Süddeutsche Zeitung

[Vaka]

Raw eggs and nasty tongues

In the 1970s there was a power center for cabaret in Munich, where big names also made their first appearances - but many places have disappeared.

From Karl Forster

The fact that a man with three eggs can make a hall riot is also unusual for Munich standards. Edi Eisheuer did it again and again. He juggled these three eggs, raw eggs, of course, on the stage in the back hall of the hacker's house, while telling an unbelievable amount of nonsense. It was this combination of nonsense and dexterity, of nonsense and the risk of failure at throwing eggs that made a happy audience even happier because they loved being entertained in such a simple, innocent way. Here in the Musikalischer Unterholz Sendlinger Straße 75 , MUH for short.

In Edi Eisheuer's egg juggling times she was still alive, Munich's cabaret scene, in the seventies of the last century and a bit beyond. A scene full of weird, bizarre, but sometimes quite ingenious stage virtuosos who were honored with the prefix "small" before their "art". With the type and number of stages that made Munich the Olympus of this almost forgotten art nationwide. A short walk through the (incomplete) past with branches to the present.

If you look for the cradle of this little art of the late economic boom, you end up in Schwabing, of course, at Ursulastraße 9, where the Lach- und Schießgesellschaft has been and still is since 1956 and where, like then, verbose cabaret in the smallest of rooms is offered. But even more responsible for the founding myth of cabaret is Maximilanstraße 31, where the theater "Die Kleine Freiheit" moved from Elisabethstraße in 1951 and for which Erich Kästner wrote cheeky texts, among others. The fact that this theater space now serves as a storage facility for a Gucci store is a very Munich twist.

But the kind of cabaret, as one understands it from the seventies on (and with proportions until today), grew into a magical triangle between the Hackenstrasse, the Einsteinstrasse and the Dreimühlenstrasse, where - in that order - the MUH, the Song Parnass and the song stage Robinson were at home. The principle of programmatic chaos applied here, because the audience enjoyed the variety of a half-hourly changing program, which in turn resulted from the more or less randomly present small artists.

It is thanks to such a coincidence that Fredl Fesl, who has long since grown into a legend, was able to celebrate his stage premiere in the song Parnass. He had taken a liking to the shop as a guest and had found that people who brought an instrument did not have to pay admission. So he took his guitar with him and was taken to a back room of the (still on EinsteinstrasseUnion brewery, the backstage area for artists, and shortly afterwards, to his surprise, invited him onto the stage. Fredl Fesl remedied the lack of a half-hour song repertoire with detailed explanations of his program, which were so insane that they later became an integral part of his program. It was there that Fredl Fesl met his future mentor Arthur Loibl, the doyen of Munich cabaret and interpreter of the Swedish hedonist lyricist Carl Michael Bellmann. When Arthur Loibl, operator of a vegetable stand at Viktualienmarkt, sang on the stages of Song Parnass, MUH and Robinson with great Ernst Bellmann's song about the nymph's jumping breast and the skirt that flipped up while walking, there was almost something like awe in the stalls. Arthur Loibl died on November 11th.

A kind of tour of the small artists developed from stage to stage. There was, for example, Udo Lenze, who shot the well-known song "Der Jäger aus Kurpfalz" through the stylistic meat grinder - from Spanish flamenco to the prayer song of the muezzin to the groovy southern blues; there was the doctorate mathematician Dietrich Paul, who, because he was also a shrewd pianist, as "Piano Paul" with powerful words and playing, drove the "Happy Birthday" from the Baroque fugue to Liszt's Hungarian rhapsodies through music history; there was the university official, poet Helmut Eckl, who (until today!) gave his wonderful Bavarian verses and stories for the best; and there were three young musicians who accompanied their very cheeky and very Bavarian songs on umpteen instruments and called themselves "

