu (born as Sarojini Chattopadhyay; Haiderabad, India, 1879 - Lucknow, India, 1949) also known by the sobriquet as The Nightingale of India. Naidu was a poet and was the first woman to become the governor of an Indian state (United Provinces of Agra and Oudh from 1947 to 1949). She was the second woman to become the president of the Indian National Congress in 1925 and the first Indian woman to do so. Sarojini Naidu began writing at the age of twelve. Her Persian play, Maher Muneer, impressed the Nawab of Hyderabad. In 1905, her first collection of poems, named The Golden Threshold was published.

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca, known as Federico García Lorca (Fuente Vaqueros, 5 June 1898 – Víznar, 19 August 1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27, a group consisting of mostly poets who introduced the tenets of European movements (such as symbolism, futurism, and surrealism) into Spanish literature. García Lorca was openly homosexual. He was a multifaceted artist : he wrote prose, poetry and plays, was a painter and drawer, a good musician playing guitar and piano, could sing in a moving way and was a pantomime player. He was executed by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. His body has never been found. In 2008, a Spanish judge opened an investigation into Lorca's death. The García Lorca family eventually dropped objections to the excavation of a potential gravesite near Alfacar, but no human remains were found.

Dezső Kosztolányi (Szabadka, now Subotica, Serbia ; 29 March 1885 – Budapest, 3 November 1936) was an Hungarian poet, writer, translator and journalist. He is considered one of the most important Hungarian writers of the 20th century. In 1910 he published his first collection of poems The Complaints of a Poor Little Child. It made him instantly famous throughout Hungary.

Edward Slonski (Zapasiszkach, 23 October 1872 - Warschau, 24 July 1926 ) was a Polish poet and writer. He initially trained and worked as a dentist, which had led to the joke that he was the best poet among the dentists and the best dentist among the poets. He was politically active in the Polish Socialist Party and was arrested several times. Throughout his life he remained loyal to his socialist ideals, but later combined them with Polish nationalism. This brought him after the war into conflict with communist groups who looked for association with Moscow. In later life, Slonski dedicated his efforts to crafting books for children and young people.

Kostas Karyotakis (Tripolis, November 11 1896 – Patras, July 20, 1928) is considered one of the most representative Greek poets of the 1920s and one of the first poets to use iconoclastic themes in Greece. His poetry conveys a great deal of nature, imagery and traces of expressionism and surrealism. He also belongs to the Greek Lost Generation movement. The majority of Karyotakis' contemporaries viewed him in a dim light throughout his lifetime without a pragmatic accountability for their contemptuous views ; for after his suicide, the majority began to revert to the view that he was indeed a great poet. He had a significant, almost disproportionately progressive influence on later Greek poets.

Leopold Andreas (Paul) van Ostaijen (Antwerp, February 22, 1896 - Miavoye-Anthée, March 18, 1928) was a Flemish modernist poet and prose writer. Van Ostaijen is considered to belong to a group of young artists who out of activism rebelled against the elitist individualism of artists. These humanitarian expressionists have an international focus (‘peoples community) and are pacifist. After his military service in Krefeld (Germany) in 1922, he worked as a printer and published in several magazines. In 1925 he opened in Brussels an art gallery "A la vierge poupine’ which he abandoned already after one year. His last years were spent for tuberculosis treatment in the sanatorium 'Le Vallon' in Miavoye-Anthée near Dinant. Van Ostaijen died there on March 18, 1928. In his final years he promoted ‘clear lyrical poetry’ : pure sound poetry, decarded from reality and the feelings of the poet. His humanist expressionism had evolved into what he called an ‘organic expressionism’. On November 8, 1952, he received his final resting place at the honorary cemetery of Schoonselhof in Antwerp.

Charles W. Wood (birth and death dates not found) was a respected leftish activist in America (no portrait on the internet). Therefor he was stigmatized in the mainstream as an example of the un-American degenerated left wing. There is little to be found about him on the worldwide web. Only his birthplace could be retraced as Ogdenburg (upstate new York).

