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5.0 out of 5 stars
Tribute to a Crusading Poet, September 13, 2002
This review is from: Merkt Ihr Nischt (Audio CD)
Kurt Tucholsky was one of the Weimar Republic's most loved and hated writers: a muckraking journalist and political poet, he was both a thorn in the side of Germany's ineffectual politicians and an uncompromising opponent of the rising Nazi movement. When Hitler seized power in 1933, Tucholsky fled to Sweden where--hopeless and depressed--he committed suicide.
But his poems--some of them sarcastic, others tender, but always sensitive to the human condition--deserve to live. In Germany, their revival was due largely to radical singer/actor Ernst Busch, who survived the war in Nazi prisons. In the 1950s he approached composer Hanns Eisler in Berlin and asked him to compose music for several Tucholsky poems. Eisler began to work, but Busch returned again and again with more texts. Eventually, a complete song cycle emerged.
These songs are a testament to a simpler time when radical poets like Tucholsky, playrights like Bertolt Brecht, actors like Busch and composers like Eisler and Kurt Weill thought they were inventing new art forms that could change the world. Their hope was shattered, but in these songs the vision of a generation of creative and courageous artists is represented. It was a clear vision that did not turn away from the painful terms of human existence. For that reason their art can be instructive for our own time.
Neither German texts nor English translations are provided, unfortunately, but the texts are available on Amazon[.com]'s German site at Amazon.de. The Hanns Eisler website at EislerMusic.com is gradually publishing selected English translations.
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