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Popular song and unpopular protest
Zuletzt verändert am 10.08.98
For a cabaret artist success is a particularly complex phenomenon that is always in jeopardy. It takes sensitive management to generate public and critical reactions that prevent you being booed off the stage for being too offensive, and ignored for being too bland. There is a delicate balance to be struck to make sure that the number of those who walk out in disgust is exceeded by those prepared to pay to hear someone controversial. And no matter how well you carry this off, alongside the perennial complaint that cabaret is not was it was in the good old days, a particular frustration that can always reappear is the accusation of impotence. By definition, a cabaret artist seeks to identify ills, and perhaps even, if only implicitly, suggest alternatives to existing conditions. Yet how can one convince anyone that one can actually change anything? Cabaret artists may be successful in entertaining and stimulating their audiences, but must still defend themselves against the charge that they are fundamentally a failure, and that cabaret is frothy. The charge often goes further. Not only does one not bring about change, one can be thought guilty of connivance with the existing order; satirical cabaret acts as a sort of confession, in which laughter makes anxieties and intimations of guilty conscience easier to acknowledge, but also easier to accept; having found a valve which releases the pressure, members of the audience can afterwards resume their established patterns of behaviour and values on their return to daily routine. Presented with this moral Gordian knot, it is easy to see why cabaret artists respond by ignoring such issues; many accept their role as entertainer, adapt their satire so that it becomes a product with a mass market, and pocket the rewards that society offers for commercial success. Who is to say that a cabaret artist or satirist is any less effective for being rich and the darling of chat shows? At the same time, the rapid evolution of television satire, in the UK at least, and the accompanying cosy, well-paid cliquiness that accompanies it might be argued to be proof of the sterility of the genre and the venality of the profession. But perhaps that would be the view of the zealot, with a naive belief in the individual's ability to precipitate social change.
It is hard to imagine a starker expression of the cabaret artist's frustrations than the scene described by George Clare in his memoirs "Last Waltz in Vienna". Clare was born into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna in 1920; on his 17th birthday, December 21st 1937, he was part of the audience at the Simplicissimus, the cabaret run in Vienna by Karl Farkas and Fritz Grünbaum. Both were Jewish. Clare praises them highly: "There never was a more perfect partnership in the history of cabaret, an art form which, I think, reached its highest form in the Vienna of the Thirties." (Clare, p 156). The two performers were brilliant in this particular show, which celebrated the club's 25th anniversary. As a measure of their success, Clare describes the head waiter at the club, Herr Flieder, laughing so much that he dropped the tray he was carrying at the final rehearsal - the first time such a thing had happened in 25 years. As a measure of their lack of success, the Anschluss took place three months later. Grünbaum, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, was clubbed to death in Dachau, and Farkas had to flee to America.
This paper will examine some of the satirical cabaret songs of Georg Kreisler, who comes from the same Viennese Jewish background and vintage as Clare. He celebrates his 75th birthday on 18th July 1997, and still pursues an active career in cabaret. The paper will aim to show that Kreisler, while aware of the many tensions inherent in the medium, has remained a consistently important voice in political cabaret; it will also argue that Kreisler has produced large numbers of enduring cabaret songs of the highest quality, which deserve much wider familiarity in the English-speaking world than they currently enjoy.
It is ironic that his work is not well known outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland, since he has a close association with America. He has American nationality, and began his professional career as a cabaret writer and performer in California. Two years younger than Clare, who made the transition to the English-speaking world through escape to Britain, Kreisler fled with his parents after the Anschluss to Hollywood, where he had a cousin. Flight from Nazi persecution was the start of a voyage in which he was cast as a latterday Candide, confronted repeatedly with bizarre coincidences against a global backcloth of vicious brutality. His experiences constitute a fascinating and sometimes picaresque story in themselves, but are important in helping to understand the development of his later political awareness.
