"Left Melancholy" by Mesut Bayraktar | The Future as Allies

Melancholy is suspect on the left. It seems too easily to become a pose of disappointment, a sentimental retreat from political struggles.

Walter Benjamin coined the term "left melancholy" in 1931 as an accusation against a resigned left that clings to its defeats instead of learning from them. Mesut Bayraktar, however, uses the term in the spirit of the Marxist historian Enzo Traverso, who speaks of a productive melancholy—as the memory of past struggles that can become the basis for future ones.

Bayraktar takes up this idea and develops it poetically. His melancholy, too, is not a retreat, but a resistance. "Melancholy is a source of utopian strength," he writes in the afterword, "it forgets no injustice, carefully filing each one, an archive of indignation." It reminds the defeated of the one who inflicted their wounds. Grief turns to rage: "Is there a revolutionary who wasn't melancholic?"

The author, born in Wuppertal in 1990 to Turkish immigrants, speaks from the perspective of those missing from the grand narratives: workers, migrants, people between languages, between times. "Melancholy is one of the first feelings I experienced," he reports.

In the poem "Bad Times," the mother advises: "Go learn/ Otherwise you'll have to bend your back/ Like us." The son follows her advice and studies. "The universities hate you/ Hate our class," he hurls at her upon his return. But this realization doesn't lead to resignation, but to resistance: "Go fight/ That's learning."

Bayraktar's work reflects the experience of a generation that grew up with failure – the collapse of real socialism, the dismantling of left-wing movements, the barbarism of normal capitalist operations: "Since I was born/ the news has reported/ about the war."

Yet the lyrics aren't a swan song for the left, but a revolt against forgetting. In a time when political poetry has become pose, he writes poetry that takes sides – for the humiliated, for those who aren't heard. Beauty still resides in the defeated, whose dreams were smothered in blood and concrete – thus, in a train station bar, "the grace of the betrayed rests on their faces." Such verses restore dignity to the vanquished without denying their failure.

The poems combine Marxist historical and social analysis with a lyrical form that eschews sentimental gestures. In concise, precise images, Bayraktar exposes the present—a world in which capitalism has long since colonized people's innermost spaces.

Formally, the poems are sparse and precise, with echoes of Brecht perceptible. Rhythm and tone emerge from the seriousness of what is being said, not from artistry. A class consciousness shines through everywhere, something that has become rare in contemporary German poetry. This makes the volume a poetic counterpoint to the dominant culture, to the bourgeois peace with history.

"Left Melancholy" is a rare book—both poetically and politically. It trusts that grief over the past generates energy for what is to come. It resolutely refuses to give up on the future. Its melancholy is not an end, but a beginning: "When we doubt/ When we weep/ Then—because we suffer from the future/ That hasn't yet arrived."

Mesut Bayraktar: Left-Wing Melancholy. Poems. Autumnus-Verlag, 80 pp., hardcover, €18.90.