Does it first take a Dutchman to show the Germans which entertainment treasures they have long forgotten? That’s what Robert Kreis, the Dutch cabaret artist and pianist, hears a lot.
The programs of the entertainer, who was born in Indonesia in 1949 and who counters any retro wave with the consistency of a joke production that seems timeless, naturally also serve an educational purpose. They transfer the 1920s from back then to the 1920s of today and pay homage to artists such as Willy Rosen, Fritz Grünbaum and Franz Engel. This is one of the reasons why Kreis has just been awarded the Federal Cross of Merit.
In the foreground, however, is the attempt to make people laugh for two hours with musically decorated jokes and subtleties in order to make them forget the difficult times we live in for a moment. Times, by the way, which are almost eerily similar to those of the 1920s (inflation, pandemics, the decay of values, the brutalization and dumbing down of people – crises wherever you look). With one difference: “People used to have more on their minds.”
Robert Kreis and the charming joke
Since 1973, Kreis, now 73 years old, has performed over 8,000 times. This year he celebrates his 50th year on the stage. He sees his art less as a memorial to the restless spirits to whom he pays homage, and more as a way to hear and see. “The issues from back then are still the issues of today,” says Kreis less critically, but exhilarated by this almost strange idea. “Back then, people also talked about how people had lost their sensitivity or why the entertainment program was getting worse and worse.”
He can transfer the subtle remarks from so many texts 1:1 without loss of meaning, says the circle, which has long since become a Berliner, who describes himself as a man of the old school and pursues a stage trade that is practiced in his homeland, for example, by the great Toon Hermanns exemplified Above all, he never ran out of jokes about love and marriage (“Love makes you blind, but marriage makes you clairvoyant. If you have a quick-witted wife, you should register her in a tennis club.”)
Of course, this prankster, who is more passionate and also more polite than many 20-year-olds in conversation, does not want to hurt his audience or confront them with malicious things. On the one hand, this is because everything is “crystal clear” on his cabaret evenings. “People don’t have to think deeply.” His motto: class instead of mass. On the other hand, it is also because he wanted to attract gourmets who, after two hours of diaphragm training, put their arms around their partner and also feel like part of a family with everyone else in the room.
“You have to laugh at your audience, but never laugh at them,” says Kreis. He has some such wisdom ready and likes to share it with his listeners. He keeps fit with his life’s work. “It’s like lifting the Titanic every time you find something new to fit the program.” He has a group of friends and collectors who call him the moment they dig something up. The danger of becoming nostalgic has long been averted, because Kreis not only traces life in Berlin during the Weimar period (which he considers to be a culturally unprecedented epoch), he almost merges with it. He has always lived in 1920s-style apartments, and paintings and music from this period have accompanied him for a long time. And old 78rpm records. He calls an entire collection his own. “Others take drugs, I take shellac,” he laughs.
While most of his evenings are a joyful reminiscence of old times, he also provides emotional moments of understanding between the generations with his series “Bevered, persecuted, forgotten!”, based on Ulrich Liebe’s book about actors persecuted by the Nazis. Sometimes relatives of murdered Jews visited there. Kreis tells of an encounter in Frankfurt that has stuck with him. A very robust man of 92 addressed him, “a personality, a great guy with beautiful but broken eyes”. The guest turned out to be an Auschwitz survivor who was crammed into the cattle car bound for actor Kurt Gerron in the direction of the concentration camp. Gerron became known as the police chief of London in Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. In 1944, the SS forced him to make a propaganda film about Theresienstadt. Together with everyone involved, he was gassed by the Nazis in Auschwitz. Even as he got off the deportation train, when he said his name, he thought: “You will definitely make an exception for me.” They didn’t do that.
Robert Kreis is aware of the tragic background of his working basis, but he is not a doubter, not a warning. Instead, he is more relaxed about the fact that humor will always be a means of connection – and, quite old-fashioned, an effective weapon against death and grief. “I’ve had a great life,” he sums up – with the still unfinished autobiography in mind. “I’ve seen half the world and lived in many places. Sometimes I look up and say, ‘Thank you! That was great. You must like me a lot to believe me capable of all this.”
This trust in himself and a heavenly power that may forgive, but above all pats the cheerful people on the back, possibly also characterizes his song and word art, which makes no secret of the fact that it is first and foremost a revival. Robert Kreis therefore sees himself as a humble mediator and a mischievous conservator. And he’s always as happy as a small child when a play on words or a smutty sparks off just as much in our times as it did in the 20’s, which have long been left behind.
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