Ture Nerman (Norrkoping, May 18, 1886 - Stockholm, October 7, 1969) was a Swedish socialist politician and journalist. During World War II he was editor of Allt Pride! (In spite of everything!), an anti-Nazi newspaper. He was MP from 1946 to 1953. On Kungsholmen, one of the islands of Stockholm, a street is named after him. Ture Nerman was a vegetarian and a teetotaler. Alcohol Abuse was a major social problem in Sweden in the early 20th century. It went through all layers of the population, but made most of its victims among the working class. Ture Nerman thought alcohol made the working class passive and depressed, so they could not stand up for her rights.

Giuseppe Ungaretti (Alexandria, February 10, 1888 - Milan, June 2, 1970) was an Italian poet. His father was an immigrant from Tuscany who had participated in the Suez Canal Project. He visited in Alexandria the Ecole Suisse Jacob and then moved to France in 1912 to contunue his studies. Here he met several poets and artists such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Georges Braque and Amedeo Modigliani. In 1921 he moved with his family to Rome and in 1924 he joined the fascist movement. His poems against the war and his poetic humanism are in stark contrast with his political choices. Until World War II, he remained loyal to fascism and to Mussolini who gave him in return a professorship in Rome. In 1944, he wrote against the war : "No more crying”. And it still is a mystery to literary critics how Ungaretti reconciled all these contradictions in his life. In 1969 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature..

Little is known about this song. It was found in Lopik (Netherlands) and was probably left behind brought by a Belgian refugee (a deserter?). It could have been written in the trenches of Flanders’ Fields. The scan on the website of the Nederlandse Liederenbank (a Dutch Song Database) marks it as a ‘Broadside Ballad’. This means it is a song that wasn’t published in a book or song collection but was found as a separate sheet of paper with only lyrics on it.

Winifred Mary Letts (Broughton, 10 February 1882 – Rathcoole, 1972) was an English-born writer who spent most of her life in Ireland. She was known for her novels, plays and poetry. She spent many childhood holidays in Knockmaroon, Phoenix Park, Dublin, which was her mother's home. She began her career as a playwright, writing two one-act plays for the Abbey Theatre (Dublin) : The Eyes of the Blind (1906) and The Challenge (1909). She then started writing novels and children's books. Her first poetry collection, Songs from Leinster, was published in 1913. In 1933 Knockmaroon, a reminiscence of her childhood in Dublin in her grandparents' house, and considered her finest book, was published.

Julio Baghy (originally Baghy Gyula, Szeged, January 13, 1891 - March 18 1967) was a Hungarian actor and writer in Esperanto. He learned Esperanto from 1911 and was a prominent activist and vice president of the Academy of Esperanto. Baghy wrote for many Esperanto magazines and was chief editor of Literura Mondo (until 1933). His motto was : “Amo kreas Pacon, paco konservas homecon, homeco estas alta plej idealismo” or Love makes peace, peace protects humanity and humanity is the highest ideal. He was welcomed by Zamenhof, founder of Esperanto, and by other Esperantists of the first hour

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Маяко́вский; Bagdadiin, Georgia,19 July 1893 – Moscow, 14 April 1930) was a Russian Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor. During his early, pre-Revolution period leading into 1917, Mayakovsky became renowned as a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement, being among the signers of the Futurist manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1913). Mayakovsky produced a large and diverse body of work during the course of his career : he wrote poems, wrote and directed plays, appeared in films, edited the art journal LEF, and created agitprop posters in support of the Communist Party during the Russian Civil War. Though Mayakovsky's work regularly demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of the Communist Party and a strong admiration of Vladimir Lenin, Mayakovsky's relationship with the Soviet state was always complex and often tumultuous. Mayakovsky often found himself engaged in confrontation with the increasing involvement of the Soviet State in cultural censorship and the development of the State doctrine of Socialist realism. Works that contained criticism or satire of aspects of the Soviet system, such as the poem Talking With the Taxman About Poetry (1926), and the plays The Bedbug (1929) and The Bathhouse (1929), were met with scorn by the Soviet state and literary establishment. In 1930 Mayakovsky committed suicide.