After the same machinations experienced by the Klaars in gaining permission to leave Vienna, described by Clare in his memoirs, Kreisler travelled with his parents to Genoa (he was an only child), where they embarked for Hollywood1. The next stop on their Candidian journey was Marseilles, where to kill time they visited the cinema, emerging at the end of the film onto the Canebière to discover that it and much of the rest of the city was engulfed in flames. During the subsequent crossing of the Atlantic the ship came across a yacht giving out a distress signal; the two occupants who were taken on board turned out to be gangsters, one of them Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, who, as a racketeer from the days of Prohibition, was high on the list of those that the police were keen to interview. Siegel whiled away the journey to Los Angeles playing chess with the 16-year-old Kreisler, who was bemused to find his companion whisked off by waiting policemen on arrival. As befits a Voltairian narrative, Bugsy Siegel reentered the story ten years later when, on his return from active service with the American army in Europe, Kreisler was working as an entertainer in a Beverley Hills club. Enquiring about the source of a commotion a few blocks away, Kreisler was told that Bugsy Siegel had just been shot. What would Dr Pangloss have made of that?
On arrival in America Kreisler started to establish himself as a musician; he continued his studies as a conductor, and worked on the music for a number of films. He was acquainted with a large number of other expatriate German native speakers. When he was 19 Kreisler married - "in an attack of madness," as he later put it2 - a girl whom he was at school together, Philine Hollaender, daughter of Friedrich Hollaender, who was a prominent figure in pre-war Berlin cabaret, and had provided Marlene Dietrich with songs such as Falling in Love Again in The Blue Angel. Though the marriage soon collapsed, it allowed Kreisler closer acquaintance with a leading one the leading cabaret artists of the day. He also knew Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote to him confirming that he was willing to accept him as a pupil at UCLA; Kreisler's application was, however, rejected by the University. The Candidian nature of the biography resumes once Kreisler, who had by now acquired American citizenship, was called up. After training and transfer to the UK, he was stationed in Yeovil and Devizes, and toured the country producing GI shows for troops preparing the invasion of Normandy. For the campaign in Europe he was recruited to an intelligence unit that was keen to draw on his skill as an entertainer and his usefulness as interpreter. Once again he became an unexpected witness to historical events when he was assigned to conduct preliminary interrogations of senior Nazi war criminals, among them Hermann Goering, Julius Streicher (the ultimate Jew-hater and editor of the rabidly antisemitical publication Der Stürmer), and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Reich Security Headquarters). Kreisler had the opportunity of participating as an interrogator and interpreter at the Nuremburg trials, but was keen to get back to civilian life in the States. After mediocre success in post-war California, he moved to New York, where he had to work hard to establish himself. Having eventually acquired a steady job working as an entertainer in a club, he decided in 1955 that he could achieve more by returning to Vienna, and working in German.
The account of Kreisler's life as a young man is fascinating in itself. It also tempts one to speculate about the cultural dimension of Kreisler's decision to return to Europe just over forty years ago. His belief in himself was fully vindicated by his subsequent success in Vienna, and later Munich. Was it attributable to greater sophistication on the part of the audience? His disparaging remarks on his 1995 CD Taubenvergiften für Fortgeschrittene about the guilelessness with which Viennese audiences nod their assent to assertions of his that are meant ironically do not altogether support the idea. Were European audiences more open, more broad-minded? Certainly the America from which Kreisler departed had experienced McCarthyism during the previous two years, and was providing Vance Packard with material that he would publish in The Hidden Persuaders only two years later; Kreisler's experience was that America was intolerant of alternative points of view, that politics, and even parodies of toothpaste adverts, were taboo, that record shops refused to stock an album of his called Please shoot your husband on the grounds that the title was immoral2. On the other hand, reactions in Vienna were not entirely dissimilar. People would walk out of his performances in disgust; Kreisler recounts how one lady left after hearing his witty and endearing song about the desperate frustrations of a professional triangle player with the words Ich lasse meine Philharmoniker nicht beleidigen ("I won't have a member of my Philharmonic insulted like that")3. Numerous songs, such as his delightfully disrespectful opera parody "Opernboogie", were actually banned on the radio and on television. Nonetheless Kreisler did create or encounter an environment which gradually allowed his art and his views on politics and society to unfold; European audiences responded to him with greater enthusiasm than their American counterparts, allowing him to cultivate the special love-hate relationship that an exciting satirist requires, and he is now well known in the German-speaking world as a leading cabaret artist of the post-war years.
