Mascha Kaléko

Mascha Kaléko has been compared to Kästner, Tucholsky, Ringelnatz and Morgenstern, but that is not accurate. She has their playfulness, satirical sharpness and wit, but there is also a yearning, a delicate fragility. It is this unpathetic longing that makes her poetry seem so unruffled, beyond all fashions. Mascha Kaléko, of Jewish origin, was born in Galicia in 1907, came to Berlin in the 1920s, was forced into exile with her husband and son in New York in 1938 and moved to Israel in 1966. She died in Zurich in 1975, after a reading tour that brought her back to her painfully beloved Berlin.

Read by Doris Wolters
Andreas Erchinger at the piano

March 22, 4 p.m. at the Wallgraben Theater
Coffee and cake from 3 p.m.