Gilbert Frankau (London, 21 April 1884 – Hove (UK) 4 November 1952) was a popular British novelist. He was known also for verse (he was a war poet of World War I), including a number of verse novels, and short stories. He was born into a Jewish family, but was baptised as an Anglican at the age of 13 and converted later to Catholicism. He wrote about himself : “Political journalism meant more to me than my novels and short stories. Only fiction, however, could make me enough money to gratify my supreme ambition – a seat in the House.” In 1928, he was invited to launch a new Right-wing weekly newspaper, Britannia. Frankau threw himself into this venture with characteristic energy, but it was not a success.

Nothing is known about the author of this Beti folk song, tells of the retreat and shows the conflict between those Beti who supported Atangana and those who opposed him. There exist different versions of this song.

Hè ! Atangana Ntsama, the war is over ! (…)

How is it that you would like me to leave so many goods behind ?

Hè ! They will surprise you in your greed !

Such richness. I should take some !

You others, move off, what are you doing there ?

Friend, there were as many goods as in a market ;

Friend, we have marched through all of that without taking anything !

The Allied West African Campaign of World War I reached Kamerun in 1914. Douala fell on 17 September, and the Germans regrouped at Jaunde. Beti informants alerted Atangana as to the Allies' progress, and as the loss of Jaunde seemed inevitable, Atangana prepared to escape with his masters. He and the chiefs under him gave their posts to weaker relatives so they could more easily take them back should the Germans return. They held out in Jaunde until 1 January 1916, when troops of the British Army captured the town, and the German soldiers and missionaries fled into the forest. Atangana and 72 Ewondo and Bane chiefs, along with 14–20,000 villagers (mostly soldiers and their families), led them through. It is not clear whether English is the original language of this song or whether it is a translation from a local language.

Elia Abû Mâdi ( إيليا†أبو†ماضي†Īlyā Abū Māḍī ; Bikfaya, Libanon, 15 May 1890 - New York, 23 November 1957) was an Arab poet and journalist whose poetry achieved popularity through his expressive use of language, his mastery of the traditional patterns of Arabic poetry, and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary Arab readers. When he was 11 years old, Abu Madi moved with his family from their mountain village in Lebanon to Alexandria, Egypt. As a young man, he earned money selling cigarettes. He published his first collection of poetry in Alexandria in 1911. The following year he migrated to the United States, settling in Cincinnati, where he worked with his brother. In 1929 he started his own bimonthly magazine, Al-Samīr (“The Companion”), which he expanded into a daily newspaper in 1936 and continued to publish until his death. He spent much of his life in the United States.

Mīḫāˀīl Nuˁayma (ook Mikhail Naimy ; Arabic: ميخائيل نعيمة†- Mount Sannine, now Libanon, 1894 - Beirut, 1988) was a Libanese writer and poet from the New York Pen League. He studied in Nazareth (Palestine) en Poltava (Ukrain). In New York he worked with Kahlil Gibran and eight other writers who promoted the rebirth of Arab literature, the New York Pen League. The writer of the previous fragment, IIliya Abu Madi, was also part of this leaugue. Naimy was the vice chairman and Gibran the chairman. After 21 years in the US, he returned to Baskinta (Lebanon) in 1932, where he lived the rest of life. He died at the age of 96 in Beirut.

Kurt Tucholsky is one of two poets with two entries (the other is Bertolt Brecht). More on the author Tucholsky and what he did during the war is featured higher. This fragment is derived from a text published in 1931 in the magazine Die Weltbühne. The publication date is an exception in this mosaic text, but in the work of Tucholsky one can find ideas with this content much earlier and already during World War, but it took him till 1931 to formulate it in three words: Soldiers are murderers. Under the pseudonym of Ignaz Wrobel he wrote : "Four years there were kilometers of land where murder was mandatory. While it was strictly forbidden half an hour away. Did I say : murder ? ... " The army felt deeply insulted and because Tucholsky lived in the meantime in Sweden, the responsible publisher of Die Weltbühne was prosecuted for the "Insulting the Reichswehr". However, Carl von Ossietzky was acquitted because the quote "does not target a specific person and an indeterminate generality can not be offensive." This wasn’t the end of lawsuits because of the little sentence. In the 70s and 80s, peace activists were also prosecuted for using this Tucholsky quote. But the Bundesverfassungsgericht (German Constitutional Court) in 1995 finally ruled that the use of the quote should be allowed. The sticker above was found on the car of a pacifist that led to his conviction for insult and incitement, which the Federal Constitutional Court, however, repealed. However in 2010 the journalist Thies Gleiss was convicted for a similar statement in the journal Die Junge Welt (20/05/2010), and later in appeal acquitted again. All this is not new in history. Cyprian of Carthage wrote in 200 AD in a letter : "Murder is a crime, when committed by an individual. But it is honored for its virtue and courage, if committed by many.” Tucholsky criticizes in his text the military police glaringly who made sure that “in the front rows the killings were done correctly” but then at the rear murdered the deserters.