It would be pure speculation to try to identify to what extent language, shared cultural experiences, lack of shared cultural experiences, and mentality played a part in this; it would equally be speculation to examine Kreisler himself as a variable in the two essentially identical processes of performing cabaret material in different languages. We do, though, appear to have a mysterious cross-cultural signpost in considering the song that rapidly brought Kreisler notoriety at the start of his European career: Taubenvergiften im Park ("Poisoning pigeons in the park"). Written in 1955, it inevitably invites comparison with the similar song by Tom Lehrer that bears the same English title and dates from the same period. Kreisler acknowledges during the commentary on his latest CD (1995) Taubenvergiften für Fortgeschrittene that he has been accused of plagiarism (the title of the CD means "Pigeon poisoning for advanced learners", whereby there is a possible pun on "Fortgeschrittene", which literally means those who have moved forward or gone away). In fact it was only some years after his return to Europe that he came across Lehrer's work. What emerges from contrasting the two pieces is firstly a tentative conclusion that Lehrer and Kreisler seem to have achieved comparable success in America and Europe respectively with the same sort of material at roughly the same time (the Lehrer song was recorded in 1959, and the Kreisler song in 1957), though even if this is true it is likely to have no significance for a comparative evaluation of audience attitudes since so many other factors could have contributed. Of greater significance is the strength of the association between Kreisler and this one song in the eyes of the German-speaking public; the song has become a limpet that simply will not be dislodged, whereas Tom Lehrer did not see his audience identify one particular song as his trademark in quite such an unshakeable way. The whole business has proved a source of considerable frustration to Kreisler, who points out tartly on the commentary from the Taubenvergiften für Fortgeschrittene CD referred to above that even 40 years on, "at a time when, instead of poisoning pigeons, people pillage rainforests, allow children to starve by the million, and burble on about limited nuclear conflict, such a song is still considered macabre". There it is, journalists, in the way journalists do, refer to Kreisler as the Pigeon Poisoner rather than by name, audiences continue to cheer the song, which has a special place in cabaret history if not German popular culture in general as a way of speaking the unspeakable - and which will re-enter the discussion in due course.
First though, there is a further aspect of Kreisler's outline biography that deserves comment: the way that fate cast him in the role of Wandering Jew. While he has said that Jewishness would not of itself be an issue for him, circumstances, and other people, have made this inescapable. The flight from Nazi persecution could not have represented a starker manifestation of the role. As a partially assimilated European in the US, non-native speaker of English, and purveyor of insights into human folly which did not always resonate very harmoniously with the American outlook on life, he again found himself an outsider. His return to Europe gradually brought him status and approval, but of course did nothing to resolve his basic dislocation as a Jew in a country that had rejected its Jewish community; he was now, moreover, an American abroad, and worst of all failed to find kindred spirits or colleagues whom he could relate to on a personal level at the Marietta Bar in Vienna, his initial place of work4. Once he moved to Munich, in 1958, he was in all senses an outsider, and the great majority of his European career has been spent outside Austria. When it comes to defining his professional status, rather than singling out one among the huge range of his talents and artistic activities (writer, composer, pianist, cabaret artist, actor, director) he enters the term Fremder ("stranger" / "foreigner") in forms that seek to elicit the information, for example when registering at hotels. As he confirmed in a radio interview, "das hat bis jetzt noch niemand beanstandet" ("no one has ever complained about me doing so")2.
It is no surprise that this sense of alienation has left its mark on works less directly concerned with political issues, such as his novel Der Schattenspringer ("The man who dodged his shadow"), published in 1996. There are also many songs in which "Jewish themes" are explored - and often subjected to the same probing mockery found elsewhere. It is striking, though, that the uncompromising analyses of political shortcomings found in Kreisler's cabaret songs, at one and the same time fiercely rational and hilariously quirky, seems to accord with the role as outsider that the events of his life have assigned to him. It is not surprising if one who does not share the same parameters of experience as the norm does not promulgate the same values.
In almost all senses Kreisler does not make concessions. The danger to a political satirist's integrity of doing so is a theme he often addresses, as in the song Das Kabarett ist nicht tot ("Cabaret isn't dead")5. Here the narrator is the sort of cabaret artist from whom Kreisler so vigorously distances himself, and whose attitude was sketched in the opening paragraph of this paper. The narrator explains why he feels there is still a great deal of mileage left in cabaret. Indeed, it offers secure employment; if a cabaret performer manages to be funny, popular, and, as a patriotic democrat, loyal to the government of the day, he will remain a commercial success as well as a mouthpiece for commonly approved alternative views on issues from current affairs - views which Kreisler than goes to enumerate and satirise.
