Kurt Julian Weill was a German composer, active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall. He became a United States citizen on August 27, 1943.
Hanns Eisler was an Austrian composer. He is best known for composing the national anthem of East Germany, for his long artistic association with Bertolt Brecht, and for the scores he wrote for films. The Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" is named after him.
Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Busch was a German singer and actor.
Gerhart Eisler was a German politician. Along with his sister Ruth Fischer, he was a very early member of the Austrian German Communist Party (KPDÖ) and then a prominent member of the Communist Party of Germany during the Weimar Republic.
Dagmar Krause is a German singer, best known for her work with avant-rock groups including Slapp Happy, Henry Cow, and Art Bears. She is also noted for her coverage of songs by Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler. Her unusual singing style makes her voice instantly recognisable and has defined the sound of many of the bands with whom she has worked.
The Decision, frequently translated as The Measures Taken, is a Lehrstück and agitprop cantata by the twentieth-century German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Created in collaboration with composer Hanns Eisler and director Slatan Dudow, it consists of eight sections in prose and unrhymed, free verse, with six major songs. A note to the text by all three collaborators describes it as an "attempt to use a didactic piece to make familiar an attitude of positive intervention."
Round Heads and Pointed Heads is an epic parable play written by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, in collaboration with Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and the composer Hanns Eisler. The play's subtitle is Money Calls to Money and its authors describe it as "a tale of horror." The play is a satirical anti-Nazi parable about a fictitious country called Yahoo in which the rulers maintain their control by setting the people with round heads against those with pointed heads, thereby substituting racial relations for their antagonistic class relations. The play is composed of 11 scenes in prose and blank verse and 13 songs. Unlike another of Brecht's plays from this period, The Mother, Round Heads and Pointed Heads was addressed to a wide audience, Brecht suggested, and took account of "purely entertainment considerations." Brecht's notes on the play, written in 1936, contain the earliest theoretical application of his "defamiliarization" principle to his own "non-Aristotelian" drama.
Duck and Cover were a multinational avant-rock septet founded in West Germany in 1983, comprising Chris Cutler (UK), Heiner Goebbels (GER), and Alfred Harth (GER) from Cassiber; Tom Cora (US) and Fred Frith (UK) from Skeleton Crew; Dagmar Krause (GER) from Art Bears; and George Lewis (US) from the ICP Orchestra. The ensemble was initially commissioned for the 1983 Moers Festival at the request of festival director Burkhard Hennen to Alfred Harth.
Supply and Demand: Songs by Brecht / Weill & Eisler is the first solo album by German singer Dagmar Krause released by Hannibal Records in 1986. It is a collection of 16 songs by German composers Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht and sung by Krause in English. She also sang the songs in the original German which were released by Hannibal at the same time on a companion album, Angebot & Nachfrage: Lieder von Brecht / Weill & Eisler.
Let No One Deceive You: Songs of Bertolt Brecht is an album by American folk and blues singer Dave Van Ronk and vocalist Frankie Armstrong, released in 1992. It consists completely of songs by Bertolt Brecht.
Günter Kochan was a German composer. He studied with Boris Blacher and was a master student for composition with Hanns Eisler. From 1967 until his retirement in 1991, he worked as professor for musical composition at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler". He taught master classes in composition at the Academy of Music and the Academy of Arts, Berlin. He was also secretary of the Music Section of the Academy of Arts from 1972 to 1974 and vice-president of the Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR from 1977 to 1982. Kochan is one of eleven laureates to have been awarded the National Prize of the GDR four times. In addition, he received composition prizes in the US and Eastern Europe. He became internationally known in particular for his Symphonies as well as the cantata Die Asche von Birkenau (1965) and his Music for Orchestra No. 2 (1987). His versatile oeuvre included orchestral works, chamber music, choral works, mass songs and film music and is situated between socialist realism and avant-garde.
Eres Holz, is a German composer of Israeli origin. He has been living in Germany since 2003.
Ernst Ottwalt was the pen name of German writer and playwright Ernst Gottwalt Nicolas. A communist, he fled Nazi Germany in 1934 and went into exile in the Soviet Union, where he fell victim to the Great Purge and died in a Soviet gulag. Later, when the Allies of World War II prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials, the chief prosecutor from the Soviet Union quoted from an anti-Nazi book by Ottwalt.
Kurt Tucholsky was a German journalist, satirist, and writer. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Kaspar Hauser, Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger and Ignaz Wrobel. He was silent after 1932 and probably committed suicide.
Sonja Kehler was a German actress and chanson singer, known internationally for her interpretation of works by Bertolt Brecht, first playing his characters on the theatre stage, then focused on singing his songs and those of others in solo programs. She also taught acting in Danish at the theatre academy in Odense, appeared in films, worked as stage director and presented literary programs.
Kate Kühl was a German cabaret performer, chanteuse and film actor. After 1933 her brand of political cabaret was no longer permitted and she found herself subject of a Berufsverbot : she left Berlin and supported herself as a regional (unnamed) radio announcer. She was able to return to the stage after 1945, however.
Roswitha Trexler is a German operatic soprano and mezzo-soprano who became internationally known especially as an interpreter of the music of Hans Eisler and for her commitment to avantgarde vocal music.
"Soldiers are murderers" is a quote from an opinion piece written in 1931 by Kurt Tucholsky and published under his pseudonym Ignaz Wrobel in the weekly German magazine Die Weltbühne. Starting with a lawsuit against the magazine's editor Carl von Ossietzky for "defamation of the Reichswehr" in 1932, Tucholsky's widely quoted assertion led to numerous judicial proceedings in Germany, also after World War II and until the late 20th century. In several cases in the 1990s, last in 1995, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that using the quote as a means to express pacifist views is protected by the constitution of Germany.
Fritz Hennenberg is a German musicologist and dramaturg.
Rheinsberg: Ein Bilderbuch für Verliebte is a story (Erzählung) by Kurt Tucholsky, with illustrations by Kurt Szafranski. Written in 1912, it was the journalist's first literary work. The plot is a weekend trip of a young unmarried pair of lovers from Berlin to Schloss Rheinsberg. The work, written in a light ironic style, was immediately successful. It was adapted to a film, an audio play, and audio books. It was translated in 2015 as Rheinsberg: A Storybook for Lovers.
