a musical-documentary revue
With a musical revue in the best 20s tradition, Gonska & Bergner revive this decade of contrasts. We hear a lot of music, jazzy settings of great poetry from the time between the world wars. In addition, the two actors unfold a lively panorama of this decade in the accounts of well-known contemporaries such as Friedrich Hollaender, Oskar Maria Graf, George Grosz and Kurt Tucholsky.
We get to know a Germany that, after world war and revolution, tries to establish a new culture and art in metropolises marked by hunger and loss.
But it's not just the celebrities of those years who have their say. With a piece of his own family history, author Bergner tells how his grandfather, after wartime service in the Imperial Navy and the Kiel sailor uprising, tried with little luck to work out a modest bit of prosperity for his family in provincial Saxony. And how his eldest daughter enthusiastically chases the promises of the National Socialists after her father's early death. Thus the German 1920s end turbulently, with hopes both small and large, but also - as we know today - with a dark foreboding.
Silke Gonska - vocals, spoken word, percussion
Frieder W. Bergner - concept, composition, trombone, tuba, vocals, spoken texts, technique
