Hans-Werner Meyer

Markus Runzheimer

Reinhardt Repke

Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater

“O horrible confusions of life, we hang here by the red thread!” – so begins the anthem of the Gallows Brothers by Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914).

And isn't it sometimes helpful to see things with a bit of gallows humor?
Morgenstern himself wrote that "gallows poetry" was a kind of worldview, and that one sees the world differently from the perspective of the gallows. With his gallows songs, he wanted to "spread a little intellectual lightness, cheerfulness, and freedom, to enliven the imagination, to thaw just a little of the music of the soul frozen in the post horn." Fifty years later, Marcel Reich-Ranicki recommended all the gallows songs in his canon of German-language poetry.

Poems like "The Picket Fence," "Sophie, the Hangman's Maid," and "The Moon Sheep" are legendary; "The Werewolf" is even part of the school curriculum. "You laugh yourself silly," Tucholsky already remarked, "and afterwards, having grown more serious, admire a profound lyricism that only veers into the playful at the last moment—and realize in the end that you've learned a philosophical sentence."

Dead Poets Society