Mascha Kaleko - Gesungene Lyrik der Dichterin

In the organizer's words:

Mascha Kaleko - sung poetry by the poetess

Hermann Hesse described her as a "poet of the big city": Mascha Kaléko, who felt at home in the big city - in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Here, in the "Romanisches Café", Berlin's hotbed of artists, literary greats such as Erich Kästner, Klabund, Else Lasker-Schüler, Walter Mehring, Erich Mühsam, Joachim Ringelnatz and Kurt Tucholsky, who represented and shaped a new era after the fall of the German Empire, were all at home.
Mascha Kaléko was able to count herself among this progressive-thinking and active circle after publishing her first poems in 1929 in "Querschnitt", one of the most important cultural magazines of the 1920s. Soon, Berlin daily newspapers such as the "Vossische Zeitung" and the "Berliner Tageblatt" were also publishing verses by the "philosopher of the little people", the "female Kästner", as Mascha Kaléko was also known. What the promising writing talent began to put down on paper back then with tenderness and strength, wit and charm, melancholy and authentic humor still touches people today. It is the special talent of this poet to be able to transform feelings, experiences and everyday occurrences into poetry with her own expressive power, as the master of fantasy, James Krüss, once put it: "To use words as if they were clothes with which to dress the world."
Mascha Kaléko's first volume of poetry, "Lyrische Stenogrammheft", was published in January 1933 and was soon declared "harmful and undesirable" by the National Socialists. In September 1938, the Jewish poet emigrated with her family to the USA, where she tried to make a new home for herself in New York.

In their homage, Anna Haentjens and Sven Selle present songs and chansons based on texts by Mascha Kaléko, set to music by composers Herbert Baumann, Jochen Breuer, Gerhard Deutschmann and Edmund Nick.
Anna Haentjens also provides biographical insights into the life of this restless and great artist.

Songs and text by Mascha Kaleko

Performed and sung by Anna Haentjens, Sven Selle at the piano

Price information:

normal: 15 € reduced: 12 €