Fisch ohne Fahrrad

The life, fate and poetry of Mascha Kaléko

She was regarded as the "quiet voice of Berlin": Mascha Kaléko, born in Galicia in 1907, spent her "few shining years" in the 1930s in the capital, where her career as a writer took off in a flash with the "Lyrisches Stenogrammheft". The cheeky, subtle tone of her poems, which often revolved around everyday life and observations of life in the big city, sometimes tipped over into a charmingly snotty sadness, perfectly capturing the attitude to life of the time. "Bright windows glitter on the Tauentzien. You can let yourself drift aimlessly. Cafés flaunt the little bit of greenery and pretend to be 'terraces' along with ivy."In 1938, she was forced to emigrate as a Jew and moved with her family to New York, where Minetta Street became her new address. At the end of the 1950s, she moved to Jerusalem. Her life, characterized by painful losses and the never-ending feeling of foreignness, becomes the material for her "popular poems in the best sense of the word" (Daniel Kehlmann, foreword to "Ich tat die Augen auf und sah das Helle. Poems and Prose", Munich 2024). Although her books sometimes achieved very high print runs after the war and she repeatedly returned to her old homeland, she was denied great fame during her lifetime. "Sometimes I feel as if my heart is breaking. Sometimes I'm homesick. I just don't know what for..."
Barbara Mergenthaler and Katharina Reich approach the poet's life and work through her poetry and biography in scenic moments.A timeless evening about Mascha Kaléko, her philosophical curiosity, poetic perseverance, her search for home, identity and the meaning of life. Timeless and topical.

Playing time:

approx. 1¾ hours, with interval