Carl Sandburg (Galesburg; January 6, 1878 – Flat Rock; July 22, 1967) was an American poet, writer, and editor who won three Pulitzer Prizes : two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature”. At the age of thirteen he left school and began driving a milk wagon. Then h worked as a mason, hotel clerk and coalman. He began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later he wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, children's literature, and film reviews. Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. Sandburg volunteered to go to the military and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry during the Spanish–American War (1898). But he was never actually called to battle. In 1903 he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and joined the Social Democratic Party, the name by which the Socialist Party of America was known in the state. In 1945 he moved to Connemara, a 246-acre (100 ha) rural estate in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Here he produced a little over a third of his total published work, and lived with his wife, daughters, and two grandchildren.

This fragment is an exception to the rule that the poems for this mosaic must have been written during the First World War. It is not entirely clear when Brecht actually wrote it. But he added this poem to his collection Gedichte im Exil (Poems in Exile, 1936-1937). First the book didn’t get published. So he included the poem in Deutsche Kriegsfibel (German War Reader) published in Moscow, 1937. And finally the whole Fibel was added in 1939 to the Svendborger Gedichte. But the poem itself may be older, because it was already part of the cantate Gegen den Krieg (Against the War) of Hanns Eisler (1936). This cantate consists of poems and fragments from what later became the Deutsche Kriegsfibel. As with the Tucholsky’s fragment, these verses have also led to legal prosecution. In 1988 anti-war demonstrators used these verses in a pamphlet and were sentenced to 8 months of conditional imprisonment by the Landgericht München on the basis of "... fortgesetztes verfassungsfeindliches Einwirken auf die Bundeswehr nach § 89 StGB” (continued unconstitutional acts against the German army). The whole poem consists of three strophes, each of which has four verses : a general is confronted with something that provides hem with good services - the second line identifies the usefulness of the thing - the third line is the same in the three strophes (“But he has one defect”) - and the fourth verse identifies that defects (“it needs a human being”). In the third and final strophe (the fragment used), that limitation is tightened : man can think. Suddenly, the poem suddenly gives a warning to the general (“you’re not that almighty") and a call to every soldier and every human being ("think about it"). Thus, this fragment summarizes the entire mosaic and brings it to a point : man, think thoroughly and do not collaborate with the general ! Because then he is standing there alone with his tanks and armory …

Rosenstock’s poem, ‘The Storm and the Deserter’s Song’, evoked the anguish and alienation of the soldiers : Hentea parses the strong alliterative stresses and internal rhymes of the Romanian, ‘Stîlcim stîrvurile lepădate ín zapadă’, ‘We trample corpses fallen in the snow’. By this stage the 17-year-old was already experimenting with the pseudonym that would crystallize as Tristan Tzara; in Romanian, ţară means land or country, as Hentea explains, while trist, of course, is ‘sad’. In the imperfect pun, caught between French and Romanian, the high-modernist gesture itself reveals the incomplete self-effacement of the artist.

The poem was published in Du Champ des horrors (Geneva, Éditions de la revue Demain, 1917, pp 11-13). All poems are about the horrors of war but also about the possibilities of preventing it. The poem ends with a vague dream that maybe one day things will be different… The whole book can be found on the internet http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65196595/f15.image

The poem collection ‘Oorlog’ was ahead of its time, It was dadaist in shape and tone, and it was realistic and confronting in terms of the message it brought to the reader. The subtitle ‘Verses in staccato’ characterizes the poems precisely : short lines of usually two words that keep up a steady cadence towards the end of the poem, almost like a machine gun. It was an extraordinary anti-war book of high quality that unfortunately remained hardly noticed at the time.

