"Jage die Ängste fort" – Reading Poetry by: Mascha Kaléko

Thus ends one of the best-known poems by Mascha Kaléko (born 1907 in Chrzanów, Galicia; died 1975 in Zurich), who today is regarded as the most widely read German poet. In his Kaléko biography Wenn ich eine Wolke wäre (Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2025), Volker Weidermann focuses above all on the year 1956, when Mascha Kaléko—after long hesitation—sets foot on German soil again for the first time after almost two decades in exile, “die erste Deutschlandreise, / Seit man vor tausend Jahren mich verbannt.”

In the early 1930s, before the war, she was a star in Berlin with her cheerful, life-affirming poems that vividly and accessibly captured the everyday life of the modern metropolis. At the Romanisches Café—on the site where the Europa-Center now stands—she associated with writers of the Neue Sachlichkeit such as Erich Kästner and Kurt Tucholsky. Franz Hessel eventually became her mentor, and her debut volume Das lyrische Stenogrammheft, published by Rowohlt in 1933, was a popular success.

A few years later, just in time, Mascha Kaléko—who came from an Austrian-Russian-Jewish family—fled the Nazi regime to the United States with her second husband, the composer Chemjo Vinaver, and their son. As a poet, however, she failed to gain a foothold there; the volume Verse für Zeitgenossen (1944) met with little response (Thomas Mann attested to it “eine gewisse aufgeräumte Melancholie”). 

When she returned to Germany in 1956 at the urging of her publisher, she was initially received with great enthusiasm, and it seemed as though she might reconnect with her earlier success through a reissue of the Stenogrammheft. Yet the intoxication was short-lived: the bitter, accusatory tone of her new poems, shaped by expulsion and life in exile, met with little resonance, unlike her early, carefree texts.

When in 1959 she declined the Fontane Prize of the Academy of the Arts, which was to be awarded to her by the former SS member Hans Egon Holthusen, the mood shifted markedly. “Wenn es den Emigranten nicht gefällt, wie wir die Dinge hier handhaben, dann sollen sie doch fortbleiben,” she was told. Shortly thereafter, she moved with her husband to Jerusalem, but never felt at home there either. Loss and homelessness were defining experiences: in the years that followed, first her son died, then her husband. Two years before her own death, she wrote the following lines: “Mein schönstes Gedicht ...? / Ich schrieb es nicht. / Aus tiefsten Tiefen stieg es. / Ich schwieg es.”

On this evening, Max Czollek, Monika Grütters, and Volker Weidermann will speak with Asmus Trautsch about Mascha Kaléko’s writing and read from her poems.

Reading & Talk: Max Czollek, Monika Grütters, Volker Weidermann
Moderation: Asmus Trautsch

Before the event, a warm-up on Kaléko's poems will take place starting at 5:30 pm. The warm-up session facilitates access to Kaléko’s poetry and enables a deeper understanding of her poems. In a small group of up to twelve participants, the poems will be read, interpreted, and discussed collectively.

With: Birgit Kreipe

Please note: Both events will be held in German.

Tuesday, February 17
Kuppelhalle
5:30 pm: Warm-Up
7:30 pm: Reading
Tickets