Cabaret Prize – Egersdörfer: In the pleasant surf of madness

Egersdörfer, with whom I am friends – it is appropriate to say this in advance – and who have written two books, recently received the Wolfram von Eschenbach Prize, a prestigious award that Karlheinz Deschner and Fitzgerald Kusz, among others, had already received.

On this occasion, the “Nürnberger Nachrichten”, this plague paper, had an employee of the features section hallucinate in the headline that Matthias Egersdörfer was a “cabaret veteran” (make two mistakes with two words, you have to be able to do that), and then the pitiful lines of text after the line and desecrate thread, for example like this: »Here he presents himself as a grumbling (sic!), loudly rumbling (sic!) Franken (sic!), who faces the challenges of the world with subtle, black humor and choleric tendencies” – probably thanks to his “almost sensitive, melancholic side” with which he almost “generalizes” his own experiences, which is… Cosmos of art should not be a rare mishap.

The gentleman from the newspaper’s conclusion made me laugh in a Homeric way, and I called Egersdörfer and said with a snort that he could pack up now, he was done for. And I quoted: “Due to his depth and versatility, he is a true enrichment for Franconian cultural life.” Not just an enrichment, but one that is not false – it would be difficult to find a worse insult, the Bamberg public prosecutor’s office should take note of that If so, accept.

By the way, there is no “Franconian cultural life”. A few gifted “individuals” (Polt) in this area are sticking their heads out of the morass of dullness, anti-intellectualism and zealotry, and for this they usually get fried and from then on they hide in silence.

In a conversation with SWR, Matthias Egersdörfer confessed that his great art, which, modest as he is, he would never describe as such, was born out of “deep need.” In his stage monologues, in which he indulges in the logical connection of the inconsequential, in these trips of confusion, despair, sadness, horror (now and then: anger), perfectly modeled in mime and speech music, he strips off so-called reality and presents it them in front of you as a spirit realm. Behind the surreal, sometimes lovingly breathy mountain of words stands a white or a black wall that the (unknown) painter Egersdörfer will never show. He, this real burden on Franconian cultural life, talks about transience and no one notices (the newspaper editor naturally doesn’t anyway).

“I don’t want to explain to people what is right and left and what right belief is,” said Matthias Egersdörfer on SWR. »I find that pretty terrible. (…) I don’t want to tell anyone where it’s going” – a typical cabaret artist who, as he says in a successful feature on Deutschlandfunk from 2016, doesn’t like to “coarsen and dumb down”, like a Böhmi and a Bosetti and this institutional Geschwörl with his current “Arschgewaaf” (Egersdörfer), which truly enriches German television life. However, it would be funny to talk to Odo Marquard, evidence of an “incompetence compensatory skill” that maneuvers you into the next dark corner. “Dead ends are very important,” grumbles Egersdörfer in the DLF.

Imagination is the only way out of the cellar of the eternal imposition called domination. Egersdörfer presented a benchmark story in this regard in a BR television program. It’s called “The Espresso Cup” and anyone who doesn’t watch it on YouTube belongs to the cat.

We have no idea, but we can express it and, at best, decorate it. Humility before the impenetrable existence weaves through the silliest and crudest video sequence that Egersdörfer improvises with his actor friends Claudia Schulz and Andy Maurice Mueller in an allotment garden (can be seen on egers.de). This is what Ionesco and Cioran would have written if they had been funny – or spoken like Egersdörfer in the “News from the Secret Annex” that he grumbled into his smartphone during the Corona terror.

Matthias Egersdörfer recently performed with his boy band Fast zu Fürth at the “Weißer Roß” in Immeldorf. Since Walter Hertle opened it in 1978, the restaurant in a half-timbered house from the 18th century has enjoyed an enormous reputation as a somehow staunchly left-wing late hippie establishment – suspected by the stupid Franconians, praised by the deviants. Low ceilings, dim lighting, wood paneling, labels, stickers, posters, signs, instruments, mugs – this is where the Krautrockers Jane (the one with the terrible vocals, the terrible guitar sound, the flat riffs, the hellish arrangements) once played and the record »Jane At Home – Live was owned by everyone) and the musically high-quality, psychedelic, jazz-oriented experimental anarcho band Guru Guru from the Odenwald.