This fragment comes from the poem ‘Gebet nach dem Schlachten’ (prayer after the slaughtering). The subtitle is even sharper : Kopf ab zum Gebet (‘head off for the prayer). The war posed Tucholsky in front of many existential and religious questions. He was born into a Jewish family, but he quickly left the Jewish community. To be eligible for promotion, he became a member of the evangelical church in 1918. It did not make him more religious. In 1924 he wrote this sneering accusation under the pseudonym Theobald Tiger. He mainly used this pseudonym for contributions to the art section of the Berliner TagesBlatt. He later used it mainly for sharp anti-war poems and texts. It is one of the few poems in this Ode written after the war. But it points very clearly to the year 1914. In the poem he calls to God : Why - why - why ? There is no answer. Bitter the poems ends: Wir stehen vor dir : ein Totenbataillon. We are in front of you : a battalion of the dead. Dies blieb uns: zu dir kommen und beten ! This was left to us : to come to you and pray ! Weggetreten ! Kicked away !

Ode Marcial is part of a broader poetic cycle of the author Álvaro de Campos. In the collection are poems as "the death, the noise, the rape, the blood, the glitter of bayonets …" ; "Oh the greatest horror stops at the sound of the bugles” ; ”For those, for my mother, who died, who fell on the battlefield …" ; “Noise from far and wide and I do not know why." With the writer Álvaro de Campos Pessoa wanted to replace thinking by its opposite : feeling. de Campos wants to feel everything, by all means, in an equally helpless and hopeless urge for self-destruction. Álvaro expresses his bewilderment about the absurdity of life, the impossibility of reality, the fear for mystery and the even greater fear that this mystery become real. He is the poet of nothingness : "I am nothing / I will never be anything / I can not want to be anything / Apart from that I cherish all the dreams of the world." In the 'Ode Marcial’ the decadent Zeitgeist is displayed. The poet himself performs heinous acts in an attempt to overcome decadence. But it does not help. In the poem, the key phrase to Pessoa's poetry is stated : Dói-me an alma e não compreendo ... (it hurts my soul and I do not understand).

Poems with the descriptive nature such as “Those Born in the Years of Stagnation" are typical for Aleksandr Blok. Beneath the vivid imagery is the apocalyptic vision of “conflagration,” an extensive, devastating fire ; the sense of time for renewal or a sense of purging becomes a subliminal theme. The poem summarizes the position of the lesser Russian classes with: “On thin/ cheeks strained by war and liberation/ bloody reflections still remain.” Blok revisits the World War I sentiment toward the Russian Army for outfitting the majority of the military from the proletariat. The culmination of ideas of extensive fire and cleansing, paralleled to the apparent disregard and wastefulness of the Russian command combine to create feelings of resentment and lack of belonging. Blok perceived this notion of the outcasts despite being raised in an intellectually revered family. The government of despots feared the implications of Blok’s work because of dual nature of the poem.

This poem is from the collection The Force of a people that can be entirely read on the Internet. Hikmet published the collection in 1919 when he was 17-year-old. There are already many innovative linguistic and form experiments in this book. But most striking is his indignation over injustice and war, and his belief in the power of the people. Hikmet internationally best known anti-war song, thanks to the version of Pete Seeger song (I come and stand), is The girl of Hiroshima. "All that I ask is that for peace you’ll fight today."

Poetry International Rotterdam analyses in her journal this poem as an example of African political poetry. “S.E.K. Mqhayi, an early-twentieth-century Xhosa-language journalist and poet who acted as the mouthpiece of the colonially oppressed, also singles out political figures in his poems, for example deriding the prince of Wales as “a descendent of the buffalo cow Victoria” in his wry and bitter mock praise-poem ‘Aa! Hail the Hero of Britain!’ Mqhayi’s poems were a rallying cry to fellow Africans to unite against the suppression of colonial rule, yet they are not mere cultural relics, important only for their historic significance : their craft means they endure as poems that inspired subsequent writers in Xhosa.”

