DOTA sings Kaléko

DOTA sings Kaléko

Mascha Kaléko began writing in Berlin in the 1920s, publishing in daily newspapers from 1929. Her early poems are trenchant sketches of everyday life in Berlin dialect. She made a name for herself, socializing with the greats of Berlin bohemia in the Romanisches Café. In 1933, her first book "Das lyrische Stenogrammheft" was published and was immediately well received. Her success as a writer came to an abrupt end when the Nazis came to power. As a Jew, she was no longer allowed to publish. She left Berlin in 1938, but the city remained a firm point of reference for her. In one of her last poems, Bleibtreu heißt die Strasse, she writes "40 years ago I lived here [...] My happiness was at home here. And my hardship. This is where my child was born. And had to leave. My friends and the Gestapo visited me here", she concludes with the question "What remained of it? [...] an old wound unscarred"

Dota Kehr is from Berlin and has been writing lyrics, singing and performing with her band DOTA since 2003. They have now recorded 16 albums and played countless tours at home and abroad.

Dota hits the nerve of her time, or several of them, with her music, which jumps and dances, pauses, jumps off the quarry pond jetty, swims and dives to the bottom, which is also the title of one of her most beautiful songs. She mixes folk and indietronica and lets her love of Brazilian music shine through here and there.

Her texts are touching in their immediacy; Dota does not speak of the ivory tower, but of people here and now and their small triumphs and great abysses, their inadequacies in trying to be close and move in society.

She wins the Fred Jay Prize and the German Record Critics' Award, she unintentionally writes little anthems, racing bikes for all lovers in the big city, no time for the climate protest movement.

She makes record after record, always imagining her best song in the future, she earns the title of hardest touring woman in German showbusiness, plays with a band and in a duo with Jan Rohrbach on guitar.

At one of the concerts, a fan slips her a booklet by Mascha Kaléko. Dota is thrilled by the directness of the poems and the succinctness of the language and decides to make music from the texts. She obtains permission from Kaléko's executor and asks songwriter friends if they would like to take part. Everyone is enthusiastic, and so this record features songs sung by Dota alone, but also duets with old and new voices from the German music scene such as Alin Coen, Hannes Wader, Karl die Große and Max Prosa. The record is released in 2020 and stays in the album charts for 8 weeks, a success. Due to the pandemic, the accompanying tour does not take place until 2022, but is then celebrated all the more by the audience.

It is fortunate that Dota has taken up Kaléko's poems and turned them into songs. Like Dota, Kaléko's lyrics are not about myths and distant spheres, but about people; Kaléko talks about patients with health insurance and Dota about pregnant women in DIY stores. So it is not at all surprising that Dota finds it so easy to lend her voice to these related texts. Dota and her band have given the poems an additional layer, new colors, sometimes set in contrast to the text, and have achieved the feat that, while listening to the songs, you never once think of poetry with musical accompaniment. Dota has rescued Mascha Kaléko's texts for our time, and even more: they sound as if they were written now, in this form.

And of course there was more to discover in Kaléko's poetry collections, essays, mixed notes and diary entries. Enough for a second record, again with well-known collaborators. This time the music dresses even better, Kaléko's lyrics move naturally and freely within it, sometimes in classic song form with verses and refrain, sometimes repeating a line evocatively until everyone has pinned the sentence to their fridge "How beautiful it is to be alone".

In 2026 DOTA will once again play a few selected concerts with this program. On this evening in duo formation with Jan Rohrbach.

There will be songs from the two Kaléko albums and some pieces with her own lyrics. Acoustic, concertante, rousing!

Tickets at www.ticket-regional.de

Admission: 18.00 hrs