VA - Singt eener uff´n Hof - Kurt Tucholsky als Kabarettautor

On 10 May 1933, a remarkable act of barbarism, a prelude to the many worse ones that followed, took place in the city of Berlin. Students from the Wilhelm Humboldt University, all of them members of right-wing student organizations, transported books from their university library and from other collections to the Franz Joseph Platz; adjacent to the university. Accompanying their actions with declaimed denunciations of the authors, they proceeded to toss thousands of titles, by writers famous and obscure, foreign and native, into the flames of an already ignited bonfire. The egregiously primitive act lasted for hours, interrupted only by the incantation of Nazi songs and a speech by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

Among the 20,000 volumes hurled into the flames were the writings of Henri Barbusse, Franz Boas, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Förster, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, André Gide, Ernst Glaeser, Maxim Gorki, Werner Hegemann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kästner, Helen Keller, Alfred Kerr, Jack London, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Hugo Preuss, Marcel Proust, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Margaret Sanger, Arthur Schnitzler, Upton Sinclair, Kurt Tucholsky, Jakob Wassermann, H.G. Wells, Theodor Wolff, Emilé Zola, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig.

The next day, and in the weeks following, there was a massive reaction in the world press, especially since many other German university towns imitated this infamous act. German newspapers reported in triumph that Germany was beginning to purge itself of the alien and decadent corrupters of the German spirit, while newspapers and magazines abroad, from as far away as China and Japan, responded in surprise and shock. Even then, some knowledgeable journalists recalled the prediction of the poet Heinrich Heine, who had said a century earlier: "Where one burns books, one will soon burn people."

The album "Singt eener uff´n Hof - Kurt Tucholsky als Kabarettautor" features interpretations of Kurt Tucholsky lyrics, recorded between 1920 and 1966., with artists like Paul Graetz, Kate Kühl, Trude Hesterberg, Claire Waldoff and Ernst Busch.

VA - Singt eener uff´n Hof - Kurt Tucholsky als Kabarettautor
(256 kbps, cover art included)