The flemish humanistic magazine ‘DeMens’ dedicated in 2014 an issue to war poetry that is not ‘sweetish’. They claim ‘sweet poems’ are not appropriate to commemorate a war. The magazine presents this poem by Ibrahim as an example of a poet who does not mourn powerlessly about the horrors of war, but analyzes them and points out : The West has become a burning torch // terrifying the heaviest thunderclaps // Science blazes the flame // and a senile civilization fans it ruthlessly.

The excerpt comes from a poem written during the World War and published in his first book of poetry that came out after the war in 1919, Pjesme I and II (Songs). The poem is part of a small cycle of three poems and is not yet as politically loaded as the satirical works he wrote later. The poem ends with the rather philosophical-fatalistic words : ... and the snow melts // and in the spring the water flows.

The quoted lines are not a fragment but they are a whole poem. Ungaretti was known for these clenched, haiku-like verses. Soldati comes out of the collection Allegria di naufragi (1919 - the cheerfulness of ship wrecks). It was previously published in July 1918 in the journal La Raccolta. In a few lines Ungaretti summarizes the feeling of the existential tragedy of the First World War. He wrote it in the trenches in the forest Courton near Reims. But perhaps 'soldiers' can also be replaced by 'people' who can not escape pain and death.

In 1917 Hanns Eisler put two Klabund songs to music and gave his composition the title Dumpfe Trommel Drum und berauschtes Gong (Dull Drum and intoxicated Gong). These two poems were Der müde Soldat (Schi-King - the tired soldier) and Der rote und die weiße Rose (Li-Tai-Po - the pink and the white rose), both translated adaptations from old chinese poetry. Der müde Soldat is the oldest known Eisler score. Klabund took inspiration from a Chinese poem of more than 2000 years old (Schi-King, 11-700 AD). The poem is not militant anti-militaristic, but the I-don’t-want-to-be a-soldier theme is already there in 1915.

After he was mobilized for the war in 1914, he began to write poems about the senselessness of war and violence. In Vienna he joined during his medical studies the literary circle around Mosche Silburg. Ber Horowitz writes neo-romantic poems with references to nature and the Jewish village life in the Carpathians. In 1919 his first book of poetry appeared fun mayn hejm in di mountain (from my home in the mountains) in Vienna in which the chosen poem is included.

The first published poem by Brecht appeared in the school newspaper in 1913, Der Brennende Baum. It just describes a burning tree. From 1914 he published poems in the Augsburger newspaper Neueste Nachrichten. Brecht wrote about who saw as a hero and about the real experiences of soldiers. Moderne Legende (1914 - Brecht is 16 years) ended with “only the mothers wept // on this side and on the other." 1915 appears Der Fähnrich. The sergeant cannot stand it anymore. It's just not human to have to carry out these orders and to hand them out. There is no heroic death. Already the young Brecht is full of empathy and compassion.

"The Gift Of India" evokes a sense of pride but also sadness about the sacrifices that India had to bring during the war. By the time of the poems' composition, there had been over 80,000 Indian troops committed to the British war effort with heavy casualties. Naidu hopes the offering (the 'gift') will at least provide India the right to independence. Freedom is never the result of charity ... When placed in this context, "the gift of India" is a means by which to prove that Indians were indeed capable and worthy of self-government. The poem is included in the collection The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and the Spring, which came out in 1917. But Naidu read it already to the public in 1915.

The poem was published posthumously under the title Iglesia abandonada (Balada de la Gran Guerra) (Abandoned Church - Ballad of the Great War), but is officially dated November 29, 1929 after the crash on Wall Street. Probably however Lorca already wrote it in 1918. About the exact origin of the poem not much is known. Did he write it after a political meeting, after a cinema visit ? He tells of a frustration that turns into mourning. First he gave the poem the subtitle ‘memory', then it became 'war memory'. The son is gone, permanently. What remains of the hope of a new world after the war ? There stays only lament in an abandoned church ...

This poem was published in 1915 in a collection with the same name. Kosztolányi had been working on this book since the outbreak of the war. My Brother is a collection of poems in which characters are depicted who mainly express feelings of regret and sadness. War is associated with murder and suicide. The poet takes on feminine values and opposes softness and warmth to the pain and fury of war. Yet there is also (bitter) humor in the poems.