You stayed as a guest at the bar of the Robinson song theater in Dreimühlenstraße, one saw nothing of the goings-on of such artists, because the mighty column in the middle of the room blocked the line of sight to the stage. But that couldn't disturb the fun when, for example, the "Guglhupfa" around the later multi-artist Andreas "Andi" Lechner and the dulcimer virtuoso Rudi Zapf played. Here it could happen that the landlady would close the curtains at curfew, lock the door and music-savvy guests would drink and jam with the artists until the early hours of the morning. The Robinson is still there in Vierau, municipality of Runding in the Upper Palatinate. Obeying the need, they moved out in the mid-1980s. What misery? For example, because a three-room apartment in this house near the railway bridge was recently rented for $2,400 excluding rent. Back then that would have been almost 5,000 marks for 100 square meters. The song Parnass has also set its cultural fragrances: The Unionsbräu complex is home to Munich's most exquisite jazz stage, the Unterfahrt, among other things. And in the former MUH, culinary culture prevails in the vegetarian restaurant Prinz Myshkin.

The small artistic power center of this triangle had a kind of control center: the Fraunhofer, an inn with a theater room at Fraunhoferstraße 9 . At the beginning of the seventies, when so many things began, the brewery actually wanted to turn the rather shabby shop into a fast food restaurant like the ones that appeared everywhere back then. But there was Beppi Bachmair, a young trained butcher from the neighborhood, against and asked for a trial year to be allowed to spice up the Fraunhofer and its theater. The rest can be assumed to be known.

The mechanical engineer Werner Winkler was part of Bachmair's clique. Together with Beppi Bachmair and the MUH impressario Uwe Kleinschmidt, he founded the Theater Drehleier in 1976 in a corner house on Balan- and Pariser Strasse. Here the heroes of cabaret from all over the republic and beyond were able to present their full evening program. The hurdy-gurdy became the home of the premiere for Sigi Zimmigart, the most evil of all evil and most eloquent of all eloquent Passau residents. The Dutch music artist Robert Kreis has been a guest here again and again. And here was the uniquely wondrous "Varieté Spectaculum" with the wonderfully crazy Quasimodo, given by the wood carving artist Rainer Strixner. In 1996 the hurdy-gurdy had to move to Rosenheimer Strasse. Today there is a tapas bar in the former theater room. After all, it's called Theatro.

In a completely different quarter of the city, a friend and homeland of Sigi Zimmigart celebrated his first premiere as a cabaret artist. In 1979 Bruno Jonas stood on the stage of the backyard theater at Gabelsberger Straße 50 with his program "On the Lamentation of the Nation". The house, in which the Indian specialty restaurant "Masala" resides today, offered another future star the first opportunity to work in cabaret on a small stage in the back room: Ottfried Fischer founded the "Machtschattengewächse" here. The beginning of a truly impressive career.

And then there would be a somewhat set back house on Kaiserstraße , it bears the number 67 and was not only a refuge of the KEKK, which means cabaret & committed cabaret, but a refuge for all those mostly male representatives of the 68 generation who absolutely do not want to see that they too are getting older: the Heppel & Ettlich. The two names stand for the two Berlin guys who took over the former "Fäustle Garden" around 1976 and turned the theater room at the back into a cultural institution in Schwabing. Unfortunately, it was over in 1996, Wolfgang "Wolle" Ettlich dared to move to the first floor of the also legendary drug store on Wedekindplatzand made fine cabaret there in the best Munich sense. But he too is now withdrawing into private life. The boys, the successors of Edi Eisheuer, who juggles eggs, of the famous Fredl Fesl and the eternal birthday musician Piano Paul, today let off steam on the stage of the clubhouse, near Wedekindplatz and yet far from the former entertainment art.

So the Munich cabaret today is only approximate, as Frank Wedekind put it and as it stands here carved in stone on his fountain: "Strange are the whims of happiness / How no brain has yet devised them / That I am mostly amazed / Can't laugh or cry."