There is, though, an exception to the contention that Kreisler does not make concessions; it takes us back to Taubenvergiften - poisoning pigeons. While Kreisler professes - understandably - that he would like to leave the whole concept behind him6, he is really of course guilty of complicity with the process of mythification, perhaps having realised that resistance is futile. The title of Taubenvergiften für Fortgeschrittene is evidence enough The CD is a retrospective look over 40 years of professional cabaret activity, and it contains an "updated" (written in 1971) version of Taubenvergiften which satirises the nuclear power industry. In this the spring activity of poisoning pigeons for fun has been replaced by setting off an accident in a nuclear reactor. Though the CD was published in 1995, this version of the text predates the Chernobyl accident by 15 years and was previously recorded for an album entitled Mit dem Rücken gegen die Wand which appeared in 1979. The updated text, entitled Spielen wir Unfall ("Let's play accidents") once again shows that the cabaret artist cannot win; Kreisler is a Cassandra, to use the phrase employed by Clare to describe Farkas and Grünbaum. He therefore alludes to the possible catastrophes that human beings are apt to unleash on themselves and on other human beings, whether this be imperialist annexation or the world's most serious nuclear accident to date. Yet he does not and cannot prevent these events; he can therefore derive little comfort from being right, since his satirical prophecies prove impotent.
Kreisler has a simple answer to the question of the cabaret's effectiveness, formulated thus by Horst Wandrey in an interview on the DDR Funk (East German state radio) in 1983:
Kann man mit Kabarett eingreifen in soziale gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen oder ist das letzlich ein stilles leises Lied, das erklingt und keine Wirkung zeitigt?
("Can one through cabaret have a direct influence on social developments, or is it, when it comes down to it, a still small voice that fades away and produces no effect?")
What can cabaret actually achieve? Kreisler's answer: Ich glaube, das ist eine Frage, die niemand beantworten kann ("I believe that is a question no one can answer"). As people do when they are interviewed, he then proceeds to provide a highly pragmatic adumbration of his non-answer, saying that one can overestimate and one can underestimate the power of the cabaret, and that it is in essence no different from other art forms, which sometimes do have a tremendous effect, though it is not necessarily the ones that most want to trigger changes that actually do so.
What underlies this answer is the implication that the question must not be allowed to get out of proportion. We can formulate it thus: Questions about the effectiveness of cabaret are of course legitimate; they illustrate an essential tension integral to the genre, a tension on which the artist draws in creating his work and releasing it into the public arena. The artist will, though, draw on other tensions during the process of creation, such as the tension between contemporary relevance and universality, and these other tensions will have either equal status alongside the debate about effectiveness and ineffectiveness, or indeed overshadow it.
A further implication of the reply that Kreisler gave is that when it comes to debating the artistic quality of a work of cabaret, the criterion of effectiveness, in the sense of power to initiate social or political change, becomes even more marginal. In this respect cabaret can be judged on criteria analagous to those used for a work of art from a different medium: criteria such as durability, quality of thematic, literary, theatrical, musical components, the coherence with which they interrelate, the skill with which the end product, be it sketch or song, allows tensions to coexist, and the number of tensions it can accommodate. There may be concurrent tensions such as those between entertainment and chastisement, between insight and polemic, between tendentiousness and plurality. One can evaluate work on such terms, and the critical and audience response that it elicits can be drawn into the process; these are no doubt worthwhile ways of determining one's view of the cabaret artist's achievement, and helpful in creating an environment in which the medium is taken seriously - and in which most of its jokes are put to the sword.
A final implication of Kreisler's reluctance to answer the question is that as far as the ultimate value of the genre is concerned, all the above is of little significance. Belief in its value, rather than in its capacity to be evaluated, is an act of faith which goes far beyond pronouncements such as saying that a healthy democracy requires proficient satirists, or conversely that a sick society needs proficient satirists. It is interesting to note at this point that the interview from which Kreisler's comments are drawn was given on GDR radio at a time when Kreisler was negotiating a tour of cabaret performances in leading GDR cabarets; the tour did not take place because of the excessive restrictions that the authorities wished to impose on the content of the programme.... If, as a convert to the cause, one accepts the notion that satirical cabaret is a natural medium in which human beings express themselves artistically, one ceases trying to determine its worth relative to other media and art forms, and allows the discussion to set its own agenda. This is not to say that the world of cabaret "faith" and cabaret "theology" are not linked, and if the artist has produced great things in a medium that is capable of allowing great things to happen, the audience's cognition of this will be supported by evidence based on the sort of criteria listed previously.
