Political Songs

Lotte Lenya, later the star of the James Bond movie From Russia With Love (she wears the shoes with knives attached to them), was a young prostitute picked up from the back streets of Weimar Berlin to star in the Threepenny Opera.

Here she plays Jenny Towler the barmaid who waits on the lecherous, drunken men while dreaming of a ship (almost certainly the USSR, it’s how Brecht saw Russia in those days) which will come to mete out revenge for her. Class war was class war in Weimar, pre-Hitler Germany.

Note the strange, impassive hardness of the face in the closeups – almost as if she were a prostitute from the back streets of Weimar Berlin.

Oh, she actually was a Weimar prostitute before being picked by Brecht for the part).

er warning to philistines – the film is from 1931

One of the most moving political songs (the women singing French at the end would give Gomez Addams goose pimples).

Leonard Cohen’s The Partisan

with photographs of the French Resistance, some of them not nice. look at the faces carefully.

And, like, play it up LOUD.

Another great political song from pre-Hitler Germany.

Macheath – Hitler himself – Mackie Messer – Mack the Knife.

This guy is everywhere – some would see him appear on these threads occasionally, but they must be paranoid.

A poor widow wakes up raped, but who could it be? mackie, what was the price?

Seven kids burned alive in a jerry-built tower (connect??). It couldn’t be Mackie – nobody asks him, he’s nowhere at the scene, nowhere to be found. Must be someone else.

The same 1931 movie – with English subtitles, with the fate of Jenny Towler (pirate Jenny) revealed.