Dieter Süverkrüp & Walter Andreas Schwarz - Erich Mühsam - Ich lade Euch zum Requiem (1986)

Erich Mühsam (6 April 1878 in Berlin, Germany – 10 July 1934 Oranienburg Concentration Camp) was a German-Jewish anarchist, writer, poet, dramatist and cabaret performer.
Both a prolific poet, dramatist and a Bohemian intellectual, Mühsam emerged at the end of World War I as one of the leading agitators for a federated Bavarian Soviet Republic. However, Mühsam achieved international prominence during the years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) for works which satirized Adolf Hitler and condemned Nazism before Hitler came to power in 1933.

Erich Mühsam was an anarchist who despised dogma & close-mindedness. He believed in the power of the individual & the power of the lowest classes of society.

At Sonnenburg, the first Concentration Camp where Mühsam was held, it was reported:
"After breaking his teeth with musket blows; stamping a swastika on his scalp with a red-hot brand; subjecting him to tortures which caused him to be taken into a hospital, even now the fascist hyenas of the Sonnenburg concentration camp continue their beastly attacks upon this defenseless man. The last news are really atrocious: the Nazi forced our comrade to dig his own grave and then with a simulated execution made him go through the agony of a doomed man. Although his body has been reduced to a mass of bleeding and tumefied flesh, his spirit is still very high: when his traducers tried to force him to sing the Horst-Wessel-Lied (the Nazi's anthem) he defied their anger by singing the International." (from: "The Nazi Regime at Work: Erich Mühsam" in MAN! A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement. Vol. 2, No. 3, March 1934)

On this album Dieter Süverkrüp, Walter Andreas Schwarz and Vridolin Enxing (from the polit-rock band "Floh De Cologne") have arranged and interpreted 31 agitation songs, poems and vicious ballads from the estate of Erich Mühsam. The final verse proclaims: "Das Heut´erkennt das Gestrn nicht, / trotz Ruhmeskranz und Seelenmessen. - / Wer Zukunft schuf, bleibt unvergessen. / Erst die Geschichte hält Gericht." Mühsam´s requiem for his dead revolutionary colleagues had different connotations for a West German audience than for one in the GDR. In the GDR, these lines were dripping with irony even as late as the 1980s because of the hollowness of the state´s claims to be the continuation of this past - the dead revolutionaires had indeed effectively been forgotten. In the West German version, on the other hand, there is no intended irony, only the invoking of a tradition in a country were radical socialism has ceased to play a majore cultural role. By 1986, the heady days of student rebellion were longe gone. Süverkrüp and Schwarz´s modest motivation is to keep the spirit alive "für die, die auf dem beschwerichen Weg in die Zukunft Mühsams Idealismus brauchen als Stärkung und Bestätigung", as the booklet informs us.

Dieter Süverkrüp & Walter Andreas Schwarz - Erich Mühsam - Ich lade Euch zum Requiem
(192 kbps, front cover included)