‘Those who are not yet lost’ is one of Slonski’s best-loved poems. It recounts the particular hardship faced by Polish men in being forced to join one of three armies – Austro-Hungary, German or Russian – and fight against their fellow countrymen. The direct address of the poem to ‘my brother’ also allows for a universal interpretation of the poem which recognises the equality of all soldiers. The title 'Ta co nie zginęła' [‘Those who are not yet lost/ who didn’t fall yet) makes reference to Polish national hymn 'Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła póki my żyjemy...' [Polen is not lost, for as long as we live). But it can refer as well to all beloved dear ones and family members, or to the earth itself. Personification adds to the sense of the ‘whole world’ being affected by the fighting: ‘groaning trenches’, guns that ‘roar’ and ‘whistling bullets’ twice result in the forest and the earth weeping. The repetition of personal pronouns ‘you’ and ‘I’ emphasizes the bare humanity of those involved in the warfare, and evokes an intimacy between the speaker and addressee.

In February 1919 he published his first collection of poetry: The Pain of Men and Things (Greek: Ὁ πόνος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ τῶν πραμάτων), which was largely ignored or badly criticized by the critics. The chosen poem comes from this collection. Karyotakis gave existential depth as well as a tragic dimension to the emotional nuances and melancholic tones of the neo-Symbolist and new-Romantic poetry of the time. With a rare clarity of spirit and penetrating vision, he captures and conveys with poetic daring the climate of dissolution and the impasses of his generation, as well as the traumas of his own inner spiritual world.

He became increasingly torn between 'interiority' and 'externality', between his dark and gloomy thoughts of mankind on the one hand and his sensitivity for the empirical reality on the other. The quoted fragments are from the poem Fatalisties Liedje (fatalistic song) from the poem collection De feesten van angst en pijn (The party of fear and pain). He attempts to reconcile the conflict between his gloomy thoughts and the reality full of desire in a ‘unio mystica', a metaphysical ecstasy. The emaciated man struggles as a wreck against the triumphant, recurrent “rocking song / I and thou / ebb and flow / life and death' of the world ocean. In a recovered draft of the poem is noted "a good rest with Plato”, but it was later deleted.

His National Anthem appeared in 1916 in The Masses in an article titled "Am I a Patriot?" “Patriotism”, he writes, “is evidence of a small or undeveloped mind. It is especially a disease of childhood and is most virulent in such underdeveloped persons as … Theodore Roosevelt.” - “Nationalism”, he continues, “made the world war possible.” The only ‘-isms’ about which he feels any enthusiasm whatsoever are internationalism and materialism : Ideals are "lies and deception that distract us from our preoccupations and enslave us to the ambitions of others. The idealist gives his life for geography and colors.; the materialist for tangible concrete things such as women and children." Writing with equal vehemence and eloquence in his less well known King of the Magical Pump, Wood calls these ideals simply ‘flapdoodle’.

The haunted castle is a reference to the Peace Palace in The Hague. In 1913, one year before the outburst of the war, the Peace Palace had been inaugurated as a symbol of the hope and desire that future conflicts would only be resolved peacefully. But by 1916, in the middle of this monstrous war, the Swedish writer and politician, Ture Nerman, bitterly described this ‘Spökslottet’ (this haunted castle) : Fading into the grey // Rising up in her Sunday best, // Stands a proud dream in stone : // The Peace Palace of Princes. But the poem ends sourly : Before me the pile only grows, // Heaped with millions of corpses. // Today, I fear, it leaves // The Peace Palace in the shadows!”

The quoted lines are not a fragment but they are a whole poem. Ungaretti was known for these clenched, haiku-like verses. Soldati comes out of the collection Allegria di naufragi (1919 - the cheerfulness of ship wrecks). It was previously published in July 1918 in the journal La Raccolta. In a few lines Ungaretti summarizes the feeling of the existential tragedy of the First World War. He wrote it in the trenches in the forest Courton near Reims. But perhaps 'soldiers' can also be replaced by 'people' who can not escape pain and death.

