Ernst Busch - Merkt ihr nischt - Ernst Busch singt Tucholsky / Eisler

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.

Tracklist:

 1. Die freie Wirtschaft

  2. Wohltätigkeit

  3. Immer raus mit der Mutter

  4. Rosen auf den Weg gestreut

  5. Zuckerbrot und Peitsche

  6. Nach der Schlacht

  7. Merkt ihr nischt

  8. Der Graben

  9. Couplet für Die Bierabteilung

  10. Das alte Vertiko

  11. Feldfrüchte

  12. Vor acht Jahren

  13. Der schlimmste Feind

  14. Das Lied vom Kompromiss

  15. Rückkehr zur Natur

  16. An den deutschen Mond

  17. Friedensweihnachten

  18. Einkäufe

Ernst Busch - Merkt ihr nischt - Ernst Busch singt Tucholsky / Eisler
(320 kbps, cover art included)