If we try to examine some of Kreisler 's recent work in the light of all this, we find that the question of durability is once again central. We have already seen that Kreisler includes on a recent CD an updated, though now out-of-date, version of a song which made his reputation among German-speaking audiences.
Not content with that, Kreisler begins his latest cabaret programme, premiered on 1st October 1996, and entitled Fürchten wir das Beste (which translates along the lines of "The best is all we've got to look forward to") with a performance of Taubenvergiften im Park which he himself interrupts. Hang on a minute, or words to that effect, cabaret is supposed to deal with current issues, so he produces another updated version in which the Pope is the target of the satire. The line Gehn wir Taubenvergiften im Park is replaced with Gehn wirHerzen vergiften nach Rom: "let's go and poison a few hearts in Rome". The fact that the line appears clumsy in its English translation reflects the unnatural feel of the original, the point being that the song is destined for an audience familiar already with the "classic" on which it is based. The value of this is that the petty sadistic nastiness that prompted the Viennese narrator of the original song to go poisoning pigeons for amusement when the advent of spring galvanises him into action is now linked to a global institution responsible for guiding the moral, spiritual and socia behaviour of its flock - the Catholic Church. The same gratuituous spitefulness is imputed to the two. It contains a good few gags at the Pope's expense such as this one:
Er küßt, wo er hi'kommt, das Pflaster,
Doch wenn Menschen sich küssen, das haßt er...
He'll kiss ground all over the planet
But if people start kissing he'll ban it...
Kreisler goes on to reflect on the irony of starting the premiere of a cabaret programme in 1996 with a song which caused a furore 40 years earlier. A professional enfant terrible has to blend popularity with shock, and the interplay between "golden oldie" and revamped version in his exploitation of the Taubenvergiften song is an effective way of warming the audience up.
Whereas the original text of Taubenvergiften is now just tame, and Kreisler has to engineer his abrasive comments in other spheres, there is also evidence of a different nature. Not all Kreisler's texts need updating; in 1995, together with his wife Barbara Peters, the Berlin actress with whom he has performed cabaret programmes since the late 1970s, he contributed a 30 minute programme to the Salzburg cabaret festival Salzburger Stier. The programme is an annual event that provides a platform for a wide range of cabaret artists from different German-speaking countries. One of the songs that Kreisler chose for the 1995 Salzburger is entitled Ich wünsche mir ein mächtiges Deutschland zurück ("I wish we had a powerful Germany again"). The narrator is a woman who spends the first part of the song emphasising how modest her needs are: just the Rolls, the yacht, the Swiss bank account, and her shares in American oil (the dividends from which she would really prefer not to have to bother with; she pockets them reluctantly to stop the money going elsewhere). Once we have become familiar with her materialism and her egocentricity, Kreisler is ready to reveal her imperialist fantasies: she implores destiny to revive the old Germany, restoring to it areas such as Danzig, the Ostmark (the Nazi term for Austria), and so on. The second verse shows that the fantasies go further, encompassing Russia, indeed the whole of Asia. Nur Japan bleibt vorläufig frei, she says ("Japan will be the only bit to remain free - for the time being...").
Any assumption on the part of the audience in Salzburg in 1995 that the song had been written in response to German unification in order to ventilate skeletons in the national cupboard would have been perfectly reasonable. But in fact the song dates from the 60s, when Kreisler was keen to draw attention militarist and nationalist tendencies among those opposed to Ospolitik and détente. In casting a shadow over the celebration of unification almost thirty years after its creation, the text has not lost any power to break a taboo.