The Deserter tells the story of a soldier who gets the death penalty for cowardice (leaving the front line). Fellow soldiers have to shoot him a bullet in the heart. The poem speaks directly to the reader and asks whether we have the right to judge a man like this. He was still young, a man with a whole future ahead of him. In the same volume there is the poem, Hero. There are similarities between these two poems. In both poems the mother receives a letter that her son fell ‘on the field of honor’. The truth is not told. Is the so called Hero really a ‘hero’ ? The poet invites the reader to think about this…

The title of the poem is '1919', and it was published in the first poem collection of Baghy Preter la Vivo (Beyond Reading, 1922). This collection opened new horizons for the Esperanto Poetry and was awarded in 1923 with a literary Esperanto Prize in Budapest. Baghy was the first writer who used Esperanto as a literary language to pass on humanitarian concerns. The entire book can be read on the internet d.yimg.com/kq/groups/2719935/.../PRETER+LA+VIVO.pdf

His love affair with a married woman, Lilya Brik and many other love affairs will follow. They along with the profound impressions of war and revolution, influenced his works in these years. War and Universe is an extensive poem which took the poet quite some time. It depicts the horrors of the First World War. It stands next to the poem 'The Man' from 1917 in which he describes the anguish of love. Both are key poem in which he makes the switch. of a futurism that was hopeful about the war (“a clean swiped world) to a militant pacifism.

This anonymous song is included in the"Weltkriegslieder-Sammlung" (world war songbook) that brought songs together that were sung during the First World War. The book was published in 1926 by the publishing house "Der Deutschmeister" in Dresden. It was compiled from testimonies of war survivors. The book has 647 pages and about 700 texts of soldier songs are included. Most songs glorify war and date from the first years of the war. In Germany a real myth was created around the battle of Langemarck (Oct-Nov 1914) based on false victory bulletins of of heroic battles of young German soldiers. However, no poem about Langemarck is included in the song collection. So the myth was created long after the war. The deserter is one of the few critical poems about the war in the collection. The song tells about a soldier who cannot stand his guard duty any longer. He follows a kind of Loreley figure who sings songs about "love and fidelity” to him. The Weltkriegs-Liedersammlung can be found entirely on the internet.

The poem "The Deserter" describes a single incident of a soldier being executed. The poem begins with the soldier apologising for his crime while the other men "bandaged his livid face" and led him out to "die his death of disgrace”. The second stanza describes the firing squad “preparing for the execution”. The final stanza opens with the sergeant major giving the command to “fire”. The "shameless soul of a nameless man” perhaps shows how the poet had admiration for this man who had the courage to stand up against the horrors of war. The tone is almost cold as the poet appears to cynically mock the idea of heroic war stories.

The chosen fragment comes from a poem from the Diwan Collection of 1919. Abu Made would publish a total of four Diwan books (poem collections). With this second collection from 1919 he established his name as a lyrical, romantic poet. Innovative in his poems is that he writes long poems and discribes his feelings extensively.

While his poetry frequently addresses spiritual matters, critic Issa J. Boullata, in “Mikhail Naimy: Poet of Meditative Vision” for the Journal Of Arabic Literature, noted that Naimy moves away from entirely traditional Arabic forms his work, using an accessible, common diction. “His meditative mood,” wrote Boullata, “coupled with the attraction of his whispering quiet tone, wins over the reader as one who shares the experience with the poet.” The poet sounds very depressed and sombre about the horrors of war :

Dear brother, who are we without a neighbour, kin or country ?

We sleep and we wake clad in shame.

The world breathes our stench, as it did that of the dead.

Bring the spade and follow me - dig another trench for those still alive.

The fragment is chosen because it contains the famous phrase "Sometime they will give a war and nobody will come". It comes from another long poem The People, Yes (1936). The quote became famous during anti-war protests in the sixties. Allen Ginsberg completed the thought experiment in his poem Graffiti of 1972 : "What if someone gave a war & Nobody came ? // Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again." The (free) German translation is often wrongly attributed to Bertolt Brecht (Stell Dir vor, es Gibt Krieg, und keiner geht hin). Carl Sandburg wrote The People, Yes during the Great Depression of the thirties. He wants to convey a happy reassuring message in his text. His verses address the American people, not the American nation. The poem opens with questions asked by children, e.g. the questions about war. Sandburg is dreaming of a "Family of Man" and to get there he puts his trust in ordinary people.