Revue Roter hype – art is still weapon

A little is already tired of historical comparison. The Weimar years are used everywhere to explain the broken present and to warn what can come. There are certainly some parallels: the fascists are on the rise again; You don’t know exactly whether the preparations for the next war are still made or whether you are already in the middle of it; And the louder they call a democracy, the more violently the others are already turning away. Obviously, the differences are also.

It takes a little bit of joke and the right handle, with which you can really get packed yesterday and today. Not a bad idea of ​​taking up again Erwin Piscator’s “Revue Roter Rummel”, which has been stuffed in the collective memory.

We remember: Erwin Piscator, that was in the interwar period of the theater maker who – at times with Brecht step – promoted the performing art into the here and now. One of his many scandalized spectacles was entitled “Revue Roter Rummel”, first listed in November 1924. For this evenings between cabaret and agitprop, vocals and fast scenes, workers and actors came together on the stage. The music had written Edmund Maisel, got the text Felix Gasbarra.

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The coalition of the Center Party and German National People’s Party had just burst under the tolerance of the right social democracy and new elections were pending. This was the right moment for the artists to give a cancellation of the politic circus supported by capital and to ask about the actual interests of the election people. This is how the first “proletarian revue” was created, as it was said in the contemporary press. Workers were not only on stage, the performances not only took place outside in the workers’ quarters in Berlin, the protagonists of these colorful evenings were also workers. With plenty of humor and less squeamish, the conditions have been put on the dock and dreamed of the big change. The artistic principle has made school: soon there was “red reviews” land on land.

At the turn of the millennium, the Berlin Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, largely on the initiative of the then chief stage designer Bert Neumann, was reminiscent of this art form and with the “rolling road show” an updating appropriation of the original to the Berlin margin district.

It may not have become more comfortable in the past quarter of a century, it is still chosen. That is why a multimedia election theater is invited to a “Revue Roter Rummel” with the subtitle “. Perhaps nowadays there is a lack of communist mass movement and a new piscator has not yet been spotted in the theater sky, but laughing at the rulers is still the first crucial step to feel power.

On February 14th at 7 p.m., a political spectacle will take place as a new edition of the “Revue Roter Rummel” in the coinberg hall on Franz-Mehring-Platz 1 in Berlin-Friedrichshain.

www.roterrummel.berlin