Words from cruel times are more relevant today than ever: “Because you allow yourself to be so easily ensnared / When you have recovered from the war. / And that’s why I want to warn you / That you don’t get charred again.” The previously unknown author Curt Bloch kept poems of urgent appeal, such as “To My German Readers,” hidden during his lifetime. After the German-Jewish lawyer fled to the Netherlands in 1933, he produced 95 small magazines – in Enschede, under the roof of a Christian couple. In it he collected sarcastic, humorous poems about the fate of the German people under Nazi rule, the fate of his family and his own.
It was only 50 years after his death that his daughter Simone Bloch decided to publish the hidden work “Het Osterräder Cabaret”, translated as “The Underwater Cabaret”. After an interview with the SZ magazine-Journalists Lara Fritzsche and Lars Reichardt, the 64-year-old will now speak to them again about the contemporary witness’s poems at a reading in the Literaturhaus.
Evening with Curt Bloch, Thursday, January 18th, 7 p.m., Literaturhaus Munich, Salvatorplatz 1, www.literaturhaus-muenchen.de