It is plain enough that Kreisler believes that his songs as they age can have a purpose that goes beyond that of being a golden oldie. The latter they undoubtedly are, and he has recorded a successful series of three double records/CDs under the generic title "Everblacks". But it is interesting to note that virtually all the songs that Kreisler took for his latest programme were selected from his previous output. It is plainly risky to re-use old material; in the event the audience listened with relish, and drew breath when the barbs are lanced. An even more significant indication of the potency of the satire is the fact that Kreisler would be indigestible on German television. Bayerischer Rundfunk, the Bavarian state broadcasting company, is pleased to keep references to him in its archive, and include his old numbers on its Sunday afternoon radio compilations of cabaret medleys, but would not consider taking the risk of putting such material on television. Eine Schere im Kopf ("mental scissors") is the term Kreisler himself uses1 for the self-censorship that television adopts, and it is easy to confirm the accuracy of his statement with the staff of the station itself. Other leading figures in the cabaret world are more acceptable to the television studio; when Hanns Dieter Hüsch, who inspired the founding of the German Cabaret Archive in Mainz, reached his 70th birthday in 1995, a television tribute was broadcast, on which such key figures as Dieter Hildebrandt and Konstantin Wecker took part. Hildebrandt, extremely well-known as the driving force behind the Munich cabaret Münchner Lach- und Schießgesellschaft, has had a highly successful subsequent career in television, and Wecker has a reputation as the Angry Young Man of German rock whose work constitutes the Sturm und Drang of recent popular song in Germany, culminating in his controversial and well-publicised appetite for cocaine. Wolf Biermann's recent 60th birthday was likewise marked with a television programme.
At the time of writing it is, sadly, hard to imagine that Kreisler's 75th birthday, will benefit from such publicity. And it is not by any means because those who know his work consider it to be inferior. Kreisler is still too uncomfortable for German television audiences, though he has always been immensely popular and respected by cabaret-going audiences, sufficiently so to mean that the Austrian authorities do not totally ignore him. Kreisler has taken the initiative in order to avoid being institutionalised: on 1st October 1996 an open letter from him appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. It was addressed to a number of Austrian dignitaries ( the Federal President, the Federal Chancellor, the Federal Minister of Culture, the Lord Mayor of Vienna, and the Vienna City Councillor for Culture), and acknowledged receipt of official government birthday greetings on the occasion of his 50th, 60th, 65th and 70th birthdays. He explains that he remains puzzled for two major reasons:
Firstly, he is not an Austrian citizen: having lost his citizenship through no choice of his own in 1938 he was not prepared to have to apply to have it back. Why was it not simply returned to him without question? Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the cultural authorities in Austria had not only failed to furnish any support during the forty years of his artistic career, they had actively obstructed it. Kreisler therefore declined in advance further official congratulations on the occasion of his 75th birthday in case this helped the state to put him out of harm's way in the pantheon of the country's artistic community once dead.
Kreisler's unwillingness to compromise the acerbity of his political analysis has denied him access to the one medium which has the potential to record the full range of talents as performer and writer that singles him out as a great artist of the cabaret. The price you pay for deciding to be awkward is considerable; it is illustrated by the comparative experience of Gerhard Bronner, another Jewish "veteran" of Viennese cabaret forced into exile by the Anschluss, with whom Kreisler collaborated closely in the initial stages of his return to the Viennese stage, along with Helmut Qualtinger, Carl Merz and others. Kreisler soon discovered that his and Bronner's approaches to cabaret were incompatible; Kreisler accuses Bronner of producing entertainment cabaret for commercial success, and calls him "ein arger Reaktionär - ein Mensch, mit dem ich nichts anfangen kann" ("...a dreadful reactionary - a person I can't relate to at all"). In contrast with Kreisler, Bronner has certainly been accepted by Austrian television, with more than 120 appearances to his credit, and has achieved greater awareness of his work in his home country and abroad. Bronner was invited, for example, to contribute a performance of a cabaret programme to the recent festival of Austrian Jewish culture in London.
