Singing between the chairs

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Cover of the first edition of 1932 Singing Between the Chairs

Singing between the chairs is a book of poetry by Erich Kästner published in 1932 .

content

The 47 rhymed poems in different meters have a wide range of contents and deal with personal, generally philosophical, everyday as well as political topics. The poem Das Herz im Spiegel describes the experience of the poet suffering from a weak heart with an “ orthodiagram ” and contrasts the anatomical-medical view of the heart with the metaphorical meaning. The encounter with a drying place reflects a childhood experience and the memory of the mother, the ballad of distrust suggests an unhappy love story and the proximity of the forest cemetery reflects a funeral.

As with a motto that is as time-related as it is universal, the volume is presented with the poem What also happens! opened:

"Whatever happens: you should
never sink so deeply
from the cocoa through which you are drawn,
and drink."

The view of Kästner in the political poems is partly only hinted at, like the criticism of the Turner movement in The Handstand on the Loreley , partly the poems refer to events of the day such as in The Ballad of Imitation Instinct or turn against the re-emerging militarization with reference to the First World War and the National Socialist movement, for example in the poems Die deutsche Einheitspartei , Verdun, many years later , Marschliedchen or Das impotent Dialogue , an accusingly gloomy poem in a dialogue between a questioner and a chronicler who closes the volume. Some poems, such as The Development of Mankind and The Synthetic Man, deal with philosophical subjects that move the personal and the political at the same time.

Some of the poems are provided with counterpointing "notes" by Kästner. One example is the poem Letter to My Son, both personal and political . It moves the expectations and fears of an as yet ungenerated imaginary son and closes with the stanza: “If you still become a person like most of them, / everything that I made you look at as a mockery, / a guy like everyone else, over a bar , / then you will never be what you should be: my son. ”Referring to the line of text in the first stanza,“ All I need is the mother of the child ”, there is a comment after the poem that the author has after publication of the poem received letters from girls and women in a magazine and pointed out that written offers of this kind would not be considered. The poem The Giant Toy is followed by the remark that the number of young unemployed is more than a million.

The poems

  • Whatever happens!
  • The evolution of mankind
  • The ballad of distrust
  • Letter to my son
  • Necrology for the painter EH
  • In a foreign country, so to speak
  • To a monster in an evening dress
  • The handstand on the Loreley
  • Meeting in a small town
  • The synthetic man
  • The leader problem, genetically
  • Hunger is curable
  • On a small bench in front of a large bench
  • Near the forest cemetery
  • The giant toy
  • Inscription on a Saxon-Prussian boundary stone
  • Exemplary autumn night
  • Recitation in rainy weather
  • Ball in the east: daily beach party
  • A Quartan thinks at the sight of the teacher
  • Encounter with a drying area
  • The ballad from Mr. Steinherz
  • Elegy on all sides
  • Mathilde, but framed
  • The dream of swapping faces
  • An example of everlasting love
  • The homecoming of the prodigal son
  • Sadness everyone knows
  • Director Körner is inattentive
  • Letter from a heart bath
  • The ballad of the instinct for imitation
  • The railway parable
  • An animation lady gets in touch
  • Legend, not quite house trained
  • Young man, 5 a.m.
  • Current album verses
  • The German Unity Party
  • Balance by chance
  • The regulated contemporary
  • Verdun, many years later
  • Small arithmetic problem
  • The heart in the mirror
  • Marching songs
  • One cubic kilometer is enough
  • Walk after a disappointment
  • The grandparents have visitors
  • The impotent dialogue

history

Erich Ohser : Cover of the first edition, 1932

Singing between the chairs is Kästner's third volume of poetry after Herz auf Taille (1928) and Lärm im Spiegel (1929). It first appeared in October 1932 in the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in Stuttgart. The first edition from 1932 comprises 111 pages and 12 drawn vignettes by Erich Ohser . The cover drawing also comes from Ohser and shows large people sitting on chairs from behind, who are seated like in a theater and give a bizarre martial impression. One man carries a raised rifle, other people have raised their hands. Between the chairs, the front view of the singer can be seen, in the proportions only about a third of the size of the seated person, with his mouth wide open, which characterizes both the singing and despair or futility, which is also reflected in the fact that the audience of turned away from him. The volume itself is bound in black linen, the writing is embossed with gold, on the front in German script , on the spine in Latin script .

On May 10, 1933 Gesang fell victim to the book burning in Berlin, together with the other two volumes of poetry and all works except for the children's book Emil and the Detectives , at which Kästner himself was present. The books were banned.

In 1944 Frederick Ungar published the work in his New York publishing house . In 1961 Cecilie Dressler Verlag published a special edition of 400 numbered and signed by Kästner copies in a light blue silk batiste binding with embossed lettering on the spine in a slipcase . At the same time, the publisher issued a paperback edition. Since then, other issues have appeared in various publishers.

reception

After the poems appeared, the press wrote that Kästner was a poet who never pursued anything other than his heart. He was too stupid to resent because he was too clever, and so he found the only possible and sensible way out: "He sings between the chairs between which the situation of 1932 put him." On the one hand, Kästner's poems are considered easy to read, something after its publication led to poems being read again. On the other hand, at the time of the rise of National Socialism, he said what no one dared to say. He himself was a man caught between the chairs who, as a determined individualist, always took sides. Marcel Reich-Ranicki said that due to "dark and bitter poems", Kästner was "Germany's most hopeful pessimist and German literature's most positive advice of negation."

Due to the singing nature of the poems, some of them were set to music and found their way into cabaret .

Expenses (selection)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uwe-Jens Schumann: Erich Kästner and the book burning "It was disgusting" Spiegel story from May 8, 2013. Retrieved on March 28, 2020
  2. ↑ Rudolf Walter Leonhardt: Mein Kästner: Memories of the poet and friend on the 100th birthday . In: Die Zeit 07/1999.
  3. ↑ Quoted from the back of the paperback edition by Cecilie Dressler Verlag, 1961.
  4. ↑ Between all stools. In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur . July 26, 2014, accessed on March 28, 2020 (to repeat the broadcast with Udo Samel and the Berlin cabaret ensemble Tingeltangel on the 40th anniversary of Erich Kästner's death).
  5. ↑ Sandra Schumacher: Texts by Erich Kästner are more current than ever. In: Westfälischer Anzeiger . September 14, 2012, accessed on March 28, 2020 (Kästner Interpretations Hans Georgi).
  6. ↑ Sergio Vesely : The development of mankind. In: all Goethe, ... or what ?! available online
  7. ↑ An animation lady gets in touch. In: YouTube . May 4, 2012, accessed on March 28, 2020 (Rüdiger Wolff sings and reads his Erich Kästner program in the Winterhuder Fährhaus Hamburg).