BERTOLT BRECHT - Kriegsfibel - 1955

The true first edition of Brecht’s renowned photobook on war, conceived during his exile and first published in the GDR in 1955. For Kriegsfibel, he cut press photographs of the Second World War from newspapers and magazines and paired each image with a four-line poem, his 'photo epigrams.' The book unfolds as a sequence of 85 image–text pages that teach the reader how to critically read war photography, revealing the ideology and rhetoric behind contemporary press captions.

This first Eulenspiegel edition is the original realization of the project and a crucial meeting point of literature, photography, and political education. It is a key title for collections on Brecht, photobooks, and the visual culture of the Second World War.

Now widely recognized as a landmark of twentieth-century photobook history, Kriegsfibel is included in Parr and Badger’s The Photobook: A History and has become a touchstone for later artists and theorists of war photography, most notably Broomberg and Chanarin’s War Primer 2.

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Berlin: Eulenspiegel Verlag for Satire and Humor, 1955. First edition, 1st–10th thousand. 4to (approximately 30 × 25.5 cm). Original black cloth lettered in white on the upper board and spine, in a photo-illustrated dust jacket. 70, [4] pages, with full-page black and white photographs printed in gravure. Text in German.

Cloth with only light rubbing to extremities and corners. Small contemporary ink ownership signature to front free endpaper, otherwise interior fresh and unmarked, pages crisp, binding tight.

Dust jacket about good: overall rubbing and edge wear, several short tears, creasing to upper front panel, and small chips to spine ends and corners. Very good copy in a good dust jacket.