(OOC Editor's note: This is taken from https://www.sueddeutsche.de/ and Translated. I edited it slightly to fit in the MN Universe. I thought it was a nice read.)​

 

[Vaka]

Human rights, made in East Berlin
by Annette Weinke

(Is everything still as it is? The official gallery during the military parade on October 7, 1989 in East Berlin with the Soviet head of state and party leader Mikhail Gorbachev (1st row, 2nd from left) and the GDR State Council Chairman Erich Honecker (1st row, 3rd from left). A few weeks later the Berlin Wall fell, and a year later the division of Germany was over)

When hundreds of thousands of GDR citizens flocked to the streets in autumn 1989 to protest against the arbitrary rule of the SED, the call for human rights suddenly became ubiquitous. Even in the most remote East German provinces, slogans were circulating which - based on the Conference for Security and Cooperation (CSCE) of August 1975 - urged the implementation of "Helsinki human rights".

The fact that human rights played an important role in the collapse of the GDR is one of the basic assumptions of GDR historiography that has hardly been questioned.

According to the historian Ned Richardson-Little, this view was promoted by the active memory work of various actors. After the end of the GDR, the only thing they had in common was often that they were inscribed in a human rights success story that was now prospering worldwide.

Individual representatives of the reform-oriented communist elite, who were also involved in the round table discussions on a draft constitution for the GDR in the spring of 1990, still considered themselves legitimate to underpin their ideas of a continuing GDR with the idea of socialist human rights.

Others saw the mass protests and emigration as proof that the GDR population, with their confession of freedom and liberal human rights, had followed a development that began in the age of the transatlantic revolutions of the late 18th century.

Even if the narrative of an East German romance with western human rights is still very fascinating today, this first overall story of the development of human rights in East Germany shows how one-dimensional and shortening such an interpretation is.

The strength of Richardson-Little's study of cultural history lies primarily in the fact that he not only names the diversity and ambiguity of socialist human rights discourses, but also focuses on their often unforeseeable consequences. This approach, which also explains the easily misunderstood title, is based on a stimulating and provocative initial thesis.

Regardless of the fact that the socialist countries, under the leadership of the Soviet Union, abstained from voting on the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, human rights were nevertheless almost consistently anchored in the political culture of the GDR.

Contrary to what was previously assumed, the communist party and state leadership by no means only fought against human rights, Richardson-Little continued.

While on the one hand a socialist human rights concept had been worked on since the 1950s, which was used alternately against the West German persecution of communists or - on an international level - as a weapon in an anti-imperialist defensive front, the GDR leadership had opposed its own people presented as a pioneer and guardian of economic and social rights. As early as 1959, the SED was the first Eastern Bloc state to announce the establishment of a state committee for the protection of human rights (KMR).

The SED state presented itself as the guardian of the law
As the author can convincingly show, on the one hand the foundations were laid that in the mid-1970s should lead to the GDR supporting basket three of the CSCE Final Act, despite all its reservations. On the other hand, the political effects of the socialist human rights offensive were all the more paradoxical.

Among the states that were the first to establish diplomatic relations with the GDR, the authoritarian monarchies of Cambodia and Iran stood out. In 1986 the Israelis took revenge for the "anti-Zionist" attacks by the UN Human Rights Commission under its chairman Hermann Klenner, legal philosopher, KMR member and long-time unofficial employee of the GDR State Security by making his Nazi past public.

At the end of the eighties, so the punch line of Richardson-Little's book, the SED had gradually slipped out of its hands the socialist human rights discourse that it had previously made acceptable. This created the prerequisite for system-related reform forces, church representatives and various opposition groups to gather behind an unspecified concept of human rights in the run-up to the "peaceful revolution". In this vague and diffuse form, human rights would not have triggered the revolutionary events, but would have made a decisive contribution to their peaceful course.

With his counter-narrative to a long prevalent Western success story, the author undoubtedly enriches our knowledge of the causes and consequences of "1989". But some of his far-reaching conclusions also provoke contradiction. In the final part of the book, Richardson-Little claims that the German-German unification "erased" "alternative visions" of human rights as they had been advocated in East Germany until 1989.

Apart from the fact that those "visions" remained predominantly an elite phenomenon until 1989, this argument also ignores the fact that the price that had to be paid for the many years of propaganda exploitation was the largely empty content and arbitrariness of the socialist human rights discourse. In this respect, the supporters of this discourse, who even after 1989 believed themselves in possession of a superior legal concept, contributed alongside the Cold War liberals to its ongoing discrediting.​