DOTA sings Kaléko

Dota Kehr is a Berliner who writes lyrics, sings, and has been performing with her band DOTA since 2003. They have now recorded 16 albums and played countless tours both at home and abroad.

Mascha Kaléko began writing in Berlin in the 1920s; her early poems are pointed sketches of everyday life in the Berlin dialect. Her first book, *Das lyrische Stenogrammheft* (The Lyrical Shorthand Notebook), was published in 1933 and was an immediate success.

Her literary success came to an abrupt end with the Nazi takeover. As a Jew, she was no longer allowed to publish. In 1938, she left Berlin, but the city remained her constant point of reference.

In one of her last poems, "Bleibtreu heißt die Strasse" (The Street Is Called Bleibtreu), she writes, "Forty years ago I lived here […] Here was my happiness at home. And my sorrow. Here my child was born. And had to leave. Here my friends and the Gestapo visited me," concluding with the question, "What remained of it? […] an old wound unscarred."

Like Dota Kehr, Kaléko's lyrics don't tell of myths and distant realms, but of people; Kaléko speaks of people on public health insurance, and Dota of pregnant women in hardware stores. It's therefore no surprise that Dota found 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 even contrasting them with the text, and have achieved the feat of making the songs so seamless that you never once think of them as simply poetry with musical accompaniment.