For the second time, the Berlin singer-songwriter wraps the timeless poetry of Mascha Kaléko in a folk-pop dress.
Some sentences seem horribly up-to-date. “We have no other time than this, which saddens us with half-filled shame,” sings Dota, before Dirk von Lowtzow’s grumpy bass begins: “We grew old before we were young / Our life is not yet dying.” Mascha Kaléko’s poetry was long forgotten before she was rediscovered by the Berlin singer-songwriter Dota, who once found fame as a street musician with small change.
In 2020 she set poems by Kaléko, who died in 1975, to music with the support of Hannes Wader, Konstantin Wecker and others. On the follow-up IN DER FERNSTEN DER FERNE your band chooses a very warm, but above all unobtrusive folk-pop sound, which puts the focus on the words, validates them and lets them shimmer.
And space is given to the many different voices, because again the prominent names jostle: besides the Tocotronic chairman, there are Gisbert zu Knyphausen, Malonda, Sarah Lesch or Funny van Dannen, but also the comedian Anna Mateur. She is allowed to sing “The Possible” at the start: “I’ve even managed the impossible, but I can’t do the possible.” Yes, that sounds like a deep sigh of Generation Z, Kaléko is so receptive, with her quietly mocking, but very Local urban poetry was still successful in the Weimar Republic before it was banned by the Nazis because it was Jewish.