The Weimar Spectacle

Send us a Text Message. What do you get when you mix a bottle of Laphroaig Whiskey with three charming Weimar raconteurs? A freewheeling conversation that touches on the disturbing, occasionally hopeful, similarities of the Weimar period with our own days, the enduring importance and power of the poetry and plays of Bertolt Brecht, why New Orleans might be a last bastion of Weimar Culture, and on bringing to light some lesser known artists of 1920’s Germany. Over my kitchen table in New Orleans, I was joined by Sarah Brecht, David Symons and Harry Mayronne to discuss their fascination for the Weimar period and Sarah's esteemed Grandfather, Bertolt Brecht.

Send us a Text Message. Many years ago, I started my musical career singing, or maybe I should say screaming, with a Punk band, then eventually, through some very complicated in-between steps, I ended singing Opera, then on to musical theatre, then swinging it with jazz groups, and nowadays, mostly, I’m singing my own original songs. However through all of that, I've been enchanted, inspired, and more than a little obsessed, by the music of Kurt Julien Weil. I've sung Weill’s music in lovely concert halls and dark saloons, I've sung his music accompanied by rock guitar, punk bands and jazz quartets, and I've never grown tired of his songs. And I believe that is because Kurt Weill was a wild and crazy Punk Rocker, and that’s what I intend to prove in this episode.

Send us a Text Message. On October 29th, 1918, only a few days before the official end of WW1, in Kiel, a naval port on Germany’s northern coast, sailors in the German Imperial Navy staged a mutiny that would spark revolutions across Germany, would lead to the formation of a new state with a constitution recognizing radical new human rights, and ultimately would lead to the rise of the Nazi Party. The Sailors were responding to the unauthorized decision by the Imperial Navy Command to take the entire fleet and engage in one final suicidal battle against the Royal Navy. The German Naval officers believed it was better for the sailors to die gloriously in battle at sea than to accept the upcoming, so called, dishonorable peace settlement and go home alive. The sailors, however, thought differently. www.bremnersings.com

Send us a Text Message. We’re going to leap into some of the fun, crazy and sometimes completely mad of the Weimar days, i.e. the wild sexual revolution that appeared in in Berlin and to a lesser degree across Germany. My big idea for this episode is that in Post-WW1 Germany, people had seen so much death, they searched for life through sex and rejoicing in their bodies. The war had proved a beautiful body could be easily broken or snuffed out and so pleasure was not to be delayed. But sexuality became a brutal battleground in the fight for which ideas and morality would govern a new Germany.

Send us a Text Message. In this first episode we'll take a quick overview of birth, brief life and death of the Weimar Republic and ask the big, big question: 'Why care about a failed European state that only lasted 14 years and was a hot mess from the start'.