Johannes Kirchberg sings and plays texts by Erich Kästner
People are good," Kästner knew. "Only people are bad" - he wrote. Many of Erich Kästner's sharp observations are part of our everyday vocabulary today: "There is nothing good unless you do it", for example. People speak Kästner without knowing it.
In his homage to Erich Kästner, Johannes Kirchberg makes a deep bow to the poet and presents his own settings of Erich Kästner's contemporary and socially critical poetry. "Ein Mann gibt Auskunft" links Kästner's texts to his biography, searching for and finding references that are the reasons for such well-known poems as "Sachliche Romanze" or "Monolog in der Badewanne".
With great acting persuasiveness and the simplest of means, Kirchberg slips into the role of a furnished gentleman, an unscrupulous war profiteer or a waiter, and brings to life the time between the wars as experienced by the little man. The setting could be a table in a café, the place where many of Kästner's works are known to have been written.