What actually supports the contention that Kreisler is a great artist despite not being on television? One can point to examples of timeless satire that can be removed from cryogenic suspension, reshuffled and adapted to provide an elegant savaging of any blend of current human follies and knavery that happens to be current. One can point to his mastery of stage performance, which - despite the fact that he sees himself as a writer, and regards performance as a necessary wage-earning evil - makes audio recordings an inadequate representation of his achievements. And of course one an point to his creative gifts with versification, wordplay, melody, and arrangement, which produce breathtaking results. There is one further important ingredient: his interest in big issues, and his willingness to explore them head-on in a popular genre. As an example of this, let us consider a pair of songs taken from his most recent cabaret programme (but originally dating from 1982). They are conceived as a couplet, and are performed as such. The first, entitled Freiheit ist die Kneipe nebenan ("Freedom is the bar next door") is a gutsy blues ballad sung by Kreisler's wife Barbara Peters, which presents life for the common individual as captivity from which release is found in alcohol. The theme may not be startlingly original, but we must not underestimate how dear to Western hearts is the notion of personal liberty and associated notions of the rule of law and human rights - particularly in modern German society, whose political masters are keen to celebrate the capitulation of the the repressive socialist system of the former East. Henryk Broder reported in a post-reunification article on German cabaret in the Spiegel (19/96) that cabaret artists are having some difficulty coping with the collapse of socialism; he quotes from East Berlin's Distel, where the point is made that "Der Kapitalismus hat nicht gesiegt, er ist bloß übriggeblieben" ("Capitalism was not victorious, it just happens to be what's left.") Broder was not impressed by the post-reunification efforts of GDR cabarets to come to terms with the new situation; Kreisler, meanwhile, by drawing on material that debates from 1982, has neatly sidestepped the accusation of reactiveness and disorientation by getting his statement in before West German values were able to establish their monopoly on German society. In doing so he draws fully on the cabaret artist's arsenal of exaggeration, distortion, tendentiousness, emotiveness, and what one might call intuitive rather than the closely-reasoned analysis that would naturally carry weight in a German-speaking environment; the couplet which ends the song makes a contribution to debate about contemporary Germany more acutely than many a political critique:
Freiheit ist nur die Freiheit vom Gehorsam auszuruhn.
Freiheit hat mit Deutschland nichts zu tun...
"Freedom: we're free to take time off from doing what we're told.
Freedom just leaves Germany totally cold..."
The artistic context of the cabaret song, in which the point is made as part of the narrative, enables the audience to identify with the character portrayed - a woman expressing her frustration, an everyday person caught, as it were, in a moment of lucidity and reflection on the way from routine life to alcohol-induced escape in the pub next door. The effect is to persuade the audience to discount their automatic objections and give serious consideration to an analysis that would arouse all sorts of objections in normal discourse.
Freedom is the theme of the song which immediately follows to form the pair, but the sense of depression that was generated by the narrative "I" in Freiheit ist die Kneipe nebenan is briskly dispelled by its counterweight, entitled Meine Freiheit, deine Freiheit ("My freedom, your freedom"). The second song is performed by Kreisler himself, and forms a response to the lamentations performed by his wife. He opens with a brisk contradiction of the charge with which the previous piece ended, played before the audience has had a chance to applaud:
Freiheit hat mit Deutschland selbstverständlich was zu tun...
Of course freedom has to do with Germany; it emerges that the narrative "I" of this song is a capitalist who blithely acknowledges that while an entrepreneur like himself enjoys freedom, "you", in other words the character from the previous song and by implication the audience in general, do not, and he is very cheerful about the situation. What follows is a bravura performance in which a malevolently cynical, Gilbert and Sullivanesque text is sung to a burlesque melody of unrestrained triteness and jollity, reminiscent of Rossini and the purest opera buffa. To hear Kreisler perform the text shows his mastery of breath control and phrasing. To see him shows his command of the self-satisfied leer; he gloats as he surveys the audience and rationalises his unabashed exploitation of "you". The song is a tour de force which elicits delight, admiration, and particularly enthusiastic applause.
Does this mean that the audience is then absolved from further preoccupation with the problem? Yes and no. With such a song, the dominant feature resonating in the listener's memory is likely to be its brilliance, not its politics; the created artefact is fundamentally what counts, and it is in the nature of things that the artist provides a product that the audience wants to applaud, that the audience wants to go home happy. But the theme worms its way back into one's consciousness; above all its treatment encourages it to be taken simultaneously at two distinct levels: on the one hand the concrete context-bound, and utterly unmisunderstandable, situation of the "fat cat" telling the "man/woman on the street" a thing or two about how life works, and on the other a more universal instance of Darwinism in human social relationships, of "I'm alright Jack" at a simple level or "man's inhumanity to man" at a more inflated one. What makes this duality possible are factors such as the clarity and concision with which the characterisation is drawn, and the strict control of the contextual signposts such as mentioning the constitution, which clearly binds the narrative to the Federal Republic and its pride in its Verfassung.
What is more problematical is the inevitable tendency for such cabaret work to be preaching to the converted. It is highly regrettable that television does not take a more open attitude to Kreisler's work, giving publicity to songs such as the two alluded to here, which are currently unbroadcastable in the German-speaking world. If it did, more people would be able to decide whether they share the view that Kreisler succeeds in combining radical political comment with consummate artistry.
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