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Literary Heritage in the ‘Clowns‐Liedertheater’ of Wenzel and Mensching
Author(s) -
Robb David
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0483.00141
Subject(s) - ideology , musical , literature , lyrics , german , art , unification , singing , rhetoric , politics , philosophy , art history , law , linguistics , political science , computer science , economics , programming language , management
Hans‐Eckardt Wenzel and Steffen Mensching are two highly acclaimed East German poets who together play the clowns ‘Weh’ and ‘Meh’ in a musical and literary cabaret act which has successfully spanned two political systems. They achieved fame in the 1980s with satirical productions such as the Hammer=Rehwü and the Da Da eR clowns’ series. Due to the heightened sensitivity surrounding the GDR public stage they decided to abandon singing their own lyrics and to express themselves via texts from poets of the literary ‘Erbe’. Using a technique of musical and theatrical disruption, they constructed montages from texts by, for example, Goethe, Hölderlin and Heine, highlighting where these ironically clashed with the ideological rhetoric of the GDR state. This literary montage approach has also served them well in the 1990s. Wenzel and Mensching’s Aufenthalt in der Hölle, inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer, reflects the disorientation of the early years of unification and forms a clownesque account of the conflicts of a new society of winners and losers.