Robert Stadlober
Eine Reise durch die Zeit
mit Kurt Tucholsky
('A journey through time
with Kurt Tucholsky')
Kurt Tucholsky said that 'when we're not cruel, for a change, we immediately believe that we are good.'
We live in dreadful times! Although we are wont to agree with this sentiment, it has certainly also already been applied to times that seem rather pleasant, from today's perspective. After all, even the 'German Charlie Chaplin', the actor and comedian Karl Valentin, already realised: 'The present is tomorrow's good old days', because how bad are the times, really, compared to others, and were they actually better at any point in time? Does the whole mess that orbits around us maybe constantly repeat itself, time and again? And do we maybe simply lack the necessary broader perspective to actually recognise this mess that continuously orbits around us as precisely this? Robert Stadlober says about his first encounter with Kurt Tucholsky: 'I was suddenly able to look at the lunacy out there with different eyes and could face it with a smile, albeit a lopsided one, and even a cautious gleam of utopianistic hope in one eye, because Tucholsky had to contend with vexations that were very similar to ours, and often even faced worse, and he described all of this precisely and to the point, at the same time delighting in the absurdity of it all.' Robert Stadlober therefore simply turned Tucholsky's written texts into songs about the futilities of human interaction, in matters of love as well as matters of hate, about the senselessness of violence and the hopelessness of any political system that attempts to convey its meaning through violence. At their core is the yearning for a right kind of life and the everlasting struggle of the many for a small piece of the whole. What does all of this have to do with us? Well, apparently, not all that much has changed since then. Our times are probably not really worse, but they are also not better, either.
