When hearing the party name “La République en marche!”, Alsatians might also get the idea that the republic is “fucked”, as the poster for a satirical revue in Strasbourg recently revealed.
However, the tendency to play on words and to make crude jokes is evident among satirists all over the world, and as is well known, this was also the case in the German spontaneous scene, which oscillated between radical seriousness and satirical humour, and which emerged after 1968.
In their spirit, the band Ton Steine Scherben was formed, which in 1969 turned the slogan "Break what breaks you" into a song for an agitating play.
It became an anthem of protest culture.
Jan Wiele
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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Shortly thereafter, the singer Rio Reiser (real name Ralph Möbius, the stage name was inspired by Karl Philipp Moritz' artist novel "Anton Reiser") had further spontaneous ideas.
You could hear that on her "Agitrock", and you can still see it impressively on the paper thought game that was created a good ten years later and is shown here from a worksheet for the play "March Storms" in 1981. It refers to the so-called Kapp Putsch of 13. March 1920 and the following Ruhr workers' uprising, combined with the West German present: "The activist theater group performed the uprising as a local revue, interviewed recent contemporary witnesses and was so successful that the 'March Storms' kept coming back to the stage.
It was a piece of left-wing Heimatliteratur," explains Gunilla Eschenbach,
A play on words from the Thirty Years' War
The historical reference, according to Eschenbach and Richter, is “surrounded by barricades of words, syllables, sprinklings.
Rio Reiser smashes the date into sonic and semantic shards.
It seems as if he was looking for rhyming words, an anarchic appropriation of the historical event;
from a distance a literary quotation sounds.
The combination of the god of war 'Mars' and the art 'Ars' comes from Gregor Greflinger's poem 'Mars is now in Ars' from the 17th century.
Already here, against the backdrop of the Thirty Years' War – long before the subculture's affect against elitist 'art shit' – 'Ars' was roughly burlesquely combined with the Old High German 'Arsch'.” With the association “KAPUTT-SCH/KAPPUCI-NO!!! Reiser also rebels “against the cappuccino as a symbol of a hedonistic easy life”, according to the authors:
"Punk shouldn't be the icing on the cake!
And weren't the 1980s," they ask, "the watershed in which a part of the 'lifestyle left' (Wagenknecht) avanti lettera discovered Tuscany as a real, existing utopian place, complete with the first 'little pleasure for the day' (Nietzsche), the frothed milk drink in the morning?
What seems like a lyrical political poem due to the drawing of a harlequin (left) accompanying the text describes the political poetics of the shards in protest and radical self-questioning.”
the frothed milk drink in the morning?
What seems like a lyrical political poem due to the drawing of a harlequin (left) accompanying the text describes the political poetics of the shards in protest and radical self-questioning.”
the frothed milk drink in the morning?
What seems like a lyrical political poem due to the drawing of a harlequin (left) accompanying the text describes the political poetics of the shards in protest and radical self-questioning.”
The literary-historical analysis is of course not the point of the seemingly playful essay with the title "The Color Roth" and the subtitle "Snow White with the seven shards": It is dedicated to today's Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth, who was once the manager of the band Ton Steine Scherben – and, what fewer people may know, also involved in the agitprop theater described.