So Egersdörfer, Lothar Gröschel and Tilo Heider performed the epic meditation recitative “La Meer”, crooked gstanzln, folk songs between NDW and atonality or in a Celtic-Balkanese tinge of scrambling, sentimental avant-garde nonsense close to Dadaist art rock. The disparity, the contradiction is the source of comedy. A deeply sung kiss is followed by the rhyme: “Please finish it!”

“Almost zu Fürth embodies hysterical phlegm,” one self-portrayal says, quite rightly. I would like to praise not only the hit songs “Say what you like”, “When it rains” and “Stalingrad” (to the tune of “Jingle Bells”) as well as the brilliant escalation of nothingness “Haus auf Sand”, but especially the ontological exercise “Fly,” which leads into an adversarial, worship-like sing-along passage à la “Life Is Life”: “Existence in ruins – nanaanaanana!”

The story of the origins of Fast zu Fürth and the founding and operation of the Winterstein cultural association in Franconian Switzerland is told in Egersdörfer and Gröschel’s wonderfully old-fashioned miracle book “The Laughter of the Green Woodpecker – A highly adventurous story about friendship, art and madness in Franconian Switzerland”, published in 2023 Province”. It is almost impossible to adequately discuss the problem. A Jean Paul-esque tangle of sections in an artificial fairytale tone, rowdy, exuberant puns, “fabulously confusing stuff”, bursting plasticity, intoxicatingly opulent imagery, allusions and allotria surround the reader’s head, and perhaps this would be a knee-jerk (educational) novel about the activities of four art hallodris and “all-time dilettantes” who In 1993, the oxymoron “Protestant Baroque” was appropriate when they grabbed a farm “in reckless joy.”

“The Laughter of the Green Woodpecker” is a homage to home, a Dionysian-Lucullian celebration of certain traditions (eating bread, sausage, beer, schnapps) and a wistful memory of the 1990s, of this magnificently free time in which the feeling security went hand in hand with the will to be “inexperienced and naive or crazy and careless,” as Egersdörfer explains on BR television.

Actual art thrives in the hinterland, in the comfortable chaos, in the vastness of confinement. In the Winterstein community, in this pigsty, in this “mill of happy madness”, in this elective shared apartment, exhibitions, happenings and “oddities” took place around the clock; HC Artmann, Henscheid and Max Blaeulich read. There was drinking, drinking and eating (“city sausage and press sack massacre”), and at the center of the social, leisurely ecstasies was Moll Philipp, the universalist, humanitarian and hedonist who died in 2016, who countered the Protestant hostility to pleasure by teaching “good sausage awareness to eat”, and mocked the pomp and mendacity of the art scene (be sure to see the documentary “The Moll from Lauf Links – Obituary for a very special person”, 2017, DVD available from Medien Praxis).

“The Laughter of the Green Woodpecker”, this story of liberation from the many humiliations of youth and the achievement of autonomy, begins – and this requires more than courage – with a long description of Matthias Egersdörfer’s stay in the closed room, and it climbs up his Summit in a crazy chapter about a theological symposium in the kitchen, which Egersdörfer and Gröschel, “you won’t believe it” (Heino Jaeger), co-authored. I haven’t read anything like this since Laurence Sterne.

On January 11th, Egersdörfer will receive the German Cabaret Prize in Nuremberg. In terms of content, this is completely fine. But the name of the honor is once again: wrong. German Total Art Prize was halfway there.

Matthias Egersdörfer / Lothar Gröschel: The Laugh of the Green Woodpecker: A highly adventurous story about friendship, art and madness in the Franconian province. Starfruit, 248 pages, hardcover, €26.